In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer

  “Irena! Irena!” she screamed. “It's Irena!” The door burst open at her touch and she fled inside, still screeching.

  All the hairs on my body stood up as though I had touched an electric wire. “Bronia!” I whispered. “She is little Bronia!”

  Tears flooded my eyes. I fell more than climbed down I from the buggy. Distantly, I heard its wheels whirring away as I fumbled for the gate. In my haste and excitement, I could not work the catch. I heard a cry from the house, and when I looked up, Mamusia and Tatuś were framed in the doorway.

  Like a bird freed from a net, my heart flew up to the sky.

  When I Thought I Could Be Happy

  Tell me the happiest you have ever been, and I can say that on that day, I was happier. Our tears wet each other's cheeks as I kissed my parents and my sisters Marysia and Bronia and Władzia. “Janina?” I asked, holding my father's hand to my face. “Where is Janina?”

  “She has a job in a restaurant,” Mamusia said as she stroked my hair. “She'll be home soon.”

  We cried and hugged each other, and I laughed and ruffled little Władzia's curls, and I did not have a handkerchief but sniffled and had to wipe my nose with the back of my hand, and then we all began crying afresh as we moved in an awkward clump of embracing bodies into the house.

  Bit by bit, I began to take in my surroundings. I had interrupted some task on the dining room table, where there were scraps of rubber tires and piles of blankets. A large cone of coarse black thread stood amid the jumble.

  “We make carpet slippers,” Tatuś explained, flushing slightly. His chin jutted, and I saw that the collar of his shirt gaped around his neck. He had lost so much weight. “It earns us some money.”

  Mamusia picked up a pair of heavy scissors and began cutting a blanket. “Enough to help out poor Helen. Her husband was killed in the first fighting.”

  With a sister holding each of my hands, I pushed a chair to the table and watched my family work. As they pieced together cheap slippers from retreads and mothy fabric, we took turns piecing together our stories. I had been gone from Radom for twenty months, but I had been separated from my parents and sisters even longer—nearly two years. We had lost precious time as a family.

  And the war had taken its toll on them. Tatuś had lost his job: All Polish intellectuals and professionals had been ousted by the invading Germans. Most had been sent to prison camps; many had been executed—at least, that was what everyone assumed. Men had disappeared and never been heard from again. That made poor Tatuś, reduced to sewing black-market slippers, one of the lucky ones. Mamusia's dark hair had turned completely gray since I last saw her. Kozłowa Góra and the rest of Oberschlesien had been snapped up by Germany, and my family, along with many others, had fled eastward, into the “independent” Poland now known as the General Gouvernement. It was as independent as a prisoner in leg irons.

  “Now we live like slaves, or worse,” Tatuś said, frowning, as he used an awl to punch a hole in a rubber sole. “All Poles are subject to the death penalty for violating curfew or selling black-market goods, or for demonstrating a ‘hostile mentality‘—”

  “What could be more subjective?” Mamusia broke in.

  “We must step off the sidewalk and remove our hats if a German approaches,” Tatuś continued, still drilling with great concentration. “And the death penalty is automatic for anyone helping the Jews.”

  I felt a chill drive away our joy. “Helping the Jews?” I asked, squeezing Bronia's hand. “Helping the Jews do what?”

  Mamusia and Tatuś exchanged a glance. “Live. Work. Get away,” Mamusia said. “They are—they are not wanted by the Germans.”

  I was baffled. “Then why don't the Germans let them leave?”

  “I don't think that is what Hitler has in mind,” Tatuś began carefully. “I am afraid—”

  We heard the door open, and a cheery voice that brought fresh tears of joy to my eyes sang out, “I'm home! Where is everyone?”

  Janina walked into the dining room, shaking her hair as she pulled off her hat. She froze when she saw me.

  “Irena!”

  We both screamed at the same time and ran into each other's arms. “I can't believe it!” she cried, jumping up and down with me. “I can't believe you're real!” We found Bronia and Władzia and Marysia in the embrace with us, and all five of us laughed and sobbed as we clung together, together again.

