Janet Applefield
Holocaust Survivor
Nowy Targ, Poland
1939-1947
Holocaust Survivor
Nowy Targ, Poland
1939-1947
“One day I had this family that showered me with love and attention and then they were gone. I didn’t know what happened and I was just trying to survive another day”.
Janet Applefield, born Gustava Singer, was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland. Janet, her parents and younger sister Sareka lived in the small town of Nowy Targ approximately 50 miles south of Krakow, close to the border with Slovakia. The town of Nowy Targ was a mix of Jews and Christians who all “had workable relations before the war”. The Christians celebrated Christmas and the Jews celebrated Hannukah. “Everybody did their own thing “.
The family rented an apartment with electricity and indoor plumbing that “was nicely maintained”. They lived on the second floor of a three-story building with a balcony overlooking the cobblestone streets. Janet was surrounded by a large extended family. Her mother was one of three daughters, and her father was one of six brothers. Janet recalled one uncle had a motorcycle with a side car and he would put Janet in the sidecar and take her to the candy store. “I remember a specific candy.” It was made of hardened jelly and had either sugar or sprinkles on it.
Janet also recalls shopping at the butcher with her mother, buying kosher meat and bringing a dead chicken home, plucking the feathers and cooking it for dinner. She also has fond memories of baking with her mother and grandmother. “I had a very wonderful childhood” until the war started.
Her father wanted to be a dentist, but her grandfather told him he needed to go into the family business. His father owned a store that sold lumber, hardware and housewares. It was a place for the people in their town to come and buy hard goods. The town was built around the central town square, and the store was located on one corner of the town square.
On September 1, 1939 the Nazi’s invaded Poland. Janet recalled her father waking up at 5am to the sound of exploding bombs. He turned on the radio to hear the announcer say, ‘we are at war’. Her father packed up the family and brought them to Janet’s grandparents’ home in a nearby town. When they arrived, the entire town of Nowy Targ was packing their belongings to flee to Russia to escape the Nazis and the fighting.
Janet’s grandfather decided it was no longer safe for them to stay and packed some of their possessions onto their horse drawn cart and began what would be a very difficult journey to Russia. The road was packed with other families who were also escaping from the Nazi’s. People were using carts drawn by horses, bicycles and hand pushed carts. Along the way planes from the Nazi Luftwaffe flew overhead and strafed the defenseless citizens as they fled. On several occasions they had to jumped off the wagon and take cover in a ditch. Janet remembers passing by the wreckage of a plane that had been shot down. The trip was difficult and often the bridges would be out, and they would have to cross the rivers by foot. Back in Nowy Targ her father and uncles tried to join the Polish Army, but Poland was defeated in five weeks.
Janet’s father and uncles joined the caravan of 200,000 people leaving Poland and heading for Russia. When he arrived, he had no idea where Janet and the rest of the family was. Very few people at that time had a telephone making communication very difficult. “My father advertised in the newspaper and that’s how he found us”.
The family found a place to live in the nearby town of Winniki. Each day Janet’s father would go out and look for work and each evening he would come home and empty his pockets of what he had been able to scrounge for food. During the day Janet and her mother would walk through the forest looking for mushrooms. Her mother would make a stew with the mushrooms to feed the family. After nearly a year of living in Russia, there was announcement that all people from Poland would be forcibly deported back to Poland if they did not become Russian citizens. If the Singers became Russian citizens, they would not be able to return to Poland after the war and reclaim their property and belongings. The Singer family decided to return to Nowy Targ
Before they left Winniki, the Mayor of the town received instructions from the Nazi police, also known as the Gestapo, that he was to assemble all of the Jewish men at the city hall where they would be given a special work assignment. Desperate for work two of her uncles, carrying shovels, went to city hall. Once assembled, the men were marched to Piaski Ravine where they were told to undress and then shot and buried in a mass grave.
Janet and her family made the return trip to Nowy Targ. Her grandparents decided not to make the trip, and an aunt and uncle would also stay with them in Winnicki. The return home was not joyful for the family. Seranka surrendered to diphtheria at the age of 18 months and Janet’s grandparents were rounded up and put on a train to a slave labor camp in Siberia. Janet would never see them again.
When they arrived in Nowy Targ the Gestapo was waiting for her father. He was deemed a communist and was sent to the local jail. “I remember my mother cooking his meals. I even remember the containers. They were aluminum and stacked on top of each other and you put different foods in different sections”. It was very difficult for a six-year-old girl’s mind to fully absorb the gravity of the situation and make sense of the things she was experiencing. “I was always scared. I was always afraid”. In 1941 parents did not explain to the children what was happening. Janet only saw her grandparents and parents frequently crying. “I remember one time the Gestapo came to our apartment looking for valuables. I understood a little bit. Jews had to wear armbands to identify themselves as Jews”.
Her father was eventually released from jail, but the harassment didn’t stop. Her father learned that the Gestapo was again looking for him. The news was getting out that when the Gestapo rounded up the Jewish citizens they were being taken to cemeteries and forced to dig their own graves. Others were put on trains and sent to slave labor and extermination camps. Soon the Gestapo was rounding up the Jews and forcing them from their homes, into very cramped conditions, in what sounds to be a ghetto. “We moved to a very small apartment in a short building…all cramped together”.
