At 91, Sonia Warshawski is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City–and she’s the focus of the film “Big Sonia.” The film centers around the nonagenarian’s experience as a Holocaust survivor–and you can easily see why with her bright nails, cheetah prints, and red lipstick. At just 4’8″, she is clearly a force beyond nature.
Sonia still drives herself around her Midwestern suburb–and runs a a six-day-a-week tailor shop. It’s actually the only thriving business in a failing Kansas City mall–which is a story of survival on its own. It also speaks to Sonia’s ability to thrive, despite being a survivor of the Holocaust (she was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen), and despite being a widow. When she was 13, she saw people in her Polish hometown, Miedzyrzec, rounded up for concentration camps, and at 17, she saw her mother enter a gas chamber.