An Instagram post. A tour guide standing in a Czech museum. A photograph snapped and sent across the ocean to a woman in Connecticut who had no idea it existed.
That is how Deborah Weiss, professor emeritus of speech, language, and hearing sciences, first learned that her mother’s story had been memorialized in an exhibit thousands of miles away — and how a journey began that would bring that exhibit to the Southern campus.
The exhibit, which opens this month at Buley Library in conjunction with Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — consists of 26 panels documenting the lives of eight Jewish families from Mladá Boleslav, a city in what is now the Czech Republic, who were interned in the Mladá Boleslav Ghetto during World War II. The exhibit was created at the museum, which was the location of the former ghetto, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. One of those eight families is Weiss’ mother’s.
The story began, as Weiss tells it, in the spring or early summer of 2025, when her niece Carly contacted her with astonishing news. Carly had been following a woman on Instagram — a tour guide in the Czech Republic who led excursions to Jewish historical sites. Scrolling through the guide’s posts one day, Carly noticed the woman was in Mladá Boleslav.
“That’s where my grandmother was from,” Carly wrote to her. The guide, whose name is Yvonne, replied that right at that moment, she was standing in an exhibit at the museum in Mladá Boleslav, in front of a panel that was about Carly’s grandmother, Milada Günsburgová, who was Weiss’ mother.
Originally titled “ne(Návraty),” the exhibit was created at the Museum of Mladá Boleslav in the Czech Republic, where it was first exhibited in spring 2025.
The family had known nothing about the exhibit. Yvonne sent a photo to Carly, who forwarded it to Weiss. The image showed a panel nearly identical to what would later appear on the exhibit’s promotional flyer. It featured a photograph of Weiss’ mother Milada, as a young woman — her high school graduation picture, as it turned out — an image the family had never seen before.
Milada (Mila) who passed away five years ago at the age of 99½, was the sole survivor of her immediate family. Her father died in the Mladá Boleslav ghetto after being taken and beaten by the Gestapo. Her mother was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943, when the Nazis cleared out the ghetto, and did not survive.
Her brother had earlier made his way to England — smuggled out illegally through a border crossing — and joined the Czech Resistance Army. He was killed shortly after enlisting, under friendly fire.
Weiss’ mother escaped a different way. She was 17 years old and was about to complete her final year at the Gymnasium, the Czech secondary school, with plans to go on to college, when the situation in 1939 became very dangerous for Jews. Milada’s parents were searching for a way to get her out of the country.
They discovered a young man, Richard Weiss, who had been born in the United States, whose own father had died young. His widowed mother had brought him and his brother back to Czechoslovakia when they were children. Despite years abroad, both boys still held American passports.
At 21, with no money but a valid U.S. passport, Richard let it be known in the Jewish community that he would marry someone in exchange for passage out of the country. Milada and Richard “met at a coffee shop, and she thought he was very cute, and they arranged the marriage,” Weiss said.
They married in Mladá Boleslav’s town hall. After living with her family for a time, the two fell genuinely in love. Weiss’ father then returned to the United States to obtain a visa for his new wife, a process that took more than a year. Meanwhile, the family was moved to the ghetto. When the visa finally came through, Weiss’ mother left Czechoslovakia, but had to leave her own mother behind alone in the ghetto. She arrived in America — in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Weiss herself would grow up.
After Carly forwarded those first photographs, Weiss became interested in bringing the exhibit to the U.S. and began corresponding with the exhibit’s curator, Sylva Mistecká. Weiss speaks no Czech, Mistecká no English, and so they communicated through a combination of Google Translate and Mistecká’s son, who served as interpreter during their video calls.
Weiss had initially imagined the logistics of physically shipping the panels across the Atlantic. Mistecká had a simpler idea: she would have the panels translated into English and send them digitally, and Weiss could print them here.
The exhibit itself is set to open April 15 with a special presentation by Weiss, who will speak about her mother’s life using archival recordings from the USC Shoah Foundation’s archive of Holocaust survivor testimonies. The 26 panels will be displayed in the library, where they will be accessible during all regular library hours.
Weiss says she wishes this had all happened while her mother was still alive. There are questions she never thought to ask, such as which families shared a room with her mother’s family in the ghetto and whether any of the families featured in the exhibit were among them.
“Each story is so moving,” she says. “And it just makes you realize how much there still is to find out.”
The Holocaust Remembrance exhibit — “Those Who Returned and Those Who Did Not”: An Exhibit from the Museum of Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic — opens April 15, 2026, on the ground floor of Buley Library. A presentation by Deborah Weiss, “Mila Nishball: Story of Survival,” will be held on April 15 at 1:00 p.m. in the Adanti Student Center Theater, followed by a reception and viewing of the exhibit on the ground floor of Buley Library. The exhibit will remain on display through May 22, 2026, and is free and open to the public during regular library hours.
In the Media
“Professor brings mother’s Holocaust survival story to SCSU Campus” – WTIC – Fox61
