Holocaust Survivor Esther Danon Kaidanow Dies at 88

July 31, 2024 JMORE Staff

Esther Danon Kaidanow was born in the Croatian city of Split. (Photo courtesy of Sol Levinson and Bros.)

Local Holocaust survivor Esther Kaidanow passed away on Monday, July 29. She was 88.

Born Esther Danon in the Croatian city of Split in the former Yugoslavia, she was the youngest of four children. In 1941, Kaidanow was 6 when the Nazi and Italian armies invaded Yugoslavia and arrived in her hometown.

“My parents, two sisters and brother had a good life in a close-knit Jewish community,” Kaidanow told the Human Element Project. “While Italian Fascists ruled, life was difficult but bearable. … Jewish schools were closed and Jewish businesses were confiscated. A neighbor warned my family when the Nazis entered the region. Thinking only men were in danger, my father and brother left. Soon after, a neighbor warned us that now women and children were to be collected as well.”

While some members of her family joined the partisan movement, Kaidanow and her mother and sister traveled to a small village to hide with a family of friends. Later, they hid in the Alps mountain range with a Yugoslavian partisan group until British troops liberated part of Italy from Nazi occupation in 1944.

“We were in the mountains with a resistance group and we did what we could do to help,” she told the Hagerstown Herald-Mail in 2013.

Kaidanow and her family sailed by rowboat to Hvar Island off the Croatian coast and were eventually placed in Bari, a displaced persons camp in southern Italy. She was reunited with her father and brother there, and the family was brought to the United States and placed in another camp in Oswego, New York.

“When we came to the United States, we were overjoyed,” Kaidanow told students last March at a Holocaust remembrance program at The John Carroll School in Bel Air.

In an interview with Baltimore Magazine a few years ago, she said. “Already in 1944, President Roosevelt was told that he would look very bad in history if he did not do anything about the situation in Europe. Already most of the Jews had been killed. He decided he would bring 1,000 refugees to United States for safekeeping in Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. My father and my brother applied, and they were accepted. When they heard we were alive, they asked if we could join them. And I guess America was always for reunification — if they accepted part of the family, they accepted the rest.”

After the end of World War II, Kaidanow and her family moved to Philadelphia. In 1959, she met Howard Kaidanow, also a Holocaust survivor and Polish-born partisan fighter, on a blind date. They married two years later.

Howard Kaidanow passed away in November of 2023 at the age of 94. The Kaidanows lived in Lutherville and belonged to Pikesville’s Beth El Congregation.

In 2017, they were featured in a Jewish Museum of Maryland art installation titled “Holocaust Memory Reconstruction: A Sacred Culture Rebuilt.” The installation incorporated the stories of the Kaidanows as well as local Holocaust survivors Leo Bretholz and Morris Rosen.

Esther Kaidanow is survived by her children, Tina Kaidanow and Eric (Patricia) Kaidanow; her siblings, Isak (Leonor) Danon, and Sarah (the late Morris) Meller (nee Danon); her brother-in-law, Jerry (Ellen) Kaidanow; her granddaughter, Mia Kaidanow; and many nieces, nephews, and grandnieces and grandnephews.

Besides her husband, she was predeceased by her parents, Hana and Joseph Danon; and her sister, Blanca (the late Ivica) Nuić (nee Danon).

Services for Kaidanow will be held in Sol Levinson’s Chapel, 8900 Reisterstown Road in Pikesville, on Friday, Aug. 2, at 10:30 am. Interment will be at Beth El Memorial Park, 9633 Liberty Road in Randallstown.

Contributions in her memory may be sent to the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, 4 West Red Oak Lane, Suite 204, White Plains, New York 10604, or the National Kidney Foundation, 30 East 33rd Street, #8, New York, New York 10016.

“Esther was the most selfless person I knew,” wrote her friend Stephanie Hack on the memorial page of Sol Levinson’s website. “She was generous, kind and nurturing; Esther and Howard always made you feel special. I loved our friendship and always enjoyed spending time with Esther and Howard. I am grateful for knowing them and will miss them both. May their memory be a Blessing.”