History of the Jesuits Book

Ilona's favorite of the few books the three year old Ilona Goldman had to look at while living in hiding in a small room with her parents from late 1942-July 1944. The room had been the office of a Jewish gynecologist who was deported with his family and killed in a camp. Ilona felt the books saved her from life where the daily reality was that their Ukrainian and Polish neighbors, as well as the German soldiers, wanted to kill them. Soon after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Gusta and Salomon, with two year old, Ilona, fled Krakow for Russian controlled Lvov (Lviv, Ukraine). When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the family was forced into the ghetto. Salomon worked as an accountant at a factory owned by the Wehrmacht. In the spring of 1942, fearing the liquidation of the ghetto, Salomon arranged a hiding place for them outside the ghetto with a former employee, Jozef Jozak. However, he would not hide Ilona because it would be too hard to conceal a lively 2 year-old child. Ilona was smuggled out to the countryside and placed in hiding as a Christian child, with a Polish woman, Hania Seremet, who was paid to hide her. After 6 months, they could no longer pay for her care, and Hania dumped Ilona back with her parents, without the knowledge of the Jozak family. The three had to stay hidden nearly all the time in one small room. The family lived in hiding until the Soviet Army liberated the city in July 1944. When the was ended in May 1945, they returned to Krakow.