Faced with the realization that the situation would not improve and would only likely worsen, the family decided to flee to Krakow where her father knew several non-Jews. “So, one night we left our apartment and took off our armbands and went to the train station. But train stations were very dangerous because that’s very often where the plain cloths Gestapo would be. But we were lucky that night”. Her grandmother and grandfather and dog were not so lucky. Janet’s father later told her how the Gestapo barged into their home one evening looking for him. The dog was barking amidst the yelling of the Gestapo. The Gestapo tired of the barking and shot the dog right in the apartment. Her grandparents and other relatives were deported to death camps.
On the train Janet remembers slowly passing through a small station and seeing three Jewish men with long beards hanging from gallows with signs pinned to their coats saying, Kosher Meat. Janet didn’t know what it meant but she knew it was bad. They arrived in Krakow and lived with non-Jews for a few nights, but it was a dangerous game they were playing, and each family would politely ask them to leave after a few days. The risk to the family harboring Jews would mean extreme punishment or death. Her father decided to move the family again, this time to the town of Niepolomice where Janet’s grandmother lived.
Once in Niepolomice her parents faced the stark reality it was no better there. It was Summer of 1942, and Janet’s father decided, the family needed to move again to escape the constant Gestapo round ups of Jews. Her father loaded the family’s few remaining possessions and put Janet and her mother on a cart attached to horse and headed out of town. Along the drive her father could see the Polish police on horseback off in the distance. He knew the police, known as the Blue Police, collaborated with the Nazis. The family jumped off the cart and began running through the potato fields next to the road, but they could not move fast enough to evade the Blue Police. The police jumped from their horses and began to beat her mother and father with clubs. They were told to return to the ghetto.
Her parents could see their future, and they could see it was likely to end very badly. They concluded they must make the most difficult and agonizing decision a parent could be forced to make. They would have to give Janet to someone else who might be able to give her a life. They explained to Janet that she was going to go and live with Maria, her cousin Miriam’s nanny. Maria was half Polish and half German, known as Volksdeutsche. These were people whose language and culture could be traced to German roots although they were not German citizens. This gave them many privileges in the Nazi occupied areas of Europe. Janet begged them not to, but her parents told her to be brave and soon they would be reunited.
Maria took Janet’s wrist in one hand and her tiny suitcase in the other and they left her parents. That was the last time she would ever see her mother. The Gestapo ordered the people in the town and the surrounding towns to meet at a staging area on the outskirts of Krakow. Her parents decided to separate, hoping they would have a better chance at survival apart. Janet believes there were over 12,000 people, all Jews, at the staging area. They slept on the ground in the open air. Many of these people were shot, 1,000 were sent to become slave laborers and the balance of the people were loaded onto box cars and sent to the extermination camp Belzec. Her father was sent to the ghetto in Krakow. The Nazis were building an extermination camp and their plan was to kill all of the Jews in the Ghetto once the camp was operating. In 2015 Janet would learn her mother, grandmother, cousin, aunt and others were killed in that camp.
It was Fall of 1942. Living with Maria was no place for a little girl. The apartment had no electricity and often Maria would go out in the evening and leave Janet alone in the dark apartment. Janet recalled a visit by the Gestapo one day. The Nazi officer announced that he had orders to search the apartment for Jews. “He turned over some of the furniture…and came up to me and held my braids…and wanted to know who I was. Maria said I was her niece, and she was taking care of me because her sister was sick”. The Gestapo officer left and Janet believes her Aryan features helped her avoid further scrutiny. “I still hear those boots and see those cold blue eyes”.
It is noteworthy the Janet’s birth name was Gustawa, but it changed several times during the war as her identity changed. More on that later.
One day Maria suddenly announced that Janet was going to be leaving and she should pack her suitcase. Scared and confused, Janet packed her belongings and followed Maria to the trolley. They exited the trolley at the stop near the ghetto and began to walk in that direction. As they got closer to the fence of the ghetto, Janet could see her father. “My father put his fingers through the mesh of the fence and said to me, he loved me”. Janet asked about her mother, but her father didn’t answer.
“Suddenly there was a women standing right next to us and my father said, ‘this is your cousin Lala. You’re going with her. You be a good girl. You listen and be brave’. Suddenly she took my suitcase and pulled me away from the ghetto fence”. Just like that Janet was on her way to the next chapter of her survival.
Lala, 19 years old at the time, was living under the falsified Christian identification papers of Helena Walkowska. She was also able to obtain a falsified birth certificate for Janet using the identity of a dead Polish girl. “So, I took on this girl’s identity. My new name was Krysia Antoszkiewicz”. How was a little girl able to continue to adapt? “I just knew I did whatever anybody told me. I was very obedient”.
Lala was an angry woman. Maybe it was personality or maybe she had been stripped of her humanity by the war and living in constant fear of the Gestapo. The first thing Lala did was to tell Janet the story of her new identity. She was the daughter of a Polish officer in Warsaw, and both of her parents were killed in a bombing raid, and she was living with her cousin. She was to recite it if she was ever questioned.
