Silver medallion with Mary enthroned holding Jesus given to a Jewish girl living in hiding

Silver medallion with Mary enthroned holding Jesus given to a Jewish girl living in hiding 

Silver medallion with Mary enthroned holding Jesus given to a Jewish girl living in hiding 

overall: Height: 1.125 inches (2.858 cm) | Width: 0.875 inches (2.223 cm) 

Catholic medallion given to 17 year old Roza Kwar in 1944 by a Polish Catholic teenager admirer when she was living under a false identity as a Catholic. He had made a pilgrimage to Czectochowa to see the Black Madonna and bought it there. After Nazi Germany occupied Lvov, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine) in June 1941, Roza and her parents, Benzion and Tinka, were moved to the Jewish ghetto and assigned to forced labor. In August 1942, Benzion purchased false papers for her. She escaped and went to live with Krystyna Moskalik, a Polish schoolteacher, in Sieciechiowice. That area was liberated by the Soviet Army in January 1945 and in May, after the war ended, Roza went to Krakow to further her education. She continued to live under her false identity as a Catholic because of the intense antisemitism. Roza learned that her parents had died of typhus and only three of her large extended family had survived the destruction of the ghetto. Family members in New York, learning that she might have survived, found her in Krakow. They arranged for Roza and her maternal aunt, Freida Herzer, to emigrate to the United States via Cuba in January 1948.