Anna Novak Heller survived Holocaust with luck, forged papers and daring

To the end of her days, Anna Novak Heller never forgot the postcards.

As a teen, she watched German soldiers march through her native Krakow, Poland “like Supermen.”

She had to wear a yellow Star of David. And she had to submit to Nazi doctors taking painstaking measurements of people’s heads and bodies, trying “to prove that the race, Jewish race was inferior,” she said in an oral history by the USC Shoah Foundation.

When the Nazis began moving masses of Jews from the ghetto, postcards — ostensibly cheerful, but in fact chilling — began to arrive from those who’d been relocated.

The cards were a Nazi bid to quell the fears of those left behind. But their prisoners used code to try to warn the others.

“Between the lines would be written in Hebrew, words like. … ‘This is the end,’” she said. “They were shipping people to various camps to kill them.”

A Glenview resident, Mrs. Heller survived the Holocaust through a combination of luck, forged papers, sympathetic protectors and her own sheer nerve.

At night, she lived in Plaszow, a forced-labor camp. During the daytime, she sewed German military uniforms in a factory owned by Julius Madritsch, later honored by Israel for helping the Jewish people. He protected his Jewish laborers, at one point working with Oskar Schindler of “Schindler’s List” fame.

At the factory, she hatched a daring escape plan. “I asked one of the Polish (girls). . . if she would lend me her ID and I could walk (out) with her, and she agreed,” Mrs. Heller told the Shoah Foundation.

When the day came, she strode past a guard. “As he was opening the gate and I was walking, I heard his voice right behind me. If he had seen me, recognized (me), he would kill me,” she said. “It was his life against mine. He actually received 50 lashes for my escape.”

“I was so terrorized,” she said, “that when I walked with this girl to maybe a block away, I wanted to go back. I just didn’t know what to do with myself, and she prevented me from doing that.”

The relatives of Mrs. Heller, 101, who died in May, say they’ll always wonder about the identity of that woman.

She could be the reason they even exist, said Mrs. Heller’s granddaughter, Diana Novak Jones.

Mrs. Heller told the Shoah Foundation that as the war amped up, she remembered how the Nazis separated children from their parents, sometimes using whips. “It was screaming and terror,” she said.

When their children were taken from them, the women “would be howling. … I thought, this must be how it is in hell.”

After her escape from Madritsch’s factory, she passed for Christian, using papers with false names. “I always wore a cross and I had all these prayer books,” she said.

In 1947, she arrived in the U.S. “The first few years in this country, when I saw a policeman, I was looking at my arm (to check) if I had my (Star of David) band on,” she said.

She and her husband Henry, who also survived the Holocaust, opened a store in Chicago, Novak’s Children’s Wear. And after going to school for eight years, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Next, she applied to the Jane Addams College of Social Work. The oldest student there, she graduated after two years with her master’s degree.

Mrs. Heller worked at a psychiatric division of the Cook County courts. She loved her job.

“They usually were in a great deal of trouble and I somehow could relate to that,” she said. She stayed 11 years, until she left to care for her husband, Henry, who died in 1986 of cancer.

After his death, she married a widower, Dr. Paul Heller, a concentration camp survivor.

Mrs. Heller liked to fill relatives’ freezers with kugels and chicken soup. For their birthdays, she made schnitzel and linzer tortes.

Her parents Rivka and Adolf Grinberg and her sisters Paulina and Francesca died in the Holocaust. Her son Tony died in 2014. In addition to her granddaughter and son Dr. Rick Novak, she is survived by her stepchildren, Caroline and Tom Heller, and three other grandchildren. Services have been held.

She told the Shoah Foundation, “To survive is meaningful, because I have a family, because they will carry on for the rest of the family who are not alive.”