Judy Kolt
Author: Judy Kolt (Jablonska)
Publisher: Makor Jewish Community Library
Place of publication: Caulfield South, VIC.
Year of Publication: 2009
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Sydney Jewish Museum, State Library of Victoria and other public libraries.
Cities/towns/camps: Poland: Sieradz, Warsaw, Warsaw ghetto, Otwock ghetto, Rabka, Laski, Wrzosów; Germany: Berlin Schlachtensee DP camp, Landsberg DP camp, Munich; Australia: Melbourne.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative.
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: child survivor; ghetto; hidden child in a Catholic convent; false identity.
Tell it to the squirrels is the story of Judy Kolt’s miraculous survival as a young Jewish child in Nazi occupied Poland. After escaping from the Otwock ghetto, Judy and her sister Tosia spent the war in perpetual flight, hiding in various homes across Poland under the care of Catholic nuns.
Pages 1-17 recount the author’s travels to Poland as an adult to reconnect with figures from her past and conduct research for her memoir. Pages 13-37 detail the onset of the war and Judy’s experiences in the Warsaw and Otwock ghettoes as a small child. Pages 38-66 chart her time in hiding in a Catholic convent boarding school in Warsaw with her sister, with pages 67-83 presenting family photographs. Pages 84-119 describe the author’s time in Laski, her mother’s wartime experiences and their reuniting in Laski during the last months of the war. Pages 120-159 recount Judy’s immediate post-war experiences and her life in the Schlachtensee DP camp. Pages 160-202 describe Judy’s time in the Landsberg DP camp and Munich from 1948-1952, with accompanying photographs and documents. Pages 211-242 recount the family’s new life in Melbourne.
Judy Kolt was born Iska Jablonska on 30 September 1936 in Lodz, Poland, the second daughter of Fela and Stefan Jablonski. Judy grew up in Sieradz, near Lodz. Her parents owned a timber mill and were moderately wealthy. With the Nazi occupation of Poland, when Judy was three years old, the Jablonski family moved to Lodz and then soon thereafter to Warsaw. In 1940, they were forced into the ghetto, though it was not yet closed. Sometime later, Judy’s entire family was transferred to the Otwock ghetto. Through connections with his gentile customers and the underground resistance, her father was able to secure false identity papers that allowed him to live as a gentile in Warsaw. Whilst his wife and daughters were in the ghetto, Stefan worked at a timber mill in order to secure funds for false papers for his family.
In late 1940, sometime after Judy’s fourth birthday, she and her sister, Tosia, were rescued from the ghetto by their father via a hidden escape route. They were then placed in hiding in Warsaw with an elderly couple and given false Christian identities. Unknown to Judy, her mother also went into hiding. After some time, the girls were sent to Rabka, a resort town in the mountains where her father had found hiding places for several family members. In December 1942, German authorities began searching for hidden Jews and their sixteen-year-old cousin Pola was shot. Their elder cousin Lonia, only eighteen, smuggled the girls onto a train back to Warsaw. Many of Judy’s relatives hiding in Rabka were killed.
Judy and Tosia were moved between hiding places in Warsaw before being settled in a convent boarding school. On 3 June 1943, Tosia had her first communion, which her father came to witness. Tragically, he was caught by the Gestapo and the girls were forced to flee the convent. The girls were again shuffled between hiding places organised by the nuns. Ten-year-old Tosia was often left to take care of Judy. As conditions in Warsaw worsened, the girls endured starvation, disease, and bombing. For a time, they lived in an orphanage in Wrzosów in the outskirts of Warsaw, and in August 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, were sent to the nearby village of Laski where they were placed in an institute for blind children. As wartime fighting worsened, the girls were sent to a farm where they lived with a peasant family under the protection of the resistance. There, they were reunited with their mother who left her hiding place in Warsaw to find them. The girls lived on the farm with their mother until the Soviet army liberated Warsaw in January 1945. Judy was then eight-years-old.
After the war, the family returned to their hometown, Sieradz, where they were reunited with their mother’s brother, Uncle Natan, who had survived the concentration camps. Due to repeated instances of antisemitism in Sieradz, Natan organised for the family to be smuggled out of Soviet occupied Poland to a DP camp in Germany. From there, they hoped to emigrate to Palestine or America. The family was smuggled to the Russian Zone of Berlin, to the Schlachtensee DP camp run by the UNRRA. For two years, Judy’s family lived in Schlachtensee, where Judy attended school. In the winter of 1948, in light of worsening Cold War tensions, they were evacuated to the Landsberg DP camp in the American Zone. They lived there until 1951 when the camp was dissolved. The Jablonskis then moved to Munich with the assistance of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee when Judy was fifteen.
A cousin of Judy’s mother, who had emigrated to Sydney, agreed to sponsor the family and in the autumn of 1952, the family departed for Australia via Genoa. They arrived in Melbourne on 29 September 1952, a day before Judy’s sixteenth birthday. Assisted by friends and the Jewish Relief Fund, the family eventually settled in St Kilda. When twenty-years-old, Judy met her future husband Hymie. The couple had three children. Over the years, Judy made several trips to Poland with her husband and children. In 2006, she returned to Poland to conduct research, visiting various archives and reconnecting with several of her rescuers.
Tell it to the squirrels is a detailed account of the author’s Holocaust experiences, as well as her family’s. She conducted extensive research, interviewing family members and rescuers, as well as accessing documents from various archives. Her book also includes translated excerpts from memoirs written by her rescuers. Though some dates, timeframes and events are not identified, the memoir provides a carefully reconstructed account. The writing of the memoir was facilitated by the "Write Your Story” Program and edited by Julie Meadows, who conducted the program at the Makor Jewish Library.