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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Nazi Germany had occupied France two years earlier, and the deportation of French Jews was gathering momentum. Laznowski\u2019s husband, Wolf, had just been taken away to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Laznowski knew her turn would come soon.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Adele Laznowski Zaveduk, now 58 and a resident of north suburban Northbrook, is one of an unknown number of \u201chidden children\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe felt we didn\u2019t have the right to talk about what had happened to us,\u201d Zaveduk said. \u201cThey were the real survivors. But now that the older generation is disappearing, I feel we must speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday, Zaveduk will be the featured speaker at the city\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This is high season on Zaveduk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m doing it for my parents,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause the history of that dark time must be told.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey abandoned me,\u201d Zaveduk said, \u201cor at least that\u2019s how I experienced it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Madame Mulard — the foster parent she came to call \u201cMeme,\u201d or \u201cGranny\u201d — reinforced that.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe would tell us our mother was a bad woman,\u201d Zaveduk said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMeme\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
But, on the other hand, \u201cMeme shared what little food there was evenly — we were not treated worse than her grandchildren. And even though my mother\u2019s money must have run out at some point, she kept us,\u201d Zaveduk said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zaveduk, who was almost 9 when the war ended, became \u201ca good Catholic\u201d who had been taught that \u201cthe Jews were evil, and they crucified Jesus.\u201d So she was particularly displeased that the strange couple who came to take her and Josette back to Paris were Jewish.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kept bringing crosses home, and my parents kept throwing them out. But although they wouldn\u2019t let us go to church anymore, they didn\u2019t replace our religion with anything else,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter what their Judaism had cost them, they were not very observant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even worse, her parents were not able to show the joy and love they must have felt at recovering their children.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had lost so much,\u201d Zaveduk said, \u201cthey were afraid to become attached to anything for fear of losing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The children, for their part, became very protective of their rather distant parents: \u201cWe always had to be good — we couldn\u2019t inflict any more pain on them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of Zaveduk\u2019s story is the dearth of communication, not just with her mother — who never explained why she had \u201cabandoned\u201d her — but with her own children.<\/p>\n
Zaveduk said she never talked with her parents about their wartime experiences. It wasn\u2019t until 10 years ago, when her mother taped a \u201cliving testimonial\u201d for the Holocaust Foundation in Skokie that Zaveduk got any inkling of what Laznowski had been through.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said to her, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you tell us more?\u2019 She answered, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you ask?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t want to bring up sad memories, and she didn\u2019t want to burden me with her past.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two years later, when Zaveduk agreed to speak about her childhood for the first time, she asked her elder son to type the speech. \u201cHe did it very graciously,\u201d she said, \u201cbut he never asked any questions. When I asked him why, he replied, \u2018There was a very clear line; I knew I wasn\u2019t supposed to cross it.\u2019 So I guess I must have conveyed the same reticence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of the reason for the conspiracy of silence is that, like other parents and children, Holocaust-survivor families \u201ctry to protect each other from bad things,\u201d Zaveduk said. \u201cBut also we were told, \u2018Forget the past. Get on with your life.\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Adele married Ben Zaveduk and they moved to the Chicago area in 1963. Their sons, Victor and Mitchell, live in Chicago.<\/p>\n
Adele Zaveduk is active in a 100-member support group called Hidden Children\/Chicago, which meets every other month.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a bond that can\u2019t be described,\u201d she said. \u201cOur lost childhood, the abandonment, having to go back to parents you don\u2019t remember and who weren\u2019t the same as they\u2019d been three years earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
“Secret Sufferers Of Holocaust” is the original title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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