Jacek Jachimowicz

Pockets of Freedom - A Portrait of My Mother Jacek Jachimowicz

Seventeen years old when the Germans invaded her hometown of Niwka, she would struggle to survive throughout the war years. She saved her parents' lives once but ultimately lost them along with dozens of family members in the Nazi death camps. Homeless, starving, and constantly on the run, she faced death often, but always succeeded in finding a way out - not only for herself but also for her little niece, Henia, for whom she acted as a protector. Whether in the hellish ghettos of southern Poland, jailed in a Nazi prison for her work in the underground resistance, or at the epicenter of dehumanization, the Auschwitz death camp, Adela never lost her humanity. She created pockets of freedom for herself and others in times when freedom came at the price of death. After surviving the war, rather than follow most other Jewish survivors and leave her tarnished homeland, she started a family and a new life in Communist Poland. She embraced communism in varying degrees until the wave of anti-Semitism in 1968 forced her to pack her belongings and leave the country permanently. Her husband, a government official, stayed behind. A quarter century after the war, profoundly disappointed by the results of state communism, Adela settled in Frankfurt, Germany. Even as she coped with the stigma of returning to the land of her oppressors, Adela plotted one last heroic maneuver - the heroic rescue of her husband from behind the Iron Curtain.