To escape the Nazis, a number of Jews changed their names and pretended to be Christian. Author R. D. Rosen tells the story of three of these “hidden children” in his new book, “Such Good Girls: The Journey of Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors” (HarperCollins). In this excerpt, Laura Schwarzwald, who lived six years incognito in Poland before finally making it to London, finally tells her daughter Selma, 11, that her identity has been a lie.
“I need to ask you something,” her mother finally said, turning.
“What is it, Mama?”
“Zofia, do you remember what your name was before you were five?”
Zofia tilted her head and looked quizzically at her. “What do you mean?” she asked. “My name has always been Zofia.”
“No, darling, it hasn’t.”
Zofia stared anxiously at her mother.
She led her daughter to the small park near the shopping district and sat her down on a bench. “Darling, do you remember when the Germans made us move to a much smaller apartment in Lvov?”
“Not really.”
They were sitting close together, but, as always, in different worlds.
“Well, I had to give you a new name when you were about 5 and Daddy was taken away by the Russians. You remember about Daddy, don’t you?”
Zofia looked down. “Yes,” she said.
“You were 5 years old when the Russians took him away,” Laura continued, “and after that the Germans wouldn’t let anyone leave the ghetto. That’s when I gave us new names. You were Zofia and I was Bronislawa. We pretended to be different people so we could escape the Germans and get to Kraków. Remember that train ride?”
“But I didn’t know we were pretending. Why did we have to?”
“Because if we didn’t, the Nazis would have killed us. They were going to kill everyone in Lvov. Only a few people in our family escaped — you and me and Aunt Nusia, whose real name is Putzi, and Aunt Fryda.”
“Why did the Germans want to kill us?” Zofia said, and suddenly her eyes widened at a memory. “Herr Leming, you thought, wanted to poison us with the chocolate bar, but he didn’t.”
Laura took her daughter’s hand and held it. “Look at me, Zofia,” she said, drawing her breath. “They wanted to kill us because we were Jewish.”
Zofia pulled her hand away. “Because we were Jewish? That’s silly. We’re Catholic.”
Even though she and Putzi had blocked out so much themselves, Laura was taken aback. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Zofia would have no memory at all of ever being Jewish.
“No, Zofia. Until you were 5, you were a Jewish girl named Selma Schwarzwald, and your family was Jewish. Your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles — all Jews. When the Nazis came, there was only one way to stay alive if you were a Jew and that was to pretend you were a Catholic.”
“You’re making this up,” Zofia said.
“No, darling. Daddy and I were Laura and Daniel Schwarzwald, and when you were born, we named you Selma.”
Zofia shook her head violently to make it go away, but her mother wouldn’t stop.
“We pretended in order to survive. You were too young then to understand this, to be able to pretend to lie. So I had to make you believe you were Zofia Tymejko. I was Bronislawa and we were Catholic. That was the only way I could keep you — us — alive.”
Zofia kept staring and Laura kept talking.
“In a couple of days, Aunt Rosa and Uncle Emil are having a big dinner. You’ve seen Rosa cooking, yes? They’re preparing a Passover seder. Do you know what that is?”
“That’s when the Jews use the blood of Christian children to make their special bread.”
“No, they don’t. That’s a lie. Passover is a festival, a Jewish holiday. It celebrates the Jewish people’s escape from being slaves in Egypt many thousands of years ago. In Poland, we became slaves again, the victims of Nazis instead of Egyptian kings.”
“They killed Christ!”
“Those are lies, Zosia. People spread all kinds of lies about Jews.”
“How do you know, Mama?”
“Because I’m Jewish.”
“But I’m not a Jew!” Zofia was yelling now. “I’ve been baptized, like Jesus Christ! I’m Catholic.”
“Yes.” Laura sighed. “Perhaps you are by now.”
For a few minutes, no one said anything. To Laura, speaking now seemed futile. Zofia wasn’t even trying to process what her mother was telling her.
“Well, now I wish I was dead!” snapped Zofia.
Laura recoiled. She felt as if she’d been slapped. But she knew her daughter was experiencing something far worse — a frontal assault on everything she knew to be true. On the one hand, did her daughter have no idea what her mother had endured to keep them alive?
Laura leaned over and kissed the top of Zofia’s head, murmuring, Around them, Londoners were rushing in all directions.
“It’s all right, darling, it’s all right.”
“We are the lucky ones,” her mother whispered.
“I am not lucky!” Zofia cried. “I became what you wanted me to become! And now you want me to become a Jew?”
Zofia shifted on the bench to face her mother squarely. “Who,” she said, breathing hard, “who would want to be a JEW?”
Zofia would change her name to Sophie Turner, become a doctor and move to New York to practice medicine. She gradually embraced her Jewish roots, married David Zaretsky, and eventually donated her crucifix — a symbol of her hidden identity — to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Today Sophie lives in Manhattan and is the grandmother of two.
