Jack Dygola collection

Jack (Yitzchak) Dygola (1930-2011) was born in Dobrzyń, Poland. His father died of a heart attack in 1937. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he was forced into the Strzegowo ghetto with his mother Eva (Chava) and his brother. In the fall of 1941, they escaped the ghetto though a loose slat in the wall. They split up, promising to meet again in Dobrzyń after the war. Jack changed his name to Wacław Dulczewski, bleached his hair, acquired a bible and a cross, and began to memorize Polish prayers. In early spring 1943 and suffering from illness, he asked a Polish woman for help, and she nurtured him for nearly six weeks. She sent him to live with a widow nearby who needed help on her farm, but he needed identification papers first. He sought papers at the local Nazi headquarters claiming to be an orphan, and recited Catholic prayers when the Nazi officer tested him. In the fall of 1944, a group of local partisans recruited him, and he stayed with them until the end of the war. After the war, he learned that his brother had been murdered by firing squad and was told that his mother had also been murdered. He joined the Zionist kibbutz “Dror” in Łódź, which moved to Landsberg, Germany, in 1946. In 1947 he met Jewish American soldiers from Brooklyn who offered to contact his aunt who lived there. She urged him to immigrate to the United States, but he was only able to find a route to Canada with the help of the Jewish Congress of Canada. He was welcomed by the Fogelbaum family of Montreal and learned the furrier trade and how to speak and write English. In 1949, he learned that a woman named Eva Chava Dygola living in Milwaukee was looking for any family survivors. Philanthropist Harry Bragarnick sponsored his immigration to the United States, and Jack was reunited with his mother in September 1950. Jack married Renee Dygola and had two children Jeffery Dygola and Shawn Dygola.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jack Dygola

Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Jack Dygola donated these photographs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999.