(TheFirstNews-Poland) Stuart Dowell - Aviva Landau was due to visit Poland from Israel this month for the first time since the end of World War II and was keen to contact the family of the Polish woman who saved her. Her granddaughter Gal Stern joined the local Facebook group of the town of Kozienice and posted a notice looking for the woman who hid her grandmother for two years during the war. Within hours, Agnieszka Janeczek responded: "She was my great aunt!" Anna Neklaws was the woman who saved Aviva's life by taking her into her home in Warsaw and pretending she was her Catholic niece. Aviva, accompanied by her daughter and other family members, finally met relatives of Anna on Sunday in Kozienice. Aviva was just six years old in 1943 when she along with her family were marched to Umschlagplatz to be deported to Treblinka. The guards sent her mother and sister back to the ghetto to wait for deportation on another day and her father managed to bribe his way out using a gold watch. Aviva was left in the line alone. She was rescued from certain death as a result of a mix up. Suddenly, a German soldier holding a suitcase came to her, put her inside the suitcase, and walked her out of Umschlagplatz. "It turned that he had been paid a small fortune to save another girl but he mistook my grandmother for the other girl, who was most likely murdered in Treblinka," Stern said.
2021-09-23 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive