Estera Horn papers

Estera Horn (1937-2001) was born on January 28, 1937 in Chelm, Poland to Benjamin Horn and Perla Lindenbaum Horn. Soon after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Estera’s father was killed and she and her mother were forced into the Chelm ghetto. During the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 Perla and Estera escaped. They hid in the nearby villages of Turka and Kamien. Around October 1943 Perla asked the Strus family in Plawanice village to take care of Estera while Perla hid with other Jews in a nearby forest. They were soon discovered and Perla was killed by the Germans.

The Strus family didn’t want to hide Estera, whom was living under the false-identiy of Marysia. In spring 1944 Jozefa Strus met Leokadia Wojtkiewicz at a village Red Cross station, and she agreed to hide Estera. She brought Estera to Warsaw and placed her with her sister Joanna and her husband Karol Kulesza. After the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944 the Kulesza family and Estera were deported to a village outside of Warsaw. Estera was sick with scarlet fever and was placed in a convent hospital in Laski. She was transferred from there to Krakow and placed in an orphanage. Mr. and Mrs. Ochlewski adopted her from the orphanage. Leokadia had also wanted to adopt her but thought that the Ochlewski family was better suited to raise Estera.

Estera, then under the name of Maria Ochlewska, earned her PhD in Agriculture from Uniwersytet Jagiellonski. Leokadia continued to be interested in Estera and researched her family. She discovered that Estera’s maternal grandparents were Moshe Lindenbaum and Estera Rosenman Lindenbaum. Estera was then able to locate her only living relative, Abraham Rosenman, in Canada. In 1997 Leokadia Wojtkiewicz, her sister Joana Kulesza, and her brother-in-law Karol Kulesza were recognized as Righteous among Nations by Yad Vashem.