Olga (Steinberger) Bowman was born on April 8, 1927 in Pacin, Hungary. She had two brothers and one sister. Her parents owned a beer garden business which was taken away by the Hungarian authorities in cooperation with the Nazis in 1940. At age 13, Olga went to live with relatives in Budapest to receive a better education. But in 1944, Olga, along with her aunt, uncle, and cousin, were confined to the Budapest Ghetto. Three months later, Olga and her cousin, along with hundreds of other Jews, were forced on a march to Dachau concentration camp in Germany, nearly 400 miles away. They were then taken by train to Ravensbrück, and Olga was separated from her cousin, who was sent to Sachsenhausen.
Olga was taken to Oranienburg concentration camp and forced to work in a munitions factory. Each day Olga and her fellow prisoners were forced to stand for hours during the “appel,” or roll call. Only a small number of these women survived the beatings, starvation, disease, and temperatures to the end of the war. The Soviet Army liberated the camp in January 1945. Olga was extremely ill after being freed and was helped to recover by a Russian soldier, who was himself a Jewish refugee from Krakow, Poland, and who later became her husband. After the war, Olga returned briefly to Budapest to learn that her entire family had been killed.
Olga and her husband stayed in Germany until 1949. With the help of relatives in Pennsylvania, she and her husband immigrated to the United States. After one month, they moved from Pennsylvania to Youngstown, Ohio. They had two children and lived there for ten years. In 1960, they moved to Los Angeles, where Olga’s husband was a barber, and they ran a liquor store. He died in 1977. In 1994, the big earthquake in Los Angeles completely destroyed Olga’s home, prompting her to move to El Paso to be with her two sons who had settled there.