She Saved My Father’s Life. Yad Vashem Doesn’t Know Her Name |
Władysława Kazimiera Jaeger hid two Jewish children for five years under penalty of death. She has never been formally recognized. I am going to change that.
My father Edward Singer was five years old when the Nazis marched into Kraków.
He and his younger sister Giza were handed to a Catholic woman named Władysława Kazimiera Jaeger, who was not their mother, not their relative, not under any legal or moral obligation to do anything for them. She was a family friend. She was Polish. She was Catholic. She was thirty-two years old.
She took them anyway.
The penalty for hiding Jews in occupied Poland was death. Not arrest. Not imprisonment. Death for the rescuer. Death for their family. Death for anyone in the house. Władysława knew this before she said yes. She said yes anyway.
For five years, she raised my father and his sister as her own children. She forged birth certificates listing herself as their biological mother. She drilled them in Catholic prayers until the words came without hesitation, until crossing themselves looked natural, until their Polish names were the only names they answered to. She rehearsed the hiding routine: strangers at the door, children disappear, no sound, no movement, no matter what.
Her brothers, Mieczysław and Stanisław, ran the Polish Underground in the region. They provided the outer ring of protection. Anyone asking questions was made to understand the consequences.
My father spent five years not existing as himself.
He came out at eleven years old. He never fully explained what those years had done to him. He learned that silence meant safety and spent the rest of his life practicing it.........