Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust

Born-Again Jew

101 First Name: Adele Last Name: Zaveduk Maiden Name: Laznowski Date of Birth: August 4, 1937 City of Birth: Paris Country of Birth: France Born-Again Jew Adele Laznowski Zaveduk Whether or not children revealed that they were Jewish could have meant the difference between life and death. This is my story. I was born in Paris, France, in 1937, and as a little girl at the beginning of World War II, I had no recollections of being Jewish. None. Years later, after the war, I learned that my father had been a captive in Auschwitz. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew there was a war and that my father was a French soldier. My mother never talked about religion or being Jewish to me or to my younger sister Josette, born in 1940. Perhaps she meant to protect us. I remember my mother wearing a yellow star on her coat, but I didn’t understand why she tried to cover it with her purse when we were outside. Because we were under five years of age, neither Josette nor I had to wear the yellow star. In 1942, my father was released from the French Army in North Africa and returned to Paris. Around that time, the French police were tracking and picking up all the Jewish men and sending them to Eastern Europe concentration or work camps. My father, to avoid being picked up, went into hiding and did not live with us. Several times I remember the French police, with orders to take my father, coming to our small apartment in the middle of the night, banging on the door. I was terrified. In July 1942, the French police picked up my father and then sent him to Auschwitz at the beginning of August. My mother, through an underground agency that helped find hiding places for Jewish children, was able to place my sister and me with a Catholic family in the countryside, in Brou, a small village near Chartres. 102 Out of Chaos My mother left Josette and me with Madame Moulard, a widow, who with her daughter and her daughter’s three young children lived in a small two-room apartment above an old vacant store. There was a small kitchen, without running water. The bathroom and a water tap were downstairs in the vacant store. We had to go outside and then enter the store. At night it was scary for a little girl because the store was dark without any electricity. I also had a chamber pot under the bed for immediate necessities at night. As a mother, I now realize how difficult it must have been for my mother to give up her children. But she knew that the Nazis were rounding up Jews and that women with children were shipped immediately to death camps. After leaving my sister and me with Madame Moulard, she tried to find work in the neighboring farms to hide and be close to us. When I was an adult my mother told me that Madame Moulard denounced her to the police, who found her and forced her back to Paris on the same day. She never had a chance to say good-bye to us, no hugs, and no kisses; we were being left alone. After returning to Paris she was picked up in September 1942, along with many other Jews in another roundup and was sent to Drancy, a detention camp on the outskirts of Paris, and from there to Auschwitz. As I look back, our mother’s decision to hide us with a Catholic family saved our lives, but at that time we felt abandoned, left alone with strangers. We cried a lot and looked for her, but what can two little girls do when they feel abandoned? Madame Moulard told us that this is what happens to bad people. I always wondered who were the bad people? Was it us? Was it my mother? Madame Moulard treated us no better or worse than she treated her own family . She had a humble household. The war was going on and there was little food and few basic necessities. In the summer we went barefoot, and in the winter we wore wooden clogs that we wrapped with old newspapers tied with a string around our feet to keep them warm. When she and her daughter drank, they hit all of us kids, including their own, for no reason. There was...