“Combating Hate and Prejudice”: Holocaust Survivor Janet Singer Applefield Shares Story of Resilience

Henry Goldstein ’26 and Ethan Goldberg ’27, leaders of the Upper School Jewish affinity group, introduced Applefield during the all-school assembly. A powerful voice in Holocaust education, Applefield reaches hundreds of thousands of people annually through her speaking engagements and is a vocal advocate for genocide education. 

Born under the name Gustawa Singer in Nowy Targ outside of Kraków, Poland, Applefield spoke of her brief but happy childhood. As the first grandchild, she described being “pampered and spoiled,” and she shared many family photos of her as a child and of her parents and grandparents on the screen behind her as she spoke. 

That happy childhood came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. The family initially tried to escape together, journeying eastward toward Russia. Applefield displayed a map of “Singer family movements” and described different family members’ attempts at escaping Nazi rule, only to die or be killed in the process, describing uncles who were asked to dig their own graves before being shot into them. At one moment, she shared a pre-invasion family photo of her mother, aunts, and sister with the written caption, “I am the only one in this photo to have survived.” 

When the family was forced to return to Poland from Russia, Applefield’s parents made the agonizing choice to leave her in the care of a neighbor, believing she would be safer that way as a child with blond hair and green eyes. Applefield spent years “hiding in plain sight,” living under false identities to survive and escape Nazi persecution. She first took on the name of a deceased Catholic girl, but over time, she was passed from home to home—from that neighbor to a cousin who abandoned her after being caught up in a raid, to a farm, and, after the war, to a Jewish refugee center. It was there that she eventually reunited with her father, who had survived the Kraków ghetto. Having worked in the labor camps under starvation conditions, he was so skeletal that it scared her at first. Applefield read an excerpt from her memoir, Becoming Janet, recounting that experience. In 1947, she and her father were able to relocate to the United States, settling in New Jersey. When she started school there, she took on another new name—Janet.

Applefield had a special favor to ask of those at the assembly as she concluded her speech—to pass along her story to someone who has never heard her speak. “I’m a witness to that history, and I’m also the voice of all those whose voices were so brutally taken from them. Now that you’ve heard my story, you all are witnesses,” she said.

Later, in Eitan Tye’s Grade 7 humanities class, Applefield answered questions from students. One student asked how we can remember survivors of the Holocaust after we can no longer hear from them directly. Applefield answered that it’s important to keep telling the stories of survivors. “Every survivor’s story is different,” she said. If we continue to tell these stories, “when I’m no longer here, my legacy will continue,” Applefield said. She also noted the importance of speaking up against injustice on any scale. “It didn’t start with gas chambers, it started with words, racial slurs, and jokes,” she said. 

In concluding her assembly address, Applefield also emphasized the importance of choices. “Even the smallest acts of kindness have a ripple effect, and I’ve often thought about the people that saved me,” she said. “They didn’t just save my life, they saved the lives of future generations. They did something very difficult and very dangerous, and yet they did what they thought was the right thing to do.”

“We all have voices,” she implored the assembly audience, “And we all must use our voices.”