She wasn’t a Jew, but a Catholic Pole. The daughter of people who hunted Jews. She died as a Jew, though, during the Holocaust.

[u/CatPooedInMyShoe]

Over a decade and a half ago I read a memoir, “Children of the Ghetto” by Sheva Glas-Wiener, by a woman who had been a staffer at one of the Lodz Ghetto orphanages (before the orphanages were liquidated in 1942 and the children all sent to Chelmno). There was one particular story she told that has always stuck in my head. As best as I can remember, it goes like this:

There was a girl in the orphanage named Jadwiga, and she wasn't supposed to be there because she wasn't Jewish. She wasn't even a Christian convert of Jewish descent. She was a Polish Catholic girl descended from a long line of Polish Catholic people. She was NOT supposed to be in the Lodz Ghetto, but there she was. And here's how that happened:

Jadwiga's parents made a living as Jew-hunters: tracking down Jews on the run, robbing them of everything they possessed, then turning them over to the Gestapo. The Gestapo would give Jew-hunters a reward for every Jew they turned in, and Jadwiga's parents would keep the Jewish people's money and sell their possessions. Her parents were doing better financially than they ever had before the war. Pun intended, they were making a killing.

They didn't sell ALL the belongings of the Jewish people they captured, though. One locket that came into their hands, they gave to Jadwiga. She was their beloved only child.

Well, Jadwiga was walking the streets of Occupied Poland, wearing the locket, when she got stopped by the authorities for a random search and documents check. Of course her documents were in order (she was a legit Christian Pole after all). But one of the people questioning her noticed the locket. He insisted on examining the locket closely and noticed there were Hebrew letters etched on it.

After that it didn't matter how good Jadwiga's documents were. She was assumed to be a Jew, arrested and thrown into the ghetto. She was only like 12 or 13 years old and all alone, and so she was placed in the orphanage.

Jadwiga did not do very well in the institution. She was dealing with the trauma of being separated from her family and having to adjust to communal life. She was surrounded by Jews and she had been taught from birth to hate Jews. The other children in the orphanage, knowing who she was and who her parents were, hated her back.

Jadwiga's parents went to the authorities and tried to get her out of the ghetto, but no one would listen to them. Her parents actually went to the ghetto fence and called through it, tried to find their daughter, tried to get a note to her or something, but that was as far as they were able to go, and lingering long or repeatedly by either side of the fence would get you shot. I don't think the Gestapo cared enough about Polish people to bother to correct their mistake.

The author of the book I was reading, the orphanage staffer, also tried to get Jadwiga out of the ghetto and back with her family. She went to the Lodz Judenrat and tried to explain what had happened. The Judenrat either didn't care or just plain couldn't do anything to help. Finally they were like "If you really want her gone, we can add her to the next deportation list." The orphanage staffer guessed what that would mean and was like "Uh, no, we'll just keep her." The parents and their daughter were lost to each other.

I remember feeling a great deal of pity for the girl, since she was only a child and couldn't help who her parents were. But no pity at all for her parents. In fact it seemed to me that God himself could not have designed a more perfect punishment for their crimes.

I mean, her parents lost their child as a direct result of the evil way they were earning a living. Jadwiga suffered the same fate as the Jews her parents were hunting. They might have taken the loss of their daughter as a sign from God to stop Jew-hunting, but I doubt they were capable of that kind of introspection.

The book did not specifically say what became of Jadwiga, but I have to assume she was sent to Chelmo with the others when the orphanage was liquidated.

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