Peter Silverman (l. to r.), Jadviga Seledevskaya and Jack Silverman celebrate their reunion in Bayside.

Queens Holocaust survivor meets with Catholic savior

Ayala Ben-Yehuda
December 11, 2003

Timesledger@aol.com

The Bayside living room of Jack Silverman is far removed from the terror of Hanukkah 1941, when the Nazis who occupied his village of Jody, Poland massacred nearly all of its Jewish residents.

But the memories of those dark days were still vivid last week as he sat at home near Cardozo High School with his brother Peter, 81, and the woman whose poor peasant family secretly sheltered them for a year.

Jadviga Seledevskaya, 77, flew in from Belarus to Kennedy Airport Dec. 2 to see the two Silverman brothers her family rescued when she was a teenager.

The Silvermans and Seledevskaya were reunited by the Manhattan-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a group that finds, honors and financially supports hundreds of Christians and Muslims around the world who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

"It was a real joy to get them here," said Jack Silverman, 83, of Seledevskaya and her grandson Sasha, who accompanied her on a two-week visit. "We never forgot them."

"I still can't believe I'm sitting next to them," Seledevskaya said in Polish, using Peter Silverman as a translator.

The 700 Jews of Jody, a village in what is today Belarus, were forced into a ghetto during the summer of 1941 and then murdered en masse on the fifth night of Hanukkah by the Nazis and their Polish collaborators.

Seeing men pour into the village with shovels and pickaxes for digging a mass grave the night before the massacre, the Silvermans' father, Alter, became suspicious and fled with his three children, sister and her three children to the homes of two nearby Christian families.

But when one of the homes was raided in 1942, the two Jewish families were forced to flee again and wander in the countryside until they came upon the Konochowicz family’s farmhouse, where the Catholic family of 10 lived in poverty.

"My father was very religious," Seledevskaya said. "He said, 'Those people are suffering and in danger of being murdered. We must help them.'"

She was 17 when the Silvermans came to her family's house. Peter Silverman was 21 and his brother was 23.

Though both families lived in fear of being caught, they learned to live with the fear.

"If we die, we're going to die together," Seledevskaya remembered her father saying.

The eight Jews lived in the attic of the Konochowiczes' barn above the cows and pigs for a year. The Jews poked a hole in the thatched roof of the barn so they could tell whether it was day or night.

"One ray of sun came in," Peter Silverman said. "We could tell the time as the sun moved."

Through the freezing winter and boiling summer, the family spent their days hardly moving and hardly making a sound, trying not to cough or sneeze for fear of capture.

Seledevskayawould bring pails of bread and soup to the barn, meals the stowaways pulled up to the attic on a rope. She would hum to announce her arrival but did not dare call to them.

When the Silverman children and their cousins left the barn in 1943 to fight with the Partisan Brigades, or rebel forces, Seledevskaya's father sent her and her sister to a neighboring town to smuggle weapons for them.

"We knew if we were captured, no matter what we said they were going to kill us anyway," Seledevskaya said.

When the Soviets liberated the area in 1944, the Silvermans, all of whom survived the war, made their way to U.S.-occupied Western Germany, where they spent a few years living in a Displaced Persons camp.

The family migrated to the United States and Canada. Jack and Peter Silverman married Holocaust survivors and opened the J & P Appetizing deli on 73rd Avenue and Bell Boulevard.

Peter Silverman moved to Toronto in 1972, but his brother remained in Bayside with his wife.

Seledevskaya lives in Belarus and is supported financially by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. She said she tells her grandchildren about the Holocaust.

"They can't believe it," Seledevskaya said. "They say, 'How is it possible that innocent people were destroyed?'"

Though Seledevskaya and the Silvermans have corresponded by mail for decades and talked for the past two years by phone, "I wanted to see those I saved," she said. "On the telephone you can't touch and feel someone's friendship."

Shopping, sightseeing and a foundation awards dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria were on the agenda for her trip.

Seledevskaya's brother and sister came from Latvia to visit Peter Silverman in Toronto, and he visited Seledevskaya 12 years ago. But it was Jack Silverman's first time seeing her since 1945.

"They are poor and they struggle for a living," Jack Silverman said of his savior and her family in Belarus. "If we could give them the United States, it would not be enough."

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous can be visited at www.jfr.org