Miraculous story of survival told at Holocaust Remembrance Day event

OTTAWA – Joe Gottdenker was still in the womb in 1942 when the Nazis shipped his father off to a work camp.

Joe was a Jewish newborn in occupied Poland at the height of the Nazi’s extermination effort. His chances of survival were close to zero.

But on Tuesday, he was in Ottawa for Holocaust Remembrance Day, held at the Canadian War Museum, remembering all the six million lives lost, and celebrating those, like himself, who survived.

He was also celebrating the reason he survived – a Polish couple named Wladyslaw and Petronolo Ziolo.

After his father was sent to the camp, the Ziolos took his pregnant mother into their farm. She gave birth there, but fearing for both her and her son’s life, fled into the Polish underground.

Using forged papers, the Ziolos convinced the authorities Joe was their son. And for the rest of the war, they cared for him as if he were.

One of his earliest memories is watching Petronolo Ziolo milk the cows.

"I’d sit there and she’d sometimes send a stream of milk into my face. I still kind of remember the warm sweet milk right out of the cow. And after I licked as much as I could, the cat came over and licked the rest."

The couple’s 12-year-old son treated Joe like a brother and Joe accompanied the family to church, where he took communion like the Catholic boy he was pretending to be.

The ruse had to be airtight. In a neighbouring village, a cousin of the Ziolos brought word that another family who had been sheltering Jewish children had been found out. The Nazis shot the children and the entire family.

When the war finally ended, Joe’s mother came back for him, and that’s when the Ziolos proved their goodness a second time.

"Not only did they risk their lives to hide me, but they also gave me up. A lot of families that hid Jewish children would not give them up at the end of the war."

Miraculously, Joe’s father also survived the war and the reunited family emigrated to Toronto. But they stayed in touch with the Ziolos. The Gottdenkers would send care packages, and every Christmas and Easter Joe would receive communion wafers in memory of his Catholic infancy.

That’s a tradition the Ziolos’ granddaughter, Betty Swierc, who now lives in Chicago, keeps up to this day.

She says her grandparents never spoke of their reasons for taking Joe in. She suspects that’s because for them it was the rational thing to do.

"I think it’s a natural instinct of protecting another human being. Or maybe one mother protecting another mother’s child."

The Ziolos’ heroism was honoured at Tuesday’s National Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony when they were named to the Righteous among the Nations, a list that Israel’s official Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, keeps of all the gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Betty accepted the award on behalf of her grandparents, in front of MPs, ministers, and ambassadors from around the world.

But for Joe, the award only scratches the surface of his appreciation.

"How do you express a gratitude for saving one’s life? And now I have three kids and three grandchildren, one on the way. None of that would have happened if it wasn’t for her grandparents."