On Bonifratrów Street: How a boy from Lwów escaped the Nazis

Mia Swart

On Bonifratrów Street How a boy from Lwów escaped the Nazis Based on the life of Michael Katz

Mia Swart

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET How a boy from Lwów escaped the Nazis Based on the life of Michael Katz

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-1818-2 © ibidem-Verlag, Hannover  Stuttgart 2024 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Printed in the EU

Table of Contents AUTHOR’S NOTE ............................................................................... 9 A note on names .......................................................................... 10 Acknowledgements............................................................................ 12 CHAPTER 1 Paris-Moscow Express ................................................................ 13 Proskurov...................................................................................... 16 Country estate .............................................................................. 20 CHAPTER 2 “This means war” ........................................................................ 25 The bombing continues............................................................... 30 The bombing stops ...................................................................... 37 Journey to Lwów ......................................................................... 40 CHAPTER 3 Lwów ............................................................................................. 45 CHAPTER 4 NAZI OCCUPATION ................................................................. 61 The Germans march in ................................................................ 62 CHAPTER 5 JANOWSKA ................................................................................. 71 10 August 1942 ............................................................................. 74 Janowska Camp ........................................................................... 79 CHAPTER 6 WARSAW ..................................................................................... 87 The bookshop ............................................................................... 94 The Home Army .......................................................................... 97

5

Into the Sewer............................................................................... 98 AK Binder ................................................................................... 101 A German woman ..................................................................... 106 Close to the Gestapo .................................................................. 107 The bacon .................................................................................... 110 Kutschera .................................................................................... 112 CHAPTER 7 The Uprising Begins .................................................................. 115 Surrender .................................................................................... 121 CHAPTER 8 Liberation: Krakow.................................................................... 129 Back to school ............................................................................. 134 Sasza ............................................................................................ 136 Łódź ............................................................................................. 137 Train to the West ........................................................................ 139 Onto Munich and Föhrenwald ................................................ 145 A letter from Philadelphia ........................................................ 150 Crossing the Atlantic ................................................................. 151 EPILOGUE ......................................................................................... 155 ENDNOTE ......................................................................................... 157

6

1931 -1942

-1942

Feliks Anderman

-1942

Isak Gluzman

Adam ‘Adas’

1906-1942

Lisa

-1942

Sara

1990-

1953-

Robin Roy

Arkady

Edward Alexander Katz

1928-

Michael

1896-1942

Rita

Arye

Fanny

1949-

2000

1963-

Dalia

Alexander “Sasha”

Omer

Deganit

Zvi

Gluzman Sister

1915-1997 1910-1988

Berest

Amelie

Marc

1939-2015

Oliver

Gabi

Alexander “Sasza” Winnikow

Stefa

Jurek Raya

Wife

Wife Samuel

Wife

Srulek

1903-1942 Ginsburg -1942

Wife

Gluzman Mother

Yosef

Edward Katz

Wife

Gluzman Father

Family Tree

AUTHOR’S NOTE I met Michael Katz in the spring of 2020. Our initial talk was via zoom. I was working for the media network Al Jazeera at the time and interviewed him for an article on the 75th anniversary of VE Day. As one of the few Holocaust survivors from Lviv alive today, he was also the subject of a chapter in Philippe Sands’ magisterial book The Ratline.

When I first spoke to Michael, I lived in Doha and he lived in New York, which is still his home. In the midst of a pandemic, Doha felt particularly remote from the East Side apartment Michael was speaking from. As we spoke, the distance shrunk. I asked him why he was not writing his memoirs. Our conversation continued for more than three years.

I had approximately 70 interviews with Michael and the book relies on his memories. Although the historical material provides fertile ground for imagination, I tried to resist my imaginative impulses, increasingly realizing that in wartime especially, the truth is stranger than fiction or imagination. I tried to honor the gaps in his memory by leaving some events unexplained, some leads unfollowed. By taking this approach I hope to have respected the vastness of all that was lost in the Holocaust.

Born on 13 February 1928, his experience of wartime Lviv (Lwów at the time) was shaped by his youth, a secular home, his privileged economic class and a blend of luck, resilience, exceptional intelligence and resourcefulness.

When I first asked Michael how he thought he survived, he said he attributes this to his ability to make instant decisions, an ability which later helped him when he had to perform surgery. But he understands the importance of luck. The shoehorn he used to dig himself out of the concentration camp became a lifelong symbol of luck to him. He is still an avid collector of shoehorns.

I visited Lviv in late September 2021, five months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With the help of Enver Bekirov, a Crimean refugee, community leader and currently member of the

9

10

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Ukrainian military, I searched for the places mentioned in this book.

In September 2022, I met Michael and his wife Robin in person in the town of Ormskirk, near Liverpool.

When he was a child, Michael’s parents closely followed the news on the Spanish civil war. Michael remembers them discussing the plight of the victims only to enjoy their dinner straight afterwards. Michael later wondered how many people were reading the news of the plight of the Polish Jews only to continue to eat their dinner. This book is written with the hope that it would make some pause over their dinners.

Post-war life After arriving in the United States, Michael became a renowned pediatrician and expert in infectious diseases.

He graduated with an AB degree from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in tropical medicine from Columbia University and a MD from the State University of New York. After serving two years in the US Navy as a Lieutenant Commander in its Medical Corps he became a resident in pediatrics at Babies Hospital in New York.

Later still he became the Chariman of Columbia University Department of Pediatrics, the Reuben S. Carpentier Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Public Health at Columbia University. After becoming emeritus professor, he joined the March of Dimes Foundation as its Senior Vice President for Research and Global Programs and remained in this position for 25 years.

After reaching the age of 96, he continues to be involved in a number of these activities, but does so informally. He remains Honorary President of Maternal and Perinatal Health at Oxford University.

A note on names The city of Lviv has had many name changes. In 1772, following the First Partition of Poland, the city was annexed by Austria and

AUTHOR’S NOTE

11

became Lemberg, its Germanic name. Under German occupation it was again named Lemberg, which means “city of the lion”. Under Ukrainian rule it became Lviv. I used the name Lwów, its Polish name, throughout.

Almost all Lwówian street- and place names have changed since World War II. As the city’s identity once again changed when it became part of Ukraine, the Polish street names were changed.

Bonifratrów street, for example, is now Kravchika street. The name Bonifratrów means “good brotherliness”, which is similar to the meaning of Philadelphia. The cover image is of Jagiellonska street, a street in the city centre of Lwów.

The photographs of Michael’s family were mostly kept by his family members in the US and were used courtesy of the Katz family. I took the contemporary photographs of Lwów during a weeklong visit to the city in September and October 2021.

Acknowledgements I thank Antje du Bois-Pedain, Ivan Horodyskyy, Louis Gaigher and Tali Nates for their encouragement and advice. I am deeply grateful to Philippe Sands for introducing me to Michael and for triggering my interest in the history of Lviv through his book East West Street: On the origin of genocide and crimes against humanity. I am also grateful for the help of Sofia Dyak of the Centre for Urban Studies in Lviv. Thanks to Jaike Wolfkamp for proofreading, Tracy-Lee Malcolm for the cover design and Michael’s wife, Robin Roy, for copyediting and other intellectual support. Thank you to Christian Schön of Ibidem Press for instantly showing enthusiasm and willingness to publish this important story.

I was inspired by the film The Pianist, set in German occupied Warsaw and directed by Roman Polanski, a survivor of the Kraków ghetto. I drew inspiration from Warsaw Boy by Andrew Borowiec, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein and Tadeuz Bór Komorowski’s memoir The Secret Diaries: The Memoirs of General Bór Kómorowski.

Since this book, in essence, is about loss, I dedicate the book to the memory of my youngest brother Cillié who died on 22 March 2023. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Michael told me that the bombing of Ukrainian cities was a painful reminder of his own wartime experience. The book is therefore also dedicated to all children who have had to listen to bombs falling at night.

Mia Swart October 2023 Johannesburg

12

CHAPTER 1 Paris-Moscow Express On the afternoon of 31 August 1939, the people of Warsaw were going about their day as if they were not about to be swept up in the hurricane of war. Shopkeepers were selling their goods, bankers were cashing checks, families were strolling in the parks.

Michael felt hot and sweaty. He was walking hand-in-hand with his father to the central train station in Warsaw, accompanied by his governess, a young Polish woman who walked with haste and determination. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk like a clock clicking too fast.

Michael would much rather not have been there at all. Seeing his father off at train stations always left him with a sinking feeling.

As they turned into Aleje Jerozolimskie and approached the station building announced with the imposing sign Warszawa Glówna with its big sharp lettering, he felt that same hollowness in his stomach each time he had to say goodbye to his father. It was if the sharp ends of the W hit him straight in the stomach.

13

14

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Edward Katz, 1930s

Within minutes his father would be leaving for Łódź. It was a life Michael knew very little about and he struggled to even imagine his father’s life in Łódź. But they corresponded quite regularly and Michael always knew when he would see his father again. The month they just spent together in Urle in the countryside near Warsaw brought them very close.

His father, Edward Katz, had moved from Lwów to Łódź shortly after his parents divorced in 1933. Michael was but five years old. His father, a businessman working in the textile industry, found a job in Łódź quite easily. Michael heard from his mother’s father that his father did not want the divorce but that his mother insisted. He did not understand why his parents took this decision.

He did not remember his parents ever fighting or any tangible

CHAPTER 1

15

tension between them. None of his friends’ parents or parents’ friends were divorced. His parents’ separation was a very odd thing.

But the divorce belonged to the topics that were simply not talked about in their family and his mother never offered an explanation. Their divorce made him worry that grown-ups take seemingly inexplicable decisions about big things and left one in die dark about their reasons or motivations. This left one vulnerable to being subjected to something that terrifying again.

The station platform was busy. His father turned to him and hugged him closely. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and deep-set, melancholy eyes. Michael buried his face in his father’s wide chest inhaling the faint smell of tobacco.

He watched his father walk away and step into the train, his broad shoulders swaying gracefully. It was a grand train, the ParisMoscow Express. His father often took this train when he travelled between Warsaw and Łódź. His father loved sinking into the soft seats. Halfway into his journey, halfway between his old life and his new life in Łódź, he might have ordered Russian tea.

His father lowered the window of his compartment to speak to Michael. Michael said he will have to be careful because if the train’s brakes fail, he will end up in Paris, not Łódź. His father laughed, then waved. The train started to move.

Michael stared at the departing train. He hoped he could one day visit his father in Łódź. He wished he could return to Lwów soon with his mother and stepfather. He wanted to be anywhere but in Warsaw. They moved to Warsaw because his stepfather, Busia was offered a senior position there. Michael never took to the city.

Busia was a suave, successful businessman who worked for the famous English tea company Anglas. His name was Arkadi Ginsburg but everyone called him Busia. He had been married once before but had no children. In 1938 he became Poland’s representative of the company which meant the family had to move to Warsaw. Michael’s mother married Busia shortly after her divorce. Rabbis in Poland could not marry divorceés, but with her characteristic

16

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

resourcefulness his mother found a rabbi willing to turn a blind eye and who married them.

And then Michael’s governess lightly tapped him on the shoulder, interrupting his thoughts, and reminded him that he was expected for dinner at home. He walked back to their apartment on Żurawia Street thinking of his father.

Proskurov Michael Katz was born in the long shadow of the Russian revolution. His family moved from Russia to Poland in 1922 to escape the scourge of the Bolsheviks. The family was from the small city of Proskurov on the banks of the Bug river in the Western Ukraine region of Russia.

In the 19nth century Proskurov was linked to Zhmerinka-Volochisk railway line which accelerated its economic development.

The new railway line also boosted Jewish wholesale trade which turned many Jews who traded in lumber, grain and textiles to the city. By 1897 the Jewish population was 11, 411, which comprised half of the population.

Michael’s maternal grandfather, Isaac Gluzman, was a businessman and his paternal grandfather, a banker. He never met or knew his father father’s name or any details of his father’s family.

They resided in what was then known as the USSR and contact with them was limited. That part of his family remained as blurry as an underdeveloped photograph.

When his parents, Edward and Rita, met through a mutual acquaintance of their grandfathers, the relationship progressed quickly. Edward studied mathematics and Rita had just finished high school. Nothing stood in the way of a swift union.

Michael did not know how his parents had met but he imagined it could have been at a social event, a dinner or a dance. His mother, a dark-haired, delicate beauty, was often the center of attention. According to his grandfather, his father had fallen in love with his mother the moment he first saw her.

Isaac Gluzman was warm, gregarious and the center of their family life. He was also tall, slim and devastatingly handsome. As

CHAPTER 1

17

a member of the landed gentry of the western Russia whose property was violently confiscated by the Bolsheviks, he was fiercely opposed to the Russian revolution. He had been born in Brest-Litovsk and it was not clear to Michael how and why he ended up in Proskurov. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, in 1922, he moved to Lwów with his wife, his two daughters and his brothers.

He assumed that in Lwów, they would all have a better and more secure life. His grandfather told Michael that his father was very much in love with his mother and followed her to Lwów. His father, who studied mathematics in Proskurov, never completed his studies. The couple married shortly after arriving in Poland in 1922.

Wedding of Edward and Rita Katz, 1922

Once in Lwów, the family assimilated rapidly into Polish society.

They moved into an apartment building in Bonifratrów street that was opposite a military hospital. Bonifratrów street was a short, tree-lined street in a beautiful old neighborhood. The family would soon speak Polish fluently but also continued speaking Russian.

18

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Michael Katz at 15 months, May 1929

But Michael knew his grandfather was not entirely free from the Bolshevik yoke. In their family the Bolsheviks came to represent all that was sinister and undesirable. His mother’s parents, who lived in the apartment just next door, would often join them for dinner.

Politically his grandfather was a socialist, believing in ecumenism and social justice. But it was Bolshevism that got him fired up. His grandfather would make derogatory jokes about the Bolsheviks.

Michael did not know exactly what it meant to be a Bolshevik but the Bolsheviks seemed worse than the villains in the films he sometimes saw in the cinema. But in Lwów they were safe from the Bolsheviks. His family believed this gentle city of art and music would keep them safe.

From time to time his grandfather told him about their old life in Russia but much of what his grandfather told him now seemed hazy. He remembered his grandfather telling him of the pogroms that had swept over Proskurov between the years 1918 and 1922 during which many thousands of Jews had died in the city. These were not the first pogroms in the history of Proskurov. In the 17nth century the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky initiated anti-Semitic massacres in the name of an independent

CHAPTER 1

19

Ukrainian state. These massacres which were mourned by Jews as an unprecedented act of violence became a precursor to the massacres of late imperial Russia. The violence was never publicly condemned. To rub salt in the wounds, statues glorifying Khmelnetsky were erected all over Ukraine.

Proskurov, old city view, undated (Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance)

On 15 February 1919 Ukrainian soldiers belonging to the Ukrainian People’s Republic under the command of Ivan Samosenko, murdered more than a thousand Jewish civilians in Proskurov in a mere three and a half hours.

Mobs consisting of Ukrainian nationalists, soldiers, enraged townspeople and peasants went from door to door plundering and looting Jewish houses and beating and murdering Jews.

The local peasants also had weekly public executions of Jews, Catholics and criminals in the city center. His grandfather remembered days when he had avoided going out on the street in Proskurov for fear of getting caught up in the pogroms. In that February of 1919 he had had a narrow escape. There was a great commotion

20

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

in town that day as Jews were being beaten up in the street. As his grandfather was about to be attacked by a mob, he was pulled into a nearby droshka or horse-drawn carriage by a sympathetic coach driver. The coach driver used his whip to beat the men who attacked him and said “Leave my customer alone.” He then sped off, the horses’ hooves clacking loudly on the cobblestones. This was how his grandfather escaped being one of the thousands of victims of Jew-killing mobs. Approximately 1,500 Jews were killed during the three-day February pogrom.

Country estate After moving to Poland, Isaac and his younger brother bought an estate in the country that produced lumber in an area to the northeast of Lwów. To get there took several hours by slow train.

Michael would later long for the summer holidays they spent on his grandfather’s estate. They were all together then: his mother and father, his mother’s younger sister Lisa, her husband uncle Feliks and their son Adam, called Adas. Long after his grandparents moved to Lwów and sold the estate, Michael kept wishing the clock could be turned back and they could all be in the countryside once more.

They usually left Lwów at night and arrived by narrow-gauge railroad in the morning. There was marshland all around them.

They would be met by his grandfather on horseback and be picked up by a horse drawn carriage, except for Michael who would ride with his grandfather, perched in front of his grandfather on the saddle. This was exciting, especially because his mother and grandmother showed their disapproval. But his younger cousin, Adas, was never allowed this privilege. It was a benign form of sibling rivalry, the closest Michael ever came to this form of rivalry.

CHAPTER 1

21

Michael Katz, 1943

They spent their days taking long walks, picking berries and sprawling in the sun. Michael and Adas invented games which were all strictly supervised by his nanny. His mother and grandmother would sit nearby, talking, busying themselves with embroidery and other crafts. Michael later remembered these days as some of the most idyllic of his life.

22

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Adas Anderman

The most exciting of the games was the one in which his grandfather indulged him: riding a log in the sawmill. Lumber was the estate's primary product, and as a result, gigantic logs on a conveyor belt were sliced with a large circular saw. Michael’s grandfather would place him on the top of a log going slowly towards the saw, hold him, and then snatch him away before the danger point was reached. This was frowned upon by the three women who were observing it all from nearby, but they knew they had little influence on Isaac.

It was at the estate that he first saw his grandfather lose his temper. One of the servants, a young Polish woman, did not clean one of the rooms to his satisfaction. His grandfather screamed at the

CHAPTER 1

23

young woman. She started crying and ran out of the room. Since that day Michael’s love for his grandfather became tinged with a light fear. But he always loved to be in his grandfather’s company.

Isaac Gluzman had the kind of personality that made everyone around him feel important and who made even the mundane seem exciting.

Isaac Gluzman on his country estate, circa 1935

CHAPTER 2 “This means war” On the first day of September 1939 Warsaw was covered by a blanket of thick clouds. The Germans Luftwaffe invaded the Westerplatte peninsula at 4:45 that morning, moved east and bombed Warsaw a few hours later.

The loud explosions woke Michael. To Michael the bombs sounded like wailing sirens following by the loud bursting of balloons. The bombing was accompanied by something just as upsetting. He had developed a fever and a strange red rash had crept up on him. The bombs scared him, the fever was disorienting.

And then he heard the mayor of Warsaw’s voice as a message came over Polish Radio in the room next door: “This means war.

From now on, all other matters and issues become of secondary importance. We set our public and private lives on a special track. The entire effort of the nation must go in one direction. We’re all soldiers now. We need to think about only one thing: fighting until we win.”

Michael wondered whether he, too, at the young age of eleven, would be a soldier and what this would mean. The speech reminded him of a speech by Foreign Minister Jozef Beck in May: Beck said: “Peace is a precious and a desirable thing. Our generation, bloodied in wars, certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but a measurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price.

There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations and countries that is without price. That thing is honour.”

What did it mean that peace could have a high price he wondered. When he first heard that the Germans were almost certain to invade Poland, he wondered what this would mean for a Jewish family such as his. He had heard that Jewish families in other countries were forced to leave their homes and go to labor camps where they would work for the Reich. He heard that all children also had to leave their homes. What did the children do while their parents were working, he wondered? And at what age does one have to 25

26

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

start working? He did not feel like working yet. He was eleven and had six more years of school to complete. Were there schools in the labor camps?

As a young child he did not know he was Jewish. Then one day, when he was about four, their maid Tusia took him aside and explained to him that he was a Jew and, in rather rudimentary terms, what this meant. He was surprised because his family seemed so different from the religious Jews he encountered in school. At home they did not celebrate the Jewish holidays. And they observed no dietary restrictions. His grandmother sometimes even served him a ham sandwiched on matzoh during Passover.

CHAPTER 2

27

Sarah Gluzman, 1930’s

Although his parents never attended synagogue, his grandfather occasionally did. On one occasion his grandfather took him to the synagogue on the Jewish New Year to hear the blowing of the ram’s horn called the shofar. His grandfather explained the significance of the ritual but Michael was more interested in the musical than the religious dimension of the ceremony. The long. low sounds of the shofar did not move him in the way it seemed to move the people around him. He heard that the sound was supposed to reverberate through one’s body but he simply did not feel this.

Rita and Edward Katz

Politics was not discussed too intensely in their home. His parents opted for a slightly left-of-center newspaper called Chwila. Chwila meant “the moment” and was a daily paper published in Lwów which appeared in the afternoon. Michael would sometimes pick it up after school and bring it home. His parents and grandparents closely followed the events of the Spanish civil war, sympathizing with the Republicans. They would often discuss the war in Spain before dinner but then as soon as the food arrived they would change to more lighthearted topics. They never seemed to connect the acts of the Francoists with what those in Germany and with what may be in store for them should Germany invade. Michael

28

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

later wondered how many people were reading of the plight of the Polish Jews only to continue to focus on their dinner.

Chwila (credit Mia Swart: 2021)

Much later on, when the Soviets occupied Lwów the only newspapers were the Russian papers Pravda and Izvyestiya. In occupied Poland people joked that Izvyestiya had no news and Pravda no truth.

Michael knew the grown-ups had been talking about the possibility of Germany invading Poland. His family huddled around the radio every day, keenly listening to the Polish news. But it still seemed to him that to his mother and stepfather war was something that happened to other people, not to them. They read and followed

CHAPTER 2

29

the news closely but had a detached approach to world events. He never saw them panic about how the family would be affected once war breaks out. They never seemed to worry about a possible German invasion to the extent that his friends’ parents did. They believed their adopted country would keep them safe.

To his mother’s family and to an extent to Busia, their escape from the Bolsheviks meant they were protected, as if one could not be expected to escape persecution more than once in one’s lifetime.

When it came to political realities of the day, his family clung to a romanticized idea of the past which catered for only one set of villains, the Bolsheviks.

On that morning their apartment in Żurawia Street in the center of Warsaw was noisy, with people coming and going amid the explosions. He felt the fever burning his cheeks and the bright red rash becoming worse, spreading over his whole body. It felt as if his skin was reacting to each bomb that fell, as if his body was a battlefield and the red bumps represented the German army. And the Germans were winning more and more ground. He wanted to open the window for some fresh air and relief from the itchy stickiness but his mother urged him not to, warning that the smoke from the explosions would make him feel worse.

She came to sit on his bed to comfort him. Stroking his blonde hair, she whispered “Misha, Misha it will all be well.” She was wearing a summer dress, a short string of pearls and a perfume that smelt of marzipan, cinnamon and other more exotic spices. The pearls picked up the rosiness in her very light skin and reflected the light in his room. Only his mother, always glamorous, would choose to wear pearls while bombs are falling, he thought. She tried to feed him his breakfast porridge but he kept nothing down. Overcome with nausea, he ran to the bathroom and threw up. His mother called the doctor who visited and diagnosed him as having scarlet fever. The doctor gave him strict instructions to stay in quarantine.

The young doctor was uncharacteristically somber that day.

He said he would not be able to visit Michael again because he has been drafted into the army and had to report for duty that afternoon.

30

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

A few hours later, their neighbor Aniela ran into their apartment and anxiously hugged his mother. “Rita, Rita! What is happening?” she cried. Aniela, a lively and attractive woman in her mid-20’s and his mother had become very close over the course of their months in Warsaw. Aniela was married to an ambitious young lawyer called Stefan Reichler. He was wiry and energetic and became well-known for representing prominent clients in Warsaw society. But as a Jew he was aware of his ever-shrinking professional prospects. From the previous year his Jewish colleagues could no longer get licenses to practice law in Poland. Stefan, ever the dynamic optimist, became very depressed about the way things were closing in on European Jews and expected more restrictions.

The Reichlers lived on the same floor as theirs, in the apartment just next door. From time to time the couple fought passionately. Aniela would then turn to his mother for advice and his mother would sit with her over tea and calm her.

Everyone was restless that night. Michael fell into an interrupted sleep, waking first in a haze of light delirium, later in a puddle of sweat.

The bombing continues The next morning brought news that Great Britain and France had issued ultimatums to the Germans to cease hostilities in Poland and withdraw, or to face the two countries in a war. The Poles were overjoyed: their friends were standing by them, and now the hostilities would end, they thought.

The radio further reported that people were gathering in front of the British and French embassies to express their thanks. But the crowds were soon asked to disperse because there were German planes in the air. The warning was either not heeded, or came too late. The German Stukas fired their machine guns at the small crowds below. The sidewalks were splattered with blood.

A few days later another doctor came by and confirmed the diagnosis of streptococcal infection or scarlet fever. Michael had to stay in isolation. “No visitors” said the doctor.

CHAPTER 2

31

His skin was still itching and the heat made it worse. His mother said he had to tell anyone who asked him about his illness that he had “the grippe.” To hide the rash on his hands, his mother gave him gloves to wear whenever he was out in public or had to go to the bomb shelter with her. It was strange to be wearing gloves in summer, he thought. And how funny to wear delicate gloves in wartime. But everything was strange now.

The bomb shelter in their building was so dark he could not see a thing. He could hear people whispering but recognized no one. After a few days, running to the shelter became part of his routine. As they emerged from the shelter their neighbors would comment on his gloves and how well-dressed Michael was. If he was to become a soldier, as mayor Starzinsky advised, he wondered, would he be a soldier with gloves?

The rash subsided but the fighting continued. After the first days of the bombing, their lives took on a fixed routine. He stayed in bed as the doctor advised and spent most of his days reading.

After about a week Michael became used to the howling sound of sirens calling them to bomb shelters. There were about two or three air raid sirens during the day and one at night. As soon as he heard the sirens he went into the shelter in the basement of their building with his mother and Busia. As he sat on the floor of the shelter, he was so close to his mother he could hear her breathing. He wondered when their building will be struck. But somehow, as long as his mother was near him, he did not feel afraid.

