Local author Janet Singer Applefield on her book Becoming Janet: Finding Myself in the Holocaust.

Gustawa Singer, a 4-year old girl blessed with blond hair and green eyes lives in Nowy Targ, a bustling town in the snowy foothills of Poland’s Tatra Mountains. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles dote on her, and strangers admire her flawless complexion. Her father works in the Singer’s hardware store, and the family prospers. All of that is shattered on the morning of September 1, 1939, with the invasion of the German Army. After several failed attempts to flee danger, Gustawa’s parents make the agonizing decision on the evening before a mandatory SS “Selection” to give their only living child to a nanny. Assuming the identity of Krysia, a deceased Catholic girl her age, Gustawa is hidden in plain sight for the next three and half years by a handful of strangers, not all of whom have good intentions. Intuitively she keeps a secret that her looks conceal: she is Jewish. On May 8, 1945, the girl’s father emerged from the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto weighing 110 pounds. After three months of searching, he miraculously found his sole reason for living: Gustawa. Of the hundreds of Jewish children playing around the streets of her town before the war, she was the only child to return.

Since 1947 when her father insisted his 12-year-old daughter dictate to him the story of her survival, being a hidden child during the Holocaust has been central to Janet Singer Applefield’s identity. Initially, she believed her experiences were insignificant compared to those who survived the camps, but in the early 1980s, like many other child survivors at the time, she started sharing her story. Janet collaborated with Facing History and Ourselves, an educational non-profit dedicated to “using lessons of history to challenge students to stand up to bigotry and hate” and began speaking to thousands of middle and high school students every year across Massachusetts. In 1981, she returned to Poland - the first of five trips - to find and thank the Catholic family who hid her during the war, and discover the fate of her mother, and the grandparents, uncles, and cousins who had disappeared.

Janet Singer Applefield holds a Master of Social Work from Boston University. Working with the non-profit, Facing History and Ourselves, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she speaks to 4,000 students a year about her experiences as a child hidden during the Holocaust and the importance of standing up to bigotry and hate. Over the past 40 years, she has presented her story at hundreds of venues including the Massachusetts State House, Faneuil Hall in Boston, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, Westminster Synagogue in London, and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing following the program.