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My Escape Into Prison and Other Memories of A Stolen Youth, 1939-1948
By Jane Lipski (Jadzia Szpigelman)
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER 1 - Our Life Before the War
I was born in 1924 on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest and most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. Like most of the Jewish population in Będzin, a city in southwest Poland, my parents Hadassa and Meyer Joseph Szpigelman fasted and prayed all day long in the synagogue. They sat apart from one another, because according to orthodox Jewish tradition, women did not pray near the Ark and the Torah or sit with the men in the main sanctuary. Rather, my mother and the other women prayed from the floor above, where they could clearly hear the men chanting and observe the Torah being lifted out from the Ark.
In the late afternoon Hadassa felt her first contractions. Not wishing to disturb her husband, she stepped quietly down the stairs and slipped unnoticed out of the prayer house. She headed home with the knowledge that she could call upon the local midwife, who lived in our building and who came to her at once.
Meyer Joseph prayed through Ne’ilah, the day’s closing service, as the early October sun dipped below the horizon. It was only afterward that he found out, while waiting for his wife by the stairwell, that she had left hours earlier. By the time he arrived home and heard my cry from the bedroom, I had already been cleaned up and a red ribbon tied in my wispy blond hair to protect me from the evil eye.
I came into my parents’ lives rather late. My mother had delivered five children before me, of whom three were alive at the time of my birth. My brother Poldek was 15 years old, my sister Helen was 13 and Hania was 6. Even though my parents were probably hoping for another son, having lost two, they were happy with the healthy newborn daughter that God had given them.
They named me Jadzia, after an aunt, Jachet, who had died when she was over 100 and supposedly had been very clever as well as hardy. For the rest of their lives, my parents called me their Yom Kippur girl, although I could never celebrate my birthday with a party, because everyone would be fasting, meditating and asking forgiveness of God on that holy day. Come to think of it, my family never had birthday parties, and I don’t remember going to any, so maybe it simply wasn’t the custom.
We lived in an enormous, five-story, double-courtyard building on Kołątaja Street, one of three main boulevards that ran through the city. More than a hundred families resided in the building’s one- to four-room apartments. Even the basements and attics were occupied by tenants, except on the side of the attic where everyone hung their laundry to dry. Professional people, such as doctors, lawyers, professors, and schoolteachers, lived in the front apartments where the windows faced the street. The rear apartments were mostly occupied by trades people, including tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, brassiere and underwear makers, and milliners, all of whom worked at home. The building also housed a bakery, a hair mattress factory, a chicken wire fence factory, and a blacksmith, as well as a school for ballroom dancing, a trumpet school, a merchant’s organization, a private school for girls that my oldest sister Helen attended, a sports club called Hakoach, where I exercised when I was grammar school age, and a cheder (a small religious school), where a rabbi taught young boys to read the Torah. There seemed to be a whole city within the confines of this one urban dwelling, a city densely populated with vivid sounds, smells and characters that I have never forgotten.
Almost all of the tenants were Jewish and everyone knew everyone else. After school, the children played ball, hide-and-seek, hopscotch, and other games in the courtyards. A group of Gypsy men and women often came to perform their folk music; on other occasions, a blind man and his son sang and played the accordion. We children would circle ‘round to watch a performance, scramble to pick up the coins that women tossed from their apartment windows, and drop them into the musicians’ hats. Something was always going on in my neighborhood. But whereas I felt exuberance for the local happenings, my big brother Poldek adamantly kept his distance and tried to restrain my friendships in the apartment building.
Poldek stood out in our family as the disciplinarian, more rigid and exacting than either of our parents. He used to monitor my actions at home and in the courtyard; for instance, he forbade me to play with children from a poor family that lived in a one-room basement apartment. They were uncared-for and unsanitary, Poldek insisted. A medical student and later a surgeon, he worried that I would learn unwholesome habits and foul language or catch diseases from them. He punished me many times for playing in the courtyard and other such transgressions, and I grew up resenting his iron grip. Along with trying to control my playtime, he pressured me to study assiduously and even had me memorize poems and recite them in front of his friends. While other children played, I was obliged to read books that were appropriate for higher grade levels than mine, books that I didn’t understand or care about. Then my brother would test me to make sure I had read them. If I didn’t understand a book, he’d punish me. My parents and sisters couldn’t protect me because Poldek bossed them around too, and not even my parents could stand up to him. One reason my family treated him with kid gloves is because he was the prized only son, born between the two sons who had died. I recall being able to breathe freely only when he left Poland to study medicine abroad in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
That was in the early l930s, before the start of the Nazi war, when Polish Jews faced new occurrences of persecution as a result of government policies and popular flare-ups against Jews. Polish universities, for instance, enforced an admissions quota to restrict the number of university placements reserved for Jewish students. Poldek was one of the unlucky ones whose medical school application was rejected in Poland. Nonetheless, in Prague, he rose to the top of his medical class, graduated magna cum laude and grew into a skilled surgeon. He returned to Poland filled with hopes and aspirations to practice medicine in Będzin, but because he was Jewish and had studied abroad, he would neither be given a license to practice nor be appointed to a hospital staff anywhere in Poland. His hopes sank. He eventually found a meagerly paid job, working unofficially as a first assistant surgeon in a large hospital in a nearby city called Sosnowiec. Although he performed effectively at the hospital, he continued to torment our family at home. I looked forward to summer vacations when I could escape his control.
During the summer months, my mother would rent a cottage in the Beskid Mountains in southern Poland. We’d bathe under waterfalls, climb mountains, pick berries and mushrooms in the forests, and visit friends and family. Father, who worked as a brewery sales representative, joined us on the weekends. By no means were we a well-to-do family. Father’s income barely covered our living expenses, which included the costs of a Jewish private school education for four children. We had no choice but to attend private schools, because admission quotas restricted the number of Jewish students who could attend the public high schools.
