Lena Kuchler-Silberman (1910–1987)

Lena Kuchler-Silberman was born to a Jewish family in Wieliczka, Poland. After attending high school in Kraków, she went on to graduate in philosophy from the University of Kraków, also studying psychology, and education. She survived World War II by living under a false identity as a non-Jewish Pole. She lost her only daughter Mira and all her family to the Nazis. During the German Occupation, she worked on a farm and in the city as a governess. At the end of the war, she arrived at a refugee camp in Poland in search of her disappeared family members, but encountered only hungry, emotionally and physically destitute children. She took charge of the orphanage for 100 of these children, many of whom had been hidden in closets or forests and often had seen their parents killed. After encountering anti-Semitism directed toward the children, she eventually managed to help them leave the country for Israel. She herself lived on in a kibbutz for several months, then returned to Europe, where she re-married and had another daughter. She wrote one of the first books about women and family in the Holocaust, her memoir, My Hundred Children, which was published in Hebrew in 1959 and became a bestseller. In 1987, it was adapted by NBC-TV for a television movie as "Lena: My 100 Children." The book soon became part of a trilogy when Lena wrote The Hundred Coming Home and My Mother’s Home.