Living with Lala was no easy day. “She beat me with the fireplace poker. When I cried for my mother, she would say my mother was dead. She’s never coming back for you”. Once she beat Janet so badly her fingernails turned black, became infected and several fell off. For all of the acts of cruelty imposed upon one human by another, there were some people who managed to maintain their humanity. The Polish women who lived next to Lala, Yanina, took an interest in Janet and bandaged her hands. When Lala would leave the apartment for the day and leave Janet out on the front steps in the cold, Yanina would bring Janet into her apartment, feed her and let Janet play with Yanina’s baby.
Hiding Janet was a dangerous job. There was the constant threat of a surprise visit by the Gestapo acting on the information of a neighbor that someone was harboring a Jew. The Nazi’s encourage neighbors to turn on each other to improve their chances of survival. This played out with Lala. One day she told seven-year-old Janet they were going to visit Lala’s boyfriend in Krakow. It was May of 1943.
When they arrived in Krakow Lala took Janet into a church and told her not to leave. Several hours went by and Janet began to panic. She left the church and walked into a big crowd and began crying. Quite suddenly a woman came by and quickly pulled Janet under her cape and asked her what was wrong. Janet explain Lala had left her in the church and didn’t return. This good Samaritan took Janet to an apartment of a women named Alicia. They asked Janet how she found herself alone in the church and Janet told them the story Lala made her learn in case she was ever questioned. Janet said she was the daughter of a Polish officer in Warsaw, and both of her parents were killed in a bombing raid, and she was living with her cousin but now she had disappeared.
Alicia was sympathetic but was unable to hide Janet. There was a Nazi SS officer who lived in her apartment building and her mother was active in the Polish resistance. They had an operating hospital in their apartment, stockpiles of ammunition and an operating a short-wave radio. They could not afford to have a neighbor report seeing a strange little girl. God was looking down on Janet and the next chapter of her young little life unfolded.
That evening after dark, Alicia’s oldest sun, Stashek, came for Janet and they began a long walk together. After several miles they arrived at a farm that was owned by the Catholic Church and managed by Alicia’s brother-in-law. The farm was far from town and there were few people to spot a new girl in the area.
For the next two years Janet lived on the farm with the Golub family. The farmhouse had no electricity, no running water and an outhouse. Janet recalled taking a bath in the tub which was in the kitchen. When she first arrived, she had lice and the treatment was to pour kerosene on her hair and comb out the lice. She already knew how to read and write which was fortunate because the Golub’s told her it was too dangerous to go to school. Stashek handled the farms accounting records and Janet would sit with him and watch. He would often teach her arithmetic by giving her math problems to solve. Stashek would pat her on the head and tell her how smart she was.
Janet recalled eating family style at the big kitchen table with the farm hands. There would be a big bowl of mash potatoes in the middle of the table, and everyone got a spoon. There was buttermilk or sour milk to drink. The meals also typically included cabbage and brown crusty bread they baked in the kitchen. The family also made pickles and sauerkraut and sometimes they would be part of the meal. There was one village girl named Krystyna who came to play with Janet from time to time. Most days she wandered around the farm looking for things to amuse herself. She learned to milk cows, churn butter and climb trees. Genia Golub, the mother, gave Janet two books and a blank notebook. “They were tattered, but I didn’t care”. She read the two books, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tedowata until she had them memorized.
The Golub family had no idea that Janet was Jewish. Despite all that had happened to her in her short life Janet always remembered she was Jewish. She would attend mass at the Catholic Church with the family and celebrated the Catholic holidays. “It was a little wooden church”. Janet kept her secret well.
The family rarely ate meat. It was forbidden for Polish families to slaughter their own animals for their personal consumption. It was to be given to the Nazis. One day the family decided to take the risk and butcher a pig. The dead animal was laid out on the kitchen table and Jan, the father, began to carve the pig into bacon, sausages, roasts and chops and no part of the pig went to waste. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbor who had come to warn them that the Blue Police were on their way to the Golub Farm. The family scurried to pack the meat away in containers and took them to the attic. They quickly cleaned the kitchen and chopped lots of onions to hide the smell.
The Blue Police arrived and made their customary demand for butter, cheese and eggs. Sensing they were unaware of the butcher’s bonanza in the attic, the family invited them in. Janet remembered how Lala was always in a better mood after drinking vodka. She blurted out, “Give them some vodka”. The Golub’s gave them some of their homemade vodka they distilled from potatoes. After a few shots of vodka, the men left with their package of provisions.
In late 1944 a man knocked on the door and introduced himself as Dr. Antoni Kryzewski, a catholic doctor. Janet recognized him and he was no doctor; he was Lala’s father. He said he was her uncle and had come to take Janet. Janet knew this would be a problem and it showed in her face. Genia, sensing Janet’s concern, told Lala’s father it was no imposition for Janet to stay, and it was likely a much safer place. He left and Janet breathed a sigh of relief.
The Soviet army was advancing on Poland and soon there was fighting in an around the farm. In January of 1945 Warsaw was liberated and by the end of the month all of Poland had been liberated from Nazi control. Little did they know, life after the fall of the Nazis would not improve. Extreme antisemitism among Polish nationalists would make life very dangerous. By May the war in Europe was over. Janet recalls everyone being happy and celebrating. “I was reasonably happy, but I didn’t know what comes next”
What came next was another visit by Lala’s father. Now that the war was over Genia couldn’t continue to hold on to Janet. After all, Lala’s father was family and although they thought of Janet as their daughter, the time had come for them to let go.
