A random visit to an apartment building in Krakow led to a remarkable discovery: a hidden box of Holocaust-era family documents and objects that had been sealed inside a wall for nearly 80 years.
Ronit Friedman, a Tel Aviv-based designer, grew up knowing that her grandmother, Kayla Feder, had spent the war years in Krakow—and that her immediate family had all survived, a virtual miracle.
“Whenever we would visit Poland, we would go and look at the building from the outside and take pictures,” Friedman told JNS in a phone interview on Tuesday for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Then, three years ago, my husband had to go to Krakow for work. He knows I love going, so I joined him for a short three-day trip.”
That brief visit would change her life.
The couple returned to the building (Friedman asked that the address not be published to protect the privacy of the current residents), but this time her husband noticed a back door standing open.
“He said, ‘Let’s go in and go up to the apartment,’” Friedman recalled. “I was a little hesitant, but he really wanted to do it. That’s not like him—he’s almost never pushy.”
They climbed the stairs to Apartment 11, where Friedman’s family had lived during the Holocaust. Her great-grandfather and uncles had hidden in an attic there for more than two years, while her grandmother—then a young girl—spent time concealed in a convent.
Inside, the apartment door was open, and renovation work was underway. Using Google Translate, Friedman explained to a worker that her family had lived there during the Holocaust.
“He told me that when the renovations began, they found a box of documents hidden in the wall of the attic, and that I should try to find out what had happened to it,” she said.
The building’s landlord, who is Jewish, was living in Spain. Friedman contacted him, and he connected her with his daughter, who still lives in Poland. The family had kept the box. A few months later, Friedman returned to Krakow to retrieve it.
“Even now, three years later, I get chills when I think about it,” she said. “It was a box full of documents and papers—work permits, postcards between my great-grandmother and relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. There were report cards from a Jewish school, written in Hebrew. I even learned that my mother’s uncle failed gym class and Bible class.”
For Friedman’s mother, Helene Peled, who now lives in Israel, one item in particular was deeply emotional.
“I was immediately transported back to the 1940s,” Peled told JNS. “My mom always wore a beret, and there was a navy-blue beret in the box. When I picked it up, it disintegrated in my hands.”
The box also contained a mug and two cereal bowls, apparently used by Peled’s father and brothers while hiding in the attic.
“As silly as it may sound, their lips touched these items,” she said. “So I kept them close to me.”
Nearly everything in the box was fragile and deteriorating after decades sealed inside a wall. Friedman ultimately donated the documents and several artifacts to Yad Vashem, which undertook extensive preservation efforts.
Orit Noiman, head of documentation for private collections at Yad Vashem, said an entire four-story building at the museum is devoted to restoring and conserving Holocaust artifacts.
“When we received these materials, they were in very poor condition,” Noiman said. “But we were able to preserve them.”
The items are now part of Yad Vashem’s permanent collection.
The story of Kayla Feder
Together, the documents tell the story of Kayla Feder, who survived the Holocaust in Poland along with her parents and two brothers before immigrating to the United States.
When the war began, Feder was an 11-year-old girl living a normal childhood in Krakow. Peled said a local priest may have saved her mother’s life by urging the family to send her—then 14—to a convent that agreed to hide her.
“She pretended to be mute, claiming she had survived a rape,” Peled said. “The priest and the Mother Superior knew the truth. But after a while, she became terrified that one of the nuns suspected her, and she begged her mother to bring her home.”
By then, her father and brothers were hiding in the attic as conditions for Jews worsened. Friedman noted that only about 2,900 Jews survived the Holocaust in Krakow—five of them members of her family.
Peled also recounted how her mother nearly immigrated to Israel rather than the United States after the war.
Refugees were given a choice between emigrating to the U.S. or to Israel. Feder had a cousin named David living in Israel, and the family initially decided that at age 17, she would go there alone, while the rest would travel to the United States.
Her mother accompanied her to the ship, Peled said, but Feder broke down in tears, unable to bear the thought of being separated from her family.
“She asked a woman on the ship if she would look after her daughter,” Peled recalled. “The woman looked at my grandmother and said, ‘Are you crazy? After the Holocaust, everyone is searching for relatives—and you’re breaking up your family?’”
Her mother immediately took her off the ship. That decision led the family to settle in Brooklyn instead.
Kayla Feder lived in Brooklyn until she died in 2019 at the age of 93.
