Public lifeלנה קיכלר-זילברמן

Lena Küchler-Silberman

Lena Küchler-Silberman was a Polish-born Jewish educator and psychologist who saved Jewish children during the Holocaust and cared for about 100 orphaned survivors after it.

1910 to 1987Rescuing children from the Warsaw GhettoCaring for orphaned Holocaust survivorsThe movie Lena: My 100 Children

Born: 28 January 1910, Wieliczka
Died: 6 August 1987, Tel Aviv
Occupation: teacher, writer, educator, psychologist
Education: Hebrew Lower Secondary School (Krakow), Jagiellonian University

Lena Küchler-Silberman was born in 1910 in Wieliczka

She was born in Wieliczka, near Kraków, in 1910. She attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kraków and then studied psychology and pedagogy at the university there. Before the war she taught at a Jewish school in Bielsko and trained teachers.

During World War II she joined her husband in Lwów, where her daughter Mira died soon after birth. In August 1942 she jumped from a transport to the Belzec extermination camp and fled to Warsaw. There she lived under a false Christian identity and smuggled Jewish babies out of the ghetto to a monastery.

After her identity was discovered she escaped to a village and worked as a nanny until the war ended. In 1945 she found orphaned children at the Jewish Committee in Kraków and set up homes for them in Rabka and Zakopane. After antisemitic attacks, she led the children through Czechoslovakia to France.

In 1949 she and many of the children reached Israel, and most of them settled in Kvutzat Shiller. She settled in Tel Aviv, taught psychology and education, and married Mordechai Silberman. She died in 1987, the year a television movie about her story premiered.