Since they were in the apartment all day, a large part of the day revolved around listening to the radio. His parents heard that people in other German-occupied parts of Europe were forbidden from listening to the radio. They wondered how long they would still have the luxury of radio. They mostly listened to music and to the news. But the highlight remained the daily addresses from the mayor.

The mayor’s speeches were broadcast not only on the radio but also on loudspeakers positioned all over the city. His quiet, slightly hoarsened voice soothed them and lifted their spirits. His messages always started with “Hallo, hallo. Can you hear us?” As

32

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

long as Starzinsky could be heard, it seemed they were not yet defeated.

Starzinsky spoke for hours every day. He asked Warsawians to observe the air raid sirens. But his messages also brought home the grim realities on the streets of Warsaw. He warned people not to gather in crowds because from time to time the Germans would randomly round up and machine gun groups of Poles. To Michael the news of the random shootings was worse than the bombing.

How did one avoid meeting a similar fate, he wondered? Would the Germans shoot children?

For weeks and weeks, it was rumored that the Soviets would come to Poland’s defense. But these hopes were soon crushed. Despite pre-war promises and agreements by the Soviets and by France and Britain, it became evident that the Polish were on their own.

By the fourth day of the bombing, Aniela’s husband, Stefan, who was called up because he was an officer in the reserve. He came to say goodbye in his khaki officer's uniform. Michael’s mother was relieved that Busia had not yet been summoned. Since he was not a reserve officer, he would only be mobilised as a last resort.

More and more Polish men over the age of 18 were being drafted. During his daily radio messages Starzinsky encouraged Polish men to go East to fight. And then, Busia, who was agonizing for weeks that he might get drafted, decided to join the military.

Michael’s mother Rita pleaded with him to stay but Busia was resolute. For a brief moment, she considered joining him since she heard that some wives and children were joining the men on their journey eastward. But since Michael was still ill it seemed impossible to join Busia on this uncertain journey, so they decided to stay.

CHAPTER 2

33

Arkadi Ginsburg, “Busia”, 1932

From September 6 the Germans escalated their bombing campaign.

Seventeen bombing raids overwhelmed the Polish defenses and enemy tanks started closing in on the capital. Land fighting started on September 8, the date on which the first German armoured unit reached the Wola district and South-Western suburbs of the city. Despite German radio broadcasts claiming to have captured Warsaw, the initial enemy attack was repelled and Warsaw was placed under siege.

Fires kept tearing through the city. It became more and more dangerous to walk the streets. Large numbers of buildings were being destroyed all around them and Michael realized it was probably just a matter of time until their building, too, would be hit. His mother had not yet talked about what would happen if they had to move. But he was confident that she would have a plan. She always had a plan.

The days were long and hot. As bombs and artillery shells keep falling on the city, they prayed for rain, lots of rain, since rain

34

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

would ruin the roads and stop the German tanks from rolling into the city.

On the night of September 8, they awoke to a violent shaking of their building as it was hit by a bomb. The apartment did not collapse but became unstable and the windows were ripped out. It was clear that they could no longer live there. His mother quickly found a solution to their homelessness. They would move in with his step-aunt Moura who lived in an apartment several blocks away. They could only take a few suitcases and had to leave the furniture and everything else behind in the damaged apartment.

Michael always liked Aunt Moura, a lively and strikingly attractive woman around his mother’s age. He was intrigued by the fact that her first husband was a famous Russian actor and singer, Daniel Broide, known by his stage name Daniel Dolski. Dolski moved from Saint Petersburg to Riga and then to Kaunus in Lithuania after the revolution where he continued his successful singing career. From Lithuania they moved to Paris where Dolski died of pneumonia at age 40. Moura later met Busia’s youngest brother, Max, a forester. They lived together in Sopot on the Baltic coast.

From there Moura left for Warsaw with the plan to establish an apartment for them there. She did not know his whereabouts after Warsaw capitulated.

Unlike the rest of their family, Aunt Moura was not Jewish.

His mother told him that Moura was born in Russia but held a Greek passport. It was all very confusing. Her husband Max had moved east with the other men.

Aunt Moura’s apartment was generous: it had seven rooms and a big kitchen. By the middle of October, it became cold and then very cold. At night all three of them slept in the smallest room in the apartment because it was the only room that had heating. The other rooms had to be heated with coal which they had long run out of. During the day it was so cold that they mostly stayed in the small bedroom. There was barely enough space for three single beds. He was still ill so he mostly stayed in bed during the days while his mother and Moura read and talked and prepared modest meals from the bits of food that she still had in the flat. He

CHAPTER 2

35

wondered if they tried to keep in good spirits for his benefit. He knew they were both missing their husbands.

With the new home came a new air raid shelter routine. He was not cured yet and they still tried to camouflage the signs of his scarlet fever. For many weeks there was no relief from the bombing.

Since he was no longer going to school, he had almost nothing to do all day. He wondered when he will be able to go to school again.

It had been a long time since he had seen any of his friends or spoken to anyone of his age.

Then, in the middle of the month, they had an unexpected visitor from Lwów. It was a friend of his aunt and uncle called Lonek.

What excitement! Lonek practised law in Lwów but now served as a reserve officer in the battalion from Lwów which turned out to be one directed to defend Warsaw. He arrived at Aunt Moura’s apartment in his field uniform with a belt of machine gun bullets draped over his shoulder. He brought news of their family in Lwów. By then they were hungry for any news from home. And then Lonek disappeared as suddenly as he arrived. They learned later that he was killed in the trenches.

On September 17, Russian troops began pouring across the border from the East to occupy the eastern third of Poland. The Polish army had already been at a disadvantage, but when the Soviets attacked the Polish situation became hopeless.

In the third week of September the electricity failed. Since food became scarcer, they decided to start rationing their supply even further. They now had to make occasional trips into the city to find food. It was still possible to find bits of food in shops. During these forays into the city, Michael was overwhelmed by the smell of the smoke from the burning buildings and by the heaps of rubble and other sights of destruction. Entire streets had been flattened. He wondered if all the cities invaded by the Germans suffered similar destruction. He remembered Busia telling him that Hitler wanted to integrate Poland into Germany. He did not understand what use a destroyed city would be to the Germans. It was clear that the force of the violence was more than was necessary to conquer the city.

Hitler must really hate the Poles.

36

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

As he ventured out to buy food at the market one day, he passed by a truck belonging to the telephone company that was parked a few streets away from the apartment. The truck was open at the back. He looked inside and saw the limp bodies of three dead men lying side-by-side. It was clear from their clothes that they were employees of the phone company. One of the men had a bent left knee with his black sock rolled all the way down. The image of the pale white skin sticking out under the man’s trousers stayed with Michael. These were the first dead bodies he had ever seen. He wondered why these men had been killed. To him it seemed as if war was all about killing people for no reason.

In the evenings they ate and read by candlelight. His aunt’s bookshelf was well-stocked and one of the few forms of entertainment. They also listened to records of Moura’s former husband Daniel’s singing. The songs were in Lithuanian, songs of love and passion. After some time, he knew all the words to all the songs, but he did not understand any of these words. Dolski was wellknown for translating famous foreign songs into Lithuanian. The songs that stuck in Michael’s mind most was Palangos urol, a song sung to the tune he knew of a Russian song, “Pod samovarom sedith moya Masha,” meaning Masha sits under a samovar. It reminded him of the music his grandparents used to listen to.

During the long evening hours his mother told him stories of her childhood. She told him about his family, emigrants from Russia who left after the 1918 revolution. His mother and father were both from Proskurov, a town on the banks of the Bug River in the Western Ukraine region of Russia. His parents met through an acquaintanceship of their fathers—his mother’s father, a businessman, his father’s father, a banker. His mother’s father, opposed to the revolution, moved to Lwów with his wife, his two daughters and brothers.

And then, on September 23, the music stopped. The celebrated pianist Władysław Szpilman gave what would be his last live performance on Polish Radio. It was also the last music broadcast of the Polish Radio. Szpilman was playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp major and was forced to stop playing when the Germans began bombarding the Polish Radio building.

CHAPTER 2

37

On the morning of September 25, Luftwaffe bombers under the command of Major Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen conducted the largest air raid ever seen as they dropped 560 tons of high explosive bombs on Warsaw.

The bombing continued deep into September. The Polish cavalry proved no match for the enemy panzers. Michael heard the word Blitzkrieg for the first time.

The bombing stops At the end of September, the bombing stopped. Michael knew it means the Polish capitulated. For a few days everything was quiet and then he saw German troops marching into the city, determined-looking young men swinging their legs in unison.

On the 28th of September Starzinsky broadcasted his last message in Polish, French and English: “Hello, hello. Do you hear us?

This is our last broadcast. Today, German troops entered Warsaw. Our thoughts are with the Polish soldiers fighting on the Hel Peninsula and all the other soldiers, wherever they are. Poland has not perished yet! Long live Poland!”

Starzinsky finished with the words Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, kiedy my żyjemy! (“Poland has not perished yet, as long as we are alive.”) and Niech żyje Polska! (“Long live Poland!”). The broadcast ended with the stirring national anthem Mazurek Dąbrowskiego. It was the last broadcast of Polish Radio.

The Germans took millions of prisoners. More than 100, 000 Polish men, captured when the city fell, become prisoners of war.

In a matter of days everything changed. The new military government immediately started making announcements, disseminated in both German and Polish. The government outlined the restrictions placed on every Jewish civilian. Many everyday things suddenly became forbidden to Jews.

Michael didn’t understand how being Jewish, a fact he was not even aware of until a few years earlier and something he did not choose, suddenly became determinative of what and how he eats, his movements and whether he could go to school. He asked his mother about this but she said she also didn’t understand it.

38

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Jews got issued with ration cards and received less food than others. Since she was not Jewish Aunt Moura received nearly twice as much food allowance than his mother did. His aunt’s more generous allowance supplemented by some food from the black market meant that they rarely went to bed hungry.

The city was increasingly littered with posters carrying messages and announcements or Bekanntmachungen proclaiming the latest rules and prohibitions. The announcements were written in stark black letters and were updated almost every day. They were everywhere—posted on trees, lamp posts and balconies. Jewishowned shops had to display signs in their windows stating indicating that they were Jewish businesses. All bank accounts belonging to Jews were frozen. Jews could be treated only by Jewish physicians. There was no end to the amount, irrationality and detail of the restrictions.

Hitler’s face appeared in all the newspapers all the time. Some of the papers made fun of his strange looks and mannerisms. Michael first heard of Hitler when they were living in Lwów and his mother had a friend visiting. His mother was sick that day and his mother’s friend was sitting by her bed. The friend’s hand was in a bandage. She explained that she had hurt her hand and that the doctor had advised that she keeps her hand in the air. She said she felt like she was constantly saying “Heil Hitler”. His mother giggled. When he asked his mother who Hitler was, she said Hitler was a difficult man, a leader of a country that didn’t like the Poles and that Hitler did not like Jews. He did not ask his mother much more about this strange man Hitler.

His mother warned him to be careful when he left the apartment. The bombing has been replaced by a new danger: the Germans were rounding up groups of Poles and subjected them to summary executions in various parts of the city. If he wasn’t careful Michael could get caught up in such a situation.

For weeks they rarely left the flat and saw almost none of their friends. Then, at the end of October, his mother arranged to meet up with a friend at a café. She suggested that he join them. She wore an elegant dress and long coat with a fur collar. She had to tread carefully over the rubble and muddy streets in her high heels. His

CHAPTER 2

39

mother was always interested in fine clothes. Until about two year earlier she regularly visited Paris and Prague to view the fashions there. She had a contact in the fashion industry in Paris who was going to help her. Michael was vaguely aware of a businessman she went to see in Paris who offered to help her open her own shop.

From the way she spoke about this man, she seemed to like him very much. It was her dream to open a boutique in Warsaw. After her divorce she thought it would be a route to financial independence. But this dream, like all their other dreams, was on hold now.

They arrived at the café and took off their coats. It was cosy and warm inside. A thick layer of cigarette smoke hung above the room. The intense smell of cigarettes reminded him of his parents’ glamorous life in Lwów. And it reminded him, very pleasantly, of the ever-present smell of tobacco on his father’s coats. The café was the most normal and most cheerful space he had been in since the bombing started. For a moment he could imagine the bombing never happened and that they were not subjected to food rations and strange new rules.

His mother was excited to socialise again, even in this modest form. The café was filled with music, laughter and animated talking. People had not lost the ability to gossip, it seemed. Not even the presence of three German officers in a corner of the café, drinking and smoking, dampened the cheer. After all, the Germans were everywhere in Warsaw.

They sat down at a small round table and ordered tea. As they began to sip the tea his mother’s friend arrived with a broad smile.

He was a middle-aged Polish man that Michael never met before.

He didn’t understand the connection between his mother and this man. But he instantly disliked the effect the man had on her. She was wearing bright red lipstick and her fine pearls. She touched her hair a lot when she spoke to this man and smiled more than usual.

The man was very attentive and leaned towards her when she spoke. This irritated Michael. He thought the man was very boring and had nothing interesting to say. Michael looked around the room. People were eating delicacies he had not seen in months.

How could anyone still afford cake and pastries, he wondered?

40

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

And then a tall Polish military officer in a khaki uniform entered the café. He was on crutches but able to walk. As he walked into the café, everyone looked up. The three Germans jumped to their feet and saluted him. There were moments of civility still.

Journey to Lwów Life under the Germans became more unbearable each day. On November 23 the governor of the Generalgouvernement, Hans Frank, ordered all Jewish Poles over the age of 12in German-occupied Poland to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on their right coat-sleeves. They had to wear these armbands rather than stars sown onto the front of their coats or shirts as in other occupied countries. The Generalgouvernement was the German zone of occupation established after the invasion of Poland in September.

His mother talked more and more about returning to Lwów.

Even in the most dire circumstances his mother was consistently resourceful and energetic. Through her various contacts she stayed well-informed and was always planning and plotting to improve their circumstances. Through friends in Warsaw his mother managed to contact her parents in Lwów and learnt that Busia was back in Lwów. Over the next weeks she became consumed with finding a way to return to Lwów.

As Michael returned from the market one day, he managed to startle his mother. Hearing someone enter the apartment she hurried out of her bedroom in a silky green bathrobe. Upon seeing him she quickly composed herself and tied the robe more tightly around her waist. He wondered why she was acting so strange and why she was wearing a bathrobe in the middle of the day if she was not ill.

Then, towards the end of October, she started arranging their trip back to Lwów. She promised they would be home before the end of December.

They waited until the day before they planned to leave Warsaw to pack their suitcases. His mother took mostly clothes and some jewelry. They left some possessions with Aunt Moura and the rest of their belongings, almost everything they owned, remained

CHAPTER 2

41

in their bombed apartment on Żurawia street. That evening they said goodbye to some of their friends in Warsaw. The man from the café passed by the flat to see his mother off.

The next morning, they said goodbye to Aunt Moura and boarded a truck headed for Białystok, a city in the Soviet zone.

About 20 other people were already sitting at the back of the truck on benches lined sideways. They took their seats in the last row. It was crowded and quite dark. It was so quiet he could hear people breathe. He sensed the fear of the fellow travellers. As usual, his mother was not showing any fear.

After a while the slow rocking of the truck made him motion sick. He tried to overcome his nausea by breathing deeply as his mother once taught him to do, but the nausea continued to come in waves. He vomited all over the back of a woman.

The truck had to stop. They helped clean the vomit from the woman’s coat and rearranged themselves so that he no longer had a target against which to vomit. The inside of the truck now had the slightly sour smell of vomit. After several hours, they arrived at the edge of a forest.

By this time, it was almost completely dark. They got out of the truck and were told that they needed to walk quickly and had to be very quiet because they would be approaching the border and had to avoid German sentries. They had watchers who knew when the German guards were crossing. They would then be guided across the border into the Soviet zone of occupation.

They heeded these instructions and very quietly ran a short distance through the forest. They had about five or six minutes to cross. Once they crossed the border to the Soviet side, they were met by another truck and resumed their journey to Białystok. After a while the truck stopped and they all got on horse-drawn carriages. They crossed the Bug River and arrived in Białystok a few hours later. When they arrived in Białystok, Busia was standing right at the arrival point and waiting for them.

Michael was relieved and happy to see Busia, but the reunion between his mother and Busia was not as warm as he expected. Too much had happened since Busia’s departure from Warsaw four months before. His mother felt abandoned and resented Busia for

42

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

having left them. He wondered if Busia felt guilty for leaving them alone in Warsaw.

Busia had rented a room for them in Białystok in an apartment owned by an elderly couple where they would rest for a few days and make travelling arrangements before taking a train to Lwów.

In the early evening, as his mother was taking a bath, he had a few moments alone with Busia. Busia asked him if his mother had seen many friends during their last months in Warsaw. He asked whether she had seen any male friends and who they were. Michael wondered if Busia was referring to the man in the café, but he did not tell him about him.

The coldness between Busia and his mother continued to linger for a few days. Gradually the tension eased and they become more relaxed with each other again.

Two days later, he walked with Busia to the railroad station to purchase their train tickets to Lwów.

As they approached the station, they were stopped by two uniformed members of the NKVD, the notorious Soviet security police. The men asked them where they were going, and why. Their explanations did not satisfy the men and they arrested them. Suddenly they found themselves locked in a cell with a few other stragglers, all men or boys. They were given some bread and tea but nothing else. They spent the night sitting on the floor of the cell, propped up against the wall, worrying that they had no way of letting his mother know where they were.

The next morning, they were interrogated by an officer and then, after the officer confiscated Busia’s gold watch, released with no explanation. They concluded that the NKVD had no political motive for the arrest. They simply saw a man dressed in an elegant suit, walking down the street with a boy, and most likely just wanted to rob him.

When they arrived back in the rented room his mother opened the door, looking terribly distressed. She said she did not sleep that whole night.

And then they suddenly realized that the previous night was the 31st of December and that they spent New Year’s Eve in jail.

CHAPTER 2

43

They didn’t ask themselves or each other how they managed to forget it was New Year’s Eve. They knew how the chaos of the last weeks consumed and distracted them. But they were together. In that moment it was all that mattered.

CHAPTER 3 Lwów In 1940 the city of Lwów in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains was a vibrant metropolis with cinema, theatre and opera performances. The opera house graced the center of the city. Lwów was famous for its coffee houses and music, red-and-white trolleycars and horse-drawn carriages which had wheels in summer and sleighs instead of wheels in the winter.

Around 1938, motor-driven taxis were introduced. Its inhabitants included large communities of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and others.

On 23 August 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact divided the territory of Poland. Lwów, along with the western Ukrainian lands, was claimed by the USSR. The arrival of the Soviet Army caused ambiguous feedback among the population—from utter resentment to ardent support.

Many Jews fled to Lwów from the territories that came under German occupation. With this wave of refugees, the Jewish community of Lwów grew by around 40-60, 000.

To Michael, arriving back in Lwów was as soothing as slipping into a hot bath. The city, now Soviet-occupied, felt and looked different from Warsaw in every way. They could breathe freely and were no longer subjected to the daily tyranny of new announcements and arbitrary prohibitions. He felt a lightness again. It seemed as if they were in a different country. Cafés and restaurants were open and they could even go to the opera. Most importantly, the fact that they were Jewish did not have any impact on how they were treated. There were no special rules and restrictions just for them.

Michael was very happy and excited to see his grandparents again. And he was thrilled to be reunited with Tommy, their English bulldog. Tommy was shared among the family. He was meant to have accompanied them to Warsaw when they moved there in 1938 but with Busia’s peripatetic life moving between Lwów and Warsaw in the period he was setting up an office in Warsaw, Tommy never made it to Warsaw.

45

46

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Upon their return their old apartment on Bonifratrów Street was no longer available to rent, so they moved in with his grandparents whose apartment just next door was large enough for all of them. This apartment was one flight above the apartment of Aunt Lisa and Uncle Feliks Anderman. Aunt Lisa resembled his mother, she was pretty, clever and elegant. Uncle Feliks was a lawyer by training but did not practice law. For some years, uncle Feliks’ father stayed with his aunt and uncle. The father had a very long beard—one of the longest Michael had ever seen. He did not have any religious reasons to wear such a beard but his beard was even longer than the Orthodox men Michael sometimes saw in the streets. Michael used to stare at the beard and wonder how he managed the beard at night and whether he slept with it under or over his blankets.

Lisa Anderman

CHAPTER 3

47

Michael felt right at home again in their old, quiet neighborhood with its narrow, tree-lined streets. His grandparents’ apartment looked almost exactly the same as his parents’ old apartment, both were three-bedroom apartments with a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room. From the top floor of the building one had a view of the red roofs and spires of Lwów, of green patches of trees, church domes and bell towers. There were relics of art nouveau architecture here and there, the remains of the Austrian Hungarian empire.

The military hospital across the street from them remained a hospital.

2 Bonifratrów Street, 2021.

Bonifratrów street was the site and repository of his earliest memories. He remembered his grandfather giving him a pair of white skis for his third birthday. He immediately tried them on over his

48

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

shoes. His father was still living with them. He remembered sitting at the dinner table, swinging his legs back and forth, accidentally kicking his grandfather’s leg with the skis which provoked a sharp reprimand from him.

He often thought of life in their old apartment before they left for Warsaw. Since his parents had a large circle of friends and an active social life, they had frequent visitors. This remained the case when his mother married Busia. Bonifratrów Street was harmonious, almost never the site of any visible family strife. In the years after the divorce, his father would even visit them in Bonifratrów Street. He would stay with them in their apartment and socialize with Busia. His mother seemed delighted that her new and former husbands got along so well. His grandfather, however, never liked Busia. Michael heard that he disapproved of his parents’ divorce and could not remember his grandfather ever being really friendly to Busia.

Bonifratrów Street, 2021

CHAPTER 3

49

The wooden parquet floors in the apartment were polished by the servants who, about once a week, moved over the rooms with brushes on their feet. There was a very large and beautiful Persian carpet in the dining room, and smaller ones in the other rooms. The furniture was elegant, but not extravagant: a dining room table, that could expand and could sit 12 people. A piano his mother sometimes played on. Some paintings on the walls. One painting, of an old man and his grandson, painted by a Polish musician, was his favorite.

In the bedroom his mother once shared with his father and later with Busia, there were single beds; one on each side. There was a door to a balcony which looked out on Bonifratrów Street. His grandparents’ apartment, a mirror image layout of his family’s, was directly across the landing on the same floor, with the same view onto Bonifratrów Street.

Third floor, Bonifratrów Street, 2021

Even in the icy Polish winter their apartment was cosy. Early in the mornings the maid would put wood in the stoves in the kitchen and

50

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

living room and the women would warm themselves by standing with their backs to the stove.

Their nanny Tusia, an old Russian woman who had been a nanny to his mother and Aunt Lisa, was like an older member of the family. She had her own room in their apartment, with a gigantic Russian crucifix over her head. Michael often looked at the heavy wooden crucifix and feared it might fall on her while she slept.

Michael did not understand religious fervor. In Poland you were a Roman Catholic, a Jew, or, in rare cases, a Lutheran. One’s ID card had to state that you were one of the three. In elementary school he had 12 classmates of whom 2 were Lutherans, 4 or 5 were Catholics and the rest were Jewish. His elementary school, at 8 Zielona Street, was called Zofia Strzalkowska gymnasium, after a Polish teacher. It was known as an excellent, secular school, mainly for girls.

Even though it was technically a secular school, religious education was mandatory. A priest would instruct the Catholics, a rabbi would take the Jewish students to another room for their lessons, and a Lutheran minister would teach the Lutheran students, at least some of whom were likely Jewish converts.

Michael remembered the day he decided that he would have nothing to do with religion. On that day, the rabbi told them of the battle of Jericho. He told the class that God stopped the sun and thus lengthened the day so that the Jews could fight longer and ultimately be victorious. Michael raised his hand and asked how that was possible, because, after all, it was the earth that was rotating around the sun. The rabbi replied: “Yes this is the case, but in those days, people did not know this.” Michael’s response, that God knew, provoked a sharp “Sit down!” by the rabbi.

From that day onward he decided that religion made no sense.

Instead of embracing religion, he turned to music. In their house music was like a religion. His parents often went out to the opera and to theatre. His mother would dress up in her black evening dresses, her beautiful necklaces and in winter, her fur coat. His parents were always well-informed about all musical events in Lwów. When the famous Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler visited

CHAPTER 3

51

Poland, they made great effort to hear him. His parents considered Kreisler one of the greatest violinists of all time. They also attended a performance of Madame Butterfly with the Japanese-Dutch opera singer Teiko Kiwa.

Lwów opera house, 1941 (credit: Centre for Urban Studies, Lviv)

His grandfather took him to a performance of Eugene Onegin in the grand and very ornate Grand Theatre when he was about six and he instantly fell in love with opera. After that he accompanied his parents to the opera whenever he could. Their social life revolved around the musical life of the city. The director of the Lwów Opera was a good friend of theirs. He lived a block away from his parents and they sometimes visited him at his house. He had two pianos and many pictures of opera stars. Michael was entranced by this world. He later attended performances of Pagliaci, Cavelaria Rusticana and Carmen with his grandfather. He also saw a performance of Shakespeare’s “As you like it”’ in Polish.

52

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Sarah and Isaac Gluzman, Lwów, late 1930’s

Now that most opera and theatre performances had stopped, they mostly listened to music on the radio. They listened to stations from all over Europe, but Moscow station was the strongest on the long waves and played the best music. He loved listening to this station with its baritone announcer opening each programme with “Gavariet Moskva” (“Moscow speaking”).

Before the start of the war, they listened to the humorous programme Lvovska Fala “Lwów’s merry way” on Polish radio every Sunday. It was a highlight of their Sundays. He missed the programme’s satirical sketches and light music. He especially missed the lively voices of the two actors Eugeniusz Bodo, a Jewish actor,

CHAPTER 3

53

and Adolf Dymsza, a Polish actor and comedian, who were the main presenters of the show. The Lwów of Lvovska Fala seemed to have perished.