But discrimination didn’t dispirit the youth of Jewish Będzin. We were energetic and earnest, ready to help others and solve the glaring problem of hatred against Jews. Most young people belonged to Zionist youth movements or sport clubs. When I was eleven years old, I joined a Zionist group called HaNoar ha-Tsioni (“Zionist Youth,” in Hebrew). My friends and I would meet, learn Hebrew songs, and dance the hora and other group dances. Our young instructors-including Israel Diamond, Karola Bojm, Alex Statler, Sheva Ingster, and Sally Gutman-took us camping and introduced us to Jewish history literature and Zionism. From them, we leaned that the Jewish people must have our own country, that we must return to Palestine, our Biblical homeland, because it was no longer possible to live peacefully and securely in the Diaspora. Jews were not wanted in Europe.
In the summer of 1939, when I was fourteen, I begged my parents to allow me to spend one month with my friends at the Zionist Youth camp in the Beskid Mountains. Though my brother tried to prevent me from going, I cried and pleaded with my parents-I even refused to eat for two days-until they gave me permission. The Zionist camp experience remains one of the fondest memories of my youth. I befriended young people who shared a common goal and desire to build our own state. I made up my mind that summer to immigrate to Palestine as soon as I finished high school in four years. Several of my older friends had already emigrated. Others were preparing to go before the end of 1939, but the war erupted and crushed their plans.
More than forty of my family members lived in Będzin and about 150 more resided in neighboring towns and cities such as Sosnowiec, Katowice, Dąbrowa, and Strzemieszyce. Most of the family, especially the older generation, was religious and observed the Jewish holidays and the Sabbath, during which they did not work, carry money or ride vehicles. (Very few families had cars, but trams were available.)
Będzin is located in an industrial region of southwest Poland called Upper Silesia, which borders Germany and used to be famous for its coal mines. Jews had lived in Będzin for generations, reaching back to the eleventh century when the town first began to grow into a center of Jewish life for the entire province of Upper Silesia. By the start of World War II, approximately 27,000 Jews resided in Będzin, more than 50 percent of the total population.
Poldek warned our family that war was imminent. It was near the end of August, he was working in a medical unit that was preparing to head eastward, and he came to see us. I remember he was dressed in uniform and carrying a gas mask. He insisted that we all leave the area and get far away from the German border. Most people did not believe that Hider would dare to attack Poland. Nevertheless, a few days later, my parents, my two married sisters, Helen and Hania, their families and I fled Będzin. We were a mere handful among thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, who were making a mass exodus away from the battlefield in the event of an invasion. My family traveled by horse and cart and later on foot to the home of my mother’s older sister Gusta, who lived with her family in Jędrzejów, a town sixty miles east of Będzin. In the chaos of travel, my mother and I were separated from my father and two sisters. We kept trudging toward my aunt’s town, occasionally getting a short ride on a truck or car. Hearing that the German troops were very close, my mother, some friends and I fled further on foot, traveling day and night through forests and on roads, until we saw a red sky in the distance and heard gunfire and bombing. The Germans were in front of us! Shocked and terrified, we immediately turned around and headed back to Będzin, where we were reunited with my father and sisters.
Germany attacked Poland on the first of September. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on the Third Reich. The two European Allies had promised to defend Poland in the event of a German invasion. But no matter- within weeks, the Polish army was defeated. From Silesia in the south, where we lived, and from Germany and East Prussia in the north, Nazi military units broke through Polish border defenses and marched toward Warsaw, the nation’s capital. After suffering a massive encirclement assault, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 28.
In the short time that we were gone from Będzin, the Germans had occupied Będzin and burned down the synagogue and the surrounding old community of Jewish homes. Fortunately for us, our apartment building, which stood outside the Jewish quarter, had not been damaged. The rest of “gentile” Będzin also survived intact.
Hitler immediately annexed most of western Poland in October. That’s how Upper Silesia, which encompassed Będzin, Sosnowiec, Katowice, Oświęcim (Auschwitz) and other towns, became incorporated into the German province of Silesia. The northern stretches of Poland, including the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk, in Polish) along the Baltic coast, became part of the new German province of Danzig-West Prussia. Poznań and part of Łódź, two major industrial cities, were combined into a new province called the Warthegau. By October’s end, the remainder of Nazi-occupied Poland was organized into the “Generalgouvernement” of Poland. As if the German invasion was not traumatic enough, the Soviet Union stormed the borders of eastern Poland on September 17 and overtook those communities in accordance with a secret pact between Hitler and Stalin, which had been forged in August. With eastern Poland dominated by the Soviet Red Army and the rest of the country swept under Nazi control, Poland was virtually erased from the map of Europe. Thousands of people including Poldek who had fled to the east found themselves now under Soviet occupation.
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CHAPTER 2 - Poland Under Nazi Occupation
In the weeks that followed, the German conquerors imposed a series of restrictions on the entire Jewish population under their authority. They appointed Jewish Councils, called Judenrat, in every Jewish community to administer the prohibitive regulations and maintain order. In Będzin we watched as the Judenrat shut down Jewish sport clubs, cinemas, theaters, newspapers, libraries, and so forth. Our Jewish youth movements were banned; gatherings of more than six people in public or private settings were prohibited; and Jews everywhere were forced to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David (later replaced by a yellow star).
Jews were forbidden to enter city parks or walk on the main streets. We were no longer allowed to ride the trains or trams. At first we were permitted to stand on the streetcar platform, but soon enough we were robbed of that “privilege” as well. Cars were confiscated from the few families that owned them. Jewish-owned factories and stores were taken over by German commissioners, who forced the former owners to teach them how to operate their businesses.
Będzin’s Jewish schools-including three grammar schools, various trade schools, religious schools, and our private co-ed high school-did not open in September of 1939, or ever again. After six years of grammar school and two years of high school, my formal education ended when the war began. I would not be free to complete the remaining four years of my studies. Instead, at 14 years old, I was forced to join the thousands of Jewish children and youth who were left, day in and day out, with nothing to do.