Janet went to live with Lala’s father and his wife in Krakow. When the war ended the fighting stopped but the antisemitism continued as strong as ever. Janet recalled there had always been antisemitism in Poland but now it was far worse. Lala’s family continued to hide their true identity and lived everyday as a good Catholic family. Janet went to church and made her first communion to maintain the imagine of a good Catholic family.
One day Lala’s father abruptly told Janet to pack her suitcase. He grabbed the suitcase and Janet and took her on a several minute’s walk to the Jewish refugee center. Lala’s father introduced Janet to the woman behind the desk and then walked out the door. Janet was now 10 years old. A Jewish girl in hiding, raised Catholic and now at a Jewish refugee center. “I was very confused. I didn’t know who I was or what I was”. There were 70 other children at the refugee center and some of them were, as Janet described them, tough kids.
At the refugee center there were lists posted on the walls showing the survivors of the Holocaust. From the refugee center Janet and the other children went to two newly formed orphanages. One for healthy children and one for children suffering from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. The hospitals would not treat Jewish children. The orphanages were always in danger of being bombed as the angry post-war population unleashed its antisemitic beliefs.
Lena Kuchler, who founded the orphanage, would often go to the refugee center to pick up supplies. On one such trip she overheard a survivor describing his daughter as a young girl with blonde hair in braids, green eyes and a birthmark on her left thigh. Lena told him she might know where his daughter was. When she returned to the orphanage that day, she asked Janet to lift her skirt slightly, and there was the birthmark. She told Janet she had wonderful news; her father was a survivor. Janet’s father ended up in three different concentration camps but survived them all.
“I always remember the reunion with my father because when I first saw him, I was scared of him. He looked like a skeleton. He was hugging me and kissing me and telling me he was going to take me. I didn’t want to go. For the first time I had friends and Lena was like our mother”. It had been three years since Janet last saw him.
Her father wasn’t in good health, and he had to rent a room nearby until he gained some weigh and strength. “In time he was able to take me, and we went back to our town, and we moved into my grandparent’s apartment which was above the store they had. It wasn’t safe because there were always notes being posted on the doors saying we would be murdered. Two of my father’s friends were killed driving a car. They were ambushed, shot and killed”. Janet’s father finally concluded it was too dangerous for Jews to stay in Poland
Janet had an Uncle Elek who lived in Palestine and an Uncle Jack who lived in the United States. Her father asked her where she wanted to live. “I want to live in America. I heard money grows on trees”. Getting to America wasn’t an easy process. It took two years until they could get distant relatives in the states to sponsor them. The sponsor documents stated that if Janet’s father couldn’t support himself, the sponsor would be financially responsible for both of them.
Janet and her father traveled to Paris to wait for their visas. They made the most of their time and enrolled in an English class. Once they received their visas, they traveled to La Harve, France to board a marine transport ship for the 14 day journey. “It was a very rough, rough crossing”. On March 28th, 1947, Janet saw the Statute of Liberty as the ship entered New York Harbor.
Janet and her father settled in New Jersey with her Uncle Jack, his wife and son. Janet, almost 12, had never been to school. She could read and write but only in Polish. When she went with her Uncle Jack to register in the local elementary school, they asked her name. In her best English she said, “Gustava”. Her Uncle Jack insisted she have an American name. She thought about it and decided she wanted to be like her glamourous French cousin. She said, “Jannette”. Her uncle said her name would be Janet.
The next hurdle for the family was their visas. They were holding medical visas, and they were valid for only 90 days. They had a second visa to enter Venezuela if they couldn’t stay in the states. The only way for them to stay was for her father to marry to an American. The family hurried to find him a wife and before the 90 days was up, he was married. Janet had a new name, a new country, a new school, a new stepmother and a new appearance. “They cut my hair. Everything was new from that point on. It’s like life just started and my new American mother didn’t want to hear very much about our past”.
The family moved to Newark. Janet attended West Side High School and was vey popular. She loved going to dances, she had lots of friends, and she had lots of dates. Janet met an older boy, Jerry, and the couple dated for two years and married when Janet was 19. Janet had entered Rutgers University to study sociology and history. She had a baby boy and brought him to class so she could finish her degree. “It took me one extra year”.
Janet went on to have another son and a daughter. In 1975 the family moved to Boston and sometime later Janet earned her master’s degree in social work at Boston University. After 51 years of marriage the couple divorced.
Janet and her father never talked much about their experiences of surviving the Holocaust. Janet didn’t consider herself a survivor. She felt the survivors were really the people who and been sent to the camps and found a way to survive. With all of her different identities through the years and all that she saw and experienced, Janet questioned if she really wanted to be Jewish. “I grew up learning it was a bad thing…why did I want to be something people hate”? Today she is comfortable being Jewish and while she does not consider herself very religious, she is spiritual and celebrates the Jewish holidays.
In the 1980’s Janet began exploring her childhood ordeal and returned to Poland to meet her Polish rescuers. She has been back several times and has developed a friendship with a well-regarded researcher who has helped her learn her family history. Later in life Janet began speaking publicly about her experiences to schools and various organizations. At the age of 90 Janet is a sought-after speaker on her experience in surviving the Holocaust.