Michael and Adas had free reign of both his aunt’s and his grandparents’ apartments. They ran around both apartments and the grown-ups let them be. He felt free and safe. On summer afternoons he sometimes took Adas for ice cream at the Italian gelaterie about twenty minutes from Bonifratrów Street. He also took Adas to Łychakóv Park at the end of Lyczakow Street which was about a 15 minutes’ walk from the apartment. The park was close to the outskirts of the city. It looked like the wild forests surrounding Lwów with pine, sycamore and horse chestnut trees. In the spring the chestnut trees carried beautiful white flowers. And in the summer children played with the brown shiny chestnut seeds. In this park they could immerse themselves in a world of make believe, play hide-and-seek and battle games. They also often took Tommy with them to allow him to get exercise and play with other dogs.

Although the Soviet occupation caused a drop in their overall standard of living, this was the case for almost everyone in Lwów and did not affect them severely. Even when some shortages of food were reported, his family still had more than enough to eat.

From time to time, they even had treats. On his birthday, 13 February, his mother, a good cook, baked the special bow-shaped pastries she usually baked for him on his birthday, Russian pastries called varnishkes filled with cheese or sweet marmalade.

54

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Lychakov Park, 2021

In late January 1940 he started the first year of secondary school in a new school close to the city center. Although his new school was now under Soviet jurisdiction, it could continue with the Polish curriculum. The classes were still taught entirely in Polish. He took Latin, history and his favourite subject, mathematics. Having missed going to school during the months in Warsaw, he threw

CHAPTER 3

55

himself into school activities. More than anything else, returning to school made life seem normal again.

After school he spent most afternoons with his five best friends: Wladek, Marcel, Adam, Nina and Mushka. They become almost inseparable and called themselves The Six. They were all Jewish and several of them were refugees from cities to the West.

Like so many other Jewish refugees in Lwów, their parents thought life under the Soviets would be better than life in the various cities occupied by the Germans from which they fled. Wladek’s and Marcels’ families had moved to Lwów from Kraków and Adam’s family had moved to Lwów from Vienna. Michael had known the girls for some years since they went to elementary school together. Most of his school friends had nicknames. Mushka’s name was really Janina, but they called her Mushka, which meant little fly. It suited her. She was tiny and very animated. Nina, a slim, brown-haired girl, was very pretty and equally vivacious. She was a good student and interesting to talk to. He thought of her as his “girlfriend” and he had his own special whistle for her. Some evenings he would go to her house and whistle to her at her window. She would slip out of the house and they would go for walks, but they did not as much as hold hands.

For the first six months after Michael’s return from Warsaw, the group of friends lived lives that were almost-normal for children. They met at each other’s homes to chat, played chess and other board—and word games and went for long walks. They also called each other by a distinctive whistle.

After school, they often spent time at Adam’s house. Adam’s family was originally from Hungary and had lived in Austria for some years before moving to Lwów. His mother, Mrs. Armer, was a vivacious and very beautiful woman. They stared at her long red nails, the way she held her cigarette and gestured when she spoke.

She was one of the most elegant women they had ever seen. She reminded them of pictures of glamorous women in magazines and in films before the war. Mrs. Armer’s hair was bobbed, her eyebrows plucked in a thin arch and she was always dressed in the latest fashions.

56

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Unlike most of his friends’ parents she would take time and sit and talk with them. She was very youthful, laughed loudly and told them jokes. At times it felt to the boys as if she was flirting with them. She would offer them some vodka even though she knew their parents would not approve. She also talked to them about sex, something none of their parents did. In her company the awkwardness that clung to the topic of sex seemed to evaporate. It felt quite natural to ask her the questions they thought they could not ask their parents.

They wondered why Mrs. Armer’s husband was never at home. Had he been drafted or did he leave her? How could a man leave such a beautiful and interesting woman they wondered. But Mr. Armer’s whereabouts and profession remained a mystery that was lost in the wider pool of mysteries brought by the war and the occupation.

Mushka’s mother was more prim and formal. Mushka’s family seemed to have lots of money since they lived in a mansion with a big garden. Her father owned a big lumber trading business in Austria before he moved the business to Poland. Mushka’s older brother Richard, called Rysio, often joined them on their excursions into town and to the parks.

But sex was not the only topic Michael’s parents did not discuss with him. Like many of his contemporaries’ parents the topic of death and other complex social phenomena were never discussed. When Michael was about five years old, his mother suffered from pneumococcal pneumonia. But no one told him that his mother was very ill. And when his favourite great uncle died, no one told him about this. Uncle Yosif, a very jolly and warm man who moved from Poland to Manchuria was one of Michael’s favourite family members. At some point Michael wanted to know why Uncle Yosif was no longer coming around to visit them as he did on his visits to Poland every few months. Instead of telling Michael that Uncle Yosif had died, he was told by his parents that Uncle Yosif “went to America”. Michael later realized that his parents liked to use the expression “went to America” when someone died.

In his early years therefore, America was the place people went to but never came back from.

CHAPTER 3

57

Before the war, Michael’s family would spend summer holidays outside Lwów. His parents would rent a house on a lake in the countryside or in the mountains. In the past, all of them had sometimes travelled with their parents to cities or other holiday destinations in Europe. But it was no longer possible to travel abroad. As they were now restricted to Lwow and had fewer options to entertain themselves, they often went for long walks in the forests or played in the park at the head of Lyczakow Street. Their summer pursuits still included swimming, boating and fishing.

They imagined a future without war, without chaos and uncertainty. On a bright summer’s day they took a train to the countryside outside Lwów. After a long walk, they sat down in a clear spot amid the birch and beech trees to take in the views. The majestical Carpathians stretched far into the distance—layer upon layer of blue and gray. The mountains stretched into Poland, Serbia, Czechoslovakia. As their own worlds were gradually becoming more confined, the mountains connected them with the rest of Europe. They made a pact that day: they would meet each other again in the same spot twenty years after the war.

Some evenings they attended concerts by themselves or with the adults. Occasionally they would go to the theatre to watch a play or a comedy. And, on rare occasions, they would go to the movies. The films were mostly in Russian with Polish subtitles. But there were movies from America still, even cowboy movies. One of the Russian films he saw presented the USSR as the “land of milk and honey.” Judging by what Michael read and from what he heard from his grandfather, he thought it was unlikely that Soviet Union was the land of such abundance and prosperity.

They often listened to BBC radio on shortwave and to the longwave station from Moscow. They followed Mussolini’s attack of Abyssinia, the allied invasion of North Africa and other major battles and developments which they would then discuss over coffee at each other’s houses. But in spite of the Soviet occupation and the changes they observed in their city, war still largely seemed not to disrupt their lives. Michael told his friends about his experience in Warsaw after the Germans invaded. They did not quite believe that the same lot could befall them as the Jews under German

58

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

occupation. The grown-ups were worried about what they heard on the radio but in many ways life continued as it always did.

Their favourite area of the city was the area around Studencka Street which was near the university and the main market square.

They would meet there and would talk about the end of the war and what they wanted to do and become when the war ended.

In the afternoons he spent time with Busia who was no longer working and mostly at home, spending his days reading and smoking and trying to make himself useful around the apartment. Up to that point his stepfather was a very successful businessman. When his mother first met Busia, he was Eastern Poland’s representative for a big English tea and chocolate company, named Anglas (which stood for “Anglo-Asiatic”). The Anglo-Asiatic tea company was part of Busia’s father’s earlier business in Russia, which produced Wissotzkyi tea. From the early 1900s to the time the business was nationalised in 1917, Wissotzky Tea Company, founded by Kaloymus Wissotzky, was the largest tea company in the world. Wissotzky was a devout Jew. During the Russian revolution an antiSemitic ditty made the rounds in Russian society: “Tea of Wissotzky, Sugar of Brodsky and Russia of Trotsky.” Before the war, Busia was promoted to be the representative for Poland, prompting the family’s move to Warsaw in 1938.

After Michael’s mother remarried, she told him that Busia was from a very wealthy family. Busia’s father, who lived in Kiev, was categorized as a merchant of the “First Guild”. Although Jews were not allowed to have property in Kiev, those Jews like Busia’s father who were classified as Busia’s father was, were allowed certain privileges such as owning property and to participate in domestic and international trade. The family had a large house in Kiev with servants and lived very comfortably.

Michael missed his father. He had not seen him since that day at the station in Warsaw. When his father first moved to Łódź he worked as an economic consultant for a textile firm. He worked in the firm’s international trade office and had to travel to England quite often to assist in negotiating trade agreements. But after the German occupation he no longer had this job. Michael still received occasional letters from his father and it seemed that he had moved

CHAPTER 3

59

into the Łódź ghetto, or soon would. But his father could no longer phone him. By April 1940 all Jews in Łódź were forced to live in the ghetto. Michael did not know what exactly it meant to live in a ghetto but he heard that once inside people were not allowed to leave. He heard that Jews in ghettoes were not given enough food and that they had to wear armbands such as the armbands he and his mother had to wear before they escaped from Warsaw.

After his move to Łódź, his father called them on the phone every week or two but after the invasion the calls stopped completely. He knew his father would not just stop calling him unless he was in some kind of trouble. But there was no way of communicating with him. He wondered if his father was facing the same fate as Jews in other countries who were moved to ghettoes or deported to labor camps. He did not know how to get information about the Jews in Łódź. He sometimes dreamt of his father—that they were together again as they were during that last month in the countryside in the idyllic resort called Urle. His mother did not seem to be as worried as he was about his father’s silence.

CHAPTER 4 NAZI OCCUPATION At home in Bonifratrów street, they spoke both Polish and Russian but mostly Polish. They slipped easily from the one language to the other but never mixed the two. When he was younger his parents spoke Russian to each other especially when they did not want him to understand what they were saying, which prompted him to learn Russian with exceptional fluency. His grandparents mostly spoke Russian with each other.

His grandfather often reflected longingly on the Ukraine. Consciously and subconsciously, he was always searching for small things reminding him of home. At times he went to the big outdoor farmers’ market in Lwów, and on one occasion he saw a woman tasting black cherries and instantly spitting them out, clearly not liking them. He suspected that these must be the sour cherries that he had eaten in Proskurov, but could not find after he moved to Poland. He immediately tasted them. He was correct! The sourness stung and delighted his tongue. He bought some and proudly brought them home.

It was comforting to be back in the building he had grown up in. If only his father were there. He wondered whether his father would visit them in Lwów now that Lwów was under Soviet occupation. He often thought of life in their old apartment and remembered people coming in and out of their large apartment. His parents always had a large circle of friends and an active social life.

His grandfather was charming and by far the most charismatic man in their social circle. He had an eye for beautiful women and Michael noticed that his grandfather sometimes behaved very flirtatiously around young women. He remembered hearing his grandfather laughing and talking in the bathroom one evening a few years earlier when aunt Moura came to visit. The bathroom door was slightly open and Michael thought it safe to enter. His grandfather, who was fully dressed, was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, having a casual conversation with Moura who was lying 61

62

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

naked in the bathtub. Seeing them together startled Michael. He immediately left and closed the bathroom door. Remembering this incident filled Michael with a vague sense of shame. He never understood his grandfather’s familiarity with Moura.

The Germans march in For several weeks they heard on the BBC broadcasts that the Germans were amassing troops along the border with the USSR. Increasingly Jews and other refugees from the German-occupied Poland found refuge in Eastern Poland and particularly Lwów. Some of the refugees were Poles who were encouraged to walk to the East to join the Polish forces. Many of the refugees wanted to return to Western Poland but could not. His grandfather decided to help some of the men who drifted to Lwów and to let them stay in their apartment. The men slept on stretchers and mattresses in their living room.

Then the Soviets announced that all people who were from western Poland should register if they wanted to be repatriated back home. When they did, everyone on the list was arrested.

Soviet officers came to their apartment in the middle of the night and arrested all the registered men who were sheltered there.

One night there was a knock on the door. It was NKVD agents who were looking for the registered men staying there. The NKVD men told them: “Don’t be afraid. You have nothing to fear from the Soviet authority.” They convinced the men to leave with them. But the men had been tricked and were sent to Siberia instead. Many of these men survived camps in Siberia and were subsequently moved from Siberia to Palestine where some of them joined the Polish legions of the “Anders” Army and later fought the Germans during the Allied invasion of Italy.

It had also become normal practice in Lwów for families to share their houses with Russian soldiers. Many families used sheets to partition their living spaces in houses or apartments from the spaces of the soldiers. Michael’s family was spared such disruption.

In the midst of these changes in the city, Michael finished his first two grades of the secondary school, or gimnazjum. His mother

CHAPTER 4

63

was very happy with his excellent marks. He looked forward to the summer. They could still play in the parks and had access to public swimming pools such as the huge pool called Żelazna Woda (iron water).

When the days became longer in April, they would go to parks around Lwów and would take the train to the outskirts of Lwów to walk.

And then, at the end of June, Aunt Nina, Busia’s older sister came to visit. To Busia, it was an event of almost indescribable joy since he had not seen his sister for more than 20 years. They were separated when he escaped to Poland during the Russian revolution. She remained in Moscow with her husband who was now an important Soviet official in the arts. They still lived in Moscow and she was given permission to visit Lwów. On the morning of 30 June, her expected day of arrival, Michael and Busia took a taxi to pick her up at the central station. Lwów’s main train station was an impressive building. The main entrance was topped with a large dome made of bolted steel and stained glass. This entrance was flanked by a set of Tuscan columns and large mythological sculptures.

Lwów central station, 2021

64

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

It was not an ordinary day. Nina’s timing could not have been more unfortunate. Her arrival coincided with the German attack on the USSR. There were sounds of explosions in the distance, the sounds of the impending German occupation. When Michael and Busia arrived at the station, they saw airplanes circling overhead, and they heard the unmistakable flat thwacks of flak—all signs of war. The Germans were attacking and were swiftly moving eastward.

They were relieved when Nina’s train arrived on time. When Busia saw Nina on the platform he waved and then ran to her, recognizing her from the pictures she sent. They embraced each other tightly for a long, long time. And then Michael saw Busia crying— tears of twenty years of longing and separation. It was the first and only time he saw Busia cry.

Amid the explosions, Nina had to decide whether to turn around and travel back to Moscow, or to stay with them for a few days. Busia looked nervous and said she should get back on the train and return. Unaware of the extent of the danger posed by the advancing Germans, she persuaded Busia to let her stay, intending to depart in a few days’ time. They then moved swiftly, got into a taxi and proceeded home, where the rest of the family was awaiting them. The day was spent reminiscing, slowly learning about the years they had lost, and deciding when she would return to Moscow. They heard on the Soviet radio broadcasts that the war with Russia had started and that German troops were moving swiftly.

But when the next day dawned, there were no longer any trains to Moscow and aunt Nina was stuck in Lwów.

The Germans took Lwów on June 30th 1941. And on August 1st Lwów became the fifth district of the General Government. One of the German decrees stated that all Jews over the age of ten, including all people of Jewish descent to the third generation, had to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on their right arm above the elbow. This identifying symbol increased the danger of wandering the town's streets, and it acted as a magnet for attacks.

As the Germans marched into Lwów, the crowds were visibly excited. The marching soldiers loudly sang “Heute gehört uns Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt” (Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole word). Michael watched the parade which

CHAPTER 4

65

reminded him of the parade he saw the day the Germans marched into Warsaw. He knew this spelled the end of the relatively free lives they had been able to live in Lwów. Lwów and the whole of Galicia would now be incorporated into the Generalgouvernement.

The much-feared Hans Frank who presided over the Generalgouvernement was now in charge and Lwów became Lemberg, its old German name from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Some Ukrainian men and women carried flowers as they welcomed the Germans. But many carried signs of proud defiance: Ukraiyna dlya ukrayinciv (“Ukraine for the Ukrainians”). Soon afterwards, the Germans prohibited all such patriotic signs. Instead, as was the case in Warsaw, it imposed prohibitions, and various restrictions, all announced by ever-increasing proclamations.

To celebrate and cement the German takeover, Lwów hosted Governor Hans Frank on the first day of August. On this occasion, Yuriy Polianski, mayor of Lwów and head of the City Administration, made a speech in which he promised the Germans their obedience: We, the Ukrainians of Galicia, have long-standing and deep friendly relations with the great German people, and we have shed blood for our appreciation of German culture…

We want to show our feelings through action and loyal and joyful cooperation in the German cause of reconstruction, which should also shape Ukraine's future.

On behalf of my fellow citizens, I swear obedience and loyalty to you, Mr. Governor General, as a representative of the Führer.

Around the time the Nazis invaded Lwów, Michael learned from his mother that his family had the chance to move eastward with the Soviets. His mother had been working as an assistant to a Russian professor of medicine at the University of Lwów for about a year. The professor, who treated her very well, offered to transport some the Jewish members of his academic staff and their families over the border and extended this offer to his mother. If she wanted to join them her family could get one quarter of a large truck for themselves and some of their belongings, he said. But Michael’s

66

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

mother declined this chance to escape to the East. His mother and stepfather’s hate for the Soviets exceeded their fear of the Nazis.

Michael did not understand Busia’s fierce dislike of the Bolsheviks. He thought it had something to do with Busia’s family losing their money and property after the Russian revolution. Busia’s family was very wealthy. Like Michael’s grandfather, Busia often made derogatory remarks about the Soviets. Michael’s grandfather’s disdain for the Bolsheviks was a strong theme in their household. But Michael didn’t understand how the Bolsheviks could be worse than the Germans, he didn’t even fully understand what a Bolshevik was. No one ever explained it to him. The word seemed to describe all that was vile, all that was wrong with the world. His grandfather once said jokingly and in response to some pro-Soviet comment that Michael made at dinner: “Why don’t you have a sandwich with a Bolshevik in it?” His grandfather spat out the word Bolshevik as if he didn’t want it in his mouth.

By the middle of the summer of 1941, the Germans had fully invaded the Soviet Union, and by June 30th, Lwów was under their control. Synagogues were destroyed, property was confiscated, and cemeteries desecrated.

Shortly after Lwów was incorporated into the General Government, German tactics of intimidation reached their full swing with the appointment of Hans Frank as the Governor-General, and the Austrian Nazi Otto von Wächter as his deputy.

The city changed dramatically and parts of the Ukrainian population started immediately rounding up Jews to ingratiate themselves with the Germans. Many of those Jews were never seen again. Only elementary schools were reopened in early September after the summer vacations, but Jewish children were prohibited from returning to school.

As was the case in Warsaw, the Nazi occupation was followed by many new regulations which were announced by trilingual (German, Polish, and Ukrainian) posters which appeared all over the city.

A curfew began at 9 p.m. for all Polish and Ukrainian civilians and at 8 p.m. for the Jews. Jews who were found in the street, even a few minutes after 8 pm, could be shot or sent to a concentration camp. In time, the Jews were deprived of the right to ride a tram

CHAPTER 4

67

and had to walk to their places of work. The long route was exhausting and full of danger. Train riding was also proscribed, as was the right to leave town. Food ration cards were issued allowing for less food for the Jews, who were allotted about 50% of what was allotted to Poles and Ukranians. It was announced that all Jews would have to move to a ghetto, the borders of which would soon be defined and announced, within six weeks.

From this point onwards, Michael saw his close school friends much less frequently. One of these rare times, at Mushka’s family’s home, her brother Rysio was there with some of his friends, and as they were about to go out on the town, Adam noticed that Rysio was not wearing his armband and said to him: “you are without your sign of Jewishness” to which Rysio responded: “My sign of Jewishness is in my trousers.” They laughed at his joke.

It was becoming dangerous for Jews to walk in the streets.

There were Polish “blue policemen” and Ukrainian policemen everywhere. The Ukrainian policemen, in particular instilled fear because they were known to beat up Jews. in the street.

Their group of friends was also splitting up. Michael still occasionally met with Wladek but one of his best friends, Marcel, could no longer stay in his house in Lwów. Michael had no idea where Marcel moved to.

For Jews it was no longer possible to be educated above the level of elementary school. All Jews above the age of 12 were required to work. After the curfew was imposed the evenings seemed long and monotonous. Michael read as much as he could. He wished he had a radio but Jews and Poles were now forbidden from using radio sets and had to turn them in to the authorities.

Michael became acquainted with the Städtische Werkstätte, a municipal workshop or factory where they repaired and sewed uniforms for the Wehrmacht. It was a workplace established for unemployed and semi-skilled workers, all Jews, and to some extent it protected them from the German removals and brutalities.

Since he was also required to have a job, he started asking about jobs and soon heard from the son of family friends, Feliks Horowitz, that he could get a job as an assistant to the mechanics in a German Army garage. He started working at this garage and

68

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

learned the job as he went along. He was paid by a German Sergeant every Thursday afternoon.

After breakfast every morning, he took the tram to the garage but eventually the trams were not available for Jews. Initially only every third tram was open to the Jews. These trams were marked with the words Juden zugelassen, “Jews permitted”. The others were marked Nicht für Juden, “Not for Jews”.

After a few months Jews were no longer allowed to use the trams at all. He had to put on his armband in the mornings and walk to work, which took about forty-five minutes. Street life was outwardly calm but from time to time during these walks hooligans would appear out of nowhere to harass him. They knew they could beat up a Jewish boy and nobody would object.

One evening he walked around the center of town with two of his Jewish classmates. They got stopped by two young Polish men looking for Jews. The hooligans asked in primitive German “Knabe bist du Jude?” (“Boy are you Jewish?”), “Nein” said Michael. They looked at his face and then to each other and said to each other “He is not Jewish”. He was free to go.

After this narrow escape he learnt to be more vigilant. He tried to avoid these incidents by making occasional detours from his normal route.

On an autumn night in 1941, a few weeks after he started working at the garage, the family was awakened by the sound of gunshots just outside their building. He was terrified. The gunshots were followed by a loud banging on their front door. He watched as the German police stormed into their home and rounded up most of the adult men—his stepfather, uncle Feliks, and a friend who happened to be staying with Aunt Lisa and uncle Feliks.

They did not know where the men were being taken but assumed they were taken to prison. A few days later they received word. A prison guard arrived at their apartment with a note from his stepfather, rolled secretly into one of his cigarettes. Standing in their living room, the guard greeted them, while taking out one cigarette to light and gently passed another to his mother. The cigarette had a tiny scroll sticking out. His mother unscrolled the small piece of paper. The message, written by uncle Feliks’ friend, stated

CHAPTER 4

69

that they were at the jail in Lwów where Jews had begun to be detained. The note expressed uncertainty about his immediate future and ordered them to repay the messenger with the pair of men’s riding boots that had belonged to his uncle’s friend who had been staying with them. After reading the note, his mother quietly handed the messenger the boots, and the man left.

For many weeks after this they heard no news of Busia’s whereabouts. And then information reached them that Busia, uncle Feliks and hundreds of other men had been taken to the edge of a ravine in Lyczakow Park where they were shot by machine gun.

Their bodies fell into the sandy ravine. He later heard that Busia and the other men were killed to avenge the killing of a German by Jewish or Polish partisans.

CHAPTER 5 JANOWSKA In 1941, a labor camp known as Janowska was established in the northwest corner of the Lwów, near a cemetery. Over the course of the war more than 100, 000 people were interned there and forced to build arms for the Nazis.

Camps like Janowska were kept secret and did not appear on official maps.

Michael’s job at the Lychakovska Street garage entailed menial work involving servicing and fixing cars, something he knew almost nothing about. After a few weeks, he accidentally pumped a tire too aggressively until it exploded and he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, he was at home with his grandfather sitting on the foot of his bed. He stayed in bed for a few days.

He was able to get a new job in a different German army garage—now on Janowska Street, to which he was introduced by another son of family friends who was working there. A son of friends of theirs, a university student, was working there and said that this would be a better and easier job. And since it was a Wehrmacht garage, he later learned, he received certain immunities that would give him greater protection.

He started working at the new garage, on Janowska street, in September. He no longer had to walk all the way to work. He walked to a street corner not very far from Bonifratrów Street and from there he was picked up by a truck and driven 10 to 15 minutes to the garage so he could start work at 8 a.m. The garage was run by a Wehrmacht sergeant, a friendly man in his thirties.

At the Janowska Street garage he worked in a large workshop where he had to help service cars by lubricating wheel joints with a special implement containing thick grease and oil. He did it by engaging this implement with a receptacle on the joint and then pumping it by hand until he saw the grease coming out of the edges of that joint. A car or truck with its wheels so served would have grease spilling over a joint. He realized that it was possible to sabotage this by smearing a bit of the grease on a joint without lubricating it and making it look as if it were. When the driver examined 71

72

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

the vehicle, the joint gave an appearance of a fully lubricated one, but in fact it was empty.

It was the first time he did something to resist the Germans and it was thrilling.

At the garage they were supervised by a few German enlisted men. The sergeant in charge was short with blonde hair. He was not hostile to the workers. But inside his office there was a bulletin board including a cartoon ripped from the pages of Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer. He remembered his stepfather telling him about Streicher’s terrible anti-Semitic newspaper. The cartoon showed a cat and a mouse. The cat was holding the mouse in his mouth. The cat was dressed in a German uniform and the mouse had the stereotypical features of a Jew. The cartoon said in German: “the cat never lets the mouse go”. Michael noticed that Jews were depicted as mice in many of the cartoons, since the Germans thought of them as rats and mice. He wondered who posted the cartoon on the board.

He worked in the garage during the day and returned home to Bonifratrów Street in the late afternoon.

One day the Germans declared that all Jews in Lwów needed to submit their identity cards that had been issued at their workplaces. When his card was returned to him, he noticed that it had a new stamp on the outside, in contrast to those of the rest of his family whose cards were stamped on their insides. It was not immediately evident to him why his card was different from those of his family members.

He soon learned that everything turned on the position of the stamp. When Germans began their “Aktion” of taking Jews away, they would look at these cards. Those whose cards had the new stamp on the inside were immediately taken on a transport to the extermination camp, those whose cards were stamped on the outside were spared.

