Gerald Kaiser photograph collection
Extent and Medium
folder
1
Creator(s)
- Gerald Kaiser
Biographical History
Gerald Kaiser was born on January 1, 1940 in Kielce, Poland. In 1941 the Gestapo took his family to a labor camp. Gerald, a small boy at the time, was smuggled out of the camp. Stanislaw, Jadwiga (Wanda), Janusz, and Krystyna Wlodek, and Franciszek, Teofila, and Aurelia Kowalik, two Polish Catholic families, saved his life from Nazi extermination. After Jadwiga Wlodek was taken to Auschwitz, her children moved Gerald (Jurek) to the Kowalik family in another village. In 1942, the Gestapo killed Bernard Kaiser, Gerald's father, in the labor camp. Jadwiga Wlodek died in Auschwitz in 1943. Sylvia Kaiser (Hirschler), Gerald's mother, survived. After liberation in 1945, she found Gerald at the Kowalik family's house. Mother and son went to Germany where they lived for a few years in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen. Finally they immigrated to the United States. From the United States, Gerald Kaiser contacted the people who saved his life: Krystyna and Janusz Wlodek and Aurelia Rudyk (Kowalik). Yad Vashem honored these families with recognition as Righteous Among the Nations in 1986. Kaiser planted trees for them. He maintained regular contact with the surviving members of these families. In the summer of 1993 they all met in Warsaw, Poland, at the conference sponsored by the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers : "Can Indifference Kill?"
Archival History
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Acquisition
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Gerald Kaiser
Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Gerald Kaiser donated the Gerald Kaiser photograph collections to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2000.
Scope and Content
The Gerald Kaiser photograph collection consists of 68 photographs of the Kaiser family in the Kielce ghetto, Kielce, Poland, in Chlewice, Poland, in the Lipnica labor camp, Sosnowiec, Poland, and the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. Also included are images of the Zaks family in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, and the Wlodek family of Lvov and Wegleszyn, Poland.
System of Arrangement
The Gerald Kaiser photograph collection is arranged in a single series.
People
- Wlodek, Jadwiga-Wanda.
- Kaiser, Bernard.
- Gerald Kaiser
- Wlodek, Stanislaw.
- Kaiser, Jurek.
- Kaiser, Cesia.
Corporate Bodies
Subjects
- Kielce (Poland)
- Poland.
- Chlewice (Poland)
Genre
- Photographs.
- Document