MZ-434-D

This is a card with birthday wishes for Elina Kupperman from Israel, sent from Oświęcim by her teacher Jadwiga Marciniak. For many years, Jadwiga corresponded with her former student Elina and her parents, Salomon and Regina, survivors of the Holocaust. The Kuppermans also sent postcards to their friend from Oświęcim on name days and holidays. Elina, born in 1949, was one of several Jewish children born in Oświęcim after World War II. Jadwiga Marciniak (1898-1981), a former prewar teacher at the Queen Jadwiga Primary School in Oświęcim, taught underground education during the German occupation, with Jewish children participating, among them, Henryk Enoch and Anna Lehrhaft. Throughout the occupation, Jadwiga taught 37 students, with whom she worked in small groups, usually in different places, using refined methods of conspiracy. Secret education was also organized by Jadwiga’s husband, Stefan Matlak. After being arrested by the Germans, he was imprisoned in Dachau and Mauthausen, where he was murdered in 1941. However, this fact did not stop Jadwiga from continuing to teach children in the underground. Shlomo Kupperman and his wife Regina Grünbaum came from Oświęcim. They both survived the Holocaust. Regina, a pre-war activist in the Zionist youth organization Akiba, was deported in 1941 to Sosnowiec, and from there to camps: Annaberg, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen, from which she was liberated. Salomon, an activist with the left-wing Zionist party Hitachdut, and his brother fled eastward to the USSR at the outbreak of war. They stayed in Siberia and Uzbekistan. After the war, Szlomo and Regina returned to their hometown. Although they had known each other since before the war, they did not get married until after their return to Oświęcim. They married religiously in 1948 in Wałbrzych, and civilly in Oświęcim a year later. The Kuppermans lived at 1 Parkowa Street and Salomon worked as an office worker at the Oświęcim Chemical Plant. Their daughter, Elina, born after the war, completed only six grades at the Queen Jadwiga Elementary School in Oświęcim, because she left with her parents for Israel in 1962. The Kuppermans traveled by train to Warsaw, then to Italy, and from there by ship to Haifa. They settled in Holon.