While Jewish boys and girls were being pulled out of the classroom, their parents were being pushed out of the work force. That same autumn, my father lost his job in the brewery. Because our family desperately needed money and food, he got involved in illegal trading, which took him traveling by bus or train to nearby cities. My mother and I stayed at home, cooking, hand-washing laundry and knitting gloves and socks, which we’d sell to relatives and friends for about fifty groszy per pair. Eventually, my father allowed me to join him in his illegal endeavors, because, although the work was terribly dangerous, a father and daughter traveling together would appear less suspect than a man journeying alone.
We would remove our armbands, conceal the smuggled goods beneath our garments, and travel by train or bus to neighboring towns. Before the war began, merchants had stashed away goods such as yarn, linen, socks, and underwear, and now they wanted them delivered and sold in cities and towns outside Będzin. I smuggled linens by wrapping them around my waist under a loose fur coat that belonged to my cousin. Other times, I helped my aunt by delivering meat that she obtained on the black market. One time, my sister Hania and I took a train, unaccompanied by our father, to trade some goods between Będzin and Jędrzejów. We were young and willing to take such risks, because we did not realize the extent to which we were gambling with our lives. Only later did we find out that many young people who smuggled goods had lost their lives. Luckily, my family members and I were never stopped by the authorities, which I attribute to our Aryan looks. I had blond straight hair, blue-green eyes, and a straight nose. I also spoke a beautiful Polish, which set me apart from most of my Jewish friends, who had grown up in families where only Yiddish was spoken at home. Polish was their second language and that detectable difference in the spoken word could expose a Jew who was pretending to be a gentile. I have to admit that I owed my flawless command of Polish to my brother Poldek’s demanding language drills.
Despite the new prohibitions, the Zionist Youth group continued to meet in small groups in private apartments with the aim of engaging boys and girls in meaningful social activities. Once a week, a group of half a dozen nine and ten-year-old girls would gather in my parents’ apartment, where I’d read to them and teach them songs for an hour or two. We sang softly so as not to draw attention to our gathering. Sometimes we’d shut the lights and sit on the floor around a “campfire” made of twigs and an electric bulb covered with red crepe paper, while I told them stories about the heroic first Jewish settlers in Palestine, known in Hebrew as the Ha1utzim.
After a year or so these meetings came to an abrupt close, because we were forced to share our home with other families, and there was no longer any space for social gatherings. The Nazis had expelled hundreds of Jewish families from Germany and Czechoslovakia, as well as from other cities in Poland, and relocated them to Będzin, where they were forced to live with families like mine. Our two-bedroom apartment became home to a mother and daughter from Czechoslovakia whose husbands had been sent to labor camps in Germany. After they left us, we were ordered to take in a woman with two daughters, also from Germany And so it went, one broken family after another moved into our home and soon enough moved on. Where did these families go when they left us? We wondered but only learned later that they were sent to slave labor or concentration camps. The largest and closest camp to Będzin was the dreaded Auschwitz-Birkenau, the ultimate symbol of Nazi evil.
The Gestapo regularly ordered Jews to hand over their gold and money, using brutal means of coercion. They beat people up in the streets, cut off men’s beards (or the side locks of the religious men), and hung men from trees in public view for everyone to witness until the correct amount of cash was delivered. It was on Zawale Street, where an ancient Jewish cemetery stood, that I first saw men hanging from trees.
To cope with these horrific events, my friends and I sought comfort and strength by banding together and pursuing our favorite cultural activities. For instance, a group that played musical instruments got permission from the Judenrat to give a concert in the Jewish orphanage. I sat in on most of the rehearsals, mainly to listen, but wasn’t able to attend the concert because, at the entrance door, I accidentally cut off the tip of my middle finger. It bled profusely and I ran through a main street, on which Jews were prohibited, to the city hospital, which also was off-limits to Jews. Indeed, I was turned away by the nuns, who said they did not treat Jews. Finally I found a Jewish physician, Dr. Pearl who, though like all Jewish doctors was no longer allowed to practice medicine, kindly treated the wound and dressed my finger in his one-room attic apartment.
That same evening, my father and I took off our armbands and hoarded a streetcar to Sosnowiec to visit the surgeon for whom my brother Poldek worked. Dr. Travinski undid the dressing and replaced it with a fresh one. When I asked if the fingertip would grow back, he said, “A lizard’s tail grows back, but not a finger.” I was sad. My mother sobbed when we returned home that night, because she had worried that we had been caught.
Not long after my accident, the Judenrat banned all concerts and some of the young musicians were deported to labor camps-or so we were told. Every so often, young people were arrested in the middle of the night and sent away to unknown destinations, never to be heard from again. The rest of us held fast to one another, seeking comfort in our friendships, trying hard to believe that the world was not caving in on us. Once the Nazis forced us into ghettos, however, there was no escaping the overwhelming isolation and doom.
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CHAPTER 3 - The Bedzin Ghetto
In the spring of 1941, the building in which we lived on Kołątaja Street was to be converted into an army uniform factory called the Rosner Shop. All tenants were ordered to leave our apartments and move to the outskirts of Będzin, where a Jewish ghetto called Kamionka (and later called Środula Dolna) was later established. My family was given a small house with one main room, a tiny kitchen and an outhouse. My parents and I slept in the room. A young couple that we did not know was to sleep in the kitchen.
The Będzin ghetto lasted a little more than two years. The ghetto was liquidated in August 1943 and its inhabitants were transported to Auschwitz. A group of 150 Jewish men, guarded by the SS, were assigned to gather and ship our possessions-silver, furniture, sewing machines, clothing-to Germany. They burned our books, documents, photographs, and all else that remained. Later on, this group was sent to Auschwitz as well.
