Olec As told to Anne Marie Davies

Alex Kozlowski was born Olec Scheidt, around the year 1932, in Lwow, Poland (L'viv, Ukraine), to Arnold and Regina Scheidt. His mother, who earned income from an apartment building that her father gave her, and his father, a tavern-owner, separated when Olec was young. In November 1941, several months after the German forces occupied the area around Lwow, Olec, his mother, and aunt Zosia were forced, along with thre rest of the Jewish population of the city, into a ghetto. After his mother became ill with typhus, and presumably died a short time later, he was cared for by his aunt Zosia, who in late 1942, smuggled him out of the ghetto, and the two of them, along with her sister-in-law, traveled to Warsaw, and obtained false papers so that they could live under a non-Jewish name. They lived in several different locations around the city, until the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. At the conclusion of that, the Germans sent them, along with other residents, outside of the city to work as forced laborers on a farm, where they remained until they were liberated by the Soviets. After liberation, they travelled to Krakow, where they met a cousin of Olec's mother, Joe Schwadron, who had served in the Red Army during the war, and his wife, Irene, an Auschwitz survivor. Joe led a camp for Jewish refugees who wanted to learn farming techniques in order to be able to immigrate to Palestine, but by mid-1945, Joe and Irene decided to immigrate to the United States, and invited Olec and another young man he had befriended in the camp, Joe Klein, to join them. They traveled to displaced persons camps in Austria, and then to Germany, where they lived until they were able to leave for the United States. Olec, who by now had adopted the name of Alex Kozlowski, was sent by a Jewish aid organization to live with a family in Minneapolis and finish his schooling there. In September 1948, however, he chose to join the U.S. Army, and after training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was assigned to the newly formed Air Force, in which he served until 1968, being deployed to Germany (during the Berlin Airlift), as well as various locations in the United States, In the 1960s, he was sent to Vietnam and served in a unit that rescued downed U.S. airmen, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with Valour for his service. He retired from the Air Force in 1968, settling in Tacoma, Washington.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Rachelle Balaban

Gift of Rachelle Balaban, 2015. Balaban is the daughter of Kozlowski's second cousin, Joe Schwadron.