Pearl Asher was born in Sokolow-Podlaski, Poland on May 26, 1918. The town had a population of 12,000 with a Jewish population of 5,000. She graduated grade school before the war and was a member of Hashomer Hatzair (Zionist Youth organization) and worked as a seamstress both before and after the war.
She was in the Sokolow-Podlaski ghetto from 1940-1942 and obtained false papers as a non-Jewish Pole. She spent the years 1942-45 in hiding as a non-Jewish Pole doing forced labor on a farm near Peenemünde, a municipality on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.
