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During a roundup for deportation in eastern Poland in 1942, Gitta Rosenzweig—then three or four years old—was sent into hiding. She ended up in a Catholic orphanage. In 1946, Ida Rosenshtein, a family friend and a survivor, learned of the child's whereabouts and sought to claim her. After denying that it held a Jewish child, the orphanage relinquished custody after Ida recognized Gitta and a local Jewish committee paid a "redemption" fee. Gitta is pictured here on the day she left the orphanage.
Portrait of Tsewie Herschel seated in a chair, taken while he was living in hiding. Oosterbeek, the Netherlands, 1943–1944.
Tsewie never knew his parents. Born in December 1942, he was hidden with the de Jong family in April 1943. That July, his parents were deported from the Netherlands to the Sobibór killing center. The de Jongs renamed Tsewie "Henkie," raised him as a Christian, and treated him as their son. Tsewie learned about his origins from his paternal grandmother, who reclaimed him after the war, and from documents that had belonged to his parents.
Portrait of three-year-old Estera Horn wrapped in a fur coat. Chelm, Poland, ca. 1940.
Estera was born in January 1937. Her father was killed soon after the Germans invaded Poland. Estera and her mother, Perla Horn, were forced into the ghetto in Chelm. At the end of 1942, during the liquidation of the ghetto, Perla and Estera escaped from the ghetto. They hid in nearby villages. In late 1943, Perla asked a family in Plawnice to take care of Estera. Perla tried to hide with a group of Jews in the nearby forest, but they were discovered by Germans and killed. In the spring of 1944, the family began looking for a new home for Estera (who had been given the name Marysia). She was placed in Warsaw, and eventually transferred to an orphanage in Krakow.
Gavra Mandil and his family narrowly escaped death in German-held Yugoslavia by fleeing to Italian-occupied Albania. There Gavra attended a school in Kavaja that had both Muslim and Christian pupils. He is seated on the far right in the first row. June 1943.
Jewish child Hans van den Broeke (born Hans Culp) in hiding in the Netherlands. He is 2 years old in this photograph.
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