As early as mid-August of 1942, about one year after we had been forced into the ghetto, the first mass deportations of our community began. The entire ghetto population, including the young, the elderly, and the bedridden, as well as families who still lived on designated streets of the city, were ordered to assemble at the sports stadium on Kościuszko Street at six o’clock in the morning. Those who could not make it on their own were dragged to the stadium by the militia and the police. Every house, apartment, basement and attic was thoroughly searched. Around 30,000 people gathered in the stadium and waited for what was to come next.
At the time, my brother Poldek was somewhere in Russia or Asia. Later he was fighting with a heroic Polish army under British command, called Anders Army. My oldest sister, Helen, was terribly ill from typhoid fever. She lay half conscious and delirious with lockjaw and twelve large boils on her back. Nothing could be done for her. There were no medications. On the day of the selection, her husband left her lying unconscious in bed, because he couldn’t carry her to the stadium. A heavy curtain concealed the door to her room, and miraculously, she remained untouched and alive when he returned.
At the stadium, we stood in a long line that moved towards a German officer cracking a leather whip and ordering people to assemble in different areas. One section of the stadium filled with children and older people, another with young, healthy-looking men and women, and a third with people of all ages. The first group was to be sent for extermination. The second group was assigned to work in labor camps, and the last group was supposed to remain in the ghetto. When my parents and I approached the selection officer, he motioned, “Old ones to the right, girl to the left.” As I took a few steps to the left I heard my mother crying and I turned around to go toward my parents. I never reached them. I was beaten and dragged back to the left side. The man with the whip had decided our destiny.
The traumatic scene was ruled over by police bearing whips and guns. In the late afternoon, they allowed the people in my line to return to our homes. At midnight, with the streetlights on, we watched the loved ones being herded like cattle towards the orphanage, where another selection process was to take place and transports prepared for Auschwitz. We knew people were being sent to their deaths, because we had already heard horrifying reports about the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, approximately forty-five miles from Będzin.
My parents were trapped in the selection process. I stood paralyzed, separated from them and surrounded by cries of grief. I spotted my mother. That day was the worst experience of my life, the first really deep wound I ever suffered. In time, more ghastly things would happen to me, but I hardened with experience and built a shield around my heart.
I was spared prolonged suffering. Probably because the Germans were not yet prepared to send so many thousands of people to be mass murdered in such a short amount of time, some people were released the next day and sent home. Among them were my mother and father. I don’t know how many thousands were sent to Auschwitz that week, but very few of the elderly or the mothers with small children came back.
Soon after this round of deportations, my Aunt Regina, my mother’s younger sister, arrived at our place with five of her six children (four boys, ages four to ten, and a two-year-old girl). Her husband and oldest son, age 15, had been sent to German labor camps, along with other able-bodied men. Regina and the other children were quickly driven out of their little town of Jaworzno. Given no time to pack, they arrived at our doorstep empty-handed, with not one suitcase. Jaworzno was being “cleansed” of Jews, and the survivors like my Aunt and her children were “relocated” to Będzin. Because of its close location to Auschwitz, our region was used as a way station.
Not long after her arrival, Aunt Regina was deported to Auschwitz along with hundreds of others. Her four young sons (Majloch, Zelik, Izek, and Jakob) managed to run away and come back to us. Two-year-old Pauline stayed with us too; she slept with me on the sofa or in my parents’ bed. The boys slept on rugs on the cement floor in the entryway. We lived together in our cramped quarters with hardly any food, satisfied to eat a little watery soup that my mother would make.
The Będzin ghetto consisted of long rows of small houses, with one or two rooms each, without any bathroom facilities. Though the ghetto wasn’t fenced in with barbed wire, as many others were, armed police and guard dogs patrolled the space day and night. Their vigilance ensured that Gentiles did not enter or send supplies into the ghetto and prevented Jews from leaving unless one was part of a convoy of laborers walking to and from work. Any other activity that took a Jew out of the ghetto was forbidden under penalty of death.
Most of the previous owners of the houses that made up the ghetto were relocated to furnished apartments in Będzin that had been vacated by Jewish families. At the army uniform factory, in our former apartment building, thousands of Jews were put to work. Labor prolonged one’s survival, if only for a short time, because laborers were given food rations as well as identification papers, which stated that they were still needed in the service of the Third Reich.
The Polish owners of the house we now lived in had been given an apartment on Środula Street, which divided the ghetto from the rest of the city. Lotti, who had worked as a live-in maid for my parents before the war, moved into this same building on Środula Street. One day I left the ghetto illegally and went to plead with both Lotti and the former owners of the home we now occupied to take in my two-year-old cousin Pauline, an innocent and beautiful toddler. With her blue eyes and blond hair, she looked like a typical Aryan child. I begged them to help her. Instead, I was ordered to get out of their homes and never come back.
Life went on. Most of us were forced to work in factories set up by the Germans, making shoes and sewing uniforms, shirts and other clothing for the German army. We were marched under guard to work in the mornings and marched back at night. But we never knew if we’d live through the night because that’s when the Germans would barge into homes to make random arrests and send people away to unknown destinations. No reasons for the arrests were ever given. No charges were made. These veritable kidnappings were part of the Nazi terror campaign. Nobody knew when his or her turn would come. After a while, many of us thought about bunkers where we could hide and postpone the “end.”
Broken families, broken hearts, hunger and sickness. I came down with paratyphoid fever, an even worse case than my sister Helen had survived. I was 17 years old and felt that surely I was going to die. “At least I’ll die in my own bed,” I remember thinking at the time. I also recall that although I was semiconscious, I recited poems from Greek mythology that I had learned in school. Fortunately, a makeshift hospital had been established in the ghetto, and the staff was able to take care of me. Because I was bleeding internally, I needed a transfusion, but there were no blood banks, of course, or equipment or intravenous solutions. My friends from the youth movement offered to donate blood for me, but in the end my sister Helen became the donor. They put her arm next to mine and did a direct transfusion, cutting into us to find the veins. This saved my life, though I had lost 30 pounds and was too weak to walk. Friends and family brought me whatever food they could find to build up my strength. Gradually, I recovered and my parents rejoiced to have their “little girl” back again.
