Survivor: Ester Wilhelm Tepper

In the early morning darkness of Oct. 9, 1942, Ester Tepper (née Estera Wilhelm), just 10 years old, stood half-dressed and shivering in her family’s apartment in the Radomsko ghetto, which was surrounded by German soldiers. Ester’s mother, Gucia, had awoken Ester and her two older siblings, leading them to a room where the children climbed a ladder and squeezed through a small opening into an attic bunker. “I didn’t want to go in. They pushed me in,” Ester recalled. The children crawled to a place where they could settle under some rafters, while their parents joined thousands of other Jews assembled in the town square, as ordered. Sometime later, the children heard boots on the stairs below the bunker and the voices of German soldiers. “I was so afraid,” Ester said.

Ester was born on April 7, 1932, in Radomsko, Poland, to Zelig and Gucia Wilhelm. Her older brother, Manek, was born in 1924, and older sister, Chana, in 1930. Zelig was an acclaimed photographer, and his studio, Foto Venus, occupied the second floor of their spacious house. 

Ester’s childhood was idyllic, with a loving and modern family, attending a private kindergarten and vacations in the mountains. The family spoke Polish rather than Yiddish and, although they celebrated Shabbat and holidays, they were not highly observant, unlike Gucia’s extended family. 

But life began to change sometime after Nov. 10, 1938, when Herschel Grynszpan’s parents and two siblings appeared on the Wilhelms’ doorstep seeking shelter. They were cousins, originally from Radomsko who, like all Polish Jews, had recently been expelled from Germany. Making the situation even more dire, on Nov. 7, 17-year-old Herschel, who lived in Paris, had fired shots at a German diplomat who died two days later, and that act became the pretext for Kristallnacht. The Wilhelms risked arrest harboring Herschel’s family, and Zelig soon helped them escape to the Soviet Union. 

Then, on Sept. 2, 1939, the Germans bombed Radomsko. A day later, the Nazis occupied the city.  It became Poland’s second city to establish a ghetto, where the Jews were ordered to relocate on Dec. 20. But because Zelig had been conscripted as a photographer for the Nazis, Ester’s family moved into a building reserved for professionals. 

On Oct. 9, 1942, as Ester and her siblings lay hidden, Gucia returned, tearfully reporting that her entire extended family of 300 had been taken away in that first aktion, along with 11,000 others. She and Zelig were among the 350 spared, designated as Jews who were still needed by the Nazis. 

That night, 5,000 of the captured Jews were squeezed into cattle cars, destined for Treblinka. The rest were locked up in buildings. 

Three days later, a train returned to pick up the remaining Jews. A second aktion took place, and again Zelig and Gucia were ordered to the town square. Ester cried, begging to go with Gucia. “Don’t worry,” Zelig assured her. “I paid money to someone. She will be released.” 

But later that day, Zelig came back alone, and the children heard him crying. “They took your mother,” he told them. 

In November, new transports swelled the ghetto’s population to 4,500. Ester’s brother Manek often sneaked out of the ghetto to forage for food and coal, but was shot as hewas returning one night. “He was only 17,” Ester said.

In early January of 1943, after a ghetto policeman warned Zelig that “this night will be the end,” Zelig handed his daughters false papers and they left after dark, passing a mass grave where the ground was still moving from life beneath the surface. “This was something terrible to see,” Ester said. At the ghetto gate, Zelig slipped the guard some money, and they walked out. 

They split up, and Ester, now calling herself Regina Koziorowska, went to a nearby apartment of a Polish couple, who hid her behind a wardrobe. The SS came to the room, but left soon after. “This was one of the miracles in life,” Ester said. 

The couple then accompanied Ester to Czestochowa, where she stayed with an older Catholic woman, the mother of Krysia Kempa, a friend from Radomsko who was hiding Zelig. The woman — Ester doesn’t remember her name — taught her to be Catholic, which Ester, who had no Jewish religious education, readily accepted.