  That night, when we sat down to dinner with Aunt Helen, Tatuś spoke a special prayer of thanksgiving for our safe reunion. In that time of war, it was almost a miracle that our family was intact. Our home, our beautiful villa in Kozłowa Góra, was gone; all our possessions, our mementos, our photographs and books—everything was gone. But we were together. We were lucky.

  That night, after the younger girls were in bed, I told my parents the full story of what had happened to me since the invasion in 1939. Janina held my hand as I faltered through the story of my desperate days in the forest with the Polish army, and my voice sank to a whisper when I told my loved ones that I had been raped. There, safe with my family, I began to weep anew at what the soldiers had done to me.

  Tatuś leaned across the table and put his hand on my shoulder. “Irenka, my dear girl. War makes men animals. You must not let this ruin your life. God has plans for you. He did not let you die. God has plans for you.”

  I caught his hand and kissed it, while the hot tears squeezed out between my lashes. “Yes, Tatuś. I must believe that. But it is very hard.”

  The next day, Janina took me on a tour of Radom, now so different from what I remembered that it was like a new city, where even the street names glorified the Third Reich. The restaurant where she worked was run by a Polish couple, but it served only Germans: The Poles could not afford restaurants anymore. Everywhere we went, there were German soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht, and SS men in black uniforms. Savage-looking Alsatian dogs strained at their leashes, egged on to viciousness by their handlers. We saw swastika-studded signs posted at frequent intervals along the streets, listing the rules by which the Poles must now live. There were many rules. The punishments for breaking them were strict.

  And pasted on the walls were posters—cruel, mocking posters—caricaturing the Jews, who were linked to every depravity and sin. Every woe and affliction of the Polish people was laid at their feet. Loudspeakers on street corners blared warnings about the Jews in Polish and German. As we passed the mouth of an alleyway, I noticed three Nazis shouting at an old Jewish man crouched at their feet; he was trying to pluck his yarmulke from beneath one Nazi's boot. Janina took my arm and hustled me down the sidewalk, her face pale. I could not believe my senses, but every time I tried to ask Janina what it was all about, she shook her head and glanced from side to side, on the lookout for Germans.

  “This is Poland, now,” Janina said from the side of her mouth.

  Without more words, she led me down Reichstrasse. I stared in disbelief at everything I saw, and stumbled when Janina pulled me off the sidewalk to let Germans pass. “Where are we going?” I muttered, keeping my head down.

  “I want you to see something.”

  We headed south to Glinice, a Jewish section of Radom. As we approached the district, I saw newly built fences topped with barbed wire stretching across streets. I did not want to ask what the fences meant.

  At last we paused, and Janina pretended to be fixing my collar. She turned me to face across the street. There was a gate, guarded by German soldiers and dogs. A large sign warned against typhus. The word Verboten screamed at me from across two lanes of traffic.

  “Glinice ghetto,” Janina murmured, patting my collar into place. “All the Jews from Radom and the surrounding countryside have been forced to move in there, and into Walowa ghetto.”

  Then, in a bright, false voice, she said, “Let's go home, Irenka!” She gave a dazzling smile to a couple of soldiers as we hurried by.

  “But what does it mean?” I asked under my breath.

 
“We don't know.”

  Thus was my reunion with my family cast into shadow. We did not know what was going on. Rumors passed with each exchange of ration coupons for bread or cheese. Some said that Hitler was planning to exterminate the Jews, but in our family, we thought that was simply too preposterous to believe. Many of our neighbors in Radom figured the condition of the Jews was the Jews’ problem: We Poles had enough of our own, with the brutal way we were being treated.

  My nineteenth birthday was marked with only a small celebration. A few days later, I reported to the Arbeitsamt to register for work; I was issued an Arbeitskarte and a Kennkarte, my working papers and identity card. Because of my fluency in German, I was assigned to a German-run restaurant, but the place was hateful to me, filled with smoke and half-drunk soldiers trying to feel me up as I passed with heavy trays. Even the owner cornered me in the pantry one day; he was begging for a kiss when his wife caught him. I was fired. Shortly thereafter I found another job, in a small Polish-run shop near Aunt Helen's home, and that seemed ideal. It was close to home, and I was not surrounded all day by Germans.

