Esther Mor, (nee Balzam, born on 1940 in Częstochowa) about her and her mother’s fate during and after war and about her family after war in Israel
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An English resume of an interview in Hebrew that took place in Israel, as a part of the Polish Roots in Israel Project. Interviewee name: Esther Mor
Esther was born to her parents Abraham and Regina Balzam, in the city of Częstochowa - Poland, in 1940.
Esther knows nothing about her father, except for the fact that her father’s parents owned a shoe-store in which both her parents worked till 1940. Her father Abraham was shot dead several months after Esther was born. The place and circumstances of his death are unknown to Esther.
At home this subject was a taboo and also after the end of the war Esther received no information about her father. (Her mother did not speak about him either because this was too painful for her, or because she didn’t want to hurt her second husband Moshe whom she married after the war).
Her mother Regina was born in 1913 in Częstochowa, to her parents Josef and Shoshana (Esther doesn’t remember their family name). They were religious Jews who had 6 children.
Esther, who was born in 1940 at the beginning of World War II, lived as a baby with her parents in the Jewish Ghetto in Częstochowa. Those days Jews were still allowed to work outside the Ghetto, so her parents left her in the care of her grandfather Josef (on her mother’s side), while they went to work in the shoe-store outside the Ghetto.
After her father was murdered and the situation became worse, Esther’s young mother Regina understood that she was unable to protect her little baby girl anymore. She wanted to save Esther at all costs therefore she decided to give her daughter the false identity of a Polish girl.
She hung on her neck a string with the name “Krysia” attached to it, and handed her over to a Polish friend who was helping Jews.
The Polish friend took little Esther out of the Ghetto and placed her in a Convent, telling them that he found her abandoned in the street. That was how Esther spent her early childhood years, in a Convent – as a Polish orphan girl.
Once in a while, their Polish friend came to visit and check on her and returned to inform about her situation to her mother, Regina.
After some time the Germans found out that he was a “traitor” against the occupation regime and that he was helping Jews. They executed him.
The only thread of contact that Regina had with her daughter was cut off and she had no idea what was happening with her. Regina remained completely alone, after losing her husband and now also her daughter.
As aforementioned, Esther lived in the convent as an orphan, until one day a childless Polish couple came over to the convent, in order to adopt a child. When they noticed little Esther, they immediately liked her and chose her as their adopted daughter.
Esther remembers nothing from her life in the house of the Polish couple, although she was already 3-4 years old (an age from which there are already some memories). She does not remember how they treated her, if she received love and affection from them or anything about what they told her. She had some sort of a “blackout”, a dark curtain wrapping that period in her life and she is still unable to retrieve any pieces of memory.
Meanwhile the war came to an end and her mother Regina managed to survive together with her little sister. How did she survive? She never gave accurate details (again, it was some sort of a taboo that was characteristic to many Holocaust survivors who refused during the first years after the war to speak about its horror and atrocities). The only thing Esther knows is that there was a time when her mother was hiding inside a heating stove together with her sister.
Also Regina’s brother, Reuven managed to survive the war, after he joined the partisans and hid in the woods. The two of them met again only years after, in Israel.
The first thing that Regina did when the war ended – was to try and find her little daughter Esther.
She arrived to the Convent where her Polish friend placed Esther, but no one agreed to give her any information about the whereabouts of her little girl. Only after bribing the Convent’s administrator (with money that Regina received from the Joint Organization), she agreed to reveal some details: the names and the address of the Polish couple who adopted her.
Regina knew that her adopting father was a carpenter and said that she wanted to buy furniture from him, and under that pretext she arrived with her sister to the house of the adopting couple. When Regina saw the couple’s little girl, she asked her what was her name. The girl said she was Krysia, and Regina understood she arrived at the right place.
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