Lier Fier; Holocaust Survivor, Magazine Publisher

Lier Fier, 75, a Holocaust survivor who along with her husband produced one of the first postwar Jewish magazines in Germany. Fier was raised in Rawa Rusa, Poland and also lived in Lvov before the war. Leaving Poland as part of a forced labor contingent in 1942, the blond, blue-eyed teenager ended up working at a munitions factory in Germany, where she learned to sabotage armaments. After the war, she met and married scholar and Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighter Israel Blumenfeld. From 1946 through ‘48, they published The Judische Rundshau, one of the first postwar Jewish magazines in Germany, featuring the poetry of Nobel prize-winning poet Nelly Sachs and the work of famed Kafka scholar Heinz Politzer. They also updated the traditional Passover Haggadah, which was distributed in camps for displaced persons. In 1948, the couple moved to Costa Rica, where Blumenfeld served as the Israeli consul general. Subsequently, they lived in Venezuela before arriving in Los Angeles in 1953. Here, Fier’s husband was a liaison with the American labor movement and worked as the Western director of the Histadrut campaign, raising money to build hospitals and schools in Israel. After his death in 1962, she raised three children, remarried and worked at a pharmacy in Beverly Hills. She was featured in 1977’s “In Dark Places: Remembering the Holocaust,” a documentary directed by her daughter that aired on PBS. She was also a participant in the Shoah Foundation’s Holocaust survivor oral history project. On Thursday of cancer at her Westside home.