  So we passed through May and into June, and although food was scarce and we were all working hard just to get by, we took joy every day in knowing that our family was together. We were crowded in Aunt Helen's little house, but we consoled ourselves with songs, just as we had in the old days. When we gathered around the table, raising our voices and laughing over forgotten lyrics, we could almost imagine nothing was wrong. If we could just hold out until the end of the war, we believed, things must surely get better.

  But June brought news that Germany and the Soviet Union were now fighting each other; the wary peace between them had fallen apart. Janina and I lay awake at night, listening to our parents whisper in the next bed about how much longer now the war would last. When we eavesdropped on our parents this way, neither Janina nor I acknowledged to the other that we were awake. I think, for each other's sake, we wanted to pretend that we did not know how worried our parents were. But the moonlight would catch a corner of Janina's eye, glinting as she stared at the ceiling; sometimes a tear shone like oil. She was seventeen, and she had grown up fast in the last two years, but I felt a hundred years older. I felt that I had suffered my allotment of pain during my exile, and like a selfish child I wanted my life to be good and happy again. I thought I should be allowed to be happy once more.

  But even as I made the wish, it was destroyed: The Germans came one day in July and took Tatuś away.

  We were stunned. We sat at the dining room table like victims of a fire, red-eyed and speechless. The ceramics factory Tatuś had designed in Kozłowa Góra was important to the war effort, and the Reich needed his expertise to help make it function. The Germans wanted him; they took him.

  For several weeks we heard nothing; then a letter from Tatuś came, and Mamusia broke down weeping over his news: strangers in our house, old friends turning away from Tatuś because he was working for the Germans. When she was recovered enough to speak, she announced that she would take the three younger girls and go to Tatuś in Kozłowa Góra. However, she had heard rumors that young Polish women with Germanic features were being put into brothels in Germany; she would not risk taking me and Janina to Ober-schlesien.

  To me and Janina, it was as though we had woken from one nightmare into another. First Tatuś was gone. Now Mamusia, Marysia, Bronia, and Władzia were leaving us all at once. I could not believe this was happening so soon after I'd been reunited with my family. They were vanishing before my very eyes, like thistledown in the wind. Janina and I begged Mamusia to take us with her, but she was adamant. We pleaded with her, sobbing, all the way to the train station. We made ourselves sick with weeping, and gagged on our own tears. But when the train left, our mother and sisters were on it and we had been left behind.

  Now that they were gone, Janina and I grew even closer, desperate to stay together. Leaving for work every day broke our hearts, for each parting was a reminder of the people we loved who had left. The house was emptier now, but we continued to share a bed, where we held hands each night until we fell asleep. I felt responsible for Janina; I felt I must protect her from the evil that was abroad in our world.

  Life in Radom grew harsher. The Polish people were not submitting to the occupation like sheep: There were acts of sabotage against the Germans all the time, but these rebellions were met with reprisals as swift, arbitrary, and deadly as lightning. Men were grabbed from the streets, thrown against walls, and shot. Six men at a time. Ten men. It did not matter to the Germans if those men were responsible for the sabotage, or how many Poles they killed—on the contrary, the more the better. Rapid gunfire was the metronome that kept time in our lives. We learned not to look when we heard the rattle of machine guns or the dull tock-tock of a Luger.

  And to support the fighting against the British in North Africa, and against the Russians on the eastern front, the Germans were determined to make Poland work, work hard. Every day, we heard of another friend or neighbor caught in a roundup, a lapanka. The leaders of the General Gouvernement were combing the population for workers, men and women between eighteen and forty, and trucking them away.

  Where did they go? No one knew, but everyone had a guess. To Germany? To the eastern front? Some people said the prisoners were taken for slave labor. Others worried that the Germans needed conscripts to fight the Allies and the Russians. The gloomiest speculated that the Poles were simply being put into prisons, or killed outright. The Germans despised us, and we knew it. They made it obvious with every crushing rule, with every public denunciation, every arbitrary punishment. They scourged us. Night and day, heavy transport trucks whined and growled through the city. The sound would halt us in our work, make us pause with a spoon halfway to our lips, wondering who was on that truck. And make us bear the dread until we saw our loved ones again.

