THE LENA KUECHLER-SILBERMAN COLLECTION

• 13 stories of children written by Lena with her evaluation of their condition. • 4 testimonies and a memoir of children who were in Lena's children's home. • Postcards and letters Kuechler wrote to Edith Zierer, a former child in Kuechler's children's house. • Letters written by Kuechler to Frances - Zipora Schaff (Fanka Beder) a former child in Kuechler's children's house. • 2 files with items belonging to children who were in Lena's children's home. • 2 files with different items: Biographical essay, recommendation, notes, personal documents, newspaper articles, excerpts from manuscripts of Kuechler's books, letters written by the children to Lena, personal correspondence between her and her husband, Mordechai Silberman, and correspondences with notable personalities • A list of Kuechler's children, by age categories • A eulogy written by one of Lena's former students grieving one of her adopted children who fell in battle in one of Israel's wars. • 250 photographs of the children as they traveled from Poland, through France and finally – Israel. Those archival materials which have been digitized and made available for viewing -- accessed on this site or through the GFH website’s Online Archive -- may be downloaded for personal use and classroom presentation, but not for distribution in any media. Due to privacy rights, some of the materials in this collection cannot be accessed through the internet. Researchers wishing to gain further information are invited to contact the archive. Dr. Lena Kuechler-Zilberman (1910-1987) was a teacher, an educator, an expert in psychology & education and a writer. Lena was born in the town of Wieliczka near Krakow, Poland. She studied at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Krakow and continued her studies in psychology and pedagogy at the Hegelian University in the city. Prior to WWII she was a teacher at a Jewish school in Bielsko and taught at a teachers' seminary. During the war Kuechler lived under an alias and on several occasions saved children by transferring them from the ghetto to a local monastery. She herself had lost her child at the beginning of the war. In the summer of 1945, after the end of the war, she came to Krakow to find out about the fate of her family and as she entered the Jewish council's building was confronted by the shocking conditions of the Holocaust child survivors aged 3 to 15 who were brought there from the camps, the forests, the monasteries and Christian families where they hid. Kuechler became their surrogate mother and raising the needed funds from various organizations, she set up a home for them in the resort town of Zakopane in southern Poland, where, under the influence of Janusz Korczak's teachings, she rehabilitated about 100 children. Following anti - Semitic attacks on the children's home, Kuechler decided to move the children out of Poland. She managed to transfer them to France, and from there, in 1949, they all immigrated to Israel, settling down in kibbutz Kvutzat Shiller. During the following years Lena remarried and had a child. She moved to Tel-Aviv, where she taught psychology and education. Throughout the years she kept in touch with her "adopted" children. In 1987, Lena passed away. Throughout the years Lena had written and published a trilogy: My Hundred Children (first published in Hebrew in 1959 and later translated to English and other languages) and the sequels - The Hundred Coming Home [ha-Mea Li-gvulam] (1969, Hebrew) and My Mother’s Home [Beit Imi] (1985, Hebrew) as well as the book We Accuse: Children's Testimonies from the Holocaust (1961, Hebrew).