There’s a family photograph of my mother, Janet Singer Applefield, as a 3-year-old, standing in a doorway beside her grandmother’s dog, her fair skin and blond hair framing an angelic smile. That image has always supported my belief that it was solely her looks, luck, and the kindness of strangers that saved my mother during the Holocaust, but this summer, a museum exhibition in Krakow, Poland, is upending this notion.
When I read that only 11% of Europe’s pre-war Jewish children survived the Holocaust, I tend to see those children as numbers, passive and helpless. That perception is challenged by “Children of War,” an exhibition at Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, Museum of Krakow, running through Aug. 30, 2026. The show’s focus is on the agency of a select group of Krakow’s children—both Jewish and gentile—in determining their wartime fate. Instead of treating children as victims, the exhibition looks at what they actually did to stay alive—how their instincts, local knowledge, and sheer endurance kept them going.
Though the exhibition is thousands of miles away, its heartbeat is deeply personal, with a direct connection to Boston. On Aug. 23–24, 2026, as part of the exhibition’s capstone events, a keynote address will be delivered by a Boston-area voice whose life has been a testament to these truths: my mother. She’ll be accompanied by over a dozen family and friends, along with descendants of the Polish family that sheltered her during the war.
My mother will be speaking just a short bus ride away from the hospital where she was born in 1935. Her presence in Krakow marks the culmination of over 40 years of sharing her story, not only in Massachusetts, where she speaks to over 8,000 people a year, but across the U.S. and abroad.
I’m always amazed by how my mother’s words transport listeners, especially middle schoolers. They journey with her from the comforts of her pre-war family traditions, through her experiences of sadness, pain, and secrecy as a child, with false identity papers, hiding in plain sight. Exploring the moral complexities of her rescuers—some were motivated by self-gain, while others were propelled by selflessness—my mother’s survival reveals a layered portrait of the actions of ordinary people living through mortal danger.
Built from a broad spectrum of sources—ranging from wartime photographs, drawings, and firsthand accounts to recorded audio and video memories—the exhibition offers a wide historical perspective. Framing the show within a broader ethical context, curator Beata Labno invokes the tenets of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, which asserts that “mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give … beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality or creed.” Ultimately, whether viewed in person or from afar, the exhibition challenges us to consider whether we are living up to that basic, universal aim.
Explore the exhibition details through the Museum of Krakow’s Schindler Factory website, or better yet, dive into my mother’s gripping memoir, “Becoming Janet: Finding Myself in the Holocaust.”
Jonathan Applefield, a freelance writer from Arlington, enjoys writing about food, travel, art, history, and nature.
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