His mother, ordinarily so calm, was becoming more and more anxious every time she heard about another rounding up of Jews in Lwów. In June 1942 she started preparing for the worst. Since the German invasion, she had been keeping her most precious jewelry rolled up in a sock in her closet. She decided to take some of the

CHAPTER 5

73

jewelry to her non-Jewish friends and ask them to keep them to help Michael should she be deported. The jewelry—pearls, gold and diamonds—would be exchanged for false identity and travel documents. Michael remembered his mother calling him to her room to tell him what to do if she were taken by the Germans. She sat next to him on the bed, stroked his hair and tried to be matter of fact about this. She gave him the address of their friends and explained that he would have to go to them straight away should anything happen to her. She kept stroking his hair for a long time. He struggled not to cry.

On November 8, 1941 a ghetto was established in Lwów in the North of the city by order of Governor Hans Frank. The ghetto occupied the territory of Klepariv and Zamarstyniv districts, the poorest part of the city.

The ghetto was not yet enclosed, and the Jews were gradually moving into it. On 15th November 1941, an announcement appeared in the official German newspaper, Lemberger Zeitung, that within one month the Jews had to vacate their homes and move to the ghetto.

In the period from 16 November until 14 December 1941 more than 136. 000 Jews were forced to move into the Lwów ghetto by the occupational government. By the end of 1942 the majority of Jewish inhabitants from Lwów and nearby regions lived in the ghetto.

In the course of the move to the ghetto, approximately seven thousand elderly and sick Jews were killed by German police as they were about to cross the bridge on Peltewna Street. The move of Jews to the ghetto was not completed by the Germans in the allotted time, but many thousands of Jews were herded into the Zamarstynow and Kleparów quarters, in which the ghetto was set up. It became the third largest ghetto in Europe. During the winter of 1941-1942, the Germans began sending Jews to labor camps.

In March 1942, as part of Operation Reinhard, the Germans whose goal was the destruction of Jewry in the Generalgouvernement, began deporting Jews from the ghetto to Belżec camp. By August 1942 65, 000 Jews had been deported from the Lwów ghetto and killed there.

In the spring of that year, the Jews that were still in Lwów tried to find jobs in factories that performed an essential function for the German economy, hoping to be exempt from future deportations. On July 8, seven thousand Jews—mostly elderly—who could not produce a certificate of

74

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

employment were seized by the Germans and taken to a place under a bridge near Janowska camp, where they were executed.

A month later, on August 10, the Grosse Aktion started, lasting until August 20. In the course of the Grosse Aktion, fifty thousand persons were sent to Belżec. At the beginning of September 1942, Jews who were still living outside the ghetto were herded inside.

In late July 1942, in what can be described as the pinnacle of his rule, Hans Frank travelled to Lwów to solidify his leadership of Galicia. On August 1st Frank attended events in Lwów to mark the one-year anniversary of the German occupation. The buildings in which Frank spoke, including the Opera House and the University building, were draped in swastikas for the occasion. Speaking in the Great Hall of the university, in the presence of Otto von Wächter, Frank indicated his pleasure at the fact that Lwów’s Jewish population had shrunk significantly since the German occupation one year earlier. Frank made it clear that he was making progress on the Jewish question.

10 August 1942 Monday August 10, 1942 was a clear, warm day.

For some time there had been rumors that something big was about to happen, of an impending new round-up Jews. Michael’s mother decided to take his grandparents with her to work that morning. She thought they would be safer under her watch. His mother suggested to Michael that he stay with them and accompany them to the Werkstätte. But he decided not to join his mother.

He did not want to run the risk of losing the job that had been protecting him so far.

He walked the 45 minutes distance to the Army garage. His mother, Aunt Lisa, Adas and his grandparents walked with him for part of the way and then their ways parted. They walked to the Städtische Werkstätte, he was off to the garage.

After about an hour at the garage, somebody phoned the garage and said: “Something is happening in the city, they are collecting Jews, taking them away by trucks.” When he heard this, he realized he had to go to his family. He needed to see his mother and

CHAPTER 5

75

rushed toward the Städtische Werkstätte. He knew that walking into the city on this day would be dangerous, but he knew he needed to go.

As he crossed the street after leaving the garage, he suddenly heard his mother call his name three times: “Misha, Misha, Misha”.

Her voice was clear and sounded as though it were coming from about 4 meters away. Her voice was so clear that she seemed to be standing very close to him. But he knew this was not possible. He must have hallucinated, the first and only hallucination he ever experienced.

On his walk to the Städtische Werkstätte, he encountered passers-by who, like him, wore the Jewish armband and spoke of the turmoil in the city that morning: of the Germans collecting Jews.

During his walk towards the city center, he was stopped four or five times by SS patrols who demanded to see his documents. He showed them his newly stamped ID card, stamped on the outside of the passport. Somewhat reluctantly they let him go. Once or twice the SS men checking his documents punched and insulted him just for fun.

One pair of SS officers stopped him and asked him to get down on all fours like a dog and eat grass. Realizing he had no choice, he sat on his knees, bent down, sunk his face into the grass and pretended to eat the grass. He chewed the grass but did not swallow. The SS men laughed and walked away. It was a moment he would never forget.

Since the garage was on the periphery of the city, it was a long walk into town.

Upon arriving at the Städtische Werkstätte, he realized that major catastrophe had struck. By then, the collection of Jews at the Städtische Werkstätte was completed. There were few people left in the workshop and on the sidewalks, and those who were, stood in a daze.

He asked an old man who was sitting on the sidewalk what had happened. The man described the sudden arrival of SS units at about 9 a.m. that morning. Upon entering the Werkstätte the men rounded up large numbers of workers while beating them with truncheons and shoved them into trucks.

76

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

He learned that the men who rounded up the Jews were mostly SS men but that there were some Ukrainians in khaki uniforms among them.

When all was finished, about one third of the workers remained. He looked around but did not see his mother or any other member of his family anywhere; they had all been among the ones deported, people told him.

A numbness spread over him. He was as if in a trance, devoid of feelings. Instinctively, he started walking home, and although he was still periodically stopped, he was let go; the city slowly began to return to its usual state, with its usual sounds and rhythms, as if nothing had happened.

He stopped at a building where his step-uncle, Busia’s younger brother Max, worked. His uncle worked for the Luftwaffe.

He was relieved to find him there sitting at his desk.

As he told Max what happened to his mother and other family members, he started to cry again. Max looked at him in shock. He was sitting at a table in the corner of the room. A dark shadow fell on his long, pale face. Max told him he was aware that something was happening in the city but did not know about the catastrophic scale of it.

Then suddenly two enlisted Germans in blue Luftwaffe uniforms came into the room to serve themselves coffee. They saw Michael crying and asked what happened. When they heard what had happened the one young German started crying. The other German man turned to his friend and said something which Michael could not hear. Upon hearing the comment, the man became very angry because he thought his colleague said something derogatory about Michael. But it seems he misunderstood the comment. The men asked Michael if they could pour him some coffee, but he declined and felt a compulsion to go home. He did not know to what he was returning.

When he reached the corner of Bonifratrów and Hoffmana Streets, he ran into the son of acquaintances of his parents who shared the news that his family had also been taken away but that he, like Michael, was spared because of the “magic” stamp on the outside of his ID card. He was quite a few years older than Michael,

CHAPTER 5

77

about 19, or 20 and was studying at a foreign university but he had to return to Lwów when the war started.

Corner of Bonifratrów and Hoffmana street, 2021

They shared their anxiety about what had happened. Michael heard that the round-ups had started early that morning when many of the Jews inside and outside the ghetto were taken to Janowska camp. Some of the Jews were held in a school playground before they were taken to Janowska and then deported to Belżec. Michael was overcome by a numbness. His friend left with the words: “Regards to those who are still around.”

Michael remained standing on this street corner for more than 20 minutes, lost in the stillness of grief. He had never felt so alone.

He sensed that he has now been condemned to being alone for the rest of his life. More than anything he felt extreme anger. He felt he was on a road to more and more hardship and on this new road there would be no one to guide him or protect him. He was angry about how suddenly and arbitrarily this loneliness had become his fate. He was now his own and only protector.

78

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

And then, within minutes, the intense rage turned into a calm but cold realization that he had to make a promise to himself: a promise that he would survive.

He looked around and saw the remnants of the removals on the sidewalk, the last remnants of people’s lives. People’s clothing was scattered all over the sidewalk. A young girl’s pale blue sweater, an old woman’s shawl. Papers scattered about. The signs of terrible turmoil.

Neighbors told him that when the German trucks stopped in their street, they used loudspeakers to tell Jews to leave their houses. There was a terrible noise and shouts of “Out! Out!”. People were told they must leave their homes and that they could only take one suitcase with them. They were told “Take one suitcase with you because you are going to be resettled to work in the East.” As people emerged from their houses they were beaten with truncheons and pushed into the trucks.

Those who remained were too shocked to communicate. Some were crying. Some were sitting on the sidewalk, staring ahead of them, speechless. They were too shaken to have a steady conversation.

Michael arrived at their apartment building and went straight to the janitor’s apartment in the basement to fetch a key to the apartment. Upon entering the janitor’s apartment, he saw Aunt Lisa and Adas sitting with the janitor. At that moment the blood seemed to leave Michael’s brain and he collapsed on the floor.

Aunt Lisa gave him some water to revive him. Upon being resuscitated he sensed his aunt kneeling by his side and speaking to him but he heard almost nothing. He hugged her tightly. How wonderful it was to be able to touch her, to hold onto her small, delicate body. He had assumed that she and Adas were taken along with the rest of the family.

“My mother is gone. My mother is gone” is all he could think of. He went up to their apartment. It was eerily quiet. Upon entering his mother’s bedroom, he saw one of her silk shawls hanging on the back of a chair. He knew if he touched it or smelt it the longing would overwhelm him. He sank to the floor and cried.

CHAPTER 5

79

Janowska Camp The Grosse Aktion continued for about two more weeks. The Germans had a word for it: Straßenrazzia (street raid). The schools in Zamartynowska Street and Theodor Square become the assembly point for the Jews. From there the Germans took the Jews to Kleparów train station. And from there he heard that many were taken to Belżec and other camps.

The next day he returned to his work at the garage. At least he could still get soup for lunch and an evening meal. His bosses advised them not to leave the garage because of the dangerous events in the city but he decided to sleep at home in Aunt Lisa’s apartment on Bonifratrów Street anyway.

At the garage the next day a group of about 20 of the workers were told that they had to sleep over in the garage from now until the Aktion was over. They were told that for their own sake it would be better to stay there. It seemed their bosses were concerned for their safety because the Grosse Aktion was still in full swing and it was still dangerous to go into the city.

That night, the 12th of August, they stayed overnight at the garage for the first time. They were given some straw to sleep on, so he made a bed for himself on the garage floor. In the afternoons they were given their regular soup for lunch and that evening they were given dinner consisting of thin soup and some potatoes. The following evening the sergeant asked if they have enough straw to sleep on.

Although they were not locked up in the garage, they were not allowed to leave the premises.

When the Grosse Aktion finally ended, and they were allowed to go home again, Michael returned to Bonifratrów Street. Weighing on his mind was what he would do with their dog Tommy who was still in the flat. He gradually realized he had to let Tommy go, a thought that filled him with immense sadness. Lisa and Adam had already left for the ghetto and Michael heard a rumor that the garage workers would soon have to start staying over in the garage at night. It was clear that Tommy could not stay in the apartment by himself. There would be no one to take care of him. Michael was

80

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

in such a state of deep distress and everything was in such flux and chaos that it did not occur to him to ask friends to take Tommy.

Michael took Tommy out on Bonifratrów street and left him on the sidewalk. He could not bear it. He could not bear even stroking him and saying goodbye. He turned around and returned to the flat. Tommy did not instantly run away. He stood there, looking forlorn and confused as Michael walked away.

Feeling low and empty, Michael continued to the ghetto to look for aunt Lisa and his cousin. The ghetto was in the west of the city, in the Zamarstynów neighborhood. There was no wall around the ghetto yet and he could walk in and out quite unhindered.

He heard that there was an outbreak of typhoid in the ghetto because of poor sanitation and that the overcrowding was severe.

According to the then established laws, every Jew was entitled to 3 square metres of living space in the ghetto. This meant that up to 25 people would live in a two-bedroom apartment. But his aunt and cousin had their own fairly large one room apartment with a small kitchen, more room than many other families in the ghetto. They had both lost weight and his aunt was far more sombre than he remembered her, with dark shadows under her eyes. But she took trouble to create a home for him on the nights he slept there. She did not speak of the misery or severity of ghetto life but he knew she was trying not to make him worry.

The ghetto was not only crowded but also very noisy and dilapidated. He became familiar with its intricate topography: the narrow and winding streets, the bumpy pavements and the worn and crumbling facades of the houses. From time to time, Jews were ordered out of their apartments and asked to perform humiliating tasks like cleaning the streets on their hands and knees. If they didn’t do as they were instructed and didn’t do it to the Germans’ satisfaction, they were kicked, beaten and in some cases shot. His aunt told him of the random shootings of Jews in the ghetto. At times the corpses were not collected until days after the shootings.

An entry from Hans Frank’s diary dated 18 August 1942 read: “Anyone who passes through Kraków, Lvov, Warsaw, Radom, or Lublin today must in all fairness admit that the efforts of the

CHAPTER 5

81

German administration have been crowned with real success, as one now sees hardly any Jews.”

In mid-September the workers at the Wehrmacht Garage were told that they were going to be moved to the barracks in the nearby Janowska labor camp. The entire group working at the garage, including Michael, were marched to Janowska camp under the guidance of police. It was a 15-minute walk from the garage. The camp was nestled in the forest and not very visible from the outside. The camp had a concrete entrance with large iron gates. As these gates closed behind the entering inmates, he felt a chill down his spine.

Janowska camp, situated at 134 Janowska street was walking distance from downtown Lwów. It had its own streetcar stop, the last stop on the city streetcar line, Kleparów Station. The camp was established in September 1941. Initially a labor camp, it assumed different roles as the months passed ranging from a prison to a labor camp. Towards the end of 1942 Janowska became a “death camp”. The hilly landscape around it made it ideal as a mass killing site. The ravines that cut through the hills served as ready-made trenches, and the soil was sandy and easily moved.

Starting in March 1942, as part of Operation Reinhardt Janowska also became a transit camp. Jews were transported to Janowska camp and from there to Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Jews from Lwów were among the first victims of the transports.

There were about 15 wooden barracks in the part of the camp Michael was taken to. At night the inmates slept on wooden bunk beds. Each of them got a blanket made of rough burlap bags. There was a pail with water in the corner of the room for some rudimentary washing and another pale to use as a toilet. In the darkness of night, they sometimes struggled to keep the pails apart.

At sundown, the guards locked the barracks until 5 in the morning. Some boys were being kicked and beaten by the guards for not standing straight when they lined up to report for work in the mornings. The camp guards, particularly the Ukrainian and Lithuanian ones, were becoming increasingly brutal.

At night Michael tried to talk to some of the other inmates of his age but mostly just remained quiet. He did manage to sleep at night even though there was always much noise around the barracks, mostly the shouting of guards. At about 7am, they were

82

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

escorted to the garage by Ukrainian policemen and were returned to the camp in the evening, also under guard escort.

Janowska camp consisted of many different parts or subcamps. The part of the camp Michael was taken to, was the part in which workers slept at night and from which they were marched into the city to work. In other parts of the camp inmates could not leave.

When they returned from work in the early evenings they would sit on the floor of the barracks and eat their meagre bits of food. Dinner was usually a watery soup in which some potato peelings and beets were floating. The soup was accompanied by a small amount of rough bread.

The lunch that they received at the garage in the afternoon was their only real nourishment. It was always soup—but more substantial than the soup at the camp. He would stare into it as if it might hold all sorts of surprises. On a lucky day he might even find a sliver or two of non-descript scraps of meat floating about.

They were also allowed to wash in the large bathroom at the garage. There was no opportunity to shower in the camp, and he welcomed the chance to shower at the garage in the late afternoon.

At night in the barracks, in the minutes before he fell asleep, he wondered about his Aunt Lisa and Adas. He had no way of contacting them to let them know that he had been moved to the camp.

He wondered if they were still living in the same small flat in the ghetto.

He saw weary-looking civilians walking in the streets. He was grateful for small remaining signs of normal life, however bleak.

But it was during the daily walks that he realized that he would not survive if he did not escape from the camp. The guards were becoming increasingly heavy-handed and the meagre portions of food they were served in the evenings were getting smaller and smaller. He came to realise that if he stayed in the camp he might not survive.

After about two weeks of sleeping in the barracks he knew he had to plan his escape. On the daily walks to and from the garage he had had a chance to survey the area. On the other side of the

CHAPTER 5

83

barbed wire, right behind their barracks, there was a lane of tall trees and on the other side of the trees, a cemetery.

He noticed that the number of guards were reduced in the evenings after the locking of the barracks. His own barrack was very close to the edge of the camp—only about two meters. He realized that if he stayed out of the barracks in the evening and hid, he could slip under the barbed wire and escape. This was possible because the wires were not yet electrified.

About a week later, when the circumstances seemed right, he hid outside his barrack by lying down on the ground close to the barrack wall in a small depression in the ground. He waited until it was completely dark. When he sensed there were no guards around, he quickly crawled the few meters to the fence and started digging, using the small silver shoehorn he always kept in his pocket. He was able to loosen the wire and to slide under it. He quickly re-positioned the wire. It was still dark in that part of the camp, with no electrical lights, and he was sure that nobody saw him.

He was now in the cemetery on the other side of the fence. It was a very large cemetery. He was very tired and knew that, because of the curfew the Germans imposed in Lwów, he could not go into the city. The best thing would be to stay put. He decided to lie down on one of the graves and to sleep there. The stones were cold. He first tried to lie down on a gravestone but the coldness of the stone stung him so he decided to lie down on a fresh mound of soil. The ground was soft and strangely comforting. He slept for a few hours.

He woke up very early and worried that the morning count in Janowska might alert the Germans to his absence. He wondered what consequences his escape would have for the other boys and young men in his barracks. Would they be questioned? But this was too oppressive to think about.

When the curfew lifted at 6 a.m. he took off the black overalls he had been wearing when he escaped and dug another hole with the shoehorn. The overalls would give him away because the camp guards painted white stripes all over the inmates’ overalls. He remembered how they were lined up one morning and sprayed with

84

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

white paint. He buried the overall in the hole among the bushes. He was now back in the regular pants and shirt he wore under the overall. He slipped the shiny silver shoehorn back into his pocket.

He could not remember who gave him the shoehorn, but he always carried it with him, a talisman of sorts.

From the cemetery he walked straight to the friends of his parents with whom his mother had left her jewelry. The streets were still deserted, and he felt fairly safe, even without his armband.

They were surprised but happy to see him. They said they had been worried and were expecting him since August when the terrible rounds of deportations emptied the city of most of its Jews. They let him wash in their bathroom and gave him some clothes. They had his mother’s jewelry which included the pearl necklace and a diamond ring his mother left with them, still rolled up in the sock.

These would cover the costs of the new identity document he would need. He went home to the apartment on Bonifratrów Street which was still accessible to him.

It stood empty but it was too lonely there. He decided to stay with Aunt Lisa in the ghetto instead.

A few days later, he returned to the couple’s apartment to pick up the document. It was the birth certificate of a boy close to his age, probably a child who had died. The name on the certificate was “Franciszek Tadeusz Terlecki”’. Some months later when the German authorities began issuing personal identity cards, he would receive his based on this birth certificate. His identity card, like his birth certificate, was therefore real rather than fake.

CHAPTER 5

85

Michael’s false Identity document (“Kennkarte”)

He made up a story to go with his new identity. From this point onward, he would be a Polish boy whose parents were taken away by the Bolsheviks. He decided to say that his father was an engineer and that he didn’t know what had become of his parents. Although the story did not really make sense, it tapped into the prevailing anti-Bolshevik sentiment and somehow seemed credible.

The couple arranged for a young woman in her twenties to escort him to Warsaw`, pretending to be his relative.

He then made his way to his aunt’s apartment in the ghetto and spent two nights there, still wearing his armband. His parents’ friends came back with information about the woman who would escort him and gave him a train ticket to Warsaw.

He slept at Aunt Lisa’s place in the ghetto again that night and departed for the train station the next morning. Carrying a big valise with all his possessions, he met his mother’s friend in the entrance hall of the station building. She introduced him to the woman who would escort him: a blonde woman who was a little taller than him with a pleasant but reserved manner. His mother’s friend didn’t linger—she gave them their tickets and then took out some zlotys from her bag and paid the woman. She then said goodbye to Michael and wished him good luck.

86

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

He walked to the platform with the Polish woman. They agreed on a story: he was her cousin who lost his parents who were taken by the Bolsheviks and they were going to visit friends in Warsaw. She told him to go to the public bathroom in the station building, to remove his armband and to wait for half an hour and then meet her, now with his new identity. He went into one of the cubicles in the bathroom, took off his armband and flushed it down the toilet. His transformation was complete: he was now Tadeusz Terlecki.

They got on the train and made their way to a third-class compartment. An older man and a couple were sitting in the same compartment, already deep in conversation. The couple told the man that a grocery store in their village was owned by Jews to which the man responded “Tell me where it is and I will take care of it. Jews are not allowed to have stores anymore”. The young woman kicked Michael’s ankle. She meant: ignore it. About an hour later the train stopped at a small village and the couple got off the train. Throughout the journey no one came round to check their papers. They could almost pretend they were going on a holiday together and that life had not changed irrevocably. And if it weren’t for the conversations around them, they could almost pretend there was no war.

Before the war trains from Lwów to Warsaw took about five hours. But the trains to Warsaw now ran via Kraków which meant that they had to stop in Kraków first. They had to wait for about two hours to catch their connecting train. They sat on a bench on the platform and talked until their train arrived. He felt as if he were caught at a halfway station between two worlds: his childhood in Lwów and the world of uncertainty that was to come. The rest of the journey to Warsaw took about four hours.

The train arrived at Warsaw Central Station and the young woman said goodbye to him. Although he had no attachment to her, he felt her goodbye quite acutely. It meant he was, once again, on his own.

CHAPTER 6 WARSAW Upon arriving in Warsaw, he headed straight to the Kopps. The Kopps were long-time family friends of his parents who were part of their social circle in Lwów, but had moved to Warsaw in 1937.

His parents knew them from their musical connections in Lwów.

Eugene Kopp was a well-known voice coach. His wife Lydia was a sturdy woman with a dominating personality. His mother advised Michael to look them up if anything happened to her. She said they would help him.

The streets around the railway station were familiar to him and he found his way to the Kopps quite easily. He knocked on the door. The door opened and revealed Lydia Kopps’ broad, yet slightly startled smile—the first bit of warmth in his new life in Warsaw. Lydia had a large, round, motherly figure and very ample bosom. Her husband, a bit shorter and dwarfed by his wife’s physique, looked more reticent, his smile stiff and cold. It was clear that it took them some moments to recognize Michael and that they were somewhat taken aback by his presence. He knew his body had changed since they last saw him as a 10-year old boy in 1939 when he lived with his mother and stepfather in Warsaw. Looking back on this day he often wondered if they really did not recognize him or if perhaps it was more convenient for them to pretend they did not recognize him.

Lydia Kopp was warm but seemed slightly anxious at his presence. It was well-known what happened to those who hid or helped Jews. Just a few months earlier, the Germans put up posters in the city announcing the death penalty for anyone aiding or hiding Jews. Lydia invited him in and almost immediately told him that he could not stay there. He could visit them during the day, take baths and have meals there but staying overnight would be far too risky.

He left their house and returned to the railway station, where he spent the night sleeping on a bench in the waiting area. There 87

88

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

were a few other people waiting for trains, so this did not attract too much attention.

In the morning he returned to the Kopps. Over tea with Lydia the story attaching to his fake identity evolved: he was a son of their friends, whose parents had been taken away by the Soviet authorities and were sent to somewhere in Siberia. Since he was left on his own, they invited him to come and stay with them for as long as it was necessary because they were friends of his parents. He also invented grandparents and colored in the story with names of places they lived in.

Later that day, Eugene made him an offer: if he fetched Adas from Lwów and brought him with him to Warsaw, he would get Adas a birth certificate. He advised Michael to leave as soon as possible.

He decided to accept Eugene’s offer, believing it to be in good faith. He had been worried about his cousin Adas ever since he hugged him goodbye that morning in the ghetto in Lwów. Adas was the closest he had to a brother. Michael constantly feared the Germans would put him in a truck and transport him to a camp or another place worse than the ghetto.

Having accepted Eugene’s offer, he returned to the station and got on the train again. His ride in the third class compartment to Lwów via Kraków was again quite peaceful and uneventful. When the train stopped in Kraków, he disembarked and had to wait for a few hours before catching the connecting train to Lwów. Since he had never seen Kraków, he thought this would be a good time for some sightseeing. He decided to kill the time by riding trolleycars for a few hours without getting off at any of the stops. In this way he would get to see a large part of the city while avoiding the risk of getting harassed or his documents checked on the streets of Kraków. He wondered how long a person could stay on a trolleycar without being stopped and questioned. He found the city beautiful, like a glorious dream passing by, a dream he could not be not a part of.

Just before he got on the train again, he went to the public toilet and happened to put his hand in his pocket. He felt a piece of cloth there, it seemed to be a handkerchief. For a second this felt

CHAPTER 6

89

strange because but he never carried handkerchiefs. He pulled it out of his pocket and to his shock discovered his armband. He had been carrying the armband with him all this time, a piece of incriminating evidence. He instantly threw the armband into the toilet bowl and flushed it. He felt nothing but relief as he flushed it.

Once he arrived in Lwow, Michael made his way to the ghetto.

