September 25, 2011

So I hope to be getting some pictures up soon...just waiting on clearance from our Operations Department on what I can post freely!


We had another really great field trip this week. 10 students from Chicago Laboratory came...great kids, teachers, and school all around. They were so interested and prepared to participate with the docent and the speaker. The best part this week again was the speaker! 


Ida and Adam!!


Ida watched her mother commit suicide when she was just three years old. Most children do not remember much from their toddler/adolescent years, but Ida remembers. The Nazis had placed them into the ghetto and were separating the mothers from their children in order to move them to a concentration camp. Her mother couldn't handle the idea of being apart from her children and in an act of desperation, took her own life. Her eldest sister and twin brother (Adam), were all she had left in the world. One evening while walking along the outer borders of the ghetto with her aunt a man came along and took Ida. He was a christian man who had befriended her aunt before the war began. He and his wife took her and raised her as their own. Over the years Ida began to hate the Jews just as much as the Germans. She was constantly reminded of the stigma attached to being Jewish and hated her heritage. Being Jewish had ruined her family and her life. When the war finished her father, who had gone away to join the polish army, returned in search for his family and the only one he found was Ida. She refused the stay with her father hating him for forcing her into practicing Jewish traditions. For many years she struggled with accepting her true identity and it wasn't until her family came to the United States that she began to adjust and accept who she truly was. She continued to remain in contact with the family that raised her during the war, flying her "polish mother" as she refers to her, back and forth to visit the United States. Ida grew up, married, and had children of her own but she was always reminded of the hole in her family where her siblings belonged.


In 1991 their was an organized event in NYC for the Hidden Children, any and all who were hidden and saved during the Holocaust. There was a picture of a man on the front page of the article in the news paper that was identical to her father. The man, and all the others featured in the article, were in search of any family that may have survived the war. She got in contact with the man who was certain that they were not related because he never remembered having siblings or who his parents were, etc. They continued to communicate back and forth sending letters and photographs until one day his son recognized himself in a photo, but it wasn't himself that he was looking at, it was his father sitting with his mother, father, eldest sister, and his twin...Ida. 


CNN did a live broadcasting of Adam and Ida meeting for the first time in the airport and aired their live interview for the whole world to see. For 53 years they believed that all they had was hope and hope pulled through!!!


Today they both live in the United States and volunteer frequently with the museum. Ida's most important goal is to make sure that once she is gone, a true survivor of the Holocaust, that generations to come will continue to tell her story...because her story is real!