The Hemar family papers includes a 1940 postcard from Helena Kalwari in the Warsaw ghetto to her friend Tosia Stryk in Chicago, birth certificates purchased by Alice and Władek Hemar to secure identification cards under false identities, false identification cards and marriage certificate under the couple’s assumed names, a birth certificate for Ryszard Hemar under his false name, and photographs of Alice and Ryszard Hemar shortly after his birth and of Ryszard shortly after the war ended.
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Alice Hemar (1920-2012) was born as Alicja Ala Kalwari in Warsaw, Poland to accountant Szymon Kalwari (d. 1942) and Helena Haber Kalwari (1896-1942) and had a younger sister, Zosia. In 1935 the Kalwari family moved to Katowice and later to Krakow. Ala married Henryk Władysław Abrahamer (Władek Hemar) in 1939. The young couple returned to Warsaw to join Ala’s family but were forced into the Warsaw ghetto following the German invasion. Szymon died of typhus in January 1942, and Helena was deported to Treblinka in September 1942 and murdered. Despite working in the Toebbens workshop, Ala was selected for deportation in mid-November 1942, but she jumped from the train and returned to the Warsaw ghetto. Władek decided the family had to escape the ghetto and purchased three birth certificates of deceased people from a friendly Polish officer in the Polish underground army. Ala, Zosia and Władek left the ghetto in late November 1942 and lived in Warsaw under false itdentities. Ala assumed the name Jadwiga Kazimiera Ziebinska, her husband the name Henryk Ziebinski, and Zosia the name Eugenia Janiszewska. In July 1944 Ala gave birth to her son Ryszard and registered him at the Roman-Catholic Parish of the Sacred Heart. Following the August 1944 Warsaw uprising, the family were taken to the Pruszkow transit camp and later moved to Milanowek near Warsaw. Following liberation in January 1945, the family moved to Katowice and then relocated to Stuttgart in 1947 to wait for American visas and welcome their second son, Peter. They immigrated to the United States in 1951.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Hemar family papers is arranged in a single series.
Hemar family papers