14 hours ago
She's 90. As part of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, she's racing to tell her story.
She's tired, but the 90-year-old just napped in the hourlong rush-hour ride from her home in Sharon. She isn't nervous because her daughter (and manager), Deb Milley, 'hyped her up,' but mostly because she has told her story to groups like this for the past 40 years.
While the audience sizes vary from fewer than 50 people to more than 1,000, Applefield begins each speech in a similar way.
'I speak about the Holocaust because, as a result of World War II, between 50 million and 60 million people were killed,' Applefield says. Six million Jews, including 1.5 million Jewish children — and millions of non-Jews — were murdered during the Holocaust. Only about 11 percent of Jewish children in Europe survived.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
She was one of those surviving children.
Advertisement
At the end of WWII, there were an estimated 3.5 million Jewish survivors. Today, only about 220,000 are alive, some 6 percent, according to the April 2025
'Our time is almost up,' Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, says in the report. 'Our survivors are leaving us and this is the moment to hear their voices.'
Applefield feels the urgency of the call. Last year, she spoke 90 times. But this year, she has already booked 60 speaking engagements at schools and community spaces — she sometimes gives as many as eight presentations in a week. She's driven by a feeling that if she can still tell her stories and those of people no longer here, they will not die with her.
Advertisement
'I'm a witness of history,' Applefield says, 'and those who hear me are becoming witnesses also.'
A photo of Applefield at age 4 flashes on the screen behind her. She's grinning mischievously, chubby legs emerging from a dress with bows.
'My birth name was not Janet. My birth name was Gustawa.'
Before the war in Nowy Targ, Poland, Janet Applefield's mother, Maria Singer, holds her.
From Janet Applefield
In her hometown of Nowy Targ, Applefield lived a happy life with her mother, father, baby sister, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. She remembers flashes of her early childhood: riding on the back of her uncle's motorcycle to the candy store, and helping her mother and grandmother bake challah to eat on the Sabbath. But on September 1, 1939, when she was 4 years old, she tells the students, Hitler invaded Poland.
Applefield's parents were each forced to wear an armband embroidered with the Star of David to identify them as Jews. The Gestapo took all of their valuables.
Her family tried to escape several times. On the first attempt, they fled to Russia but were forced to turn around. On the journey, her 18-month-old sister contracted diphtheria, and, with no access to medical care, died.
Upon their return, her father was arrested for being an alleged Communist because he had come from Russia. When he was finally released from jail days later, he knew they had to leave again. Their town had been designated 'Judenfrei' by the Nazis — 'free of Jews.'
Advertisement
They fled next to Krakow. Applefield remembers her father trying to cover her eyes as the train passed a gallows hung with three men in long beards, wearing signs that read 'Kosher Meat.'
From Krakow, they passed from place to place, hoping to find friends or family to shelter them. Finally, traveling by horse-drawn wagon, they were spotted by Polish police and chased, then brutally beaten. Once again, they were forced to return to Nowy Targ.
'At that point, my parents realized that they had run out of all options,' Applefield says from the front of the room. 'They decided that in order to hopefully save my life, they would give me away.'
Janet Applefield with a pet dog in an undated photo.
From Janet Applefield
One student in the room gasps. Others watch with their mouths open. Everyone's eyes are fixated on the woman seated at the front of the room. No phones are in sight.
Applefield continues, explaining that she moved around through a series of homes — at first staying with her cousin's former nanny, then with a different cousin named Lala who changed Applefield's identity to obscure her Jewish roots.
'You are no longer Gustawa Singer,' Lala told her. 'Forget her. She is dead.'
Lala had managed to obtain the birth certificate of a 7-year-old Polish Catholic girl who was killed alongside her parents when a bomb fell on their house in Warsaw.
'I took on this little girl's identity. I became her. Her name was Krystyna Antoszkiewicz. That was my new name,' Applefield recalls.
She says her cousin verbally and physically abused her, including striking her with an iron poker and beating her so badly that her nails fell off.
Advertisement
Lala told Applefield to wait in a nearby church one day while she met a boyfriend at a coffee shop in Krakow. The Gestapo raided the cafe, and Lala never returned.
At 7 years old, Applefield was on her own. She had wandered the streets for hours when she ran into a woman who was concerned to see a young girl alone. Applefield told the woman her fake story about being 'Krystyna.' The woman believed it and took Applefield to a farm where she would live for the next two years.
Applefield with her father, Lolek Singer.
Handout
After the war, Applefield was brought to an orphanage.
One day, the head of the orphanage visited a Jewish committee center in Krakow where there was a community board that posted a list of names of those who had survived. She overheard a man asking about his daughter. She had green eyes, he said, blond hair in braids, and a birthmark on her inner left thigh. The head of the orphanage immediately knew he was looking for Applefield.