Again, he could walk into the ghetto without any difficulty and went straight to his aunt’s small apartment. He was relieved to find her there and she was overcome by surprise and emotion. She wanted to know why he had taken the risk of coming back and he explained that he had the chance to take Adas with him. Aunt Lisa immediately refused. Adas was all she had, she said, and as grim as their circumstances were, she did not believe they faced imminent danger. There was no persuading her.

After another undisturbed return journey back to Warsaw he made his way to the Kopps again. The Kopps greeted him with the same mixture of warmth and awkwardness as before. Eugene Kopp was quite amazed that Michael arrived without his cousin. Michael had the feeling that Eugene would rather not have seen him at all.

He returned the fake birth certificate Eugene obtained for Adas. The Kopps immediately offered to help him find his own place to live.

As he could not stay over at the Kopps he decided to again sleep at the Central Station until he found a rental room. He kept to himself as far as possible. It was getting very cold. The next day a friend of the Kopps gave him an old but warm dark gray coat. It was far too big for him, but he was very happy to snuggle inside it as it protected him against the biting autumn weather.

The Kopps helped him find a small rental room on the third floor of an apartment building on Marszałkowska Street number 79. Once or twice a week he visited them for a warm bath and dinner. Although he never felt completely at home there, he was grateful for the small luxuries they provided. Immersing himself in the hot bathwater was often the only comforting moment of the week.

The room he rented had a bed, a small wardrobe, a desk and a chair. There was also a table with a drawer he could put his papers into. He had a basin he could pour cold water into to wash his face

90

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

or his body, but he had to share a bathroom with other tenants. He had very few possessions with him.

How he wished he had pictures of his family or anything that belonged to his mother. He regretted not bringing her silk shawl or even just a small lock of hair from her hairbrush or anything that smelt like her. If he had something belonging to her he could touch or smell she would have felt closer.

In the evenings he had to be home before the curfew started at 8 every evening. During these long evening hours he spent most of his time reading. Finding books was an obsession. He would read almost anything he could lay his hands on including discarded newspapers and pamphlets or books people threw away. He managed to join a public library on Koszykowa Street in his neighborhood of Mokotów. It kept him in steady supply of books to pass the evening hours. There were classic novels, plays by Shakespeare, all the books he would normally read. As books were becoming increasingly scarce, more people joined the library. He wished he had a radio but radios were now prohibited. He heard you could get arrested for owning a radio.

About once a week, he visited the Kopps. Eugene remained rather cold towards him but Lydia’s presence was warm and reassuring. Their dining room was one of the few places where he could be less guarded and enjoy freer social interaction. They would mostly eat soup and simple Polish dishes dominated by potatoes and a small category of vegetables, very rarely meat.

On one of his first visits to the Kopps they told him the remarkable news that his family’s friend and former neighbor Aniela was in touch with them, that she had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and was living on her own under a false identity.

A few days later, Aniela joined them for dinner. She looked almost the same as she did when he last saw her in their apartment in Warsaw a few years earlier. She was still very beautiful but thinner, her face was gaunt and she had dark shadows under her eyes.

It was wonderful to see her again. It felt like reuniting with a family member. By then she had not seen her husband Stefan since he moved East with many of the other men from Warsaw when the war started. She asked about his Aunt Lisa and Adas and whether

CHAPTER 6

91

he had had any news of mutual friends. She immediately told him that she saw his father in the ghetto. She said she did not know if he was still in the ghetto but gave him a phone number he could call to possibly reach his father.

From that moment he could think of little else but hearing his father’s warm and loving voice again. The only news he had had since the day he said goodbye to him at the central railway station in Warsaw, was the occasional letter still possible between the two halves of Poland occupied by the Soviets and the Germans. About six months after he last saw his father, his mother told him that his father had moved to the Łódź ghetto. This was April 1940. In the following year and a half, he had had no further news of or from his father.

At that point people in the ghetto could still make phone calls to people on the outside and people outside the ghetto could make phone calls to reach people in the ghetto. Finding a phone from which one could make such a private phone call was very difficult.

He found a tobacco shop with a phone not far from where he lived, the kind of shop where he was told one should try to make this kind of call from. When he asked the owner if he could make the call, the owner nodded and pointed to the phone that was mounted on the wall. With a mixture of apprehension and excitement, Michael dialled the number.

As he was waiting for the phone to be answered, he looked out onto the street called Aleja Krucza. It was a bright winter’s day.

People seemed to be going about their day as they would on any other wartime day. There seemed to be an unbridgeable chasm between this Warsaw and what was happening on the other side of the ghetto walls. The phone rang three or four times before a man answered at the other end. Michael asked if he could speak to Edward Katz, his father. The reception was muffled, but he could hear the man quite clearly. In a low, tense tone, the man said it wasn’t possible, that his father was not there. He said nothing more and simply put the phone down. From the man’s tone Michael assumed that his father had been taken to the Umschlagplatz in the ghetto to be deported to one of the work or concentration camps he heard

92

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

about. But he knew he could not give up hope. He paid the tobacconist a few coins and tried to suppress the despair of the moment.

Aniela was now living in a street just outside the ghetto wall.

The ghetto was becoming smaller and smaller as Jews were deported in increasing numbers, and as the ghetto wall was moved to fit around the decreasing population. The area southeast of Chłodna Street was known as the “Small Ghetto” and the area north of it was called the “Large Ghetto”. At the intersection of Chłodna with Żelazna Street, the two zones were connected by a special bridge that had been built as part of the ghetto.

When Michael encountered Aniela at the Kopps again for dinner, he told her about his unsuccessful attempt to reach his father.

She invited him to visit her in the small, sparsely furnished apartment that she was renting. The apartment was on the ground floor on Walicow Street, which had previously been part of the larger ghetto. They had coffee, or the strange bitter brew that passed as coffee in the war and talked of the past. They knew how risky it was to share any personal information in case either of them were caught and questioned. But he always felt happy in Aniela’s presence and could not resist discussing the details of his new life with her. He visited her there several times.

Michael knew he had to acquire a job. Under the German occupier’s rules everyone over age 12 was required to work. He soon heard about a job in an “ersatz” or substitute coffee factory. As the war progressed, coffee became a very rare delicacy. Real coffee was unobtainable and people started accepting the taste of substitutes.

Ersatz coffee was a product made of ground beets, roasted to a dark brown color. The mixture had a bitter taste but in his opinion it tasted nothing like coffee. He had heard of coffee made of dandelion, roots and barley but doubted that that could taste any better.

His job—and that of a small group of his co-workers—was to place the powder made of beets in a metal mould the size of a large button, about an inch deep. The beets had been pre-baked and looked like coffee. He pressed the grounds by lowering a large lever that would insert a flat metal circle into the mould. The harder he pressed, the more solid was the resulting product. By applying substantial pressure, he created a solid pellet, which he removed by

CHAPTER 6

93

hand and placed into a wooden box that held about 20 of the pellets.

Dissolved in hot water, each pellet generated one cup of substitute coffee. This “coffee” could be purchased without rationing cards.

His unit consisted of seven young people, mostly Polish teenagers with the oldest among them—a foreman—in his mid-twenties. He was cordial, and after a while the group became friendly with each other and had interesting conversations during their breaks at work. They were always hungry, but their food supply was limited which meant that lunch was the absolute highlight of the day. Lunch, however, usually presented a dilemma. Michael was always caught between the desire to eat slowly to prolong the pleasure of eating his soup and an effort to finish in time in case he could have a second helping.

At times some of the factory workers made anti-Jewish comments but he ignored them. He dreaded the possibility that someone would make an anti-Semitic joke in his presence and that he would be conspicuous if he did not laugh. Fortunately he was spared such a situation.

One day while he was having a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues, the foreman interrupted their conversation, looked at Michael and said: “You are as smart as a rabbi”. The comment rattled him. He knew it might just have been a casual remark, but he decided it safest to leave the factory. He could take no chances.

He needed an excuse to leave and he decided the best thing to do would be to pretend to have injured his wrist. The next morning, while operating the compressing machine, he screamed in pain explaining that his hand had slipped and he had injured his wrist.

He promptly went to see a doctor who gave him a certificate saying that he could not operate the coffee pressing machine any longer. Upon seeing the certificate, the foreman agreed that Michael could no longer work there.

Without a job, Michael knew he had about one week to find another job to retain his certificate of employment without which he could be taken into forced labor. The Germans were taking civilians from the occupied territories and sending them to work in Germany, a circumstance that would be risky for him. So he set about finding another job. It was now January 1943.

94

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

The bookshop With the new year came a bit of unexpected luck: he found a job in a bookshop on Marszałkowska street—the street on which he lived.

The bookshop was owned by two Polish high school teachers. The older of the two, a bookish, quiet man of about 40, was very friendly and Michael found it easy to talk to him.

The other owner, a few years older, was far less pleasant and a staunch antisemite.

The shop sold second-hand books as well as school textbooks and had a slightly musty smell of old books—a smell Michael loved. One of his tasks was to get on a small ladder to get books off the shelves for customers. He occasionally borrowed some of the books himself, which was fine with the owners. He still made frequent trips to the lending library but was grateful to have greater access to books to keep him company during the long evenings.

The younger owner took an interest in Michael’s education and was concerned that Michael was missing his high school education because the Germans had abolished secondary school in Poland. He began lending him the appropriate textbooks to study at night.

One afternoon after work as Michael was browsing the shelves of the public library on Koszykowa Street he saw a familiar face. To his astonishment, it was Wladek’s father who was equally surprised and happy to see Michael, but they resisted their impulse to embrace each other. Speaking in hardly more than a whisper, he told Michael that Wladek was staying with him in an apartment in Warsaw. He spontaneously took Michael home with him. He and Wladek lived very close to the library and like Michael they both adopted false identities.

Wladek’s father was in his mid-forties, the scion of a wealthy family who made their fortune in the jewelry business. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all in the jewelry business and so Wladek’s father was a jeweller by birth. Their family’s shop was in the center of Kraków near Rynek Glowny, the main market square. Wladek’s mother had been deported and almost certainly killed before the father and son came to Warsaw.

CHAPTER 6

95

Wladek was shocked to see Michael. And Michael was overwhelmed with happiness to see his close friend again. The three of them talked for hours. When the sun started setting, Michael left for his room, careful not to risk missing the curfew.

Over the following months Michael visited Wladek, who now adopted the name Kuszpyt, often. Although he was careful to limit personal information about himself to anyone, he made an exception with Wladek which created a bond of trust. Yet they were always fearful of sharing too much about themselves in case one of them should get arrested and tortured.

Michael now had his own small social circle, consisting of Wladek, the Kopps and Aniella. This helped alleviate his loneliness but he could not stop thinking about finding his family.

His weeks working at the bookshop passed without incident.

The older of his two bosses, a married man, had a girlfriend, a woman in her early thirties. The girlfriend would sometimes come and visit him in the bookshop. She had curly blonde hair and somehow managed to dress well in spite of the wartime constraints. She would come into the shop, sit on one of the chairs near the entrance of the shop and start chatting about mundane things. Her remarks were usually dead boring, but once he listened. She lived across the street from the original ghetto wall and could see into the ghetto from her balcony. Her observations, however banal, were a glimpse into that world. At this point the ghetto was being emptied and every few weeks the ghetto wall was moved as the ghetto was becoming smaller and smaller. Many of the houses in the areas that had been in the ghetto were being restored and non-Jews were moving into them. This is how she ended up in one of the flats overlooking the ghetto.

Chatting away in her irritating and monotonous voice, she said she had to find a new place to stay. She said she had to move because the Jews made a lot of noise on her side of the street.

He had heard that the ghetto was shrinking because Jews were moved to the East to work. He was told they were taken to work camps—that these were places where Jews had to do forced labor.

He remembered the day his mother received notice that she had to work in the Städtische Werkstätte. He knew that she had been taken

96

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

to a camp called Belżec, a camp that many Jews from Lwów had been taken to because of its close proximity to the city. He wondered what this camp was like and hoped that she did not have to work too hard there. Most desperately, he hoped she would be freed. Although he also often heard stories of Jews who did not return from the work camps, he clung to the idea that he would be reunited with his mother and father one day.

He carried the anger about the woman’s remark inside him for some days and told Wladek about her callous remarks as soon as he saw him. He and Wladek would usually spend Sundays together. They would go for walks, often long ones, discuss the books they had been reading and try to be as inconspicuous as possible.

On weekends they would often go to Łazienki park near the Royal Baths. Łazienki Park was one of the few places where they were unlikely to be rounded up by the Nazis. The park was known for its large bronze statue of Chopin which the Nazis had destroyed in 1940 in one of their various attempts to destroy Polish culture. On Sundays it was the place Warsawians would go for a family stroll and might stay for the day, enjoying the park’s many sights. Families would sit on park benches watching squirrels scurrying among the trees. Michael wondered whether hungry Warsawians were catching and eating the squirrels. Or whether they were perhaps eating the ducks and swans on the narrow artificial lake that ran through the park. On a small island on the lake stood a splendid palace, Pałac Na Wyspie. There was something magical about the place. And there was something faintly eery about the cries of the peacocks.

On the city streets the round ups and executions continued unabated. The Polish word for the German practice of rounding up Polish citizens on the streets of Polish cities was łapanka. The victims of the round ups were chosen randomly among passers-by and either sent to concentration camps, used for slave labor or summarily executed. It was estimated that in Warsaw alone between 1942 and 1944 the Nazi roundups claimed at least 400 victims every day. On some days the number rose to several thousands.

CHAPTER 6

97

Michael knew that all that stood between him and łapanka was his identity card. He knew his identity card was ironclad and would protect him from scrutiny. Unlike the cards of many Jews who were living under false identities in Warsaw, his identity card was not a forged card but a real card based on the “authentic” birth certificate of the dead boy whose identity he assumed. But to be best protected against łapanka he needed more than this. The best protection was a card certifying that the holder was employed by a Nazi-German company or government agency. He wondered if he was sufficiently protected by his job in the bookshop.

The Home Army About a month after his arrival in Warsaw he heard of AK which stood for Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, the dominant Polish resistance movement. It was the military arm of the Polish Underground State, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London. At its peak the Home Army had about 10 000 trained fighters. Together with its intelligence network and other clandestine organisations that fell under the umbrella of the Home Army, it had about 350 000 members. Michael was curious about how one could get involved with AK and heard that AK needed runners.

In the spring of 1943, about a month after starting at the bookshop, Michael encountered an older teenager, an acquaintance from Lwów, who worked for the Polish underground who realized that Michael was hiding as well. They met a few times and started talking about AK. He invited Michael to meet some of his friends in the Underground. After learning of Michael’s interest in AK, he recruited Michael to join the Home Army.

Michael offered to work as a runner. He would get orders to pick up a package at a certain location such as a pharmacy and to deliver it to a specific address. He usually received his instructions from people meeting him in the street. His fellow AK comrade addressed him as Michal, his resistance name. When he heard someone call him Michal, he knew he could trust him or her. He also occasionally received instructions via a phone call. He had access to a phone at the Kopp’s house. He could also use phones in the

98

ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

streets, often in a specific tobacco shop. Upon asking the shopkeeper if he could use the phone, the shopkeeper would nod knowingly and say “You must”.

In the next months he criss-crossed the city to deliver packages. The majority of those working for the Underground were between 20 and 35 years of age. He was not the only child working for AK but he was one of the youngest. The content of the packages he was asked to carry from one address to another was usually unknown to him. He also often carried copies of the weekly underground newspaper, Biuletyn Informacyjny. He carried the newspapers in a special pocket that was stitched into the inside of his thick jacket. Published by the Resistance, the Bulletin was informed partly by covert listeners of the BBC and had a circulation of about 43, 000. Reliable news sources were essentially eliminated during the Occupation. The only official news publication was a Polish paper printed and edited by the Germans, the Nowy Kurier Warszawski.

The Bulletin was the only reliable and independent source of news in the city. He felt proud to be carrying it so close to his chest.

The Bulletin was easy to conceal since it had only 8 thin pages.

Yet he was constantly fearful that a German officer or a policeman would stop him in the street and search him. Fear was everpresent on the streets of Warsaw. The German police would randomly round up groups of Polish civilians and order them to stand against a wall, sometimes separating the women from the men. The Poles would then be shot as reprisal killings for the killings of Germans.

Into the Sewer Whilst Michael carried out his resistance activities above the ground, many children were used to crawl through the narrow sewers of Warsaw to deliver messages and packages. In early April 1943 Michael was asked to pick up a package, to take it through a sewer near the Warsaw ghetto and to deliver it to resistance contacts in the ghetto.

CHAPTER 6

99

This sewer was part of an intricate maze of sewers connecting the city. Sewers were a lifeline to those in the ghetto—the source of food, weapons and information. And throughout the city, as in other parts of occupied Poland, Jewish families were hiding in the sewers.

He opened the sewer hatch and descended into the darkness of the sewer with the rather heavy bag he was asked to carry. When he was already waist-deep in the sewage, the contact who gave him the instructions merely said: “Someone will wait for you at the other end.”

Michael made his way through the narrow sewer. He did not know what the heavy bag contained but the contents felt like it was bullets or ammunition of some sort. The journey through the slippery sewer felt very long. He could hardly see anything in the dark cramped space and was overwhelmed by an awful damp smell. It was easy to imagine rats running around in the filth down there, eating human waste. He imagined hearing their high-pitched squeaks. It occurred to Michael that the rats had more to eat than the people of Warsaw. This then was a world for rats, not people.

But in war one did not always know which was which.

After walking for a few minutes, he saw a ladder in the dim light. A man came down the little ladder, took the package from him and without thanking him or identifying himself said “you now go back exactly the way you came.” A few days after dropping off the package, he heard that a major uprising was being planned in the ghetto. The fighters in the ghetto had rifles, pistols and grenades. What they needed was ammunition.

The ghetto uprising started on April 19, the day of Passover and lasted four weeks. On this day 1, 500 Jews opened fire on the Germans. Their weapons consisted of pistols, a few rifles, one machine gun and homemade bombs. They soon managed to destroy a number of tanks and killed German troops. When the Germans returned the next day they used gas, police dogs and flame throwers to root out the Jews from where they were hiding out in bunkers which left the city under a layer of smoke for days. The 1000 Jewish fighters ran out of ammunition and weapons and were no match

100 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET for the Germans. Under the command of SS and police leader Jurgen Stroop the ghetto was then closed by the SS. On 16 May Stroop ordered the burning of the entire ghetto, block by block, building by building. The whole of Warsaw could see and smell the fire. For several days pieces of soot floated and fell over the city, like soft black snowflakes. But life on the outside continued as it did before the destruction of the ghetto. The space where the ghetto stood was now open, the streets empty. By 16 May the Germans had crushed the uprising. On that day Stroop reported to Berlin: “the former Jewish quarter in Warsaw is no more.” The remaining survivors were either buried alive or arrested and deported to camps. A small number escaped through the sewers.

Michael saw the clouds of smoke as he walked down Marszałkowska street, on his way to the bookshop. He heard that crowds had rushed from all corners of the city to watch the spectacle of the burning ghetto, including Jews jumping from the balconies of burning buildings. He heard Polish pedestrians say to each other: “It's wonderful that the Germans are being beaten by the Jews.” Some commented on the heroism of the ghetto fighters and the fact that the ghetto fighters held out for so long. But some said: “it serves them right” and expressed their content at the fact that the problem of the Jews was being solved. People in the bookstore were making comments about the Ghetto Uprising. The comments reflected a strange mixture of respect and abuse.

Whereas the Biuletyn Informacyjny reported on every aspect of the Ghetto Uprising this was not the case for other newspapers. In April and May 1943, the Nowy Kurier Warszawski reported on topics such as compulsory vaccination against typhoid fever and free preChristmas baths for the poor. As smoke from the ghetto billowed over the city on Good Friday the paper wrote “blue sky is towering over Warsaw, and in front of the church they are selling traditional Easter lambs.” On the Tuesday after Easter the paper reported that “the days of Easter passed this year in Warsaw in the atmosphere of awakening spring…The parks, whose trees and lawns turned green for the first time this year, were full of passers-by and residents out on a stroll taking advantage of the magnificent sunny weather…” One could find information on the theatre repertoire,

CHAPTER 6 101 concerts, or the opening of the horse racing season. All but any reference to the Ghetto Uprising.

A few months later, the bookshop closed. Fewer and fewer books were being printed and keeping the shop open was no longer economically viable for the owners. Michael realized he needed not only a job but a better job. A better job would better protect him.

AK Binder Within a week or two Michael found a job as an office boy at a firm called A.K. Binder Commandit Gesellschaft or AK Binder in short. A former Jewish firm based in Berlin, the firm collected and processed scrap metal which was used for the production of weapons and other war materials. Conveniently, the firm’s offices were on Marszałkowska street, only a few minutes’ walk from his rented room.

The new job was perfect in more than one respect: he had free access to the trams and busses and could easily move all over the city which made working with the Binder office the perfect vehicle for his resistance activities. He had a travel card which made it unlikely that he would ever be questioned or searched on public transport.

The Warsaw office was run by Herr Walter Speich and assisted by two other German directors, Herr Brachmann and Herr Mertens. Herr Brachmann, the senior accountant of the firm was a Volksdeutscher. The two men were members of the Nazi party and identifiable as such by their lapel buttons. By now Michael was used to seeing the buttons and the Nazi insignia no longer caused the same shock it did initially.

Mertens was very friendly to everyone in the office and spoke to Michael about a wide range of topics. He was concerned that Michael was not attending school and said that he thought this was unfair.

Michael was by far the youngest in the office. His colleagues, the majority of whom were women, were friendly and kind to him because of his youth, which also removed him from the sphere of office politics. Everyone in the office spoke both Polish and

102 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET German. They generally spoke Polish around the office and used German for official purposes.

When Michael first heard that Herr Brachmann described himself as a Volksdeutscher he was startled. To him the term Volksdeutscher had only negative associations. As the war progressed, people who seemed Polish and had Polish surnames started to opportunistically describe themselves in this way to win the privileges the Germans bestowed on Volksdeutsche—most tangibly, the extra food rations and well-paid employment. Some even changed their surnames to be perceived as German. Those with even a sliver of Polish pride had nothing but disdain for the Volksdeutsche.

In spite of Michael’s dislike for Volksdeutsche he came to like Herr Brachmann who won people over with his genuinely warm personality. In his fifties, he was a big man with a broad smile. Herr Brachmann was not his only colleague of German descent. There was an older woman from Poznan in Western Poland who worked as a secretary. She came from a German family and spoke German fluently but saw herself as Polish and refused to take advantage of the benefits that came with being a Volksdeutscher.

The office had a kitchen where lunch was served every day. It was simple food: sandwiches or soup, but it was an important perk of the job. He had a desk where he kept his papers and usually ate his sandwich.

His job consisted of performing miscellaneous tasks such as going to the bank and bringing money for the weekly and biweekly payroll. It was part of his job to make frequent visits to the labor office of the government, and to deal with administrative matters, such as getting proper IDs for the Binder employees.

One of his tasks was to make frequent trips to the travel agency Orbis to buy tickets, usually train tickets, for members of the firm who would be travelling to Berlin or elsewhere. Orbis was an old Polish travel agency, now under German control. His boss would ask “Why don’t you find us a train on Tuesday to Berlin?”.

Occasionally employees had to travel to Vienna or Zurich. He would go to the agency with precise information about what was needed. The agents at Orbis would make suggestions and he would decide.

CHAPTER 6 103 He fantasized about travelling to other countries but it was, of course, impossible. He had one particular fantasy. In this fantasy he would accompany a friendly German who didn’t seem to be a member of the Nazi Party, a man he knew via his work at Binder, to Switzerland as his helper. As soon as they were in Switzerland, Michael would disappear, maybe into the Alps. His perception of Switzerland was as a place that was beautiful, safe and war-free.

And in Switzerland people always had enough to eat.

As he took the trolleycar one day he was astounded to encounter one of his best friends. Michael was standing on a step near the exit door of the trolleycar when he saw Marcel standing close behind him. Michael said: “How are you friend?” He avoided saying Marcel’s name, realising that Marcel must be hiding “in plain sight” as he was. What a surge of joy he felt in seeing his friend again! He had contact with Wladek but how long had it been it since he had contact with any of his other close friends from Lwów? Except for Wladek, he had not seen any of his “circle of six” since he started to work at the army garage. He was worried about if and how the others in his close circle of friends escaped the German transports and whether they managed to go into hiding. He heard that Muszka managed to go into hiding in Hungary with her parents. Her family felt this was safer than staying in occupied Poland. He feared the rest of his friends were unable to leave. He sometimes wondered where they were and if they were safe.

Michael started to descend from the trolleycar and waited until Marcel was close to him to ask him “Are you getting off here?”.

Marcel said yes. They started walking together. They walked and talked for some minutes and agreed to meet in a nearby park the following Sunday to catch up. They decided not to share their new, adopted names with each other and also to keep their addresses a secret from each other. The prospect of either or both of them getting arrested and revealing this information under torture was terrifyingly real. They also decided that, to avoid suspicion, it would be safest to meet only one Sunday a month. They decided that in future they would have a sign on their clothing that would indicate that the coast was clear and that they could be approached.

104 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET When they met the following Sunday, they talked non-stop.

Marcel, who had been hiding for more than a year, brought morsels of news about some of their friends in Lwów. In some ways it was as if time had never passed. Their interaction reminded him a little of the interaction they had had as part of The Six. But they avoided sharing the details of their false identities and lives in Warsaw. Michael did not know Marcel’s false name, where he worked or where in Warsaw he lived.

Michael still saw Wladek regularly and regularly visited him at their apartment. On one of their walks Wladek looked very pale and drawn. He told Michael that his had father left the apartment for an errand and never returned. He might have been recognised by someone he knew or might have inadvertently done something suspicious and had been arrested. Michael tried to console his friend but they were both deeply grief-stricken.