  And even as the Poles were being shipped away, Jews were arriving. Sometimes, on my way to buy food, or to follow up a rumor of toilet paper or lightbulbs or real leather shoes, I would see a line of them being marched to the Walowa or Glinice ghetto. Some were well dressed in expensive city clothes in the latest styles and carried bulging suitcases; others looked less prosperous and carried their few worldly goods in cord-wrapped blankets; but all of them looked frightened. I did not see how so many people could keep squeezing into the ghettos; I could not even guess what the conditions were like there.

  Late summer and early fall had once been a time of mushroom hunting and hayrides for me. In 1941 those were months of work and fear. We did not hear from Mamusia and Tatuś. We could only pray that our family was safe in Kozłowa Góra, thinking of us as much as we thought of them.

  Most of our free time was spent devising ways to get more food, because we were always hungry. The policy of the General Gouvernement allowed very little food for Poles— less than half that allotted to Germans. We dutifully traded in our ration coupons, and what we got in return seemed no more substantial than the paper coupons themselves. It was obvious to me that I was anemic; the symptoms were familiar from my outlaw days in the eastern forests. Janina was sometimes able to bring leftovers home from the restaurant where she worked, but they were not enough to keep three adults healthy. Aunt Helen, Janina, and I were thin and pale, like all the other non-German residents of Radom.

  One Sunday, when I was not too tired, I took myself to church, looking for some comfort. I stood, and kneeled, and sat, and mumbled my responses by rote, but the mass did not give me the solace I craved. My mind wandered, fretting over my constant worries. How would we heat the house come winter? Where could I get Janina a warm coat? Who might be baking bread without too much sawdust in it? When would we hear from Tatuś and Mamusia?

  As the priest began intoning a benediction, I noticed a bird, a pigeon, fluttering up in the nave. I followed it with my eyes as it tried first one round window and then another, and its frantic beats sent a rain of dust slanting down through the light. It banged against a
window, stuttering with its wings. I felt the urge to cry out, to beg someone to help the bird escape, and then a confusion of sound came from outside the church. Motors raced and doors slammed, and there was a pounding of boots on the steps. There were indistinct shouts of command beyond the vestibule. In the congregation, people began turning in the pews and whispering, their eyes wide with fear. Several people got up and began edging along the aisle toward the sacristy, and one old woman began rocking back and forth, clutching her rosary and whispering her prayers through trembling lips. The priest faltered in his blessing, and his voice trailed off.

  Everyone was uncertain what to do. Were the soldiers looking for someone in particular? Was it a lapanka? Obviously, we could not stay in the church all day, but people were clearly frightened of going out. I could not take my eyes off the pigeon, still banging at the high windows. I had the wild thought that if the bird could only escape, everything would be all right. Someone jostled me, climbing past me to get to the aisle. At last, two graybeards strode to open the sanctuary doors. The look on their faces should have thrown the desecrators into hell.

  But it didn't. The uniformed soldiers were a dark mass against the brightness of the Sunday morning outside. With shouts of “Raus! Zum Strasse!” they herded us into the square in front of the church, which was ringed with more Wehrmacht soldiers pointing their guns. The priest tried pleading with an officer, but he was brushed aside.

  A wail went up from the parishioners as the soldiers strode into the crowd and began pulling people aside. A young woman shrieked as she was parted from her old mother; two young boys cried as their father was yanked away. To one side, a crowd of children and the elderly. To the other side, youths and the middle-aged.

  “Please get word to my sister and my aunt,” I whispered to the priest. “Helena Pawlowska and Janina Gutowna. Tell them what happened.”

  “Stitte!” A soldier lunged toward me, but I ducked away and went quickly where I was supposed to go. I felt the muscles in my back clench and twitch as I walked past a row of machine guns to the group of fit workers.