A neighbor, however, suspected that Ester, despite her blond hair and blue eyes, was Jewish and reported her. Shortly after, two policemen arrested Ester and the woman protecting her. At the police station, a German police officer interrogated Ester as he pushed her downstairs and into a small cell. There, he put a revolver to the girl’s head. “We’re going to shoot you, because we know you are Jewish,” he said. But instead, he abruptly left. A shot rang out, and Ester knew he had murdered another arrestee.

Inside the locked cell, Ester noticed a belt caked in dried blood. She immediately fell to her knees, praying to Jesus and Maria and expecting a miracle. Outside, a police officer watched her through a window. 

The next day, Ester was taken to the Gestapo, where an SS officer questioned her again. “I don’t understand,” Ester told him. “Do you want to kill me instead of the Jews?”  After a while, the officer released her. Ester returned to the apartment of the older woman, who also had been set free. Krysia arrived later and took her to Radomsko, where she was given over to a convent. 

Ester bunked in a room with 20 girls and worked hand-washing laundry. She also attended chapel until one day, several weeks after arriving, she failed to kneel before a particular statue, and the nuns realized she was Jewish.

Krysia again fetched Ester, taking her to Warsaw, where Krysia lived with Zelig, who was posing as a Christian and working for a photographer. But other families shared the same apartment, so Ester couldn’t reveal their relationship.

After several months, at Chana’s suggestion, Ester volunteered as a Pole to work for the Germans, leaving in May 1943. She was sent to Austria, near her sister. She spent two months in Strasshof, a labor camp, and was then transferred to Mauer, a suburb of Vienna, where she and other young people assisted an Austrian couple with running their large farm. 

Ester cut trees, fed pigs, milked cows and, after work, cleaned the couple’s house. The woman, an SS member, was difficult, but she favored Ester. “You’re different from everybody else,” she told her. “You’re so intelligent.”

Chana was staying with Ester in Mauer on April 2, 1945, when the Soviets began bombing the area. Eleven days later, they were liberated. Ester had just turned 13.

Ester and Chana made their way back to Radomsko, arriving in June or July 1945, and finding their father in their house. “Oh my God, this was a big holiday,” Ester recalled. Krysia also was there, along with Zelig’s brother and nephew, the only other survivors from among more than 500 relatives living in Europe when war broke out. 

Several months later, however, four Poles burst into their house, demanding their valuables and ordering them to leave. They did so, but Krysia, who was pregnant by Zelig, decided to remain in Radomsko. (Zelig and Krysia never saw each other again. Over the years, Ester has tried to find their son, whose last name, she believed, was likely Kempa. She has also been working, without success, to have their house returned.)

Ester eventually made her way to the Jewish Children’s Home in Blankenese, near Hamburg, Germany. She then moved to Lampertheim, also in Germany, to a displaced persons camp where her father was president. 

On Aug. 8, 1948, Ester, now 16, immigrated to Israel, lying about her age and immediately enlisting in the army. Meanwhile, Chana had moved to Palestine after the war, and Zelig immigrated there in the 1950s. 

Ester married Nisan Tepper, whom she met in the Israeli army, on Dec. 6, 1951. Their son Danny was born in February 1953; followed by daughter Bati in January 1958; son Gil in February 1960; and son Yaniv in August 1967. 

In July 1976, with Ester weary from too many wars, the family moved to Los Angeles, where she and Nisan continue to work in real estate investment. Ester is now 83 and the grandmother of 12; she has been active with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust since arriving in California. She also recently sponsored the publication of a collective memoir about Radomsko, called “Children of Dust and Heaven” by Stefania Heilbrunn.

Ester didn’t talk about her experiences until after being interviewed by the Shoah Foundation in 1995. It was too difficult. But now she advocates that all people, of all religions, live together amicably. 

“The most important thing for me is to make peace with the Germans, because you can’t live with hate,” she said.