They both knew there was a possibility Wladek’s father might have been tortured and that he had to reveal information such as where they were living. For several weeks Michael stopped visiting their apartment and then reconnected with Wladek. They decided only to meet in parks.

CHAPTER 6 105

Victor (Wladek) on the left and Marcel (right) on a balcony on Mokotówska Street in Warsaw on a Sunday in the Spring of 1944. Michael took the photo.

The streets of Warsaw became more and more treacherous. Under the leadership of Franz Kutschera who became SS and Police Chief in Warsaw in September 1943, terror measures against civilians were stepped up in Warsaw and public executions became even more frequent. Under Kutschera new posters with Bekanntmachungen would appear almost daily with the names of Polish civilians who had to report for execution. Kutchera was faithfully carrying out the decree issued by governor Hans Frank ordering the summary execution of any Pole guilty of hindering or interfering with German “reconstruction” work, an order that was meant to crush Polish resistance. Under Kutchera’s orders about 40 Poles were shot in Warsaw every day. Posters appeared daily with names of the dead.

But Poles were not only rounded up for the purpose of execution. On one of their Sunday walks his friend Marcel told him that when he had been walking the streets of Warsaw a few days earlier he got caught up in a German “Aktion”. He was apprehended and

106 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET pulled into a hall filled with men of all ages. He wasn’t sure why he was rounded up but it soon became clear: he was asked to show his penis to the German policemen. It was clear that he would be taken away for extermination if it was discovered that he was circumcised. When the Germans saw that he was circumcised, Marcel claimed that his penis was abnormal from birth and that he was uncircumcised. He then was led to a military doctor, to whom Marcel was again ordered to show his genitals. The doctor, aware of the extreme importance of his decision, carefully examined Marcel and pronounced that what he saw was a normal variation of anatomy.

He then released Marcel. Michael giggled at his friend’s cleverness.

These instances of him and his friends occasionally outwitting the Germans were bittersweet.

But it wasn’t always possible to stay completely undiscovered.

Marcel was from a wealthy family and did not lack money, even during the war. He was hiding out in Warsaw with his older brother. During their time in Warsaw his brother was approached in the street by someone who knew him from Kraków who said that unless he paid him some money he would reveal his presence. But his brother stood his ground. He said “Yes I know who you are and I will pay you but I will not let you know where I live and you can do whatever you want.” He said: “We will meet again here.” Marcel’s brother arranged to meet the man, paid him the cash and never saw him again.

Every so often Michael would stay in the office a bit later than the others to listen to the BBC in his boss’ large office. He would put the radio on a very low volume, press his ear to it and would later share with Wladek what he had learned. Together they took great pleasure in every Allied advance, every Allied victory. They had to keep the news to themselves because they were well-aware of the punishment for listening to “foreign” radio.

A German woman On Michael’s frequent trips to the Labor Office, he often dealt with a blonde German woman, Frau Schmidt, who worked as a clerk in the office. She was cheerful and pretty, with piercing blue eyes. In

CHAPTER 6 107 her early 20s, she would often strike up conversations with him.

Initially their conversations were mostly on superficial topics. But she gradually talked more about the news of the day and the brutality she observed in the city. She said she didn’t agree with the repressive and brutal actions of the Germans. Though she never spoke of the position of the Jews, she often expressed her sympathy for the hardships ordinary Poles had to endure. Her voice became soft as she stared at him with a certain seductiveness. In these moments she would stand very close to him. Her manner made him feel slightly uncomfortable but the attention she gave him wasn’t entirely unwelcome. He was but 16 and had no experience with women. The idea of a woman in her twenties finding him attractive and flirting with him was somewhat flattering but mostly intimidating. Consumed as he was with hiding his true identity and successfully inhabiting his new one, responding to the attention of women was just too risky.

On one of his visits to her office, they were again in casual conversation when she opened a drawer of her desk, and while pretending to look for something, took out a book which looked like a novel, entitled “Ehe zu dritt”, meaning “marriage for three”. She casually mentioned that so many men in Germany were in the army that women were feeling their absence and the general shortage of men. She implied that these women were resorting to unconventional means to compensate for the emotional loss. He wasn’t sure why she was telling him about this.

Close to the Gestapo One of his unofficial tasks for the Binder office was to buy items on the black market for his Nazi director at Binder, Herr Speich. He would go to various spots in the city where farmers’ produce was sold to buy whatever Speich asked for and for which he paid. His boss would for example ask him for items not available through the normal rations for the Germans. The reason was that he was preparing a bunker for himself and his family in Germany in the event that they had to hide when the war came to an end.

108 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET The black market started thriving in the early days of the war because it was tolerated by the Germans. Around Warsaw a refined network of black markets started to evolve and provided the famished Warsawian population with extra food.

Even Germany started relying on the black markets of the occupied territories. The occupied countries simply did not supply enough food to feed the German population as the black markets in these territories were swallowing up more and more food for the starving population to buy. By 1942 German soldiers were told to collect as much food as possible—much of this food was collected on the local black markets.

One day Michael was searching for cooking oil. It was quite easy to find in one of the market squares where the farmers sold their goods. The oil came in a plain aluminium can marked “Maschinen Farbe Blau Grau” (machine color blue, gray).

He started carrying the heavy can of oil to the car driven by AK Binder’s Polish driver. The driver, Kromolnicki, had quite a casual manner and did not inquire into his activities or why he had the oil with him although it must have seemed strange for a boy to be carrying that much cooking oil. A few kilometres into their journey, a convoy of SS troops appeared as it was escorting Gestapo Chief Kutschera. Somehow Kromolnicki managed to get their car between the SS escort and Kutschera’s limousine. Michael felt a chill down his spine when he realized how close he was to the notoriously brutal Kutchera, known as the “Executioner of Warsaw”, under whose orders an average of 40 Poles were being publicly executed every day. Since the windows of the limousine were dark, he could not see Kutschera’s face.

The SS quickly dismounted from one of their trucks. Two of them approached the Binder car, and flung both doors open. Leaving Michael untouched, the troops went straight for Kromolnicki, and dragged him out of the car. After fiercely beating him, they pulled him into their truck and the entire ensemble departed, leaving Michael alone in the car with the can of cooking oil. Michael did not know how to drive and realized it could be dangerous to keep sitting in the car, so he pushed it to the curb, locked it, and left it there.

CHAPTER 6 109 Then he took the can of oil and walked back to the office and reported what had happened to Herr Speich. He was still trembling with anxiety but Speich calmed him down and began making phone calls, eventually to find that Kromolnicki was in detention in the Gestapo headquarters and was all right. Michael wondered whether this meant that Kromolnicki had escaped the torture that the SS inflicted on the detainees there.

Several days later, Speich informed him that Kromolnicki was given a fine and would be released, but that Michael needed to take some documents and deliver them to the Gestapo, before the release.

Michael was left with no choice but to go to the Gestapo Headquarters on Szucha Avenue. Everyone in Warsaw knew what was happening behind the imposing and cold façade of this building. 25 Szucha Avenue was the seat of the Office of the Commander of the Security Police and Security Service. Before the war, it had been the seat of the Ministry of Religious Beliefs and Public Enlightenment.

It was now a place that inspired terror—a place where thousands of Poles, and people of other nationalities were detained and tortured in the basement of the building. Many were kept in solitary confinement and subjected to daily beatings. From 1940 almost all political prisoners arrested in Warsaw were interrogated at this address.

The streets surrounding Szucha Avenue were converted into a police district. With some trepidation Michael presented himself to the guard at the gate. His lips were thin and his eyes were narrow. The guard took his ID (the Kennkarte), gave him three slips of paper, and directed him to the stairway inside with instructions that he should go to the third floor. At each of the landings he was stopped by a guard, who took one of the three pieces of paper. As he ascended the stairs, he felt more and more fearful. On the third floor, Kromolnicki was waiting for him with a guard by his side.

Without showing any emotion and looking straight at the guard, he presented the other pieces of paper. The three of them then descended to the ground floor where his Kennkarte was returned to him.

110 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET They then departed for the AK Binder office. It was only when they walked away from Gestapo Headquarters that he was able to look at Kromolnicki’s face and see the evidence of the beating he had undergone. He was scared to look him in the eyes for fear of what he might see there.

The bacon Once, as a reward for buying the food on the black market, his boss gave him a very big slab of bacon as a gift. Michael was not unaware of the value of this gift. He could hardly believe his luck. Food was scarce but between the lunches at the Binder office and the regular dinners at the Kopps he rarely went hungry. At the same time, delicacies such as bacon were almost unheard of.

He carried the hunk of bacon in his rucksack, feeling like a rich man. After dinner at the Kopps that night, he told them about the precious gift and asked if they would refrigerate the bacon for him.

The Kopps’ eyes widened when they saw the glistening pink piece of meat. They were quick to offer advice. Lydia advised: “Don’t eat all of it so that you have something to last”. Her husband said: “Don’t carry it in your rucksack—it may not be safe”. Heeding their advice, he left the bacon at the Kopps’ house. During the next few days, he would occasionally eat little bits of the bacon when he visited them. But when he returned to the Kopps later that week and searched for the bacon, it was gone. He suspected it was Eugene who must have taken the rest of the bacon. He quietly carried the resentment with him for some days. He was all too aware of his dependency on the Kopps and knew he could not complain. Over time, his early distrust of Eugene had grown into dislike. It was clear to him now that Eugene was a cold, mean man pretending to have good intentions. Michael saw that Eugene’s initial “offer” to take care of Adas should Michael bring him back from the Lwów ghetto, was a move calculated to get rid of him, a move only thinly disguised as a thoughtful gesture. Eugene knew how dangerous it would be for Michael to return to Lwów and calculated that he would never return, never to bother them again, never to put them in the awkward position of helping a Jew. But Lydia was a motherly

CHAPTER 6 111 presence and offered him food which helped him to keep up his strength and morale. The dinners also gave structure to his weeks and broke the monotony of his office job. The Kopps’ house was also the place where he was reunited with his great friend Aniela.

The formidable, courageous Lydia also welcomed other Jews hiding in plain sight into their home. He was torn between his admiration for Lydia and his contempt for her husband but knew that surviving required hiding his feelings toward Eugene.

Eugene was a voice coach, well-known in opera circles in Warsaw. Michael was raised to believe that music elevated and ennobled the spirit but Eugene made him question this idea. He heard that some senior Nazis and their wives were ardent opera lovers.

He also heard that the beloved Lwów opera house, now under Nazi occupation, was still producing operas by Verdi and Puccini and classical ballets, even though most of the Ukrainian artists attached to the opera house have had to flee. Art and beauty were certainly not the preserve of the righteous.

The Kopps’ house was comfortable. It had a special music room where Eugene gave his voice classes. In the center of the room stood a glossy grand piano. The luscious black instrument looked almost absurd in a time of such bleakness, as if it was mocking the war. When polished, it was so shiny he could see his reflection in it.

One of Eugene’s voice pupils, an attractive Polish woman in her twenties, lived with the Kopps. It did not take Michael long to realise that she was more than Eugene’s voice pupil. Blonde, tall and innocent-looking, the woman’s soprano voice was beautiful but boring and slightly emotionless—a far cry from the voices he admired with his parents at the opera in Lwów. He wondered how Lydia could bear this woman’s presence in the house, how she could have resigned herself to this strange arrangement.

The soprano was not the only lodger with the Kopps. The Kopps’ Polish maid lived with them as well and had a brother who was a policeman. The maid and her brother seemed unaware of the risks Lydia was taking in hosting and entertaining her eclectic group of guests. The policeman wore the blue uniform of Polish policemen. The maid once told them that her brother was grateful to the Germans because but for the war, he would not have been

112 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET promoted to the rank of Sargeant. Michael found it astounding that anyone could be grateful for a war that came with so much bloodshed and suffering. It seemed the brother’s only interest was his own promotion. He made the statement at the time of the Ghetto Uprising, when people were being shot in the street at random.

The Kopps had contact with various Jews who were hiding in Warsaw. One guest who occasionally had dinner with them was a young Polish man who was an anti-Semite but was not collaborating with the Germans and not pro-Nazi. It became clear to Michael that in some cases Polish anti-Semites were dependable as protectors of Jews. This man, for example, knew that Michael was Jewish but would not have betrayed the Kopps. The man had fallen in love with a young Jewish woman who had been rescued from the ghetto and whom he had met at the Kopps. She was very beautiful and he quickly became very interested in her. Such was the improbable group of friends the Kopps opened their home to.

Kutschera In early 1944 Michael became involved in a resistance activity of a different kind. The Home Army together with the Polish government in exile planned to assassinate Erich Kutschera on 1 February 1944. Michael was asked to go to a certain street near the center and pretend to be busy. He knew that something politically significant was about to happen—precisely because it was being kept secret and no one seemed to know what exactly it was.

Kutschera was shot by three gunmen who were members of Kedyw, a special unit of the Home Army. The three Kedyw gunmen ambushed Kutschera as his limousine approached SS Headquarters. They opened fire directly into the car. Both Kutschera and his driver were shot multiple times and killed.

The reprisal was swift and brutal. Shortly after the assassination, 300 Polish civilians were publicly executed in Warsaw. 100 prisoners were taken out of Pawiak Prison, the men herded onto trucks and shot in various public squares. Kutschera’s body was later taken to Berlin by special train. It was decreed that the Warsaw municipality must raise a collective fine of 100 million zloty.

CHAPTER 6 113 After Kutschera’s assassination an extravagant Nazi funeral was planned. Michael heard that Himmler would attend the funeral. The center of Warsaw was abuzz with preparations for what was to be a particularly grand funeral and for Himmler’s arrival.

As part of the funeral preparations, the Germans announced a special curfew requiring particular streets around the center to be closed and the inhabitants of that area were prohibited from staying there on the day of the funeral.

Michael warned Frau Schmidt that completing his responsibilities in her office might pose difficulties because of the curfew.

She responded, “Well in that case, I can promise you a very comfortable bed at my home.” He thought of the book she had shown him earlier, and quickly understood that she offered more than a place to sleep. The suggestion made him feel slightly threatened.

He promptly finished his business, said “Auf Wiedersehen”, and was relieved to depart for his solitary but familiar room on Marszałkowska street.

But he was not averse to all female company. About four months later, as the Soviet troops were approaching but had not yet reached the suburb of Praga, he had to find the bomb shelter in the basement of his building when the air raid signals started in the middle of the night. In the complete darkness of the basement, he started talking to the woman who was sitting next to him. He didn’t know whether she was young, old, beautiful or not, but it instantly became a very close friendship and they always met in the bomb shelter during the raid. They never met otherwise.

CHAPTER 7 The Uprising Begins The last day of July 1944 began like any other. Michael went to the office and occupied himself with his usual tasks. In the background he could hear the distant sound of Soviet artillery. These rumbles had been perceptible for some days by then, and it was widely anticipated that Soviet forces coming from the East would be in Warsaw soon to help liberate them. For once the rumbling sounded reassuring, almost sweet.

At the same time the Home Army organized a massive strike against the Germans from within the city. Its commander, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, obtained permission from the Polish government-in-exile in London to start the Uprising from within Warsaw to resist the Germans and to assert the citizens’ own demand for freedom. One of the aims of the uprising was for the Poles to establish their own autonomous government.

Michael awaited instructions from AK, but no communication reached him.

At the end of the workday, he began his usual walk back to his room, planning to stop at the Kopps’ apartment for dinner before getting “home” just before the 8 pm curfew.

He was about two thirds of the way to the Kopps when he realized that the evening was far from normal. People were tearing streets apart and were building barricades. The message had gone out, a message he had somehow missed, that the Uprising would start at 5 pm. The same Marszałkowska Street that was usually full of pedestrians, trolley cars and horse-drawn carriages, was being destroyed. Cobblestones were being dislodged from the pavement, and barricades built from the stones. It was necessary to rip up the roads so that the German army could not access it. Deep trenches were dug; abandoned tramcars were overturned and filled with enough earth and rubble to obstruct the Germans’ Tiger tanks. Everyday items such as baby carriages, precious antique furniture and

115

116 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET even pianos were used to construct the barricades. No item was too delicate to become part of the war effort.

Upon arriving at the Kopps, Michael asked Eugene if he would be willing to help them build barricades. Eugene said he did not want to hurt his hands, since his hands, those of a pianist, were his livelihood. Michael wanted to say that if enough men did not join the effort, there would be no livelihood to protect, but he said nothing. The next day the call came for all able-bodied men, women and even children to go out to dig ditches against the tanks. Michael was issued a handgun—a revolver—and assigned to a barricade. It was the first time he had ever carried a weapon.

Civilians, who had been wary of leaving their houses for many months, poured onto the streets and built barricades with great enthusiasm, singing songs of solidarity as they worked. The insurgents sang Serce w Plecaku’ (“Heart in a knapsack”’) and Palacyk Michala (“The Palace Michael”). The lyrics of Palacyk Michala were: “Stay put, watch your faith and listen closely, stiffen your young soul, working as for two.

And when a bullet hits you, ask a miss to give you a kiss on the nose.

And every day the moment comes when we will win Stay put, watch your faith and listen closely, stiffen your young soul, as steel.’’

In parts of the city, such as the Stare Miasto (Old Town), there was an atmosphere of freedom. There were Polish flags everywhere. People were kissing and hugging each other and felt, at least momentarily, liberated. They could finally assert themselves against the occupiers and fight back. The consensus was that the Red Army would cross the Vistula and that the Uprising would end in less than a week.

Michael heard that the Uprising, or “Operation Tempest”, had been planned to start on 4 August, but had started three days earlier, on 1 August 1944, because German spies had gotten wind of the Home Army’s plot. The change in plans meant that when the Uprising started, he was fighting on a different barricade from the one he had originally been assigned to. He found himself manning a barricade in Mokotów, a large district just south of the city center.

CHAPTER 7 117 Armed with a rifle there, he watched for activity and shot into the square when the enemy appeared. The barricade was very close to Plac Zbawiciela or Saviour Square and across the street from the Church of Zbawiciela in which a PCK (Polski Czerwony Krzyz or Polish Red Cross) hospital had been established. The Church was a beautiful baroque building with two slim towers facing the Square.

Church of the Holy Saviour, Savior Square (Dallas Morning News). The Western tower was hit by a missile in 1939.

118 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET Soon gunfire was coming from all directions. Michael saw a young woman shot close to their barricade and heard her moaning in the seconds before she died, but he could do nothing to help her. He suddenly understood the high price this battle would exact.

By the second day of the Uprising, the AK in Mokotów and other parts of the city had already suffered large losses. The AK zones were surrounded by various German strongholds under the leadership of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a high-ranking SS officer appointed to lead the suppression of the Uprising. By then he had already gained notoriety for his role in commanding anti-partisan efforts in Belgium, France, the Netherland, Norway and other countries.

A lucky coincidence was the proximity to Mokotów Field, a large field between Mokotów and the city center. Before the war it had been used as a horse racing track, but during the occupation it was an open field where people could plant vegetables for personal use. It had become an important source of food for Warsawians and would become even more critical during the Uprising. Michael would sometimes crawl into it to pick tomatoes, potatoes and other vegetables to bring back to the hospital.

Mokotów also had a large contingent of German military units. The Germans replied to the Home Army’s aggression with heavy artillery and aerial attacks. During the first days of August, German troops in Mokotów—the SS, police units, and the Wehrmacht—terrorized the Polish civilian population. The first massacre of civilians in Mokotów took place on the night of 1 August. The Germans gathered nearly 500 civilians in Fort Mokotów and executed the entire group.

German forces were eviscerating entire neighbourhoods. On 5 August Nazi troops known as the Dirlewanger Brigade rampaged through the Wola district, murdering over 40,000 men, women and children. The SS threw grenades into basements, set buildings on fire and shot at everyone trying to flee. The day later came to be known as “Black Saturday”.

Michael had not seen Wladek since before the Uprising and wondered where he was. He was able to get back to the place where Wladek had been living, but he wasn’t there. Michael was worried

CHAPTER 7 119 but there was little he could do under the difficult and dangerous conditions.

Over the next few weeks, both food and water became scarce and people began to die of starvation. Dead horses, stale, moldy bread and almost anything barely edible became sources of food.

For the first time in his life Michael was faced with constant hunger.

What he craved most was a sandwich he remembered eating in Lwów. It was a ham sandwich on a “Kaiser” roll—a crisp roll of which the upper half was in a shape of an Austrian Kaiser’s hat, a round parted in four quarters. The sandwich kept appearing in his daydreams and even when he was asleep.

The group of men and women defending his barricade prevailed despite the meager food supply. Their proximity to the hospital gave them a place to rest and access to water and the odd bowl of soup. As the weeks continued, death was everywhere and dead bodies became a very common sight In addition to his barricade service, he was often a messenger, which took him through the city to other resistance strongholds.

Along one of his regular routes, was the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization or Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), a resistance organisation of mostly young people, some of whom had escaped from the ghetto and others who had been in hiding. Michael would stop and talk and sometimes have tea with the people working there, but tempted as he was to share his real identity in solidarity with them, he never revealed that he was Jewish.

Being close to the hospital held many unexpected advantages.

The foyer of the hospital was a space where one ran into acquaintances and where, at times, there was an almost social atmosphere.

To those manning his barricade, the hospital became a sort of lounge for the times when they weren’t actively fighting. They would sit down, take off their helmets, have some tea and rest.

There was also a piano in the foyer, and from time to time a pianist played well-known songs to boost their morale. One mid-September day, the hospital director announced that there would be a gathering in the evening. The pianist played a waltz he had composed for the event called “The war has ended.” For eight or nine minutes the music transported Michael to a different world. The music

120 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET distracted him from his hunger and weariness. It made him yearn for Lwów. He could imagine elegant couples gliding to the music across the hospital foyer. The music stayed with him for many weeks.

During the time Michael spent in the hospital, he occasionally stopped to talk with patients. Because he could speak German, he became acquainted with one patient, an injured German corporal in his early fifties, a prisoner of war. Michael learned that the man was a farmer who had been drafted into the army. He was not a Nazi and did not approve of Hitler’s regime. Michael could not help but like him.

After the armistice, prisoners were exchanged, and Michael was now directed to return the German soldier he had befriended to the German lines. They walked together toward the Mokotówski field, Michael carrying a white flag and the German carrying a rifle on his shoulder. Upon reaching the Germans, they all exchanged salutes, the prisoner joined his countrymen and Michael returned to the hospital. On 18 September, British aircraft being flown by Polish pilots appeared in the skies above Warsaw. For a brief moment it seemed as if salvation was finally at hand. Bór-Komorowski later recalled it in his memoirs: “The day was sunny and fine with a cloudless sky. The sound of cheering and shouts of joy on all sides alerted him that the aircraft were coming over. The sky was filled with planes flying in at a great height from the west. They left behind long trails of white dots. It took a long moment to realise that the dots were parachutes, but what it was food and ammunition and not as was hoped, soldiers of the Polish 5th Airborne Division.”

One by one, the insurgent strongholds started collapsing. Although the BBC shortwave channel transmitted news of Allied victories, it was becoming clear that the position of the insurgents was desperate. And the Soviet Army, which was by now just below the city on the other side of the Vistula, was clearly not coming to help.

Michael still occasionally slept at the Kopps’ apartment. One night in late September, the brother of the young singer who lived with the Kopps woke him up by shaking his shoulder. He asked the man “what’s the matter?” He responded: “you may not sleep here

CHAPTER 7 121 anymore.” Michael did not ask any questions and simply said “OK I will leave in the morning”. When dawn broke, he got dressed, picked up his small bundle of things and left the Kopps, never to return and never to see them again.

After a long day on the barricade, Michael was happy if he could crawl into any available bed in the basement of the hospital, just one floor below street level. It was a large room with rows of beds where about 10 people were sleeping or just resting. It accommodated a mixture of people: hospital staff, children, fellow AK fighters, and a priest or two.

He was constantly exhausted and fell asleep instantly at night.

He was grateful for his ability to sleep anywhere, under any circumstances, even when hunger was gnawing at him and consuming his thoughts. On those days especially, he welcomed falling into oblivion. One night as he was about to fall asleep, he saw a young woman coming to sit on his bed. Startled, he sat up straight. In the faint light he could see she had long light, almost luminescent, hair.

He did not know her and could not remember seeing her around the hospital before. Before he knew what was happening, she leaned forward and tried to kiss him. He swiftly pulled away from her and pushed her off his bed. They did not exchange a single word. Again, he was grateful for the great escape that sleep would bring.

Surrender What the inhabitants of Warsaw did not know was that Bór-Komorowski had begun negotiating their surrender and had been in direct contact with von dem Bach-Zelewski. These talks stretched over a couple of weeks. On 30 September, delegates of the Command Center of the Home Army, Colonel Karol Ziemski (codename Wachnowski) and Lieutenant Scibor, crossed the front line at the intersection of Zelazna Street and Aleje Jerozolimskie, and were driven by the Germans to the SS headquarters located in Ozorów.

Bór-Komorowski was blindfolded and also driven to SS headquarters. The headquarters were housed in a large and elegant mansion

122 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET belonging to the wealthy Jewish Reicher family. This was the beginning of negotiations to stop the fighting.

By the end of the month, it happened: the AK surrendered.

The ceasefire was announced on 1 October. By then the forces under von dem Bach-Zelewski had killed 200,000 Warsawians as well as an unknown number of POW’s. But the Germans had also agreed to treat the Polish fighters as combatants with POW status which meant that, in theory at least, they were protected by the Geneva Conventions. 9,000 Polish fighters surrendered and a few thousand escaped the city.

