Sylvia Weiner (born 1930) was the first woman to ever win the

Boston Marathon The Boston Marathon is an annual marathon race hosted by several cities and towns in greater Boston in eastern Massachusetts, United States. It is traditionally held on Patriots' Day, the third Monday of April. Begun in 1897, the event was i ...

’s women's masters division, which she did in 1975, at age 44 with a time of 3:21:38. She is a Holocaust survivor, born in Poland, taken from her family at age twelve in 1942 and sent to three concentration camps during the next two years. She went to

Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...

Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

, and then Bergen-Belsen. In Bergen-Belsen she befriended Anne Frank, and was with her on the day that she died. She was living in Montreal when she joined a

YMHA A Jewish Community Center or a Jewish Community Centre (JCC) is a general recreational, social, and fraternal organization serving the Jewish community in a number of cities. JCCs promote Jewish culture and heritage through holiday celebrations, ...

because membership was required to enroll her daughter in the YMHA's nursery school. There she took a fitness course which became a running class. Later she joined a small, otherwise-all-male running group called the Wolf Pack after its leader, Wolf Bronet, who was also a Holocaust survivor. She ran the Boston Marathon for the first time in 1974, with a time of 3:47. Her best marathon time was a 3:15 at the Skylon Marathon in Buffalo in 1976. At the Advil Mini Marathon 10K in Central Park, she won her age group one year, and finished second in the mother-daughter division with her daughter Debbie; in 2014 she won her division in the Leaf Peepers 5K in Waterbury, Vermont, in 48:36.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weiner, Sylvia 1930 births Living people Polish female long-distance runners Polish female marathon runners Polish masters athletes Boston Marathon female winners Auschwitz concentration camp survivors Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivors Place of birth missing (living people) 20th-century Polish women 21st-century Polish women 21st-century Polish people