Bielska Fruma (Dedek)

Bielski (Dedek), Frania Binyamin Blitzer was born in 1938 in the town of Nadworna, Stanislawow (later Ivano-Frankivsk) District. His father, Dov-Berl Blitzer, owned a leather factory and a number of rental apartments. Following the death of his mother, Tema Blitzer, Binyamin was cared for by his nanny, Frania Dedek, a poor, 29-year-old Ukrainian woman, who moved in with the Blitzers. After the Germans occupied the town in July 1941, one of their first victims was Dov-Berl Blitzer. In September that same year, the Jews of Nadworna, including three-year-old Binyamin with his sister Sonia and their father’s mother, were forced out of their home and incarcerated in the local ghetto. The only person who remained in the Blitzers’ house was Frania Dedek. Her presence protected the property from looting; besides she could sell some of the Blitzers’ belongings in order to buy food for them. Contact between her and the Blitzers was maintained through one of the ghetto guards. As time passed, the situation in the ghetto deteriorated and the question arose whether it would be better to place Binyamin with someone outside. Frania could not imagine handing over her little charge to strangers and volunteered to care for the boy herself. This required her to leave Nadworna where the wealthy Blitzer family and its members were well known. So she took the child who had been smuggled out of the ghetto, and fled. For many months, they wandered from one village to another, avoiding the big towns. Frania would do any chore for a piece of bread and a cup of milk for “her boy”. Some farmers guessed the boy was Jewish and chased Frania and him away, others even belatedly denounced them to the authorities. Feeling danger, Frania often hid Binyamin in the forest. Sometimes, while working as a seasonal worker on certain farms, she concealed the boy’s existence from her employees, hiding him in fields or barns in the vicinity. Their relationship was of mother and son; months spent on arun taught them to understand each other almost without words. The liberation of Eastern Galicia in 1944 by the Red Army found Frania and Binyamin near the town of Skalat. They found the remnants of a once flourishing Jewish community and joined them, seeking protection from Ukrainian nationalists still active in the area. Soon it became known that none of Binyamin’s relatives survived the Holocaust. Frania decided it was her duty to raise the boy in the Jewish tradition, as his father would have raised him. So they started their journey to the West, together with other survivors. On the way, Frania took under her care another orphan, Eliezer Art, a native of Skalat. The three of them spent a year in a DP camp in Germany. Then on their way to Palestine, aboard the S.S. Exodus, they were stopped by the British and returned to Germany. Only in 1948, was Frania and her two unofficially adopted sons able to immigrate to Israel. Upon settling in Haifa, Frania converted to Judaism and married Avraham Bielski, a Holocaust survivor. Binyamin and Eliezer finished Jewish Orthodox schools, served in the army and established families. Their adopting mother, Frania, never concealed from them the truth about their origins, cherishing the memory of their perished families. Frania passed away in Haifa in 1986, at the age of 77. On January 4, 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Frania Bielski née Dedek, as Righteous Among the Nations.