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Eve Kristine Vetulani

“During the war he asked my mother, ‘Can you take a Jewish woman into your house?’ and, no, he asked me, if my mother would take this Jewish woman, and I said no, never tell her that she is Jewish. This grandmother did not want to go with her Jewish children to Italy, she said I’m too old I am going to die here, I’m not going any place, I love this city, okay. And the cook was left with her, but then when she came to live with us the cook would always come to deliver food so that my mother really didn’t have to do anything except make the toilet paper. But everything else was delivered. And so he was also the one who, she stayed. And I was already in Germany and she died peacefully in our house and nobody knew. Except that I had to teach her, my uncle said, you have to teach her prayers, Catholic prayers, the first thing they do they ask you about the Christian Catholic holidays, and the years of this and that.”
(postwar testimony)

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Born October 1, 1924, in Cracow, Poland
Died March 25, 2004, in Baltimore, Maryland

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Eve Kristine Vetulani was born to a Catholic family in Cracow, Poland, an administrative and cultural city where industry grew rapidly. Her father was a professor at Jagiellonian University and her mother a homemaker. Prior to the war Eve studied a number of foreign languages in gymnasium (high school). After the war began the family adopted a Jewish woman, saving her from the Nazis. Eve was sent to work as slave laborer. She first worked at Hamewacker Chewing Tobacco in Nordhausen, Germany and was later sent to Schmidt, Kranz & Co., an ammunition factory. Eve was outstanding with languages. She worked as kitchen help for a private building company and as an interpreter. She was also a maid in the household of the company owner before she was liberated.

After the war Eve worked as a translator for the U.S. Army intelligence and attended Frankfurt University in Germany. She immigrated to the United States, settling in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1951 where she attended Washington University. She worked as a teacher of French, German and Spanish. Eve volunteered for the Red Cross Tracing Service and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum doing translations of archival documents from Polish to English.

Interview — Describes a Jewish woman her family adopted.

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