Child's yellow skirt with heart patches made for an abandoned hidden child by her rescuer

Elzbieta (Ela) Elza Schwarzwald was born in Lvov (Lwow), Poland, on February 26, 1938. She is the only daughter of Randolf Rubin and Natalia Weissberg Schwarzwald. Rubin was born on August 28, 1904, to Malka Serke Reiser and Rafael Moses Schwarzwald. His father was very devout and had a small private synagogue. Natalia was born on September 8, 1910, in Zaleszcycki to Pinchas and Ethel Wang Weissberg; she had one sister. Rubin worked in the family lumber business. The couple married in 1937. Lvov was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939 under the terms of the Soviet-Nazi Pact which gave control of the eastern region to the Russians. In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lvov. Ukrainian nationalists, with the support of the Germans, launched a killing spree and thousands of Jews were murdered; a second pogrom occurred in July. In November, the Germans established a Jewish ghetto in Lvov and the Schwarzwald family was forced to move there. By March 1942, there were frequent Aktions to round up Jews for deportation to the Belzec extermination center. Ela remembers being hidden by her father during these Aktions. Her mother soon died of typhus. Her father, her aunt Berta, and Aliza escaped the ghetto and paid a Polish family to hide them. At some point the money ran out and the Polish couple asked them to leave. Her father could find nowhere else for them to stay together, but her aunt managed to persuade the Polish couple to keep four year old Ela. She was blond and had blue eyes, and they could introduce her as their granddaughter. Her father found a place to hide nearby and continued to sneak out to visit her. He would always remind her of her real name, Elza Schwarzwlad, and that she was Jewish, but told her that she must never tell anyone. He also taught her the alphabet and sent her letters until almost the end of the war. Occasionally, she visited him and the Jewish woman he had known before the war who had given him refuge. She was a singer and had somehow managed to continue her career; Ela remembers seeing a large German audience at one event. Ela remembers that there was great joy in the town when the Soviets entered as liberators on July 17, 1944. But after the war ended, no one came to claim Ela. The Polish couple did not want to keep her. Every day, they left her at the Jewish Committee office, in the hope that someone would recognize her. One day, Shmuel and Regina Mandel saw Ela sitting there and they decided to take her in. The Mandels had managed to escape the Lvov ghetto before it was destroyed by the Germans in June 1943 and lived in hiding until liberation. Soon after taking in Aliza, they left Lvov for Legnica in Poland, a Jewish community where, to Ela, it seemed all anyone talked about was leaving Poland. The country had been devastated by the war and although the Mandels wanted to keep Ela, they could not afford to care for her. Youth Aliyah, a Zionist child rescue organization that arranged the emigration of Jewish children to Palestine, offered to take Ela to join other survivor orphans. In December 1945, the children were taken to the Purten displaced youth center in Germany, near Munich, then to Hamburg, and finally to Blaukenese sanatorium in France. In July 1947, the children travelled to Palestine on board the SS Providence and were placed in the WIZO youth village Hadassim boarding school. Ela lived there until 1959 when she was 21 years old. Shmuel and Regina Mandel also emigrated to Israel and settled in Kfar Ata. Ela, now Aliza, and the Mandels remained very close. She married Alexander Bar (d. 1983) in the Mandel's home. They had 2 children. Aliza became an educator. After years of searching for family members, she found a paternal cousin, Dr. Sophie Turner Zaretsky, in New York.

The skirt was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2009 by Aliza Bar.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Aliza Bar