Frances came from a small town in the Sandomierz Province near Kielce and Crakow, Poland. She was born into a close-knit family. Frances’ father, Menachem, was a Hebrew School teacher for the Mizrachi. He would come home from school, gather all of his children around the table and have them take out their homework. He would then teach them and make sure that they understood their assignments. Menachem had a gorgeous voice and was invited to lead services in nearby synagogues that did not have a cantor, especially for the High Holy Days. Attached to the front of their house was a general good’s store which Malkah, Frances’ mother, owned and ran. She also made and sold handmade wigs. The children would help after school. Frances was especially good at purchasing items for the store. She would come home with more than what was requested, paying less then what her mother thought the items would cost. 

 

Frances was ten years old when the war broke out. Their parents and their youngest children hid in different towns and in the forest in order to survive but the Germans would find them and bring them back. In 1942, the Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians came to Staszow all at once. Menachem, Malkah, Faiga (Frances), Sarah Perrel, Chayim Zalman and Ruchal, her husband and child, were transferred to the Kielce Ghetto. Frances’ parents always believed in trying to make the best of bad situations. They and their children, Frances, Sarah Perrel and Chayim Zalman would take daily walks inside the ghetto trying to make a normal life out of something that was far from normal. On one their walks, Frances accidentally wandered out of the gate that surrounded the ghetto. She did not know what to do because if she went back in, the Germans would have killed her on the spot. Instead, a friend of her brother Itzik saw her and took her away. 

 

He took Frances to her brother Itzik who brought her to a farm run by some Polish people he knew. Itzik paid the son of the farmer to supply false Polish papers for Frances. She assumed the identity of Marie Kruzer, a young girl who died before the war started. Using peroxide, Frances’s dark brown hair was dyed blonde. Since Frances had dark skin, people thought she was a gypsy. She hid with people she knew and people she did not know. Many times, Itzik, or other people, took her from a hiding place because they knew the Germans were coming. 

 

One day, Frances was hiding at a train station and fell asleep. She was awakened by German guards. They looked at her papers and took her from the train station, handing her over to two women who took her to Germany. While in Germany, she was taken to an employment agency. Employers came to the agency to choose people to work for them. These employers were farmers, businessmen and factory owners. Frances was chosen to work on a farm which she did for three years.

 

When the Jews were liberated in 1945, Frances felt lost. Since she had little communication with the outside world, she did not know if there were any other Jewish people alive. Frances left the farm on a train and made her way back to Poland. 

 

She got off at Kielce and began walking from the train when she heard her name being called. It was the dentist from her town of Staszow. She decided not to return to her hometown because she was afraid she would be killed. Radio stations and newspaper articles described that the Polish people were killing Jews at train stations. She was told that the Polish people of Staszow did not want the Jews to return. While in Kielce, Frances heard the terrible news that part of her family had been taken to the concentration camps: Belzec, Dachau, Treblinka, and others. Her brother Avrum was taken to a concentration camp but escaped. He was in hiding until a Polish person gave him away and killed him. Her parents, Chayim Zalman and Sarah Perrel were killed in the Belzec Extermination Camp. Her brother Itzik worked for the Germans in a factory and building roads. He was killed five months before the war ended. Ruchal and her baby were killed in a random fire. Her husband Shlomo and his family, seven brothers, were all killed while they were hiding from the Germans. 

 

Frances decided to stay in Crakow with some family and friends. HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, wanted to send her to England for school.  There she would live with a family as an au pair.  She traveled to Gdansk, Poland, a port city which was about 300 miles from Crakow in a small fishing vessel with 10 passengers. Frances wanted to be a designer because she enjoyed drawing and, in exchange for the schooling, she would be a nanny. However, one of her mother’s sisters, Hannah, paid for Frances to come to England, signing the papers for her to enter the country. She lived in England with her aunt and uncle for five years while waiting for the quota to go to the United States. Frances finally achieved her dream and arrived in New York on March 10, 1951, on the Queen Elizabeth. One of her cousins signed the papers. She changed her name from Faiga Bolguchwal to Frances Wald. Frances rented a room in the Bronx from a woman who had other boarders. She met her future husband while visiting a good friend of hers.

Always try to figure things out and do what is necessary to succeed.