A few months before I fell sick, the Judenrat had gotten permission from the German authorities to cultivate several acres of fields that had not been used for many years. The idea was to plant vegetable plots with potatoes, beans, groats, and so forth and use the harvest in a soup kitchen, where we’d feed people and allay the starvation.
My friends from the Zionist youth group volunteered to help, although we knew absolutely nothing about farming. Under the supervision of one Mr. Strochlic, a graduate of an agriculture school, we tilled the soil with spades, rakes and our bare hands. We awoke before sunrise to plant and water seedlings. Our garden grew plentiful with carrots, parsley roots, radishes, cucumbers and tomatoes. Watching the plants grow and harvesting them filled our hearts with hope. We used natural fertilizer like horse and cow manure and also excrement from the outhouses and the ghetto. We “golden youth”-former high school students and graduates-mixed soil and fertilizer by hand (we had no gloves). The wind blew it all over our legs and the smell was putrid, but the garden kept growing. At the time, nothing seemed too difficult or impossible for us. We were young, still together, and still singing and joking in spite of everything. We slept in separate barracks for girls and boys.
One sunny morning we were tending to the potato plants, when I heard someone whistling beautiful clear notes from a field on the other side of the road. Recognizing several familiar melodies, mainly classical music, I joined in. Now there were two strong and clear whistles, mine and, as I soon found out, Janek’s. He was a youth group instructor, about four years my senior, and all the older girls had a crush on him. It felt like our whistling was drawing us together. I suddenly felt so alive and happy to be working in the green fields on a glorious summer day that I could almost forget reality. It was like a breath of freedom. Janek and I went on and on, whistling one melody and then another, until a clanging bell signaled the time to leave the fields. Still whistling, Janek came from his field and I from mine, and together we walked slowly towards our barracks. Janek jumped into a little creek on the side of the road and picked a handful of forget-me-nots for me. We talked and held hands. We were falling in love. Four years older than me, Janek had graduated from high school in 1939 and had been preparing to immigrate to Palestine, where his older brother lived on a kibbutz, but the war put an abrupt stop to his plans. Now, two summers later, against a backdrop of terror, we spent long evenings together, sharing our love, worries and frustrations. But we were unable to plan for the future because we knew there would be no future for us.
The recognition of the depth and breadth of our hopeless situation marked a turning point, not only for me, Janek and our other friends in the Będzin ghetto, but apparently, in many ghettos. It became the pivotal moment when-after many of our family members and friends had been killed, after we were thoroughly isolated, after all hope had disappeared and there was nothing left but desperation and determination to save a few individual lives-acts of resistance rippled throughout the ghettos, Będzin among them.
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CHAPTER 4 - Resistance
Yes, Jews resisted, futile as we knew our efforts were. But no matter, we had to fight to stay human. According to the history books, underground resistance efforts spread in an estimated 100 ghettos in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine and Belorussia. The goals were similar-to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and procure weapons in order to be able to join non-Jewish partisan units. We never considered that we could seriously undermine the enemy. Rather, we sought to save as many lives as was possible and to connect with armed resistance fighters who were hiding in the forests and mountains.
The meetings of our youth group evolved quite naturally and logically into discussions about resistance activities. I assume that most resistance groups developed similarly to ours based on the realizations that we needed to defend what was left of our communities, and at this point, there’d be little to lose. Our youth group leaders made contact with young people in neighboring Sosnowiec. Our ghettos were called Lower and Upper Środula respectively. The two ghettos were divided by green fields, which some of us dared to cross so that we could sustain communication with one another.
Although I was not clever enough to make a plan myself, I was ready and willing to do everything I was asked to do for the cause. Our group’s strategists focused on the changed political geography under Nazi occupation. Western Poland, where we lived, had been incorporated into the Third Reich, while the central part of the country was run as an occupied area called by the Germans Generalgouvernement. We had heard that Poles were being sent to labor camps there to work and not to be killed. We determined to find a way to send some of our girls, who did not look Jewish, to work in those camps in order to save their lives. That idea turned into a daring plan.
First, contacts had to be made inside the Generalgouvernement. Lola Pomerancenblum and I were assigned to cross the border of the Upper Środula ghetto, walk to the train station in nearby Sosnowiec, and board a train for Trzebinia, the city closest to the Generalgouvernement. It would take us another two to three hours to walk through the village of Krzemionka, cross some fields and get in touch with our contact, a man who lived very close to the central border and smuggled food and alcohol to the other side at night. If he agreed to take three girls with him to the other side, we were to give him money and linen, which could not be found in any stores. The girls were Danusia Furstenberg, Mira Tencer, and the third one’s name I can’t remember.
To make this treacherous trip, we needed false Polish identity papers, which were called palcówki (“fingers”) because they contained one’s fingerprints as well as one’s name, address, age and nationality. The instructors in our group used chemicals to erase the ink on these documents and then inserted our new Polish names and addresses. Mine was Janina Baran, and I lived on Wiejska Street in Sosnowiec, but some traces of my real name remained visible on my palcówka, which gave me new reason to be fearful.
On the morning that Lola and I prepared to leave, we crossed out of the Środula ghetto and hid our yellow “Jude” patches under some stones. This patch was supposed to be sewn onto our clothes, not pinned as was ours for easy removal; the penalty for pinning it was death. Suddenly, we saw a young German policeman with a dog approaching us. “What are you doing here, dirty Jews?” he shouted. “To the police station!” he pushed us with his rifle. We thought for sure we were going to be killed.
