A potato sack helped her survive the Holocaust. She’ll tell her story during virtual event.

Suly Chenkin was only 3 when her mother and father gave her a sleeping potion, put her in a potato sack and threw her over the barbed wire.

Her parents, she later learned, thought giving the little girl away was her only chance of survival.

This was on May 11, 1944, about three years after the Nazis invaded Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania.

Chenkin, who survived the Holocaust and was eventually reunited with her parents, will share her tale of survival as part of Holocaust and Genocide Awareness week at Florida International University. Hillel at FIU, the school’s Holocaust & Genocide Studies Program, the Jewish Museum of Florida, Casa Cuba, along with several other FIU departments and organizations and other community partners have teamed up to offer a week-long schedule of virtual events including a discussion with Chenkin on Wednesday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“It took one man to kill so many Jewish people and it took so many people to save one little girl,” she said in a call from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “All through the trajectory people helped.”

Jon Warech, the director of Hillel, said in planning this year’s program in a virtual format, leaders were able to “branch out,” and “create programming that has something for everyone.”

“Not just students, but everyone can learn something this week, coming off a year when anti-Semitism was on the rise in the U.S.,” Warech said.

Chenkin was born Oct. 3, 1940, in Kovno to parents Riva and Solomon Baicovitz. She was eight months old when the Nazis came in “and all of us Jewish people living there were put in a ghetto.”

“My parents managed to hide me through all of the roundups that took place,” she said. I survived all the illnesses that children get.”

Chenkin said they decided to give her up so she could have “what they thought was a chance to live.”

A woman named Miriam Shulman took her in. She was told never to speak of her parents.

Meanwhile, her parents were sent to concentration camps — her father was sent to Dachau in Germany and her mother Stuthoff in Poland.

Soon after Chenkin was taken in by Shulman, Lithuania was liberated.

After being liberated, Shulman, thinking that Chenkin’s parents had died, took her and her own children on a 10-month journey to Israel. Chenkin began calling her mother.

Meanwhile, her parents, after months of trying to find each other, were reunited. It wasn’t until September of 1946 that she saw her mother again. They then had to wait again — this time to get documentation in line.

Finally in February 1947, Chenkin and her mother left Israel and were eventually reunited with her father in Cuba. Chenkin’s father’s family had emigrated to Cuba before the war. When they got there, Chenkin’s dad went to work in the family’s textile business.

Chenkin said she had a “very happy” childhood in Cuba. Then, when she was 19 and Fidel Castro came into power, her father sent her to Miami.

“My heart broke,” she said.

In Miami, she got a job working at a car repair shop and lived on her own. She then went to Charlotte, where some of her family settled, before landing in New York. She lived in New York for 26 years before moving back to Charlotte.

Chenkin now shares her story in hopes of preventing anything like the Holocaust from happening again. She said now more than ever people need a reminder of what can happen if you look the other way.

“We have to be very careful that January 6 never happens again,” she said of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “What happened January 6 brings back Germany, brings back Cuba.”

She takes part in the Levine JCC Charlotte Butterfly Project, which helps educate students about the one and a half million children who perished.

“We have a choice. Who we are going to be? The bad guy or the good guy,” she said. “I also tell them that in my opinion the world is divided in three parts. There is a very big amount of very good people, there is a smaller amount of very bad people, but the biggest amount of people are the people who are indifferent. The indifference sometimes allows the bad people to win.”

To register and to get a complete list of events, visit hillelfiu.org/hgaw.

Other South Florida events:

▪ The Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach, a committee of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, will hold a discussion with Roberta Grossman, director and producer of the film “Who Will Write Our History.” The film, which people are encouraged to screen before the discussion, is a documentary about a secret group of journalists and scholars who used pen and paper to fight back against the Nazi regime. The discussion will be moderated by Survivor Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, director of the University of Miami Holocaust Institute and district Holocaust educator for Miami-Dade County Public Schools. For more information and to register, visit https://holocaustmemorialmiamibeach.org/IHRD.

▪ U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will hold the 2021 “What You Do Matters” Southeast Virtual Event at 7 p.m. Feb. 11. Entrance to the event, which will feature special guests Morgan Freeman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Alexander and Ray Allen, is a $118 donation for the museum. To register, visit http://www.ushmm.org/events/2021-SE-Event. For more information, call the Southeast Regional Office at 561-995-6773 or southeast@ushmm.org.