Hana Kraus Beer Family Papers

Hana Kraus was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia on May 31, 1925. As a young adult she was taken, along with her mother, Elly, and father, Ernest, to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. Her father died at the camp. Her mother was later deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Hana survived. While at the camp she received a number of letters from her boyfriend, Pepik Smolka, who was also a prisoner at Thereisanstadt. He was also deported and murdered by the Nazis. After her liberation from the Nazis, Hana Kraus made her way to the United States where she lived first in New Jersey, then New York City, where she met her future husband, Walter Beer, and later to Peekskill, New York. In 1979, Hana and Walter Beer moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where they lived the rest of their lives. Hana Kraus Beer passed away in Atlanta in 2004, at the age of 78.