I tried to tell him in broken German that we were not Jewish, that we were visiting our family who lived in the village on the other side of the ghetto, and that we were guilty only of taking a shortcut through the ghetto to catch a train to Trzebinia. I begged him to have mercy on us. He examined our bags. We each had packed a nightgown, toothpaste and toothbrush, soap, two sheets and two pillowcases. He inspected our pockets. He ordered me to unbutton my jacket to check further. A yellow patch with the Star of David was pinned to my blouse. I had completely forgotten about it. At first I froze but then I started laughing hysterically, telling him that my cousin had advised me to pin it on, so that if someone stopped me in the ghetto I could pretend to be Jewish, because the penalty for a Pole to be inside the ghetto was death. Maybe the policeman believed me, I’m still not sure. He turned to Lola, pushed her with his rifle, and shouted that she was Jewish. I laughed again and said that I was not so stupid as to have a Jewish friend. We went to the same church-I insisted he could ask the priest. “We will see,” he said, “at the police station.” The situation seemed hopeless.
At the station, police officers took our documents and interrogated us, demanding to know where we lived, our names, age, and such. One of the policemen said I looked familiar to him and that he had seen me before (Great!). He looked up the address on my document and said that I lived in his district. I didn’t even know where the street was located in Sosnowiec. Then he stated, “A 15-mark fine for each of you, and now get lost!” We paid, and when we started walking down the dark, narrow staircase I whispered to Lola, “Now they will shoot us in the back.” I could see our bodies rolling down the stairs. We made it out of there and walked to the train station to continue on our mission. Once accomplished, we returned safely to the ghetto. I even brought back two pounds of flour for my mother, which I had bought from the smuggler.
Lola and I decided not to tell anyone about our awful escapade because nobody would have believed us. It seemed impossible even to me that we had eluded the Gestapo, especially knowing that people were regularly executed for petty incidents or for no reason at all. One can ask, if it was so easy to get away with exploits such as ours, why did six million Jews perish? But what happened to me then, and later, was truly inexplicable and probably happened to only one person in a million.
On another mission, I was asked to take a train to the German city of Gleiwitz neat Katowice and walk through the first five residential streets beyond the train station. My assignment was to drop about twenty letters addressed to German families into five public mailboxes. The letters were meant for Germans whose sons had been killed in the war. I hadn’t read the letters and didn’t know their exact contents, but I delivered them and returned safely, having mapped the mailboxes’ locations so that future deliveries would be easier to make. For this assignment I posed as a Deutsche Bund girl and wore a swastika on my arm; my yellow patch was again hidden under a rock near the ghetto.
My next assignment was to help two friends steal weapons from the apartment of a German man who we knew was a hunter. This Mr. Braun was a manager of one of the confiscated factories where Jews were forced to work. I was to ring the doorbell at his house and verify with the maid through the intercom that he and his wife were out of town. I was then to meet Harry Blumenfrucht and Kuba Rosenberg in a nearby building on the corner of Saczewska and Kołątaja Streets, let them know if it was safe to proceed, and wait there for them to bring me a briefcase with the weapons, which I was to take back into the ghetto.
Waiting inside one of the building’s two main doorways (one on each street), I was approached by my two friends, Harry and Kuba, who were dressed like Gestapo with Gestapo pins in their lapels and swastikas on their arms. They handed me the briefcase, I walked through the building, out the other main door, and through the Judenrein city back to my friend Pola’s house in the ghetto. I can still see my friends’ happy faces when they saw me, especially Pola’s; her beautiful eyes were swollen from crying as she hugged me. Her parents and little brother had been captured the night before in one of the round-ups, put on a train and sent to their death. She was 18 years old and all alone in the world. Even her boyfriend was gone, and, three months later, she would be gone, too.
There were six guns and one watch in the briefcase. The boys had taken the watch so it would look like a robbery, and, indeed, the next day, the newspaper reported that two “robbers” had tied the maid to a chair and stuffed her mouth so she would not scream. I don’t remember ever touching the guns. They probably moved them quickly out of Pola’s apartment, and I must have run home to be with my parents. They worried non-stop about me whenever I went off on a mission. None of us knew how to use a gun, but since we had hopes of joining the Polish partisans, we knew we’d need to come in with weapons.
Most Jewish armed resistance took place in 1942 and 1943. Everywhere, it was a desperate response, as was ours. We lacked training and arms; we operated in hostile environs; and since most Jews did not look Aryan, my co-religionists were vulnerable to exposure. Germans rewarded Poles with food supplies for turning in Jews. One live Jew was worth one kilogram of sugar.
General resistance efforts by Poles, which began in the same time period as the Jewish resistance, faced relatively favorable conditions. For example, the local populations were sympathetic and did not turn them in to the Germans. In addition, they were not segregated behind ghetto walls and could more easily make connections and obtain armaments. That’s why, for us, joining their fighting units became our last hope for survival. But to do so, we knew we’d need to acquire weapons.
My group was emboldened by our successful arms procurement mission. Our next assignment, however, did not turn out smoothly. The manager of another army clothing factory, Mr. Michatz, lived a little ways from the city. To get to his house from the ghetto, one had to walk illegally down the longest street in the city through the fields behind our former high school, across the bridge of the Przemsza River and still farther. The fields, once full of happy children picking flowers, making wreaths, bathing in the river with friends and family, looked empty and strange to me now.
This time, Harry, Kuba, and Olek Gutman were the heroes sent to steal the weapons. They knew when Mr. Michatz would be in the factory. My assignment was to wait in the fields in a designated place, receive the loot and take it back to the ghetto. After waiting a long time, I finally went back to the ghetto worried and empty-handed. Kuba and Olek came back separately but Harry had been caught on the way back. He was arrested and, we heard, physically tortured for weeks. The Germans tried to force him to reveal the identities of his partners, but his lips remained sealed through all the beatings. Harry finally died hanging from a tree.
