The year was 1942. The place was wartime Paris. Rachel Laznowski, a fashionably dressed middle-class woman with Semitic features, bundled her quiet, well-behaved daughters onto a train bound for the medieval cathedral city of Chartres.
Laznowski and her children, 5-year-old Adele and 2-year-old Josette, were headed for the nearby village of Brou and the poor, dilapidated home of an elderly villager who had agreed to take the girls in — for pay.
Nazi Germany had occupied France two years earlier, and the deportation of French Jews was gathering momentum. Laznowski’s husband, Wolf, had just been taken away to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Laznowski knew her turn would come soon.
She and her sister, Anna Hoffman, had agonized over what to do. Hoffman had argued she would keep her children with her, no matter what. Laznowski, though torn, felt the girls would be safer if they could be hidden with a Christian family until the horror of the war and the mass exterminations ended.
They were fateful choices. Hoffman, her daughter and all but one member of her family perished in Auschwitz. Laznowski and her husband, who managed to survive the camp, were reunited after the war with Adele and Josette, who were safe if emotionally traumatized.
Adele Laznowski Zaveduk, now 58 and a resident of north suburban Northbrook, is one of an unknown number of “hidden children” who survived the Holocaust in attics, in convents or in the homes of non-Jewish families, posing as their offspring. Their stories have only recently begun to be told, as the number of living camp survivors dwindles.
“We felt we didn’t have the right to talk about what had happened to us,” Zaveduk said. “They were the real survivors. But now that the older generation is disappearing, I feel we must speak out.”
On Friday, Zaveduk will be the featured speaker at the city’s Holocaust Remembrance Day educational breakfast, where she will address about 200 students representing every public and parochial high school in the city. A public commemoration will follow at noon at the Harold Washington Library Center.
This is high season on Zaveduk’s particular lecture circuit, because it is Remembrance Week for victims of the Holocaust. She has given six presentations since last Friday, including an eight-hour marathon at Glenbrook South High School.
“I’m doing it for my parents,” she said, “because the history of that dark time must be told.”
And perhaps because of a sense of guilt — guilt that she survived when so many others were killed, guilt that she got both her parents back after the war while most hidden children did not and guilt that her primary response to the reunion with her parents was anger and resentment.
“They abandoned me,” Zaveduk said, “or at least that’s how I experienced it.”
Madame Mulard — the foster parent she came to call “Meme,” or “Granny” — reinforced that.
“She would tell us our mother was a bad woman,” Zaveduk said.
“Meme” remains somewhat of an enigma to Zaveduk. An alcoholic who lived with her daughter and several grandchildren, Mulard frequently beat and berated all the children.
But, on the other hand, “Meme shared what little food there was evenly — we were not treated worse than her grandchildren. And even though my mother’s money must have run out at some point, she kept us,” Zaveduk said.
“People who hid Jewish children were punished by death. So while there was no love there, I have great respect for her, and gratitude. I felt no anger toward her — only toward my parents.”
Zaveduk, who was almost 9 when the war ended, became “a good Catholic” who had been taught that “the Jews were evil, and they crucified Jesus.” So she was particularly displeased that the strange couple who came to take her and Josette back to Paris were Jewish.
“I kept bringing crosses home, and my parents kept throwing them out. But although they wouldn’t let us go to church anymore, they didn’t replace our religion with anything else,” she said.
“After what their Judaism had cost them, they were not very observant.”
Even worse, her parents were not able to show the joy and love they must have felt at recovering their children.
“They had lost so much,” Zaveduk said, “they were afraid to become attached to anything for fear of losing it.”
The children, for their part, became very protective of their rather distant parents: “We always had to be good — we couldn’t inflict any more pain on them.”
Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of Zaveduk’s story is the dearth of communication, not just with her mother — who never explained why she had “abandoned” her — but with her own children.
Zaveduk said she never talked with her parents about their wartime experiences. It wasn’t until 10 years ago, when her mother taped a “living testimonial” for the Holocaust Foundation in Skokie that Zaveduk got any inkling of what Laznowski had been through.
“I said to her, ‘Why didn’t you tell us more?’ She answered, ‘Why didn’t you ask?’
“I didn’t want to bring up sad memories, and she didn’t want to burden me with her past.”
Two years later, when Zaveduk agreed to speak about her childhood for the first time, she asked her elder son to type the speech. “He did it very graciously,” she said, “but he never asked any questions. When I asked him why, he replied, ‘There was a very clear line; I knew I wasn’t supposed to cross it.’ So I guess I must have conveyed the same reticence.”
Part of the reason for the conspiracy of silence is that, like other parents and children, Holocaust-survivor families “try to protect each other from bad things,” Zaveduk said. “But also we were told, ‘Forget the past. Get on with your life.’ “
And they did. Rachel Laznowski moved her family to Argentina in 1951, the year her husband died, and eventually remarried. Both daughters grew up and married in Buenos Aires, where Laznowski died five years ago and where Josette still lives.
Adele married Ben Zaveduk and they moved to the Chicago area in 1963. Their sons, Victor and Mitchell, live in Chicago.
Adele Zaveduk is active in a 100-member support group called Hidden Children/Chicago, which meets every other month.
“There is a bond that can’t be described,” she said. “Our lost childhood, the abandonment, having to go back to parents you don’t remember and who weren’t the same as they’d been three years earlier.”
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“Secret Sufferers Of Holocaust” is the original title.