Brought Together by the Holocaust and N.Y.

A Holocaust survivor on Friday is reuniting with the deaf-mute woman whose family saved her life during the Nazi occupation of Poland.Golda Bushkanietz, 94, and Irena Walulewicz, 82, who hid Ms. Bushkanietz for six months during World War II, are traveling from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Olsztyn, Poland, respectively, to meet for the first time in 62 years at John F. Kennedy International Airport.“I am thrilled to see Irena. Her family was part of the intelligentsia in my town. I was a good friend of her parents, and her mother, a very sweet woman, saved me,” Ms. Bushkanietz said in a phone interview. “I often think about Irena, and I have told all of my grandchildren about how I stayed with the family.”Ms. Bushkanietz and her husband, Szymon Bushkanietz, escaped deportation to Ponar, a mass killing site outside Vilnius, with the help of a Lithuanian police officer. After her escape, Ms. Bushkanietz traveled back to her hometown of Swieciany, Poland, which is now part of Lithuania. She found shelter with Ms. Walulewicz’s Catholic family. Ms. Walulewicz’s father, a former mayor of Swieciany and a friend of Ms. Bushkanietz’s father, had been executed a year earlier.“My mother is old and she’s been to America 20 times,” Ms. Bushkanietz’s daughter, Lea Steinberg, said in a phone interview. “My son got married last year and she didn’t come. She said she was done traveling to America. But when she heard that she could meet Irena, she said, ‘I’ll be there!’ She just became a whole different person.” At a dinner scheduled for Tuesday, Ms. Bushkanietz’s greatgranddaughter, Skylar Steinberg, 11, will present Ms. Walulewicz with a Bushkanietz family portrait. Skylar, who is about to celebrate a Bat Mitzvah, will thank Ms. Walulewicz for saving her family during World War II.“Zofia Walulewicz, Irena’s mother, took Golda in,” the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, Stanlee Stahl, said in an interview. “She was a single mother whose husband and son had been killed, and who had a child with a physical condition, a child the Nazis thought wasn’t worthy of life. This was so brave of her! I don’t know if I could have done it.”The JFR, an organization that supports and honors Holocaust rescuers, was responsible for organizing the reunion.

Brought Together by the Holocaust and N.Y.

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