It turned out that Mrs. Michatz, whom we had not expected to be at home, ran out of the house screaming and scared away my friends. She told the police that she had seen three men. Thus, we hurried to find hiding places for Kuba and Olek-aware that Harry might talk under torture. In addition, we sought hideouts for their mothers, knowing that if their sons’ identities were to be revealed, they, as next of kin, would be held responsible and punished in their stead. Neither Kuba nor Olek looked Jewish, and we hoped that with false papers identifying them as Poles, they and their mothers would pass as Christians. And they did. Kuba and his mother rented a summer cottage in the village of Zwardon in the West Beskid Mountains. Olek and his mother also stayed high in the mountains, each in a separate cottage, pretending to be strangers.
Life in the ghetto was turning for the worse. By the time of our weapons thefts, the transports to Auschwitz were increasing. The Gestapo continued to take people from their homes at night, from work, and from the streets. No place was safe. We wanted to resist or at least not go meekly to the crematoria. Even committing suicide was preferable. We met illegally with older friends who said they would try to connect us with the Polish partisans camped clandestinely in the surrounding forests and mountains. But as we already knew, the Polish fighters would speak to us only if we had weapons.
Our next-door neighbors had prepared a bunker that was accessed by crawling through a kitchen cabinet. It could hold eight people but only for a short time. It reminded me of a small cellar, with no light or food, and very little air to breathe. Once, when we heard that the Germans were rounding up people to be sent away our neighbors allowed me and my parents to hide in their bunker. There was no room for the three boys and Pauline, but after I pleaded and begged, they allowed me to take Pauline in. I had to cover her mouth every time she whispered, “Are the Germans going to kill us?” They must have heard her, because they spent a long time in the kitchen trying to determine where the noise was coming from. We were terrified. Fortunately for us, they didn’t yet know about this type of hiding place and therefore didn’t find us. Eventually they uncovered the bunkers and were able to find almost everyone.
We heard people screaming, crying, and running outside our hiding place, and it seemed that the end of everything had come. But it hadn’t, and much worse was still ahead. When things quieted down, we crawled out and went back to our house. There was blood everywhere-on the floor, bed, doors, and walls. We had made a hiding place for the boys in the attic and told them not to move until the raid was over, but there was no sign of them, and we never saw them again. Then we learned that my middle sister, Hania, her husband, Otto, and son, Peter, were also missing from their home. As usual, everyone who had been captured was taken to the orphanage and from there, most were transported to Auschwitz or to labor camps. A few came back home, including my sister Hania and her family who returned the next day; but they did not stay for long.
In July of 1943 I was sent to rent some cottages in the Beskid Mountains. I traveled on the train with two friends from the ghetto, Arieh and Szmulik, both of whom had very Semitic features. We pretended not to know each other. I hid in the train’s bathroom while the police checked identification documents. Afterward, I was surprised and relieved to see the two young men sitting unharmed in their compartment. They had passed inspection. I delivered them to the village of Węgierska Górka according to plan and continued on alone to Jelesnia to contact our group’s leaders, Lola and Samek, who were now married. They gave me further instructions to locate the others, who were hiding in various places. Some were in shepherds’ huts in the mountains, and others were in the villages. This was the last time I saw Lola and Samek. They were later turned over to the Germans by Polish peasants.
I climbed the mountains for hours and found Olek’s place first. He had explained to his landlords that I was his fiancée and that we were planning our wedding. That way I was able to spend a night with a roof over my head and eat a meal. The cottage had two rooms. The landlords and their daughter with her boyfriend slept in two beds in one room, where the stove stood, and Olek and I slept in the other room in one bed, careful not to touch each other. This was important to us because we were still young and totally innocent. Later, after the war, Olek told me how hard it had been for him that night because he thought he was in love with me. For the peasants, sleeping together was customary. Their daughter slept with her boyfriend, and we did not want to behave differently. Since the doors between the rooms remained open for the night, neither of us could sleep on the floor. In our room, pictures of Christ and Mary and a cross hung on the walls. We made sure to kneel and say Christian prayers out loud before retiring.
The next day I went on to see Olek’s mother and two girls from the Środula ghetto outside Sosnowiec. I had not previously met these people, and I can’t remember the content of the messages I delivered to them.
When I returned to Będzin, I stopped on the Aryan side of the ghetto to look for my yellow “Jude” patch under its rock. I felt an unusual stillness in the air; the ghetto was very quiet. From the Aryan side, I heard someone call “Panno Jadziu!” (Miss Jadzia). The former owner of the house where we lived in the ghetto stood nearby watering her cabbage patch. She warned me not to enter the ghetto, saying there had been another series of round-ups and deportations. Begun the previous Saturday, the “actions,” as people called them, lasted several days. Everyone had been sent on freight trains to Auschwitz. “The screaming and lamenting was terrible,” she said. Now, soldiers with machine guns stood positioned on rooftops, waiting to catch whomever had survived, ready to kill the few Jews who might crawl out from their hiding places. “Go away immediately and don’t come back,” she urged. I was so choked up I could only gasp, “My mom and dad, too?”
I remember my father would constantly plead with me to put an end to my resistance activities. I used to disappear for days at a time, and when I’d return, he’d say, “Have mercy! Don’t endanger the whole family!” But I couldn’t stop my work because I sensed that, sooner or later, we would all be sent to the crematoria. I wanted to help rescue as many lives as possible. If only a few people could be saved, at least they could tell the world what had happened to us.
Both of my parents, my two sisters and their families, and Pauline, were sent to Auschwitz on August 3, 1943. It was only after the war’s end that I learned my parents were cremated there. By some miracle, Hania and Helen survived. Their husbands and 12-year-old Peter, the son of Hania’s husband from his first marriage, were killed by the Germans in Auschwitz. Peter’s mother, a Polish woman, had died giving birth to him.
