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Sophie was born Selma Schwarzwald to parents Daniel and Laura in the industrial city of Lvov, two years before Germany invaded Poland. Daniel was a successful businessman who exported timber and Laura had studied economics. The Germans occupied Lvov in 1941. After her father's disappearance on her fifth birthday in 1941, Sophie and her mother procured false names and papers and moved to a small town called Busko-Zdroj. They became practicing Catholics to hide their identities. Sophie gradually forgot that…
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the German occupation, Sarah (then just three years old) and her mother were forced into a ghetto. One day, a Polish Catholic policeman warned them that the ghetto was about to be liquidated. He sheltered Sarah and her mother first in his house, then in a potato storage bunker, and then in a chicken coop on his property. Sarah hid there for more than two years, until the area was liberated by Soviet forces. After the war, Sarah emigrated from…
Describes using false papers and living in hiding
A letter from Salek and Eda Kuenstler to Sophia Zendler promising land in exchange for hiding their daughter.
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…
Tina was a medical student when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She and members of her sorority joined the underground, and she hid Jews in her house from the beginning of the war. Tina found hiding places for Jewish children, forged passports, and served as a courier for the underground.
This large, lidded wooden chest was used by the Council for Aid to Jews (codenamed “Żegota”) to hide false identity documents from Nazi authorities. Żegota was an underground rescue organization of Poles and Jews in German-occupied Poland and operated from December 1942 to January 1945. Supported by the Polish government-in-exile, it coordinated efforts to save Jews in German-occupied Poland from Nazi persecution and murder. One of Żegota’s most impactful clandestine activities was producing and…
Photograph taken by George Kadish: a member of the Kovno ghetto underground hides supplies in a well used as the entrance to a hiding place in the ghetto. Kovno, Lithuania, 1942.
Two Jewish men captured by the SS pull a woman from an underground bunker during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Warsaw, Poland, May 8, 1943.
Recalls experiences while hiding in France
Wilek was the son of Jewish parents living in the southeastern Polish town of Lvov. His family owned and operated a winery that had been in family hands since 1870. Wilek's father died of a heart attack in 1929. Wilek entered secondary school in 1939. Soon after he began school, World War II began with the German invasion of Poland. Lvov was in the part of eastern Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. Although the Soviets took over Wilek's home and the family business, Wilek was able to continue his…
In May 1940, the Germans occupied the Netherlands. In 1942, it took Liny, her mother, and her sister six months to escape to southern France. They pretended to be Protestant, obtained visas to travel through Spain and Portugal, and were on one of the last trains to cross into Spain after the Germans took over southern France. They boarded a Portuguese ship bound for Dutch Guiana (Suriname). Liny was placed in a refugee camp, and then worked in the Dutch embassy in Washington D.C. She eventually settled in…
Renee's father left for the United States in 1939. Before Renee and her mother could join him, they had to flee to Belgium to escape the repression of Jews in Austria. The Germans occupied Belgium in 1940. Renee was hidden in a convent for two years, until the Germans became suspicious. The underground took Renee to a Protestant family's farm, and then to an orphanage. After the war she was reunited with her mother, who had survived Auschwitz. Five years later they joined her father in the United States.
Jewish homes in flames after the Nazis set residential buildings on fire in an effort to force Jews out of hiding during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Poland, April 19–May 16, 1943.
One of the ten metal boxes in which portions of the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat archives were hidden and buried in the Warsaw ghetto. The boxes are currently in the possession of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Benjamin Kedar (born Villiam Krausz) sits with a doll and a teddy bear shortly before his family went into hiding. Villiam's parents married in Prague and settled in Nitra, Slovakia. They worked as physicians. They had a daughter, Helen, in 1934, and Villiam in 1938. In 1942 the family relocated to a nearby village until September 1944. At that point, they went into hiding with Slovak peasants to avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Villiam, his sister, and his parents survived the…
Eva was little affected by the war until 1944, when the Germans occupied Budapest. Eva's father was prominent in the Jewish community, and the family was able to retain their apartment in a Jewish star house (a house designated for Jews). In October Eva's parents secured protective papers from Raoul Wallenberg, but the family decided not to stay in a Swedish safe house. They hid in and near Budapest until the Soviet liberation of Budapest in 1945.
In 1933 Barbara's family moved to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. They became friends of Anne Frank and her family. The Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. Barbara's boyfriend, Manfred, had underground contacts and she got false papers. Her mother, sister, and father were deported to the Westerbork camp and then to Auschwitz. Barbara survived using her false papers and worked for the resistance. She helped take Jews to hiding places and also hid Jews in an apartment rented under her false name.
Lisa was one of three children born to a religious Jewish family. Following the German occupation of her hometown in 1939, Lisa and her family moved first to Augustow and then to Slonim (in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland). German troops captured Slonim in June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Slonim, the Germans established a ghetto which existed from 1941 to 1942. Lisa eventually escaped from Slonim, and went first to Grodno and then to Vilna, where she joined the resistance movement. She…
Like other Jews, the Lewents were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, as Abraham hid in a crawl space, the Germans seized his mother and sisters in a raid. They perished. He was deployed for forced labor nearby, but escaped to return to his father in the ghetto. In 1943, the two were deported to Majdanek, where Abraham's father died. Abraham later was sent to Skarzysko, Buchenwald, Schlieben, Bisingen, and Dachau. US troops liberated Abraham as the Germans evacuated prisoners.
David was born to a middle class Jewish family and attended a Jewish school. In August 1941, after the Germans occupied Kovno, he was forced into the Kovno ghetto, where he shared two rooms with his immediate and extended family. Many members of his extended family were killed during the Great Aktion in Kovno in October 1941. David worked in a forced-labor brigade in the ghetto. In March 1944, he witnessed the Kinder Aktion and was able to save his nephew. During the destruction of the Kovno ghetto, David…
Some Jewish children survived the Holocaust by hiding or living under disguised identities. Learn more about their experiences while in hiding.
Parents, children, and rescuers faced daunting challenges once the decision was made for a child to go into hiding during the Holocaust.
Document issued by the Regional Agricultural Mercantile Cooperative in Busko-Zdroj certifying that Bronislawa Tymejko (the false identity of Sophie Schwarzwald's mother, Laura Schwarzwald) was employed by the cooperative, dated November 1942.
After the Holocaust, many Jewish parents spent months or years searching for the children they had sent into hiding. Learn about the search for surviving relatives.
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