At two years old, Shalom Koray was found inside an abandoned potato sack in the Warsaw ghetto. Someone, presumably a police officer, smuggled him out and sent him to hide away in an orphanage. Because of the circumstances, Shalom was never able to reunite with his lost family—until now.
Shalom, then called “Piotr Korczak,” spent six years of his life inside a Catholic institution located in Zakopane, Poland, before a Jewish woman working with the resistance named Lena Küchler-Silberman found him and five other children, starving and living in squalor.
Küchler-Silberman took the children to join about 100 other young refugees, and together, they moved to Czechoslovakia and then France. In 1949, she was able to get Shalom and a select few others into Israel. A family adopted him and gave him his new name. Today, he lives in northern Israel.
At the time of his rescue, Shalom was too young to know anything about his parents, and there was no way for science to help solve the mystery of his identity. So he accepted his fate and started a family of his own. Shalom is a father of three and a grandfather of eight.