I headed to the old train station, mustering all my strength to wear a calm expression on my “Aryan” face to cover the terrible pain burning inside and breaking my heart. I took a train to Zwardon, the village where Kuba, now called Józek, and his mother were hiding. After I reported the news, Józek pointed out that people who had escaped the round-ups might come to the mountains to hide. If they did, they’d likely be recognized by their frightened and Semitic appearances. They would certainly not look like vacationers. Many Poles hated Jews and would be happy to hand them over to the Germans. Although nobody suspected that Józek and his mother were Jewish (he was even dating a Polish girl who wanted to marry him), the dangers had now escalated for everyone. It became crucial to find safe hiding places for the newest fugitives as well as for ourselves.
Józek conjured up a bold plan to get us out of Poland. He recalled that a young woman in the ghetto had once told him that her brother, a dentist, lived in Slovakia. The dentist, Dr. Friedler, lived on Hlinkova Street in Prešov; a city far from the mountainous Slovak-Polish border and close to the Hungarian border. I was chosen to journey to Slovakia, contact this man and find out if it would be safe for us to hide in Prešov or in other Slovak towns. I did not think that this escapade would succeed. But at this point, with nearly all my family and friends dead, I was totally indifferent about everything and did not care whether I lived or died.
Frank, the son of Józek’s landlord, was a smuggler. One night a week, he would climb the mountain, cross the border to Slovakia and head to a Slovakian village to trade sugar, alcohol, and cigarettes. Frank agreed to take me across the border on a Saturday night. I knew that he was paid for his help though I didn’t know where the money had come from. I, too, was given a little money to cover the cost of my assignment. For the most part, I slept in the fields and mountains and fed myself berries or stolen vegetables. Sometimes I didn’t eat for days.
On a Saturday evening, Frank, a friend of his and I began our ascent to the border, which ran across the mountaintops, when we heard dogs and a patrol approaching us. We lay motionless under the trees. When it became quiet again, we moved on. Before dawn, we reached the Slovakian house where the trading took place. The Slovak peasants spoke Polish, and one of them was supposed to take me to the train station in the morning and help me buy a ticket to Prešov.
That same morning, Frank and his friend left to return to Poland. I rested in the hayloft of a barn where the Slovak, who was supposed to help me, entered and tried to take advantage of me. I fought him off and was able to bargain my way out by handing over a little gold bracelet that my parents had given me. On the way to the train station, which was supposed to be a three-hour walk, he insisted on taking my gold ring with a small diamond chip-the last object in my possession that had belonged to my parents. When I refused, he gave me the Slovakian money that Frank had provided for the train ticket and abandoned me in the middle of nowhere.
It was a sunny Sunday morning. The mountain landscape was green and peaceful. A stream ran on my left, an occasional horse and buggy passed by on the dirt road, as did several people on their way to church. They were dressed in peasant clothes and carried their shoes in their hands. After walking along this road for more than an hour, I took a chance and asked a woman in Polish, using hand gestures, how much further it was to the train station in the village of Oszczadnica. I was able to understand much of what she said, since both Polish and Slovakian arc Slavic languages. Finally, I saw the small station on the other side of the river, but there was not a bridge in sight. After a while, a man in a small boat paddled over and took me across. The station had a ticket window where I asked for a listek to Prešov, using the word I read above the window.
Inside the train car with me, a peasant woman pulled out a loaf of white bread and a big chunk of smoked bacon, and she and her husband proceeded to eat their breakfast. I had not seen bread like this in four years and for the last few weeks had eaten only what I could find in the fields. My stomach was growling from hunger, but when the man offered me some of their food, I refused because I was loath to start a conversation.
In the city of Žilina, I was supposed to have a two-hour wait and change trains. I went outside and walked around, thinking it would be safer than sitting in the station. It was a sunny day. People were well dressed, the men mostly in uniform (not German) and looking handsome. Fresh cut flowers were sold on street corners. Fruit stands displayed beautiful plums and bananas. It looked like the world I had known before the war. I couldn’t resist and bought six plums with the rest of my money. I ate them all at once and, on the train to Prešov spent most of the time being sick in the bathroom.
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EPILOGUE
We stayed in Łódź for three years. Zygmunt (Dr. Podlipski) used his influence to help me get a job as a practical nurse in a large government hospital. Because of a shortage of medical help, I performed the tasks of an RN. Later, I worked as director of a childcare center, where working mothers brought their babies from 7am until 5pm. Eddie attended a pre-kindergarten in the same building.
I missed my family. In the fall of 1950, Eddie and I emigrated to Israel to reunite with my brother, his wife and children, and my sister, Hania. A short time later, I met my future husband, Richard Lipski. We married in April of 1951 and lived in Ramat Gan. Eddie quickly learned to speak Hebrew, attended school, played soccer and made many friends. Three years later, we were blessed with a baby daughter, Miriam. The hot, humid climate and the difficult life in Israel did not agree with me. In March of 1958, we emigrated to the United States, where we reunited with my oldest sister, Helen and her family in Chicago.
Richard worked as a professional engineer and I held several jobs until I found my niche in a North Side hospital where I was employed for 21 years. We retired in 1983 and have been living in Tucson, Arizona, ever since. As the living patriarchs of our family we most enjoy visiting with the younger generation, which has grown to 33, including our nieces and nephews and their wonderful spouses and children.
In the spring of 2003, Eddie passed away after a valiant fight with esophageal cancer which later spread to his bones. He left three wonderful sons-David, an attorney married to Robin, a doctor of osteopathy; Mark, a website designer and talented musician, who is married to Heidi, a graphic artist; and Tobias (Tobie), a recent law school graduate, currently studying for his MBA, and engaged to Katherine, who also is a student of the law. David and Robin have given us two delightful great-grandchildren, Justin and Elliot, who have fond memories of their “Papa Ed”.
Our daughter, Miriam, is an interior designer and is married to Richard Glabman, a business executive. Their daughter Lindsay, our only granddaughter, is currently a student at Columbia University in New York; she is a gifted writer and an aspiring actress. Alex, our youngest grandson, is a very bright high school student and talented athlete. We look forward to sharing in their future successes.
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