Janet Singer Applefield is a living example of human resilience and reminds us of how much we can endure while retaining our humanity. Without any instruction Janet knew she didn’t have the luxury of worry, her focus was to survive the day. Janet adopted and adapted to her surroundings but never forgot her true roots and family.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been….”
Janet Applefield, born Gustava Singer, was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland. Janet, her parents and younger sister Sareka lived in the small town of Nowy Targ approximately 50 miles south of Krakow, close to the border with Slovakia. The town of Nowy Targ was a mix of Jews and Christians who all “had workable relations before the war”. The Christians celebrated Christmas and the Jews celebrated Hannukah. “Everybody did their own thing “.
The family rented an apartment with electricity and indoor plumbing that “was nicely maintained”. They lived on the second floor of a three-story building with a balcony overlooking the cobblestone streets. Janet was surrounded by a large extended family. Her mother was one of three daughters, and her father was one of six brothers. Janet recalled one uncle had a motorcycle with a side car and he would put Janet in the sidecar and take her to the candy store. “I remember a specific candy.” It was made of hardened jelly and had either sugar or sprinkles on it.
Janet also recalls shopping at the butcher with her mother, buying kosher meat and bringing a dead chicken home, plucking the feathers and cooking it for dinner. She also has fond memories of baking with her mother and grandmother. “I had a very wonderful childhood” until the war started.
Her father wanted to be a dentist, but her grandfather told him he needed to go into the family business. His father owned a store that sold lumber, hardware and housewares. It was a place for the people in their town to come and buy hard goods. The town was built around the central town square, and the store was located on one corner of the town square.
On September 1, 1939 the Nazi’s invaded Poland. Janet recalled her father waking up at 5am to the sound of exploding bombs. He turned on the radio to hear the announcer say, ‘we are at war’. Her father packed up the family and brought them to Janet’s grandparents’ home in a nearby town. When they arrived, the entire town of Nowy Targ was packing their belongings to flee to Russia to escape the Nazis and the fighting.
Janet’s grandfather decided it was no longer safe for them to stay and packed some of their possessions onto their horse drawn cart and began what would be a very difficult journey to Russia. The road was packed with other families who were also escaping from the Nazi’s. People were using carts drawn by horses, bicycles and hand pushed carts. Along the way planes from the Nazi Luftwaffe flew overhead and strafed the defenseless citizens as they fled. On several occasions they had to jumped off the wagon and take cover in a ditch. Janet remembers passing by the wreckage of a plane that had been shot down. The trip was difficult and often the bridges would be out, and they would have to cross the rivers by foot. Back in Nowy Targ her father and uncles tried to join the Polish Army, but Poland was defeated in five weeks.
Janet’s father and uncles joined the caravan of 200,000 people leaving Poland and heading for Russia. When he arrived, he had no idea where Janet and the rest of the family was. Very few people at that time had a telephone making communication very difficult. “My father advertised in the newspaper and that’s how he found us”.
The family found a place to live in the nearby town of Winniki. Each day Janet’s father would go out and look for work and each evening he would come home and empty his pockets of what he had been able to scrounge for food. During the day Janet and her mother would walk through the forest looking for mushrooms. Her mother would make a stew with the mushrooms to feed the family. After nearly a year of living in Russia, there was announcement that all people from Poland would be forcibly deported back to Poland if they did not become Russian citizens. If the Singers became Russian citizens, they would not be able to return to Poland after the war and reclaim their property and belongings. The Singer family decided to return to Nowy Targ
Before they left Winniki, the Mayor of the town received instructions from the Nazi police, also known as the Gestapo, that he was to assemble all of the Jewish men at the city hall where they would be given a special work assignment. Desperate for work two of her uncles, carrying shovels, went to city hall. Once assembled, the men were marched to Piaski Ravine where they were told to undress and then shot and buried in a mass grave.
Janet and her family made the return trip to Nowy Targ. Her grandparents decided not to make the trip, and an aunt and uncle would also stay with them in Winnicki. The return home was not joyful for the family. Seranka surrendered to diphtheria at the age of 18 months and Janet’s grandparents were rounded up and put on a train to a slave labor camp in Siberia. Janet would never see them again.
When they arrived in Nowy Targ the Gestapo was waiting for her father. He was deemed a communist and was sent to the local jail. “I remember my mother cooking his meals. I even remember the containers. They were aluminum and stacked on top of each other and you put different foods in different sections”. It was very difficult for a six-year-old girl’s mind to fully absorb the gravity of the situation and make sense of the things she was experiencing. “I was always scared. I was always afraid”. In 1941 parents did not explain to the children what was happening. Janet only saw her grandparents and parents frequently crying. “I remember one time the Gestapo came to our apartment looking for valuables. I understood a little bit. Jews had to wear armbands to identify themselves as Jews”.
Her father was eventually released from jail, but the harassment didn’t stop. Her father learned that the Gestapo was again looking for him. The news was getting out that when the Gestapo rounded up the Jewish citizens they were being taken to cemeteries and forced to dig their own graves. Others were put on trains and sent to slave labor and extermination camps. Soon the Gestapo was rounding up the Jews and forcing them from their homes, into very cramped conditions, in what sounds to be a ghetto. “We moved to a very small apartment in a short building…all cramped together”.