Michael would not give up on finding Wladek, and finally, on the third visit to his apartment, they were reunited. Wladek joined Michael at the now neutralized barricade and helped out with the various tasks associated with the ceasefire and ultimate resolution of the Uprising. One of the errands they were sent on was to take some paperwork to Gestapo Headquarters. This was not something either was eager to do and his previous experience at that address was a memory he preferred to suppress. But with their identities still hidden, neither had an excuse, so they set off together, through the same streets where only a short time ago they would have been shot. When they arrived, two SS men were leaning casually against the door. Michael explained what they were there for and asked how to get to the necessary office, to which one of them replied, “So you are the bandits who have been causing all this trouble.” Without a blink…and without really thinking, Michael responded “I think the issue of who are the bandits is a matter for discussion.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the color drain from Wladek’s face, but he knew, as did the soldiers, that there would be no repercussions. The fighting was over. The soldiers shrugged and let them pass.

With the surrender, the resistance fighters had to contemplate their options. Michael knew he was entitled to go to a Prisoner of War camp where he would be under the protection of the Geneva Conventions, with shelter and food until the end of the war. But there was still the risk that his true identity would be discovered and it was not clear at all that he would be safe as a Jew, even as a Prisoner of War. Luckily, he was relieved of the need to make this

CHAPTER 7 123 decision. The head of the hospital, Dr. Hieronim Bartoszewski, a respected Polish doctor in his fifties, asked him to accept an appointment as an interpreter in the hospital. He gladly agreed and replaced his AK armband with one of the Red Cross. This provided him with security and had the advantage of allowing him to move freely across the city.

As part of the armistice, prisoners were exchanged, and Michael was now directed to return the German soldier he had befriended to the German lines. They walked together toward the Mokotówski field, Michael carrying a white flag and the German carrying his rifle. Upon reaching the Germans, they all exchanged salutes, the prisoner joined his countrymen and Michael returned to the hospital.

The Warsaw streets were empty except for piles of rubble. Hitler's response to the Uprising had been unequivocal: all inhabitants of Warsaw were to leave the city and every building was to be blown up or destroyed by fire. On October 10 the final group of civilians left Śródmieście, the city center. Many thousands of Warsawians emerged from basements and cellars with small suitcases or backpacks. Small children were carried on carts or led by the arm. After the two months of the Uprising, the formerly besieged were now marching out of the city through green fields where cows were grazing. Many civilians did not trust the Germans and were reluctant to join the march. Debates erupted about whether to go.

The civilians also did not want to abandon the fighters.

Ultimately they were sent to a transit camp in Pruszków on the western edge of Warsaw. The conditions in this camp, called Dulag 121, (after the German Durchgangslager) were deplorable.

There was not enough food and there was rampant maltreatment, including rape. Some young adults were selected for forced labor in factories in Germany. About 55,000 people were sent to concentration camps because Gestapo interrogators determined that they were either fugitive Jews, members of the Home Army or both. The majority of civilians, particularly children and the elderly, were sent to the Polish countryside. Altogether 650,000 people passed through Dulag 121.

124 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET On one of those October mornings that felt almost like freedom, Michael and Wladek and some other young men were directed to go to the empty apartment buildings in Mokótow and neighbouring districts to search for clothes or other items that could be of use to the patients.

They embarked on this task as if on a new adventure. Through the months of constant bombing, their group had not yet seen the insides of the bombed-out buildings. They were all hungry and were hoping to find bits of food. Mostly, they found nothing in the dusty spaces but the bare remains of the lives of the families or persons who had been killed, had had to escape the bombing, or who were part of the group marching out of Warsaw to a new, unknown future.

These homes were generally still intact. People had been given a few days’ notice to pack the small amount of belongings they could take with them on their exodus from the city. Michael found the orderliness of many of the apartments quite eery. It stood in sharp contrast to their hasty departures and the general terror and chaos that had violently interrupted their lives.

Michael and his fellow scavengers did find abandoned coats, jackets, blankets and other items that would be useful for patients.

They put the clothes in a big pile. As they entered the empty apartments, they could hear explosions in the distance as the Germans were systematically demolishing the city.

Then, when they had almost given up hope of finding any food: an egg! They found the egg in an otherwise empty refrigerator of one small kitchen. They gasped for joy, not believing their luck.

They had not seen eggs for many months. It was clear they would share it among the three of them. They sat down and started discussing the best way of dividing this treasure between them.

Should they boil it, fry it, scramble it? They earnestly debated the merits and demerits of these options and finally decided that for ease of dividing, they would scramble it. But upon cracking the egg, they found that it was hard boiled. They peeled it, and each of them took a nibble.

CHAPTER 7 125 Back at the hospital, Dr. Bartoszewski was happy with the clothes they found. His resources were stretched to the limit, and he was grateful for any supplies that could help the patients. However, wound dressings were in short supply and medicine was nearly unobtainable.

The destruction of the city progressed with feverish intensity.

The Germans left nothing to chance and instructed demolition experts dynamited and burned down buildings block by block. Even the most significant Polish buildings suffered this fate: The Brühl Palace on Pilsudski Square was destroyed on 18 October and the enormous Saxon Palace was dynamited nine days later. The beautiful Old Town lay in ruins.

Some days later, the Germans informed them that the hospital would receive a truckload of vegetables. Dr. Bartoszewski asked Michael and another young hospital worker to meet the truck at the Station (Warszawa Zachodia), about ten minutes beyond Warsaw’s Central Station, and guide it to the hospital.

The two set out for the train station, walking through the burned-out city. Never before had they seen such emptiness and desolation. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, the city which had had a population of 1,000,000 people, was a dystopian landscape—there was not a soul, not a car, not a tree in sight.

At times they had to stop to find their bearings. They could no longer direct themselves by looking for familiar streets. All the landmarks were gone. They were treading in the ruins of the ruins.

Finally, they reached the vegetable truck, where a German sergeant was sitting in the driver’s seat with a younger corporal next to him. After introducing himself, Michael went to climb onto the back of the truck, but the driver pointed to the seat next to him and ordered the younger soldier out of his place. Michael was touched by this small act of civility, one of very few he had experienced from any German since the start of the war, and another small signal of a turning point in the relations between them.

The crew drove back along the route the two young men had just walked on foot. When they reached the hospital, the sergeant reverted to his military character and ordered his subordinate to unload the vegetables.

126 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET In late October, about three weeks after the surrender, they were informed that all the hospital staff and remaining patients— about 200 people all together—would be evacuated to Kraków. A freight train to carry them would soon be arriving at the same Warsaw West train station where they had met the vegetable truck. As far as they knew, they were among the last people remaining in the ruined city, although it would later become known that as a few thousand people were still hiding amongst the rubble.

The entire hospital—staff and patients—moved to the train station where they had to spend some days waiting before the train arrived. They were already in good spirits at the prospect of moving out of Warsaw, and their mood was lifted even more by a surprise discovery at the station.

During the months before the start of the Uprising, the German authorities had planned a Christmas gift of eggs to the inhabitants of Warsaw. Every inhabitant would qualify for four eggs. To prepare for this act of largesse, the Germans brought in four million eggs, taken mostly from Polish chicken farmers. The eggs were placed in large concrete basins all over the city, basins that had originally been prepared for storing water in case of a water shortage.

The basins were about 12 feet deep and quite wide.

To prepare the basins to hold the eggs, the Germans filled them with a lime solution that could preserve them for many months. A substantial number of the four million eggs—many thousands—were in a basin at the train station.

Accessing the eggs proved to be difficult. The walls of the pool were slanted but the eggs were beyond their reach. It seemed there was no way of reaching the eggs. They were all hungry and the eggs were maddeningly close. But how to get to the eggs? After deliberating over a variety of ways to get to the eggs, they decided they could create harnesses out of clothing, with which they could be lowered into the basins and bring up the eggs in buckets.

The famished hospital workers experimented with multiple ways of cooking the eggs. They found an abandoned hubcap of a truck into which they cracked many dozens of eggs. They first made an enormous omelette. How delicious! The next few days were spent in a haze of binging on eggs. Eggs, eggs, glorious eggs!

CHAPTER 7 127 The days they spent waiting at the station passed quickly.

Their stomachs were full and their hopes were high. They slept on benches and on the floor inside the station’s waiting room. One morning Michael woke to find a louse crawling on him. He was amazed because in these years of living in various degrees of filth, he had never had lice before. He dispatched the louse and walked over to one of the young physicians in the group. Showing the doctor the dead louse, he said, “Look what I found on myself this morning. What should I do?” The doctor responded with amusement, “Look for more!” The doctor then proceeded to explain the three types of lice: lice that one found on one’s skin, lice that one found in one’s hair and lice that preferred pubic hair. Michael thought of how lucky he was not to be more attractive to lice. He thought of the nights in Janowska camp when he was worried that lice might thrive in the dirty rags on the wooden bunk beds. Yet in all that time not a single louse! He thought of the last month of the Uprising and how difficult it had been to wash without any water, but no lice had approached him even then. He would have to wait to get rid of the lice until he got to someplace where he could wash himself and his clothes. He hoped that place would be Kraków.

When the train at last arrived, they filled a few buckets with eggs to prepare themselves for the uncertain and possibly eggless future awaiting them.

Once on the train they were soothed by the sight of new landscapes after years in the dusty city. Periodically, their train was moved to sidings, when a more important train had to pass. This meant that their trip of some 300 km, which would normally have taken four or five hours, took two days.

At one of the stations the train was held back for several hours.

Two enlisted men of the German Luftwaffe stepped onto the train.

The men wanted to hitch a ride and the group welcomed them into the freight car. When the train started moving Michael noticed the soldiers looking hungrily at the buckets full of eggs. One of them shifted closer to the eggs, furtively picked up two eggs and stuffed them into his pants pocket.

As the train picked up speed and began swaying a bit, Michael gradually manoeuvred himself to the soldier’s side. When the

128 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET compartment jerked, Michael deliberately smashed himself against the soldier and immediately apologized. The soldier looked embarrassed as he became aware that he now had a pocketful of raw scrambled eggs.

The rest of the journey was uneventful. As the train pulled into Kraków, Michael thought back on his last visit and the time he had spent riding the trolley car before returning to Lwów and trying to convince Aunt Lisa to let him take Adas back to Warsaw with him.

Where were they now? Where were his parents? How would they all find each other? These questions continued to hang over him like a dark cloud. They could almost breathe liberation. To him and his companions arriving in Kraków felt like an ending—the end of their war.

CHAPTER 8 Liberation: Krakow Arriving in Kraków was almost like arriving back home to Lwów.

The city was still largely intact. How wonderful to see the familiar buildings, cobblestoned streets, horse-drawn carriages and trolley cars! There were no explosions, no barrage of artillery. It all felt very quiet and calm, like the beginning of peace. They were met at the station by the Polish Red Cross and were immediately taken to a hospital building that became their home for the rest of the duration of the war. Their unit was a mixed crew of physicians, nurses, patients and non-professionals like himself. The unit was accommodated in the hospital building. He moved into a room shared with Wladek.

The period from November 1944 to mid-January 1945 was quite peaceful. He continued to work as a translator for the hospital and felt safe and protected as part of the hospital staff. The hospital offered regular meals and he even received a modest weekly salary.

In the first weeks of December there were rumours that the Soviet troops had broken through the German front and that they would soon reach them. They could hear the rumble of cannons and artillery from east of Kraków. It was a rumbling that they knew meant that the Germans would soon be gone. It was also clear that eastern Poland would be taken by the Soviets.

Then silence fell. The silence was so strange that a few of them ventured into the streets to see what was happening. Everything looked the same except that the German soldiers, who had previously been everywhere on the city’s streets, had vanished! A few days later the Russians moved into Kraków.

At the start of 1945 two Russian soldiers arrived at the hospital carrying a man’s body on a stretcher. They thought that he was still alive and as usual, Michael was called to interpret. A doctor at the hospital examined the body and quickly established that the man was dead. Michael conveyed this to the two men who then decided

129

130 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET to leave the body there. They expressed the hope that he might thaw and be revived.

To Wladek and Michael there was nothing more important than completing their secondary education. They could talk and think about little else but going to school and how to arrange it.

Their goal was to complete their secondary education and to leave the country. They knew they did not want to stay in communist Poland. Completing their secondary education was their ticket out of Poland, out of Europe, out of the hell of the prior six years.

Many of their conversations revolved around where they would move once the war was over. They considered going to Palestine, to England or maybe even the United States. They also spoke of Australia or New Zealand, although these destinations seemed very remote.

Michael’s other priority was regaining his old identity. He heard that the Jewish Committee in Kraków was assisting Jews in getting their old names back. He eagerly lined up at the offices of the Jewish Committee almost every day and about two weeks after liberation, by the end of January, he managed to get his name back and a new, official identity card.

He also had contact with two other Jewish organizations: the organisation called “Hias”’ and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JJDC), known as “the Joint”. Both organizations helped to manage survivors’ exits from Europe.

His own case fell under the jurisdiction of Hias, an American Jewish organization that was created in 1890 to provide humanitarian assistance to Jewish refugees. He was now once again Michael.

He had heard of Jews who were uncertain about taking their names back. The long, drawn-out war and the exceeding cruelty of the Germans made them lose faith that they would not again be persecuted should they step into the world with Jewish names. But for Michael, liberation would not be complete without reassuming his identity. He wanted to start his new free life as Michael Katz.

Upon receiving his new identity documents from the Jewish Committee, he immediately told all his friends and colleagues at the hospital that his real name was Michael Katz and that he was Jewish. Some of his friends were amazed and said he did not look

CHAPTER 8 131 Jewish. He did not understand what that meant. It reminded him of the time in Lwów when he was assaulted by the two hooligans who, after scrutinizing his face, concluded that he did not look Jewish. His boss, Bartoszewski was not thrilled by the news. When Michael and Wladek told him that they would need time to study to try to resume their education when the schools reopened, Bartoszewski remarked that Jews should not be so preoccupied with studying and used a word with faintly derogatory connotations.

Even Wladek occasionally forgot to call him Michael and slipped back into Tadek. He would then lightly reprimand Wladek for doing so. Wladek also took steps to get his old name back. Soon after “Tadek” became Michael, Wladek also took his last name, Schmaus, back. For the duration of the time under German occupation, he had been Kuszpyt.

With liberation in sight, Michael started to think of his relatives in the United States. His grandfather had often spoken of their relatives who had moved to a place called Philadelphia. One of the young girls who was part of his unit at the hospital and spoke English offered to write a letter to his relatives in the United States.

Although he did not have their address, he remembered that the relative owned a hotel named Hotel Taft in Philadelphia and this was the address he used. He would usually spend his time with Wladek, planning and dreaming about the potential they might have abroad, but they realized they would be better equipped for it if they completed their secondary education still in Poland.

Michael still clung to the hope that his mother and father had survived. They heard that the names of Jewish survivors were being read out on the radio and on public broadcasting systems, and he would go to the public spaces where the names were read and sit for hours listening as name after name was read. They would be part of a small crowd who would sit there with hearts full of expectation, but sinking bit by bit as the realization set in of how few had survived.

Along with the liberation of Kraków, came the liberation of the death camps that were dotted around the Polish countryside.

Auschwitz, the largest, was liberated on 27 January, but when that momentous day came, the news of the liberation did not reach

132 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET Michael. Indeed, it was not until much later, only after he had left Poland, that he learned the full reality of what would come to be known as the “Holocaust”.

Michael had heard the word Majdanek for the first time only about six months before the Uprising, but even then he believed it was “merely” a work camp. Through reading the underground literature, he knew that people were not returning to their homes and that the prisoners were very badly treated, but there was no news about Jews being exterminated. There were moments when he wondered if his father might have been taken to a death camp such as Majdanek but he kept dismissing the thought, hoping and believing against all reason and probability, that his parents might still be alive, On one of the late January days shortly following liberation, he was in the offices of the Jewish Committee and started talking to a girl who was also searching for her family but had no one left. She was about his age, and they started talking about their experiences.

He suggested that they go for a walk through the city.

They discovered they were both from assimilated Polish Jewish families and that they both had almost no information about what happened to their missing family members. She was slight, with dark hair and a soft voice. Her large coat did not fit her. She had a vulnerable, almost frightened look about her. He didn’t ask her if she had spent any time in one of the concentration camps he had heard about, and she did not ask him.

They decided to walk in the direction of the main square. She was his first meaningful female company in many months and he found her easy to speak to. They walked towards the imposing main market square with the medieval Cloth Hall. Close to the market square, they stood and admired the gothic style of St. Mary’s Basilica with its two towers. They heard the trumpet that played hourly from one of the church towers.

They peeked into the windows of jewelry shops and other elegant shops selling furs and luxuries. They had hardly any money and dared not step inside, but their eyes were feasting on the rare goods. Slowly, Kraków was coming back to life.

They walked past dozens of churches.

CHAPTER 8 133 To their astonishment, they saw a sign advertising a Yiddish lecture that was about to take place in a lecture hall that same afternoon. This was too unusual an event to miss. The lecture was about the book Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Although the lecture would be in Yiddish and neither of them understood the language, they were keen to hear it spoken in public. In the late afternoon, after attending the lecture, they continued their slow walk through the city. They walked to Kazimierz, past the Old Synagogue at the end of the Dzielnica Zydowska. As always, Michael did not feel any attachment to a synagogue, and it failed to arouse any sentiment in him. He wondered if the synagogue would ever be filled with people again.

They found themselves on one of the many pathways next to the Vistula, the river that gathered water from the southern mountains near Kraków and flowed all the way up to the Baltic Sea. It was the artery that connected Poland and connected his life in Warsaw to his new life in Kraków. Wladek had told him that as a young boy living in Kraków he had swum in the Vistula with his family and had picnics on its banks.

On the left bank of the Vistula, they could see Wawel Castle in the distance. The massive, magnificent castle was perched high on a limestone rock called Wawel Hill. Built in the 14nth century, the castle was the residence of many Polish kings. Wawel Castle became the wartime residence of Hans Frank and his family and the headquarters of Frank’s administration. What was once a proud symbol of Polish identity was now tainted by Frank’s shadow. He heard that the Germans looted many precious artworks from the castle and from St. Mary’s Basilica. Under Frank the castle was renamed Krakauer Burg and a giant Reichsadler decorated the Wawel gate.

As night fell, he said goodbye to his companion. Although there was an intimacy to this encounter he did not experience again, he would not allow himself to be distracted by the potential of that intimacy. His life was still about survival and moving forward. He never saw her again.

134 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Back to school At the end of May, his work at the hospital came to an end and he moved into a small flat with Wladek. They shared the flat with a young Polish couple who agreed to pay most of the rent. They had almost no funds, only the bit they managed to save from the salaries they received at the hospital.

Now that they were no longer under the protection and care of the hospital, food was once again a problem. They didn’t have enough money for regular meals, so they ate only about once every two days. In between those meals they survived on scraps of food they managed to find and some vegetables they bought on the market. Like the Poles around them, they knew how to improvise with the food they had. They learned how to cook potato pancakes with almost no fat, which made them crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, just like those his grandmother had made.

As schools in Kraków began to reopen, returning to school became their singular focus. They wanted to enter school at the appropriate level for their age but realized this would delay their departure from Poland. They officially needed two more years of secondary education but they wanted to finish school more quickly than that.

Time was not on their side. It became clearer by the day that Poland would become a communist country and they had no appetite for living under communist rule. They also realized that their best chance of moving to the West would be in the following months, amid the chaos of change.

They decided to pretend that they needed only one more year of school and to take their chances on a qualifying entrance examination. Formal education belonged to the distant past and they were by now used to teaching themselves. After a quick self-tutorial in a few key subjects—for example they memorized some key parts of the poetic epic “Pan Tadeusz” by the famous Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz—they took the exam in early April, managed to pass, and were accepted to the final year of secondary school. It would begin soon and run uninterruptedly through the summer, so as to

CHAPTER 8 135 resume the traditional schedule in the Fall. Their plan was to depart Kraków in October of 1945.

School started in mid-June and would be over by September.

What a pleasure it was to be back in a classroom, even if it was far from the traditional format and environment, they could immerse themselves in. They relished going to class. Every test and every exam was a step closer to the future of which they were dreaming.

Their free time was now completely consumed by schoolwork and still constrained by low funds.

But there was one occasion they could not miss. For the first time since the start of the war there would be a concert by the Kraków Philharmonic in the major symphony hall. The Kraków symphony orchestra was going to play Beethoven’s violin concerto with Wladyslaw Niemczyk, a famous Polish violinist, as the soloist. Admission would be free. Michael looked forward to this for weeks.

He knew the music well and it started playing in his mind long before the concert. He had been starved of music. During the occupation, concert attendance had been restricted to the German occupiers. Listening to radios was forbidden. The few times he had snuck into the AK Binder office to listen to the BBC, he would only listen to the news for a few minutes, not dreaming of finding music.

The concert took place on a Sunday afternoon. He arrived at the concert hall, found his seat in the third row and waited with great anticipation. The members of the orchestra gradually entered and filled the stage. He glanced around him in the full concert hall.

Neither the conductor, nor the musicians—and certainly not the audience—were dressed in a way that would have been considered appropriate for such an occasion before the war. He remembered the elegant jewelry his mother would wear to the opera or the theatre. The people around him wore threadbare clothes that reflected the scarcity and deprivation of wartime. When the music started, he started to cry. He felt embarrassed, until he realized that those around him were crying as well. It was as close to a religious experience as he could imagine having. Every note, every move of the soloist’s arm, struck him as a radical gesture of liberation. He later heard that the conductor, Zygmunt Latoszewski, was a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising.

136 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Sasza On an early spring day in September, just before his final examinations, he ran to catch the trolley car into the city, but just missed it.

As he waited for the next one, he noticed the tall and very lean figure of Sasza Winnikow, the husband of his stepfather’s niece. Sasza was amazed to see him and embraced him tightly. They could not stop talking. He invited Michael to a café for a meal. What a treat!

He had not had a meal in a restaurant for years! He studied the menu with great care and enthusiasm. It was fine food he remembered from before the war.

Sasza was living in Łódź and had just returned from a work visit to Paris working for an organisation that helped Jewish orphans. He travelled all over Europe and provided funds and other support for orphans. He was in Kraków for a few days, on a mission seeking out orphans so that he could help them.

Sasza’s wife and son had been taken away and he suspected they had been killed. He, himself, had spent most of the war in hiding. In Łódź Sasza shared an apartment with Sioma Tolpin, an unmarried man who was another close friend of his parents. He was about five years older than his father. Michael remembered Sioma’s regaling his family about his visit to Palestine in the early 1920’s.

Over their extended lunch, Michael told Sasza of his plans to leave Kraków. Through conversations with people he had met at the Jewish committees, he had learned of various routes out of Europe.

Many of these led to Palestine. Others led to the United States and even Australia. Sasza said he could help him make his way to the West via the “underground railroad” and invited him to visit him in Łódź. They would flesh out the details of his departure from Poland once he got there.

Sasza offered Michael some money to see him through the next weeks until he was able to leave the country. He suggested that Michael visit as soon as possible. Michael was getting excited. Having finished his schooling, he could embark on a new life.

Now with Sasha’s help, his new life seemed so close he could almost touch it. He was curious about visiting Łódź, a place he

CHAPTER 8 137 knew only vaguely through his father but which he had never visited.

A week later, ticket in hand, he set off to the station and took the train to Łódź. It was his first train ride since the war, and he was unencumbered by the worry that he might be stopped to produce an identity. For however ironclad his false identity documents had been, he always felt a touch of apprehension as he produced them to an official. Sitting on this train he felt light and relaxed.

Łódź Arriving in Łódź was the start of an adventure. The city was very different from Kraków.

An industrial city, for almost two centuries the center of the Russian and eastern European textile industry, there were factories as far as the eye could see. This is where his father had been appointed as an economic adviser to the largest textile firm in Poland and later established his own consulting firm.

It was easy to recognise Sasza on the station platform. He was always the tallest person in a crowd. They embraced and Sasza offered to carry his small suitcase. Sasza took him to the apartment he was sharing with Sioma Tolpin. It was a comfortable apartment with a guest room. Michael moved into the room for a few nights.

Michael knew that Sioma had somehow acquired a Romanian passport during World War I, and suspected that this was how Sioma had managed to survive this war. He dared not ask him about the details. The apartment was full of heavy silences. Sasza also never spoke about how he had managed to survive or how his wife and child had met their deaths. Both Sasza and Sioma planned to emigrate to Palestine eventually. Sioma told them stories of this dry but promising land that was welcoming more and more Jews after the war. Michael was intrigued by the stories but was still determined to make his way to the US or Australia.

Sasza and Sioma arranged for him to meet with the man who had contacts with the “underground railroad”. The “underground railroad” was run by the Zionists who were trying to get as many Jews as possible out of Europe and to Palestine. Michael met with

138 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET this young man in his small office for about twenty minutes. As they were speaking, the man opened a drawer of his desk with a dramatic gesture. Michael was amazed to see a gun in the drawer.

It seemed to him that the man was trying to impress him by showing him his authority. The man asked Michael when he would be able to leave Kraków. Since Michael had finished his schooling and had no reason to stay in Krakow any longer, he was keen to leave as soon as possible. It was arranged that he would leave in early November.

Michael passed the few days in Łódź, struggling to suppress thoughts of his father. Being there brought back vivid memories of his father and many questions. This is where his father had started a new life, and got married again. But this was also the place where his father had had to move to the Ghetto, and from where he was transported to the Warsaw Ghetto, and finally again transported to a concentration camp, but he didn’t know which one. Could he possibly have survived such a camp? Despite all he had heard about these camps, Michael kept hoping his father was still alive.

He did some sightseeing in Łódź but found the city dark and depressing. He regretted not even knowing his father’s address in Łódź, and how little he really knew about his father’s life in Łódź: only that his father had remarried a woman with one child, a boy about his age. Would he ever discover the identity of his stepbrother, Michael wondered. Would he ever meet him? And again and again, that overwhelming question: was his father still alive?

He did not know how to find out any information about his father, but he had to return to Kraków to get ready to leave and there was no time to look further.

Back in Kraków, his saddest moment was saying goodbye to Wladek. Wladek had heard that he might be able to go directly to England on the orphan transport because he looked young for his age. Orphans under age 16 were being sent to England and Vladek knew he had relatives there who would help him when he arrived.

