Rosary beads with cross given to Jewish child baptized as Catholic while in hiding

Rosary beads with cross given to Jewish child baptized as Catholic while in hiding 

Rosary beads with cross given to Jewish child baptized as Catholic while in hiding 

Rosary beads with a gold cross given to 12 year old Lida Kleinman upon her baptism as a Catholic in 1942. She was living in hiding in the Lomna orphanage under the assumed name of Maria Woloszynska. Lidia, her mother, Aniuta, and her father, Mendel, a physician, struggled to stay together after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. They fled to the Soviet controlled eastern sector and when the Soviets began to deport Jews, they moved to Turka nad Stryjem. Jewish persecution escalated with the sudden 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1942, Lidia’s mother learned that all Jews were to be deported the next day. Since medical personnel were not being deported, she sent Lida to her father at the hospital. The nurses, who were Catholic nuns, hid Lida for a few weeks, then arranged a place for her at a Catholic orphanage. Lida was taught Catholic prayers, so she could pass as a Polish Catholic. She had to be moved repeatedly when suspicions arose that she was Jewish or when the convent run orphanages were threatened by attacks. She was reunited with her father on May 5, 1945, but her mother was denounced to the Gestapo and did not survive.