Faced with the realization that the situation would not improve and would only likely worsen, the family decided to flee to Krakow where her father knew several non-Jews. “So, one night we left our apartment and took off our armbands and went to the train station. But train stations were very dangerous because that’s very often where the plain cloths Gestapo would be. But we were lucky that night”. Her grandmother and grandfather and dog were not so lucky. Janet’s father later told her how the Gestapo barged into their home one evening looking for him. The dog was barking amidst the yelling of the Gestapo. The Gestapo tired of the barking and shot the dog right in the apartment. Her grandparents and other relatives were deported to death camps.
On the train Janet remembers slowly passing through a small station and seeing three Jewish men with long beards hanging from gallows with signs pinned to their coats saying, Kosher Meat. Janet didn’t know what it meant but she knew it was bad. They arrived in Krakow and lived with non-Jews for a few nights, but it was a dangerous game they were playing, and each family would politely ask them to leave after a few days. The risk to the family harboring Jews would mean extreme punishment or death. Her father decided to move the family again, this time to the town of Niepolomice where Janet’s grandmother lived.
Once in Niepolomice her parents faced the stark reality it was no better there. It was Summer of 1942, and Janet’s father decided, the family needed to move again to escape the constant Gestapo round ups of Jews. Her father loaded the family’s few remaining possessions and put Janet and her mother on a cart attached to horse and headed out of town. Along the drive her father could see the Polish police on horseback off in the distance. He knew the police, known as the Blue Police, collaborated with the Nazis. The family jumped off the cart and began running through the potato fields next to the road, but they could not move fast enough to evade the Blue Police. The police jumped from their horses and began to beat her mother and father with clubs. They were told to return to the ghetto.
Her parents could see their future, and they could see it was likely to end very badly. They concluded they must make the most difficult and agonizing decision a parent could be forced to make. They would have to give Janet to someone else who might be able to give her a life. They explained to Janet that she was going to go and live with Maria, her cousin Miriam’s nanny. Maria was half Polish and half German, known as Volksdeutsche. These were people whose language and culture could be traced to German roots although they were not German citizens. This gave them many privileges in the Nazi occupied areas of Europe. Janet begged them not to, but her parents told her to be brave and soon they would be reunited.
Maria took Janet’s wrist in one hand and her tiny suitcase in the other and they left her parents. That was the last time she would ever see her mother. The Gestapo ordered the people in the town and the surrounding towns to meet at a staging area on the outskirts of Krakow. Her parents decided to separate, hoping they would have a better chance at survival apart. Janet believes there were over 12,000 people, all Jews, at the staging area. They slept on the ground in the open air. Many of these people were shot, 1,000 were sent to become slave laborers and the balance of the people were loaded onto box cars and sent to the extermination camp Belzec. Her father was sent to the ghetto in Krakow. The Nazis were building an extermination camp and their plan was to kill all of the Jews in the Ghetto once the camp was operating. In 2015 Janet would learn her mother, grandmother, cousin, aunt and others were killed in that camp.
It was Fall of 1942. Living with Maria was no place for a little girl. The apartment had no electricity and often Maria would go out in the evening and leave Janet alone in the dark apartment. Janet recalled a visit by the Gestapo one day. The Nazi officer announced that he had orders to search the apartment for Jews. “He turned over some of the furniture…and came up to me and held my braids…and wanted to know who I was. Maria said I was her niece, and she was taking care of me because her sister was sick”. The Gestapo officer left and Janet believes her Aryan features helped her avoid further scrutiny. “I still hear those boots and see those cold blue eyes”.
It is noteworthy the Janet’s birth name was Gustawa, but it changed several times during the war as her identity changed. More on that later.
One day Maria suddenly announced that Janet was going to be leaving and she should pack her suitcase. Scared and confused, Janet packed her belongings and followed Maria to the trolley. They exited the trolley at the stop near the ghetto and began to walk in that direction. As they got closer to the fence of the ghetto, Janet could see her father. “My father put his fingers through the mesh of the fence and said to me, he loved me”. Janet asked about her mother, but her father didn’t answer.
“Suddenly there was a women standing right next to us and my father said, ‘this is your cousin Lala. You’re going with her. You be a good girl. You listen and be brave’. Suddenly she took my suitcase and pulled me away from the ghetto fence”. Just like that Janet was on her way to the next chapter of her survival.
Lala, 19 years old at the time, was living under the falsified Christian identification papers of Helena Walkowska. She was also able to obtain a falsified birth certificate for Janet using the identity of a dead Polish girl. “So, I took on this girl’s identity. My new name was Krysia Antoszkiewicz”. How was a little girl able to continue to adapt? “I just knew I did whatever anybody told me. I was very obedient”.
Lala was an angry woman. Maybe it was personality or maybe she had been stripped of her humanity by the war and living in constant fear of the Gestapo. The first thing Lala did was to tell Janet the story of her new identity. She was the daughter of a Polish officer in Warsaw, and both of her parents were killed in a bombing raid, and she was living with her cousin. She was to recite it if she was ever questioned.
Living with Lala was no easy day. “She beat me with the fireplace poker. When I cried for my mother, she would say my mother was dead. She’s never coming back for you”. Once she beat Janet so badly her fingernails turned black, became infected and several fell off. For all of the acts of cruelty imposed upon one human by another, there were some people who managed to maintain their humanity. The Polish women who lived next to Lala, Yanina, took an interest in Janet and bandaged her hands. When Lala would leave the apartment for the day and leave Janet out on the front steps in the cold, Yanina would bring Janet into her apartment, feed her and let Janet play with Yanina’s baby.
Hiding Janet was a dangerous job. There was the constant threat of a surprise visit by the Gestapo acting on the information of a neighbor that someone was harboring a Jew. The Nazi’s encourage neighbors to turn on each other to improve their chances of survival. This played out with Lala. One day she told seven-year-old Janet they were going to visit Lala’s boyfriend in Krakow. It was May of 1943.
When they arrived in Krakow Lala took Janet into a church and told her not to leave. Several hours went by and Janet began to panic. She left the church and walked into a big crowd and began crying. Quite suddenly a woman came by and quickly pulled Janet under her cape and asked her what was wrong. Janet explain Lala had left her in the church and didn’t return. This good Samaritan took Janet to an apartment of a women named Alicia. They asked Janet how she found herself alone in the church and Janet told them the story Lala made her learn in case she was ever questioned. Janet said she was the daughter of a Polish officer in Warsaw, and both of her parents were killed in a bombing raid, and she was living with her cousin but now she had disappeared.
Alicia was sympathetic but was unable to hide Janet. There was a Nazi SS officer who lived in her apartment building and her mother was active in the Polish resistance. They had an operating hospital in their apartment, stockpiles of ammunition and an operating a short-wave radio. They could not afford to have a neighbor report seeing a strange little girl. God was looking down on Janet and the next chapter of her young little life unfolded.
That evening after dark, Alicia’s oldest sun, Stashek, came for Janet and they began a long walk together. After several miles they arrived at a farm that was owned by the Catholic Church and managed by Alicia’s brother-in-law. The farm was far from town and there were few people to spot a new girl in the area.
For the next two years Janet lived on the farm with the Golub family. The farmhouse had no electricity, no running water and an outhouse. Janet recalled taking a bath in the tub which was in the kitchen. When she first arrived, she had lice and the treatment was to pour kerosene on her hair and comb out the lice. She already knew how to read and write which was fortunate because the Golub’s told her it was too dangerous to go to school. Stashek handled the farms accounting records and Janet would sit with him and watch. He would often teach her arithmetic by giving her math problems to solve. Stashek would pat her on the head and tell her how smart she was.
Janet recalled eating family style at the big kitchen table with the farm hands. There would be a big bowl of mash potatoes in the middle of the table, and everyone got a spoon. There was buttermilk or sour milk to drink. The meals also typically included cabbage and brown crusty bread they baked in the kitchen. The family also made pickles and sauerkraut and sometimes they would be part of the meal. There was one village girl named Krystyna who came to play with Janet from time to time. Most days she wandered around the farm looking for things to amuse herself. She learned to milk cows, churn butter and climb trees. Genia Golub, the mother, gave Janet two books and a blank notebook. “They were tattered, but I didn’t care”. She read the two books, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tedowata until she had them memorized.
The Golub family had no idea that Janet was Jewish. Despite all that had happened to her in her short life Janet always remembered she was Jewish. She would attend mass at the Catholic Church with the family and celebrated the Catholic holidays. “It was a little wooden church”. Janet kept her secret well.
The family rarely ate meat. It was forbidden for Polish families to slaughter their own animals for their personal consumption. It was to be given to the Nazis. One day the family decided to take the risk and butcher a pig. The dead animal was laid out on the kitchen table and Jan, the father, began to carve the pig into bacon, sausages, roasts and chops and no part of the pig went to waste. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbor who had come to warn them that the Blue Police were on their way to the Golub Farm. The family scurried to pack the meat away in containers and took them to the attic. They quickly cleaned the kitchen and chopped lots of onions to hide the smell.
The Blue Police arrived and made their customary demand for butter, cheese and eggs. Sensing they were unaware of the butcher’s bonanza in the attic, the family invited them in. Janet remembered how Lala was always in a better mood after drinking vodka. She blurted out, “Give them some vodka”. The Golub’s gave them some of their homemade vodka they distilled from potatoes. After a few shots of vodka, the men left with their package of provisions.
In late 1944 a man knocked on the door and introduced himself as Dr. Antoni Kryzewski, a catholic doctor. Janet recognized him and he was no doctor; he was Lala’s father. He said he was her uncle and had come to take Janet. Janet knew this would be a problem and it showed in her face. Genia, sensing Janet’s concern, told Lala’s father it was no imposition for Janet to stay, and it was likely a much safer place. He left and Janet breathed a sigh of relief.
The Soviet army was advancing on Poland and soon there was fighting in an around the farm. In January of 1945 Warsaw was liberated and by the end of the month all of Poland had been liberated from Nazi control. Little did they know, life after the fall of the Nazis would not improve. Extreme antisemitism among Polish nationalists would make life very dangerous. By May the war in Europe was over. Janet recalls everyone being happy and celebrating. “I was reasonably happy, but I didn’t know what comes next”
What came next was another visit by Lala’s father. Now that the war was over Genia couldn’t continue to hold on to Janet. After all, Lala’s father was family and although they thought of Janet as their daughter, the time had come for them to let go.