'When she said she had you, my body collapsed,' her father told her when they were reunited. 'I fell to the floor and cried.'
Applefield remembers being afraid when she saw him: he didn't look like her father. He looked like a skeleton. He had survived three concentration camps and a gunshot wound to the face — the bullet lodged in his cheekbone.
Later, that bullet wound would help her father obtain a medical visa to come to New Jersey, where an uncle lived. And her father would remarry in order for them to stay and build a new life in America.
Advertisement
At age 11, Applefield went to school for the first time, and was told to choose an American name. She picked Jeanette, the name of a glamorous cousin who painted her fingernails red and lived in Paris. When her uncle introduced her to the administrator at school, he Americanized it, calling her 'Janet.' And that is who she became.
Applefield holds a copy of a 1947 visa application for her and her father to enter New York.
Shira Stoll
Today, as survivor populations are dwindling, antisemitism is on the rise.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the American Defense League has also documented
Just over the past month, two attacks on Jews have made national headlines. A young couple — Israeli Embassy aides Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26 —
Two weeks later, in Boulder, Colorado, a man threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. The attacker told investigators he was driven by a desire to
Advertisement
These days, when Applefield speaks in public, her daughter makes sure to have an escape plan. 'I'm very fearful this could happen anywhere at any time,' Milley says.
'It's very targeting for me,' Applefield says. Her grandson lives in D.C. and has attended a Jewish event at the same museum where the shooting happened. She's also watched recent immigration raids with growing alarm, chilled by the images of masked men sweeping people off of the street.
'Years ago, when someone would ask the question, 'Can something like the Holocaust ever happen again here?' And I would say, 'Oh, no, no, never.'' Applefield says. 'I have changed my mind because of what I see that is happening today.'
Applefield is not alone in her efforts. Organizations nationwide have made it their mission to preserve these stories and ensure they will not be forgotten. The USC Shoah Foundation has an archive of over 52,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors —
The nonprofit
Last year, Janet Applefield had 90 speaking engagements to discuss her experience during the Holocaust. So far this year, she has already booked 60 talks at schools and community spaces.
Shira Stoll
'We've seen a number of reasons to feel concerned about the fragility of democracy,' says Elizabeth Carroll, New England program director at Facing History. 'That has created even more of a sense of urgency for our speakers to share their stories.'
Over the past five years, the curriculum has been used in more than 62,000 schools nationwide, and over 4,000 schools in New England, according to Carroll.
For Jeff Smith, who organizes its survivor speaker program, the work is personal — to honor the memory of his grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust — and purposeful — to bring the history to life for thousands of students.
As the survivor population dwindles, Facing History has been proactive in training the children of Holocaust survivors and other atrocities to share their family histories.
'Those stories are not lost to the ages. They're continuing, and they're preserved,' Smith says.
Milley, Applefield's daughter, is determined to carry her mother's torch. And she wants to remember not just the extreme cruelty her mother endured during the war — she also wants to keep alive the kindness of those who risked their lives to save a Jewish child.
'It's the most spiritually uplifting way for us as a family to recognize that they all play a very critical role in my mother's survival,' Milley says.
It took years for Applefield to share her own story. She was married and had her first child at age 19. Applefield carried her son to classes at Rutgers University, holding on to a promise to her father that she would finish college.
She went on to have two more children and earn a master's of social work from Boston University. She was a social worker for over 30 years, helping survivors of trauma as she continued to heal from her own.
For much of that time, Applefield thought that because she was not in the concentration camps, she didn't 'fit the bill' as a true Holocaust survivor.
But in the 1980s, Applefield was invited to join Facing History. Meeting other survivors made her feel like a part of something. Suddenly, sharing her story felt like an imperative. 'When I'm no longer here, I know that my daughter and my grandchildren will continue my legacy,' Applefield says. 'My story's out in the world.'
Janet Applefield receives flowers from students. Malden Catholic school.
Shira Stoll
As Applefield finished speaking on that Wednesday in May, every person in the Malden Catholic auditorium was on their feet applauding. Afterward, a few students in hoodies and plaid skirts trickled up to the front to present her with flowers and chocolate.
Others milled in groups, waiting to talk to Applefield. The girls who made the heart gestures approached her shyly, excited but slightly starstruck. She posed for a photo with them.
Sarah Darius, a 15-year-old freshman at Malden Catholic, says Applefield's talk brought home the reality of the Holocaust for her, and the fact that her generation might be the last to hear from survivors firsthand. It's a privilege, she realizes — and a duty.
'I have to educate the younger generation on it,' Darius says. 'I'm taking on the responsibility.'
Shira Stoll is a regional Emmy and Murrow Award-winning journalist based in Boston. Send comments to magazine@
