Emanuela Nadel

Emanuela Nadel (nee Singer) was born to Ludwik and Paulina (nee Frenkel) on 24 September 1929 in Lwów, Poland (now in Ukraine). She was born into a well-educated middle-class family being the only child of her physician father and professional mother who held an executive position in the finance industry.

They lived in a large flat and the whole building was owned by her father and his two sisters. The family had a full-time maid, a washerwoman once a month and a governess who picked Emanuela up from school and supervised her homework. Although their home was in a Jewish suburb they had absolutely no contact with the Jewish community. They were Jewish but had a classic assimilated life and did not speak Yiddish.

Emanuela’s father was a physician and before the war specialized in cardiology. The surgery was in their home and included one of the first electrocardiographs. Her maternal grandfather, Ponrades Frenkiel, had been a lawyer and was a very distinguished judge, respected by Jews and Christians alike. To be Jewish and to hold such a high judicial post was rare. Her mother, Paulina, was a career woman who had studied law and worked in a bank. She was highly educated with a classical education

Emanuela had an idyllic childhood for her first 10 years until war broke out in 1939. Lwów was one of the first Polish cities to be attacked.

In September 1939 Emanuela 's father Ludwik received his draft notice for the army. As an officer he was called up to take his medical post with his reserve unit. After a couple of days he returned as his own army unit had disappeared, due to the disarray. He re-found his unit but when the Russians invaded, he was arrested and taken to Kozielsk as a POW. The last letter from him was in March 1940 and was never heard from again (he was executed at Katyn).

On 13 April 1940 Emanuela and her mother were deported to USSR. Paulina seldom stopped crying throughout the whole 18-day journey. The village of Kokpiekty in southern Siberia was a 4-hour journey on a truck from the train station. Emanuela's mother used her initiative and found a job as an accountant and found lodging in a mud-brick house. Both Lita and her mother caught typhoid fever, and bedbugs ate them alive during the summer. With the dreaded winter approaching, Paulina planned an escape back to Poland with Emanuela.

In October they executed the plan boarded a train, changing trains and directions every few days. The journey back to Lwow took 20 days and involved many unpleasant and dangerous situations. When they eventually got back to Lwow, they spent weeks hiding and then moved to a quiet place to live incognito at Chorochow. In June 1941 when the Germans arrived, they again had to flee Lwow.

Arriving in Warsaw in December 1941 Paulina and Emanuela found a room in a flat with landlady Mrs Jankowiak. Emanuela attended school and Paulina found a job in an office. Changing their Jewish identity, Emanuela attended Church, Confession and Holy Communion. Life was constantly tense as the Gestapo could pick them up any day. However, Emanuela remembers very few collaborators in occupied Poland. “On the contrary the acts of patriotism were many and very daring. The Polish underground tried, in thousands of ways, to sabotage the German war effort, but the German reprisals were horrific”. Emanuela remembers one reprisal when several Poles were hung upside down from balconies. Their mouths were blocked to stop them from shouting “Long live Poland!”. August 1944 and the Warsaw Uprising Emanuela, her mother and their landlady became homeless after a night of cannonade, and their flat was blown-up. During the Uprising they lived a nomadic existence, knocking on doors and begging for food and shelter.

They ended up in Berlin after the war where Emanuela completed her matriculation then went on to Paris with her mother and studied nursing. It was during these immediate post war years that her gift for languages became evident as she became fluent in German, Russian and French.

In 1950 Emanuela and her mother emigrated to Sydney, Australia. She met her future husband, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, Julius Nadel. They both worked incredibly hard in this foreign land, participating in communities and developing friendships.

In 1954, Louise, the first of their 3 daughters was born, followed in 1956 by Sandra and Lessley was born in 1962. In 2002 they tragically lost Louise and Lessley.

Emanuela passed away in Sydney, Australia, in 2017 at the age of 88 years.