Gertrude Stephanie Chandler

Gertrude Steffanie Chandler (nee Vrana), age 93) died peacefully in her sleep

October 4, 2023, at Allendale Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Allendale

Michigan.

Steffanie, as she preferred to be called, was born December 3, 1929, in Vienna,

Austria to Gustav Andreas Vrana and Angela Hirsch Vrana. In 1938, at the age of

nine, she, along with her father, mother and two siblings were torn from their

home and taken to a police station for interrogation, jailing, and removal to Nazi

concentration camps along with other Austrian Jews. She and her mother were

separated from the rest of her family and never saw her siblings again. She was

sent to the Treblinka concentration camp in northeastern Poland where she was

forced to watch her mother dig her own grave and then shot into it. Steffanie

remained as a prisoner with other children working daily at cleaning bricks until

Russian soldiers liberated the surviving inmates in 1944.

The fifteen-year-old teenager somehow made her way back to Vienna where she

was eventually reunited with her father, who had been sent to fight for the Nazis

on the Russian front, then captured by Russians and imprisoned in a Soviet gulag.

In 1950 she met the love of her life, Henry Hernandez, 20, a handsome young

American Army tank commander in American-occupied Salzburg, with whom she

had her only child, Henry, born in 1951. Marrying another American soldier, the

family transferred back and forth to the United States and around Europe,

eventually landing her in Spring Lake, Michigan to be near her son. There in 1996,

she proudly became an American citizen. In 1998, she broke her silence about her

war experiences to be interviewed by Steven Spielberg's USC Shoah, so that her

Holocaust stories would be preserved, saying "I really believe that God wanted

me to live. I appreciate freedom. Some people don't understand what they have. I

want people to know it really happened, so it doesn't happen again."

Steffanie was a fierce survivor, battling depression, disease and even a broken

hip, smiling and enjoying life until just a few weeks before her demise. Her son

held her hand on her last day, assuring her in Viennese German that she could

now go home to join her parents and siblings. She is survived by her son Henry

Andreas Matthews, son-in-law Timothy Chester, granddaughter Amalia Mahar

and her husband Scott, and great granddaughters Layla and Josie. Her body was

cremated in keeping with her wishes.