Two Sisters Reunited

by Ruth Mushin

So wrote Jadwiga Hegedus to her sister Irena on 9 April 1946. When Jadwiga and her family emerged from hiding after the Red Army liberated Poland in 1944, she immediately set about trying to find her beloved younger sister, Irena, who had migrated to Australia before the war. Irena too had been searching for Jadwiga and eventually found her through the Red Cross. Raw with emotion, Jadwiga’s reply to Irena’s letter expresses the joy of hearing from her sister and the sorrow of recounting the tragedy that had befallen their loved ones.

Jadwiga (nee Taube) and her husband Aleksandor (Sandor) lived in Lwów (then in Poland, now Lviv in Ukraine) with their only child, Andrzej (Andy), who was born in 1932. Sandor, whose parents had migrated from Hungary, worked with his father in their prestigious printing business. Jadwiga came from a traditional Jewish background; however, while Sandor and Jadwiga’s Jewish identity was important to them, they were not observant. They lived a comfortable middle-class life with close family ties, in a home Andy remembers as being filled with music.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the family continued to live in their apartment, but were forced to move into a ghetto in 1941. Believing that Andy would be safer in the countryside, his parents sent him to a farmer who soon returned him to Lwów as he felt that sheltering a Jewish child was too dangerous. A second family, who took their jewellery as payment, also sent him back to his parents when their children figured out that Andy was Jewish.

Through his many business contacts, Sandor managed to find a woman who was willing to hide the family. Helena Pelczarska was a tailor who lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment, and the family moved into her second bedroom. For over two years, Helena risked her life hiding them, going to different places to buy food so that it was not obvious that she was feeding three extra people.

Sandor, Jadwiga and Andy rarely left their room, living very quietly so that the neighbours would not discover them. Only Sandor, who did not look Jewish, would occasionally leave the apartment.

Jadwiga tells Irena of their mother’s tragic fate: she was living nearby in Lwów with false papers but was betrayed and then murdered in 1942. She writes:

Irus, it is hard for me to write about all this but all this needs to be written. I am alive and Sandor and Andrzej, and she is not here.

Apart from Cilica Lusia and Romek, none of the family are alive. Ciocia

Papcia hanged herself, Feliks died in a concentration camp, Ciocia Hindzia was killed and Edzio and Joachim and Zosia and Dziubka ... and Dunek and Giza and little Zosia and Leon and Lola and both Frydzias, all killed, tortured by the Germans ... Of our friends and acquaintances there is hardly anyone.

Sewer, Bronek, Mietek and Fryc are not alive, nor are their parents. In one word, there is no one left. It appears to me that this letter is chaotic, but I can’t do it any other way.

Eventually Irena was able to obtain permits to bring them to Australia, and in 1951, Sandor, Jadwiga and Andy arrived in Melbourne to begin their new life with Jadwiga’s beloved family.