Hermina and Isidor

Sydney Jewish Museum is home to hundreds of pre-World War II photographs, evidence of a ‘world that was’ before it was upended and destroyed. This photograph of Hermina and her brother Isidor Silberfeld, aged two and four respectively, was taken in a studio in Hungary in 1916. They are dressed in their finest clothing; their youthful and innocent faces captured on camera for posterity. Over 100 years later, the image gives us an opportunity to reflect on how their lives turned out.

Hermina and Isidor were born to Polish Jews, Nathan and Anna Silberfeld, living in Hungary. When the family returned to their hometown of Stary Sacz in 1918, Hermina attended a convent, which provided her with a knowledge of German and Catholicism that was later helpful for her survival during the Holocaust.

In September 1939, the family fled east by horse and cart; the Germans were bombarding Poland as they travelled. While her parents were transported to Siberia, in 1942, Hermina attained false identification papers of a Polish-Catholic woman, Jadwiga Jarzemiszewska. As Jadwiga she was able to find accommodation and work, moving from Krakow to Warsaw and then to Budapest until liberation. After the war she kept the name Jadwiga and got work in Bucharest typing up the oral testimonies of survivors for the Association of Polish Jewish Refugees. She found out her father had died of hunger and disease, but her mother and brother had survived. She was reunited with them in Poland. She married Jan Sapera in 1946 and they immigrated to Australia in 1958 with their three children.

In the last decade of her life, Jadwiga re-adopted her Jewish name Hermina.