Janet went to live with Lala’s father and his wife in Krakow. When the war ended the fighting stopped but the antisemitism continued as strong as ever. Janet recalled there had always been antisemitism in Poland but now it was far worse. Lala’s family continued to hide their true identity and lived everyday as a good Catholic family. Janet went to church and made her first communion to maintain the imagine of a good Catholic family.
One day Lala’s father abruptly told Janet to pack her suitcase. He grabbed the suitcase and Janet and took her on a several minute’s walk to the Jewish refugee center. Lala’s father introduced Janet to the woman behind the desk and then walked out the door. Janet was now 10 years old. A Jewish girl in hiding, raised Catholic and now at a Jewish refugee center. “I was very confused. I didn’t know who I was or what I was”. There were 70 other children at the refugee center and some of them were, as Janet described them, tough kids.
At the refugee center there were lists posted on the walls showing the survivors of the Holocaust. From the refugee center Janet and the other children went to two newly formed orphanages. One for healthy children and one for children suffering from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. The hospitals would not treat Jewish children. The orphanages were always in danger of being bombed as the angry post-war population unleashed its antisemitic beliefs.
Lena Kuchler, who founded the orphanage, would often go to the refugee center to pick up supplies. On one such trip she overheard a survivor describing his daughter as a young girl with blonde hair in braids, green eyes and a birthmark on her left thigh. Lena told him she might know where his daughter was. When she returned to the orphanage that day, she asked Janet to lift her skirt slightly, and there was the birthmark. She told Janet she had wonderful news; her father was a survivor. Janet’s father ended up in three different concentration camps but survived them all.
“I always remember the reunion with my father because when I first saw him, I was scared of him. He looked like a skeleton. He was hugging me and kissing me and telling me he was going to take me. I didn’t want to go. For the first time I had friends and Lena was like our mother”. It had been three years since Janet last saw him.
Her father wasn’t in good health, and he had to rent a room nearby until he gained some weigh and strength. “In time he was able to take me, and we went back to our town, and we moved into my grandparent’s apartment which was above the store they had. It wasn’t safe because there were always notes being posted on the doors saying we would be murdered. Two of my father’s friends were killed driving a car. They were ambushed, shot and killed”. Janet’s father finally concluded it was too dangerous for Jews to stay in Poland
Janet had an Uncle Elek who lived in Palestine and an Uncle Jack who lived in the United States. Her father asked her where she wanted to live. “I want to live in America. I heard money grows on trees”. Getting to America wasn’t an easy process. It took two years until they could get distant relatives in the states to sponsor them. The sponsor documents stated that if Janet’s father couldn’t support himself, the sponsor would be financially responsible for both of them.
Janet and her father traveled to Paris to wait for their visas. They made the most of their time and enrolled in an English class. Once they received their visas, they traveled to La Harve, France to board a marine transport ship for the 14 day journey. “It was a very rough, rough crossing”. On March 28th, 1947, Janet saw the Statute of Liberty as the ship entered New York Harbor.
Janet and her father settled in New Jersey with her Uncle Jack, his wife and son. Janet, almost 12, had never been to school. She could read and write but only in Polish. When she went with her Uncle Jack to register in the local elementary school, they asked her name. In her best English she said, “Gustava”. Her Uncle Jack insisted she have an American name. She thought about it and decided she wanted to be like her glamourous French cousin. She said, “Jannette”. Her uncle said her name would be Janet.
The next hurdle for the family was their visas. They were holding medical visas, and they were valid for only 90 days. They had a second visa to enter Venezuela if they couldn’t stay in the states. The only way for them to stay was for her father to marry to an American. The family hurried to find him a wife and before the 90 days was up, he was married. Janet had a new name, a new country, a new school, a new stepmother and a new appearance. “They cut my hair. Everything was new from that point on. It’s like life just started and my new American mother didn’t want to hear very much about our past”.
The family moved to Newark. Janet attended West Side High School and was vey popular. She loved going to dances, she had lots of friends, and she had lots of dates. Janet met an older boy, Jerry, and the couple dated for two years and married when Janet was 19. Janet had entered Rutgers University to study sociology and history. She had a baby boy and brought him to class so she could finish her degree. “It took me one extra year”.
Janet went on to have another son and a daughter. In 1975 the family moved to Boston and sometime later Janet earned her master’s degree in social work at Boston University. After 51 years of marriage the couple divorced.
Janet and her father never talked much about their experiences of surviving the Holocaust. Janet didn’t consider herself a survivor. She felt the survivors were really the people who and been sent to the camps and found a way to survive. With all of her different identities through the years and all that she saw and experienced, Janet questioned if she really wanted to be Jewish. “I grew up learning it was a bad thing…why did I want to be something people hate”? Today she is comfortable being Jewish and while she does not consider herself very religious, she is spiritual and celebrates the Jewish holidays.
In the 1980’s Janet began exploring her childhood ordeal and returned to Poland to meet her Polish rescuers. She has been back several times and has developed a friendship with a well-regarded researcher who has helped her learn her family history. Later in life Janet began speaking publicly about her experiences to schools and various organizations. At the age of 90 Janet is a sought-after speaker on her experience in surviving the Holocaust.
Janet Singer Applefield is a living example of human resilience and reminds us of how much we can endure while retaining our humanity. Without any instruction Janet knew she didn’t have the luxury of worry, her focus was to survive the day. Janet adopted and adapted to her surroundings but never forgot her true roots and family.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been….”