To him, it made more sense than joining Michael on the underground railway. They embraced and promised to find ways to correspond once they were settled in their new home countries—wherever they would be.

CHAPTER 8 139

Train to the West When Michael arrived at the central train station in Kraków on the day designated by the underground railway, he was checked by the leader of their group, an older man, to assure that he was on the list.

He now only had the identity document with him that was provided by the Jewish Committee. The group leader had a document stating that they were Greeks returning from a labor camp in Poland. Michael was given the name Michael Hatul. He wondered how he would pull off pretending to be Greek, because he did not speak the language, but he thought it would be okay, because no one around them was likely to speak it either. They were told not to speak Polish or German on the train, only English and French.

For some of them it meant they would hardly speak at all. Equipped with new names, they boarded a train bound for Bratislava, Slovakia.

The group comprised eight people: a couple in their forties with two daughters, ages 13 and 16. The older daughter was quiet and attractive, the younger very rumbunctious. There was also a childless couple close to fifty and a man who was single, about three years older than Michael. His name was Edek and he would become his travel companion for part of the journey.

Michael had very few personal possessions with him in his small suitcase, the remnants of what would soon be his former life.

He would have liked to have brought his high school diploma with him but decided it was too dangerous to carry it as a Greek and left it with Wladek, trusting that he would keep it safe and find a way of sending it to him eventually.

The group sat in a train compartment with several strangers.

They could see the strangers were curious about who they were.

Michael and the others spoke gibberish with each other and tried to imitate the sounds of the Greek language from the little they knew about Greek.

Upon learning that they were Greek, a few passengers who were sitting by the window vacated their seats to give the group more opportunity to see the country. “Let them see our beautiful land, before they go home,” they said. Keeping a straight face was

140 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET difficult but communicating among themselves was even more of a challenge. They took frequent naps which provided an escape from having to communicate. Within a few hours, they arrived at the Polish- Czech border and managed to cross without delay. On the Czech side they were met by a guide—identified by the Hebrew code word “amhu,” which translates to “His people.” The guide informed them that the trains were delayed and that they would have to wait at the station. They were getting used to delays of this kind and parked themselves on the floor. They sat and rested, talking very quietly and sparingly. The older couples amused themselves by humming Beethoven’s last string quartets.

Once they arrived in Bratislava they were again met by a guide who responded to their “amhu”. They spent three or four days in Bratislava which gave them time to so some sightseeing Bratislava was undamaged by the war. They enjoyed strolling through its narrow streets.

The guide led them to the Hotel Jelen where they were each given a bed, but there were no functioning bathrooms. One could wash at a pump in the yard of the hotel or wait in a very long queue for one of the public restrooms down the street. Luckily enough, one of the matrons in charge of these public facilities took a maternal liking to Michael and allowed him to enter through the service door, avoiding the crowds.

From Bratislava, they took the train to Hungary via a town called Komarno. The train was late and when it finally arrived, it was so full that he, together with the 16-year-old girl and Edek, jumped into the post office car. Once in the train they were joined by two Russian officers who were also on their way to Budapest.

Those two were gregarious and slightly drunk. They spoke Russian to them and Michael, who was the only one of them who understood Russian, had to pretend he did not understand Russian.

When the Russians asked their names they managed to communicate that they were Greek.

To Michael’s astonishment, one of the Russians said to the other “Here is your chance to practice your Greek.” The other promptly spoke to them in Greek, which they could not understand. Michael responded in gibberish, and Edek in Hebrew. The

CHAPTER 8 141 Russian kept on speaking Greek, and after a short while his comrade became aware that they were not communicating, and instantly berated him: “All these years you have told me that you spoke Greek and here you have real Greeks and you can’t talk to them.” The other sheepishly replied, “I don’t know what is going on; perhaps they are from Southern Greece.”

They gave up trying to talk to each other. Instead, the Russians opened a paper bag and produced sausage and a bottle of vodka.

The next few hours became very jovial. By the time they arrived in Budapest, they had become friends even though they had hardly communicated.

For the next four days Budapest was their home. As in Bratislava, there was a guide who had responded to the amhu greeting and led them to a hotel. Here they had individual rooms and accessible, clean bathrooms. They were completely at ease and able to go sightseeing, which they did most eagerly. Like Bratislava, Budapest was physically untouched by the war and had maintained its splendour. The Hungarian communist regime was being firmly established and although they knew no Hungarian, they could recognize the slogans proclaiming “Komunista Part”; and demanding “A reakcjo holalo”, which Michael later learned promised “death to the reactionaries.”

From there they took the train across the border to Vienna, still in the Soviet zone. Their new guides were waiting at the station and as soon as they identified themselves by the usual codename, they were taken to the old Rothschild Hospital on Wahringer Gurtel 97, which had at that point been converted into a refugee center. There, they once again adopted new identities—as Austrian Jews coming home to Vienna. Almost everyone in their group spoke German but they were concerned that their accents would reveal them as imposters. But nobody they encountered seemed to notice their unusual German and the Soviet military officers, whom they most needed to deceive, were not able to not discern the nuances of German accents.

The Rothchild hospital was named after its founder Baron Anselm von Rothchild. It was the hospital of the Kultusgemeinde in Vienna. The hospital was closed by the Nazis in 1943 and served as a

142 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET hospital for Displaced Persons. Through the support of the Joint Distribution Committee, it provided food, bedding and medical care to the many thousands of refugees flooding into Vienna from Poland, Romania, Hungary and other areas.

In Vienna, as in Budapest, they acted like tourists and explored the glorious city which had remained relatively unscathed.

Vienna was then still occupied by the four Allied armies and they took pleasure in seeing military police jeeps, each filled by an American, a Frenchman, a Russian, and a Brit. The Americans were always in the driver seats.

The next leg of their journey was more complicated. They had to leave Vienna, in the Soviet zone and travel to Graz, in the British zone of occupation. They realized they might have to provide a reason for being in Graz but thought they would continue to be protected by the general post war chaos. They decided to use their real names and to explain their presence in Graz by saying that they were foreign laborers who were forced to work in Graz and were now on their way home. This story failed to convince the British, who arrested them and put them in a refugee camp.

Being in a British refugee camp was a breeze compared to the horrors of Nazi occupied Poland. They were treated quite well and had enough food. However, they were forbidden to leave the camp.

And they realized they were in real danger of being repatriated back to Poland. Among the rumors swirling in the camp was that the American zone in Germany would be a good place for them to go since there they would be classified as Displaced Persons. This status would provide them a measure of choice in where to go and they would not be sent anywhere against their will. Upon hearing this, Michael and Edek made it their immediate goal to get to Germany. The others in the group decided to wait things out.

They learned that volunteers from the refugee camp could join working parties that were sent into the city. On the second day of joining those who marched out of the camp to their work destination, they worked until the guards’ attention strayed while having their tea. When the guards were distracted, Edek and Michael separately slipped away and met at the railroad station. They laughed at the ease with which they had managed to escape and found out

CHAPTER 8 143 that a train would be leaving for Linz, which was in the American zone, quite soon.

Through some clever manoeuvring they managed to get tickets. The train was so crowded that there were people hanging on the outside, and others crammed into the bathrooms. It was impossible to board any passenger car, but they spotted an empty carriage—Second Class, marked “For Allied Officers Only”—which they entered. They were soon joined by several other foreigners.

It was not long until they were thrown off the train, because they lacked permits to travel into the American Zone and had to stand on the platform and watch as the train vanished out of sight.

Besides this small group, the only ones at the station were three British MPs, accompanied by a German speaking youth who served as their interpreter. Those four got into their jeep and before taking off made a little speech that those who wanted to cross into the American zone would need permits to do so. These permits could be obtained at a station further West. A train would soon be arriving, which they could take to this station. They could not remain where they were, for it was a border town, and therefore quite restricted. If they tried to walk to the American Zone through the mountains that loomed before them, they would be shot at. As the jeep was about to take off, one of the men issued a punctuating fire of his rifle into the air.

Since Michael and Edek had no legitimate reason to obtain border-crossing permits, they decided that journeying through the backwoods was their most reliable option, an option they would not have been aware of had the American not alerted them to it.

They began walking in the direction that the MPs had indicated and were soon joined by four others—an older Hungarian couple, probably in their late forties, and a young couple from the Ukraine.

After walking uphill for about an hour they heard gunshots.

Indeed, the British tried to stop them by firing in their direction, but they were too far away. As it was getting dark, three men tried to pass them. They heard them speaking German to each other. The three men turned out to be smugglers who, learning that they were refugees, offered to guide them across the zonal border. This

144 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET required them to spend the night on the mountain in a cabin where a farmer they knew watched over his sheep.

The farmer was awake, as though he had been expecting them.

He served them all cold milk and provided each with enough straw to sleep on the floor of his kitchen. They fell asleep instantly.

They set off very early in the morning. In order to pass the border before dawn, they had to walk briskly along a narrow mountain path which hugged the face of a steep cliff, with no protection on its outer edge.

All but the older couple were able to keep pace. They decided to draw lots to determine which one of them would remain with the couple. The others proceeded ahead hastily. The responsibility befell the Ukrainian man, who alone stayed back, as his wife continued with the rest.

The remainder of the trek was uneventful and consisted of about four hours of downhill trails, ending at a village with a railroad station through which a train to Linz would pass. The wait until the next arriving train was about six hours. They were all terribly hungry, with no place in sight to buy food. After about an hour of wandering, they came upon a farmhouse and knocked on its door. An elderly woman opened the door, welcomed them inside, and provided them with soup, bread, and milk and refused to accept any money. They returned to the railway station and managed to travel to Linz without further interruptions.

Upon arriving in Linz, Edek and Michael parted from the group to head to Salzburg. Rumor had it that Salzburg offered better opportunities for temporary residence.

After a night at a refugee shelter, they proceeded to the station, bought tickets for Salzburg and got there in a matter of a few hours.

Here they found another refugee center. They had time on their hands and meandered about the beautiful town—its narrow streets, ornate churches—which was untouched by the war. They walked, stopped at cafes, talked to complete strangers, and to a few familiar faces from previous encounters with refugees. They learned much from these casual conversations.

Rumor had it that Munich, in the American Zone, was the most strategic place from which one could emigrate from Europe.

CHAPTER 8 145 There were truck transports of refugees going from Salzburg to Munich every day; one only needed a reason to go. Edek and Michael soon manufactured a reason: Their close relatives were in Munich and it was imperative that they join them. This story was accepted at the refugee center and they soon found themselves on top of a truck heading along an Autobahn to Munich.

Onto Munich and Föhrenwald Their trip began in the early evening. By the time they reached the German border it was already dark. Their truck stopped and they were told to go into an office where they would be checked and interrogated by an American major. Like a sheriff from an American Western, the major leaned back in his swivel chair and rested his feet on the desk. This was the first time Michael had ever seen a man sit with his feet on a desk. While it signified disrespect it was also attractively irreverent. The Americans he met seemed unconstrained by the rules of behavior that guided social life on the continent—something he later came to love. The major did not keep them for long and they soon resumed their journey. In a matter of hours, they found themselves on the outskirts of Munich.

From there they walked to the refugee center, which was set up in the German Museum. The museum was on a small island in the Isar river. A large part of the very large fort-like building was damaged by Allied bombing, but enough of the it remained standing so it could be used as a shelter for refugees. They would stay there for a few nights. Some of the most valuable collections were still hidden in the basement to protect them from the air raids. They were assigned to the Egyptian room. He heard that there were mummified Egyptian kings in the basement. There were a few figurines and ceramic objects left in the display cabinets in the room they were sleeping in. At night he felt as if the figurines were staring at him while he was trying to fall asleep.

As he wondered through some of the other floors of the museum the next day, he saw relics of Germany’s medieval past: paintings of castles and forts, portraits of feudal knights and historical maps. He also saw relics from the time of the Teutonic knights such

146 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET as a shield with black crosses carried by the knights. In his nightmares, the Teutonic imagery blended with Nazi crosses and symbols.

He was relieved when he was told he would be moved from the museum. First, he had to go to an office to be registered. Here he heard that he would be assigned to a Displaced Persons Camp called Föhrenwald, administered by UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The camp held Jewish refugees only and was situated close to a small town called Wolfratshausen. The camp was to become his home for the next six months.

A former workers’ camp, Föhrenwald was built in 1939 to provide housing for the employees of IG Farben, the infamous pharmaceutical company that produced Zyklon B gas. The camp provided housing for those working at the several munitions factories that IG Farben operated in the vicinity. It consisted of a collection of identical small white houses with steep roofs. The camp was later used to house slave laborers. At the end of the war the US military administration appropriated the camp for the housing of international refugees. On 3 October 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that Föhrenwald be made an exclusively Jewish D.P. camp, after he had found living conditions at the Feldafing D.P. camp, also in Bavaria, unacceptable. By January 1946, when Michael arrived in Föhrenwald, the camp population was 5,600.

The camp director, an army officer named Henry Cohen, later wrote: “The anguish of survival was etched on everyone’s face: the persisting painful memories of relatives and friends killed; the horrendous memories of one’s own survival experience; the sight of children quiet and unsmiling.”

Michael was put in a large room with several couples and a few single adults which meant he had very little privacy. The grounds were relatively large. It took about two hours to walk around the circumference. At its center was an office administered by about one hundred UNRAA employees, all of whom lived offsite and would arrive by cars in the morning.

Michael was completely on his own again. What was different was that he was now free and had very few obligations. For the first

CHAPTER 8 147 week or two he enjoyed the calmness and the freedom from the perpetual anxiety of the war years. He was free from the sense that danger was lurking around every corner. But after about two weeks boredom set in. He now feared the empty days stretching out in front of him.

He looked for something to do. He soon discovered that the American Army was doing construction work in the woods nearby.

Since the GIs would occasionally suffer minor injuries, they were in need of someone who could administer First Aid. He signed himself up as a First Aid worker and was tasked with following the soldiers into the woods, with a large first aid kit in tow.

Meeting the American soldiers gave him a chance to practice his English which was quickly improving. He soon adjusted to the thick Southern accents of some of the men. As he was bandaging a soldier’s wound in the forest one day, he met a young soldier from Chicago named Manny Karbelnick. They instantly became friends.

In civilian life Manny was an elementary school teacher. He invited Michael to lunch in the military cafeteria. Michael was still becoming accustomed to food being relatively plentiful and was amazed at the copious amounts of food served in the cafeteria. It was here he was introduced to American food such as hotdogs and ketchup, which he loved. What a change from the wartime monotony of thin soup and potatoes! Manny also introduced him to Coca Cola but he hated the strange taste. He had heard so much about Coca Cola and then after taking his first sip…uughh. After a few lunches in the cafeteria, he was asked to eat in the kitchen but he did not care where he ate as long as he had food—the easy access to tasty food was blissful. He ate there for a few weeks until Manny was transferred back to Chicago.

Because of the presence of a few prominent Hassidic rabbis in the camp, Föhrenwald became the center of Hasidic Jewry in the American sector of Germany during this time. Michael was invited to attend a Passover service in the refugee camp, which was conducted in a gigantic auditorium. Several hundred people attended the service and an American colonel acted as the rabbi. The message of the service was one of freedom from enslavement. It was possibly

148 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET the only religious sermon Michael could ever closely relate to. He felt inspired by the hopefulness of the message.

He sometimes wondered about his fellow refugees in Föhrenwald, about what they had seen and experienced during the war.

He knew that most of them had survived concentration camps. But there was a general silence enveloping their wartime ordeals. He realized that it was very difficult for his fellow Jews to talk about their experiences. One young man, just two or three years older than him, told him he had been in Buchenwald. Even though he had been liberated many months before, he was still very thin. He had been starved almost to death when he exited the camp. He told Michael that he had been seen by a doctor just after liberation and the doctor told him that he was very ill and that every effort had to be made to make him better. The doctor started feeding him food that was very high in calories while fearing that this would be too much of a metabolic effort to digest for a person in such a state of starvation. But the doctor also feared that if he did not feed him in this way, he might succumb to the starvation. The man told Michael it had been difficult for him to eat that much. But by the time they met, about three months later, he was largely cured.

After a month or so, Michael learned that the work in the woods would stop because winter was approaching. Ever on the lookout for new jobs, he heard that a social worker in UNRRA was looking for an interpreter. This was the perfect job for him and he decided to volunteer. He now knew enough English to translate English texts into German, Polish and Russian.

He was told he would find the social worker in a small office in the camp. He entered the office and was greeted by the wide toothy smile of a tall and strikingly beautiful young woman. The woman introduced herself as Mary Helen and gave him a firm handshake. She was warm and informal. He later learned that she came from a patrician midwestern family. He was instantly drawn to her empathetic nature. She was not Jewish but had also suffered significant loss in the war. Soon after meeting him, she told him that she had lost a younger brother in the invasion of Normandy about a year earlier.

CHAPTER 8 149 Mary Helen’s work involved getting the residents of the camp occupied with communal activities, including physical exercise.

She also helped publish a weekly camp newspaper in Yiddish called Bamidbar: Vochntsaytung fun di hafrayten Yidn (In the desert: weekly newspaper of the liberated Jews). The name referred to the wanderings of the Israelites as described in the Bible: “In the desert.

In the wilderness. On the way. We will remain.”

Mary Helen was about fifteen years older than Michael and was the closest he had come to real female companionship since his mother had been taken away more than three years earlier. In all that time, he had had no one to hug, no one to kiss. Mary Helen was generous with hugs and other forms of physical and emotional affection. It was easy for a young man to develop a crush on her. At times he would catch himself staring at her.

They spent a lot of time together. His role as her translator meant that he was with her during most of her exchanges with refugees in the camp. Many of the refugees spoke Yiddish, and although he did not grow up with the language, he had been exposed to it enough that he could loosely translate many words. His knowledge of German also helped him with translating Yiddish.

Mary Helen told him much about the US. She would hum American songs she called Negro spirituals. If the US was anything like her, he thought, he could not wait to get there.

On weekends he had the chance to travel to Munich. Although the city was devastated by Allied bombing, it was again possible to go to the theatre, museums, and to occasional music concerts. To get to the city required a 20-minute walk to the railway station in Wolfratshausen. He would often stop to have a beer at the pub near the station. From there, the train took an hour to get to Munich. His encounters with German civilians were very brief. He would ask for directions to get to a museum, but not have the chance to engage in any deeper conversations. He often wondered how the Germans he encountered had spent the war and what their role or place in the massive Nazi killing machine had been.

One weekend he decided to use some of the remainder of the money Sasza had given him to visit the Upper Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Just before he left Łódź, Sasza had sewed

150 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET some notes, approximately 40 US dollars, into his trousers to tide him over until he arrived at his new destination. He managed to exchange the dollars he received from Sasza for German marks.

From Garmisch-Partenkirchen he rode on a funicular to the top of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. The excursion into the Alps was both exciting and thrillingly cheap. The entire excursion cost him only $1.50.

A letter from Philadelphia One spring day in May 1946, he had just taken a seat in Mary Helen’s office when an assistant arrived at her door and said her superiors were requesting a meeting. Mary Helen excused herself, and returned only a few minutes later, jauntily, with news that she had been appointed to the role of immigration officer for the Föhrenwald Camp. She immediately declared that she would put Michael as number one on the list to emigrate. He was excited about the offer, but semi-jokingly suggested that it would seem pushy.

Mary Helen went along with it and changed it to number seven.

He soon heard that he was selected for the inaugural journey to the United States. The ship would depart from Bremerhaven in late May. His immigration visa had become possible through an executive order of President Truman. Whereas in the past, immigration to the USA had been limited according to the annual restriction in numbers derived from the proportional distribution of the incoming immigrants, based on their national origin, which had established annual quotas, this order by President Truman, temporarily waived this restriction and the United States accepted a larger number of immigrating refugees in 1946.

A few weeks earlier he had heard that there was a letter for him! But who would write to him? Who even knew where he was?

It has been so long since he felt the anticipation of tearing open a letter addressed to him. He was curious and excited when he saw the stamp from the United States. It was a letter from his distant relatives in Philadelphia, relatives of his mother whose name was Dain, who had received the letter he had sent from Kraków.

CHAPTER 8 151 It turned out they had no way of reaching him until Manny was able to contact them upon his return to the US. They wrote that he was welcome in their home and that they would try to obtain for him an affidavit required for his immigration.

As the day of his scheduled departure drew nearer, he became more excited about his prospects for a new life. Mary Helen gave him a fine shirt as a farewell gift. It was an American officer uniform shirt, the same as the khaki shirts worn by UNRRA officers. It was his first new piece of clothing in about six years.

Mary Helen hugged him goodbye and promised to see him once they were both in the US. The next day he took a bus to Frankfurt and was booked into the Funk Kaserne, a former armory that was being used as a processing center for refugees who would be settled abroad. He was assigned a room and provided with meals. There were a few interviews and medical examinations, and he was given some papers that would serve as his formal identification.

Crossing the Atlantic After two weeks in the Funk Kaserne, he was transported to the port of Bremerhaven. He was accompanied by other immigrants who came from several Displaced Persons camps. They boarded the SS Marine Perch, one of the “Liberty ships,” built by Kaiser Co. in California in 1945. The sister ship of the SS Marine Perch was the SS Marine Flasher which would depart Germany just before the SS Marine Perch. The ships were originally built to transport troops to Europe but later were used by the government to transport refugees, and were managed by the United States Line, a transatlantic shipping company that operated cargo services and ocean liners.

Both ships on this voyage carried Jewish refugees only.

The voyage to New York took 10 days. Their accommodations in the large cargo hold were relatively comfortable. They slept in hammocks—this took a few nights to get used to. But again, his gift to sleep almost anywhere meant that the hammock soon felt like a comfortable bed.

152 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET During the long afternoons he would often hang out on the open deck to soak in the fresh May sunshine and crisp ocean air.

Unlike many of his fellow voyagers, he did not get seasick. On the first few days they passed through the relatively narrow English Channel and could see the coast of England.

The number of passengers on the Marine Perch was about 800.

Years later he would occasionally meet people who had been on the ship with him.

After about 10 days, their voyage concluded. They glided into New York harbor in the early evening and had to remain on board until the next morning. That last evening on the Marine Perch was one of some revelry and celebration. From their anchored position they could see the spectacle of yellow sodium from the New York City lights that were visible, just across from Staten Island. They could see the heavy traffic and sodium vapor lights illuminating the Belt Parkway, a major artery on the southeastern tip of Brooklyn.

This was his first and lasting image of America.

They were far too excited to sleep and remained on the deck until dawn. One of the passengers on the ship happened to be a violinist and gave an impromptu concert that lasted almost all night. He performed a number of pieces including Jacob Gade’s tango called Jalousie (Tango Tzigane).

The following morning the ship moved up the Hudson River and docked at a pier near 44th Street. The immigration agents boarded and processed their papers with great efficiency.

The moment he was done with the paperwork, he was approached by a few journalists who boarded the ship to interview some of the refugees. Since this was the first transport of refugees after the war there was great media interest. The plight of European Jews had not entirely escaped the American public.

An eager young journalist who stopped him to interview him was pleased to discover that he spoke English well. The journalist asked him if he could take a picture of him. Michael agreed. The journalist asked him where he spent the war. He asked him if he had lost any relatives. He asked him if he had been humiliated by the Nazis. Michael did not know where to start but told him that two SS men in Lwów had made him get down on the ground and

CHAPTER 8 153 eat grass like an animal. As he was telling him this the sound of their laughter came back to him and the bits of brightness of the previous night that remained in him began to fade. In this moment he did not want to think of Lwów, did not want to go back to that August of 1942. Having come this far, he did not now want to be swept back by a current of memories. He wanted to bear forward, forward.

A very large crowd had gathered to meet their relatives who were expected to be on the ship. As he descended the ship with his small suitcase, he caught sight of a middle-aged man and a teenage girl standing in the crowd. They waved a sign. It read: WELCOME MICHAEL KATZ.

EPILOGUE This memoir is a result of the successful efforts of Mia Swart to describe my past within the realm of the Holocaust. She did it with the skill of an interviewer and her willingness—nay, even prudence—to address with accuracy the facts and their chronology.

Moreover, she supplemented the information so derived by her visits to many of the places wherein these events happened. These efforts assured the precision of what she has described.

The reader may reflect on the fact that my past falls into three phases. The first one, my comfortable lifestyle at home in Lwów and my happy attendance of a private primary school. The second, starting at age 11, with the outbreak of the Second World War when I lived in Warsaw and then went back to Lwów to what initially was relative safety even under the Soviets. Later, under the circumstances of the German occupation, those conditions became intolerable and evolved into the Holocaust and the loss of my family.

The third phase began as I descended in New York from the SS Marine Perch and was welcomed by Marcus—a brother in-law of my Grandmother’s sister who had immigrated to the United States right after the Russian Revolution. He was accompanied by his daughter Nadia, a girl of my age.

From then on, my life achieved a welcome normality. I completed my college education, followed by medical school. I became a physician and a scholar engaged in research and attained a university professorship. I have now begun writing about this third phase of my personal history and hope to complete this final effort.

Michael Katz New York 2023

155

156 ON BONIFRATRÓW STREET

Michael, his wife Robin and son Edward (Teddy) in Lake Placid New York, June 2021

ENDNOTE Many of the characters in the book did not survive the Holocaust. Aunt Lisa and Adas were deported from the Lwów Ghetto and did not survive. Michael never learnt what happened to his step-aunt Nina. When he visited Moscow after the war, he tried to find her husband but failed to reach him.

Michael later established that his mother and his grandparents were killed in Belżec, in all probability in one of the gas vans or stationary gas chambers straight after arriving at the camp. He believes his father was killed in either Majdanik or Treblinka extermination camps. His transport to Treblinka or Majdanek left the Umschlagplatz in the Warsaw Ghetto in September 1942.

Michael still keeps in touch with his friend Marcel who now lives in Australia.

157

ibidem.eu