[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15] [Extensions of Remarks] [Page 20618] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]A TRIBUTE TO EDA KAMINSKI ______ HON. TOM LANTOS of california in the house of representatives Thursday, September 15, 2005 Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in paying tribute to the life of a truly extraordinary woman, Eda Kaminski, who passed away on September 6, 2005. We celebrate her remarkable life for the perseverance, tenacity and grit that helped her survive four German concentration camps and the resilience and resourcefulness that allowed her to prosper when she immigrated to America. Eda was born in the mountain village of Zawoja, Poland on July 22, 1916. She was married in 1939 to Salek Kunstler in Krakow two days before the Germans invaded Poland and began the Second World War. Their daughter, Anita was born in 1942 and fortunately was smuggled out before the Krakow ghetto was destroyed. Eda and her husband were sent to Plaszow. The Germans separated Eda from Salek and later murdered him. Eda struggled and survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where many of those too sick to work were sent. The camp was liberated by British troops in April 1945. After the war Mrs. Kaminski found Anita hidden by a Catholic family in Krakow. Even though she had a sister who lived outside of London, most of Eda's family was killed in the Holocaust. Without resources or help, Eda and Anita moved to a Displaced Persons camp in Selb, Germany. It was there that she met her husband Reuven Kaminski and finally in 1949, they immigrated to New York to begin a new life. Their son, Harvey Kaminski became a successful financier in the New York area. Her daughter, Anita K. Epstein, came to Washington and pursued a successful career in government relations. Mr. Speaker, her truly incredible and inspiring story was chronicled in the Washington Post on September 20, 2003. I ask that the text of the article be included in the Congressional Record. Once again, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring her extraordinary life. In the Holocaust, Hide-and-Seek Was No Game (By Reilly Capps) Under glass in the new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum is a letter. It was written in 1943 by Eda Kunstler, a prisoner in Plaszow, Poland, the same forced-labor camp where Schindler's list saved a thousand lives. Eda was hoping to save just one life, her baby daughter's, when she wrote these words to a stranger: ``Dear madam, ``I beg you, you are a mother as well, save my child. God will reward you and I will pay you as well. Remember that the child has wealthy parents, and that if we survive you will have everything we promised. . . . Give her food and keep her clean. That is all that a child needs. My child is bathed every day at 8:30, is fed and then placed on her side and she will sleep until 5 or 6 AM. She is fed every three hours, a roll dipped in water, or a roll with butter and sugar, a lot of sugar. . . .'' She prayed her daughter, Anita, would survive. The little girl was born into the Krakow ghetto in late 1942, and so was already a miracle, a little bundle of life amid the canyons of death. Maybe there would be another miracle, Eda thought, and Anita would survive the ghetto's liquidation. Maybe her husband had been right. He was a rational man, the wealthy co-owner of a leather factory, and he told her that babies weren't useful to the Nazis, that the baby would be killed instantly, that the baby's only chance was in hiding. He told her all these things as he pried the little girl from her arms. ``I didn't want to give it,'' Eda says now, ``but he took the baby.'' He slipped the baby in a canvas sack, got in a taxi and headed for the gentile side of town, where a Catholic woman named Zofji Zendler waited. With a fake birth certificate, Zendler changed Anita's name to Anya and passed her off as her own. She even took her to church. Which was how it came to pass one Sunday in Krakow that a 3-month-old Jewish girl was baptized Catholic and therefore saved. According to the museum, more than a million children were killed during the Holocaust, but tens of thousands were hidden during the war and thousands of those survived. Little Anita is now 60 years old. She's married, has two children of her own, and she cries when she looks at the letter, which is part of ``Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust,'' scheduled to open to the public today. It's written carefully, in Polish. There are no water marks on it, even though her mother was crying as she wrote it. ``Each one of us that survived has a story,'' says Anita Epstein, a lobbyist in Washington. ``It is very powerful. It's very strong for me. Too much. I have to do it in pieces.'' The exhibit is almost entirely little pieces, small things that played a small part in some incredible stories. There's a sweater worn by an 8-year-old girl as she cowered in the sewers for more than a year. A wardrobe in which a small boy hid from inspectors. Words from a diary written by an adolescent girl as she hid in an attic in Amsterdam. ``In so many ways, the stories of children's experiences are powerful for everyone--for parents, for children, for the general visitor,'' says museum curator Steven Luckert. ``It deals with so many different emotions: separation, fear, play, education, tough choices.'' Flora Singer was 10 years old when the German tanks rolled into Belgium. Her cousin Nounou was just a baby. Singer was hidden in a secret apartment and in a convent by the legendary Father Bruno, who saved hundreds of children. But not Nounou. ``My mother begged my aunt to let Nounou be hidden, because Father Bruno was willing to hide him also,'' says Singer. She says her mother said to her aunt: ``You can go, but at least let Nounou be hidden.'' My mother could not convince her to go to another place, or let Nounou go with Father Bruno. ``The next time my mother came to the apartment with food, maybe five, six days later, the Gestapo had a seal on the door, you know: `Property of the Third Reich.' My mother ran in and grabbed the photos of the family.'' One of those photos is displayed in the new exhibit. It's Singer and Nounou, her hands on his arms. They're all smiles. Singer lives in Montgomery County and volunteers at the museum, but life has never been as simple as it was the day that picture was taken. ``I am here, and [Nounou] is not, and I still can't believe it, even to this day. I say, `How come I escaped?' It's an enormous feeling of responsibility.'' For Eda Kunstler, it was an enormous feeling of guilt. She felt guilty in Plaszow, and in Auschwitz, and she thought of her daughter every single day in both places. And then she got to Bergen-Belsen, and she was too tired to think of anything at all. Eda survived Bergen-Belsen, survived hunger, survived typhus, even as every member of her family, including her husband, perished. She lives in Queens now, 86 and all alone, but she remembers returning to Poland to look for her only living relative, her daughter. She found her on a stoop in Katowice, eating a roll and frankfurter. There were 20 kids hanging around, but Eda could tell right away which girl was hers. ``I am your mother,'' she told her daughter. ``No, you are not my mother,'' Anita said. ``My mother is inside.'' Eda cried, because she knew the letter had worked. ``Dear Madam, my husband and I are convinced and believe that you will save our wonderful child . . . be her mother and give her love, because I her mother cannot give her anything.''