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Spertus in the News
Exhibit tells stories of Jewish children hidden during Holocaust
March 20, 2005 (CHICAGO) — During the Nazi Occupation of France, Adele Laznowski's mother left her and her 2-year-old sister with a Catholic family in the French countryside.
Adele, then 5 years old, felt abandoned. She didn't understand that the Nazis were rounding up Jewish women and children in Paris. They had already taken Adele's father to the Auschwitz concentration camp. They would soon take Adele's mother, too.
For three years, Adele was raised as a Catholic. When she was reunited with her parents after World War II, she didn't understand why they wouldn't let her have a First Communion.
"Children have no choice," said Adele Laznowski Zaveduk, now age 67 and living in Northbrook.
"I would have preferred my mother to take us with her, but it would have meant we'd be dead. Her way of saving us was to put us in someone else's care."
Her childhood doll is part of a museum exhibit that opened Sunday at the Spertus Museum in Chicago.
"Life in the Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust" pays tribute to thousands of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust by hiding in attics, cellars and barns.
Some children, their identities disguised, were placed in convents or with foster families, who risked death themselves by helping.
Others, like Krystyna Chiger, had no rescuers. Chiger escaped with her family into the sewer system below Lvov, a city in Poland. A green sweater the girl wore while living 14 months in the sewers is displayed in the exhibit.
Diaries and artwork of the children also are on display. Perhaps most impressive is a large wardrobe where 5-year-old Frederik Steinkeller hid from the Gestapo who had an office in the same building as the Polish Catholic couple who were sheltering him.
Some of the hidden children eventually found their parents again after World War II. But many were orphaned when their parents perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Some children did not survive. They were discovered or were turned in to authorities and sent to the killing camps.
Adele Zaveduk said the exhibit makes her story and the stories of other Holocaust children significant.
"Children were to be seen and not heard. How could we compare what we had gone through to what the adults suffered in the concentration camps? We felt we had no right to mention it."
It took years for Zaveduk to get over the anger she felt toward her mother for leaving her, she said Sunday in an interview at the museum.
"My mother was a courageous woman, but when you are 5 years old, it doesn't count. You want to be with your mother," she said.
The exhibit runs through July 31 at the museum, 618 S. Michigan Ave. The exhibit is on loan from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
On the Web: www.spertus.edu
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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