For Jewish Kids Hidden by Gentiles, Israel Visit is Journey of Discovery

Growing up in a small town in Poland, Margaret Temerson always felt that something was wrong, though she could not put her finger on it.

Her parents, a loving Catholic couple, were overprotective and secretive. They gave all they had to their only child — everything but the truth.

It was not until the age of 26 that Temerson, now a 59-year-old journalist, learned that she was born Jewish and that her real parents had perished in the Holocaust.

Temerson is one of some 50 Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, most of them hidden with Christians during the war, who visited Israel this week on a journey of self-discovery.

Now in their 50s and 60s, these Polish survivors were children when the war broke out. Virtually all owe their survival to a combination of many factors, including the help of Christians, who hid them from the Nazis.

Of the approximately 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland before the war, only 5,000 to 10,000 remain.

The vast majority died during the Holocaust, and most of the remainder moved to Israel, the United States and other countries.

According to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which funds cultural and social-service programs for the mostly aged Jewish community of Warsaw, the number of Jews could be much higher.

“Until recently, Jews in Poland were unwilling or afraid to reveal their true identities,” explained Zvi Feine, JDC’s deputy director for Polish affairs.

“With the decline of communism, and the resulting increase in religious tolerance, many people with Jewish roots are making their presence known to us,” Feine said.

Two years ago, Jakob Gutenbaum, a child survivor who spent much of the war in concentration camps, decided to create the Association of Holocaust Children in Poland. At its inception the group had 20 members; today it has 300.

GREAT NEED TO IDENTIFY WITH OTHER JEWS

“There is a great need for Polish Jews to identify with other Jews,” said the 63-year-old Warsaw resident.

“There is a sense of closeness that comes from having shared the same experiences. We can speak frankly with each other about the past, and discuss things we can’t even discuss with our own families,” Gutenbaum said.

With assistance from the Joint and Amcha, an Israeli group devoted to the emotional wellbeing of Holocaust survivors, the organization is also trying to address the survivors’ many emotional problems.

“Child survivors suffer from many psychological problems, such as fear of separation and extreme loneliness,” said Gutenbaum.

“In many places around the world, survivors attend support groups and receive psychological counseling for themselves and their children, but this is only now beginning to take place in Poland,” he said.

Unlike the vast majority of Holocaust survivors worldwide, who have always identified themselves as Jewish, many of the Polish survivors grew up believing they were Christians. Those who were raised in gentile homes either hid their Jewishness or learned only much later that they were Jewish, said Gutenbaum.

“Either way, the truth created a profound identity crisis,” he said.

The trip to Israel, which cost the participants an average of four to six months’ salary, “went a long way toward helping us cope with the past and who we are today,” said Allerhand Leszek, a 62-year-old physician, during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

The only Jew in his town, Leszek said he feels “isolated” from other Jews, and the trip to Israel “underscored my pride in being Jewish.”

He and his mother survived the war by constantly moving from one place to another. “No one wanted to hide me because I was a boy, but my mother was very blonde, so people took us in.

‘POLES NEVER LET YOU FORGET YOU’RE JEWISH’

“I remember hiding in the woods, in a church, in a cemetery. Once, I hid under the bed of a cousin’s gentile wife. In retrospect, I think she must have been a prostitute, since German soldiers and others were always visiting the apartment,” he recalled.

“They were on the bed, while I hid underneath,” he said with a laugh.

Though never afraid to hide his Jewishness, Leszek said, “Poles never let you forget you are Jewish, even if you want to forget yourself. There is still a lot of anti-Semitism in Poland.”

Thirty years after discovering her Jewish roots, Temerson is still trying to come to terms with her multifaceted identity.

Born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939, Temerson was nearly 3 when her Jewish parents, sensing that death was imminent, placed her in the care of a childless Catholic couple living outside the ghetto.

When her Jewish parents perished in the Holocaust, the Catholic family legally adopted Temerson and raised her as their own daughter.

She recalled, “My parents never let on that I was Jewish and insisted that no one else reveal the truth. When some members of my Jewish family found me after the war, my adopted mother pleaded with them to keep the secret.

“They agreed, and in return my adopted mother allowed me to keep in close contact with what she called ‘our friends’ through letters and visits,” Temerson said. But there were still a lot of unanswered questions, and they preyed on Temerson’s mind to such an extent that she finally sought some answers.

I once asked my mother why there were no pictures of me as a baby, why I had no birth certificate. These were questions she simply couldn’t answer. And slowly, very slowly, I began to ask my parents’ friends,” Temerson related.

“One day, when I was 26, they just couldn’t lie anymore, so they told me the truth.”

Shocked as she was by the news of her adoption and Jewish roots, Temerson said she has no regrets.

“My adopted parents were the best, kindest parents a child could have, and I was lucky to have them.

“My mother died just six months ago, and it is very hard,” she said. “But still, it is important to know the whole truth.”

The trip to Israel, she admitted, “has opened some difficult doors. But I am determined to walk through them and see what’s inside.”