The Polish army disbanded after a few days, the soldiers ran away, and Poland surrendered. My father did not know exactly where his family was, but the only escape route was toward Lvov. He joined a caravan of people moving eastward and eventually arrived in Russia. Fortunately, he finally found us after placing an ad in the newspaper.
Life in Russia was very difficult. To support the family, first my father bought dairy products from farmers and sold the merchandise in the city. Then he became a foreman in a peat and coke factory. When my little sister became critically ill with diphtheria, it was not possible to get her the medical care she needed, and she died. She was only eighteen months old. After several months, the Russian government announced that all Polish nationals were required to take out Russian papers in order to live and work there. No one knew what to do. People feared that if they had Russian documents, they would not be allowed to return to their native land and claim the property they left behind. They hoped the war would be over soon. My grandparents and aunt and uncle decided to comply. As a result, along with thousands of others they were sent to Siberia to work in labor camps. Another aunt and uncle and their little boy got off the train heading to Siberia but did not survive. My grandmother died in the extremely harsh conditions of Siberia.
My parents decided to return to Poland - a grave mistake. When we came hack to Nowy Targ, all Jews were rounded up and forced to ______ in a confined area, the ghetto. The conditions were deplorable, and our family suffered daily indignities. Every day, people were hanged in the town square. One time I recall a sign reading “kosher meat” was pinned to the clothes of two elderly Jewish men who were hanged. The Germans appropriated to themselves anything that belonged to Jews. Every day they deported Jews. No one knew for sure where they were being sent, but people suspected it was concentration camps. The Gestapo arrested my father just after he returned from Russia; they questioned him about whether he had any affiliation with the communists, and eventually released him.
When news spread that the ghetto was to be liquidated, we planned an escape. My father put us on a train bound for Krakow, about 30 miles away. Traveling by train was very dangerous, as we might be recognized by the Gestapo who were everywhere. Instead of traveling with us my father hid in a Polish friend's attic, but he could not stay there long because they were afraid of consequences. My father met us, as planned, in the small village of Niepolomice, near Krakow, where our relatives lived. But we learned that soon the Jews of that town too were to be liquidated on a particular day. All were ordered to report to a sports stadium. Once more my parents made a courageous attempt to escape. We left in the middle of the night in a horse and wagon, to what destination I do not know, for there was nowhere to go or hide. When we realized that the police were in pursuit, we hid in potato fields. But our feeble attempt failed. The Polish police, who were collaborating with the Nazis, caught us, beat us with clubs, and returned us to the village.
The next day my parents made an agonizing decision: to give their remaining child away. It was brave, courageous, selfless, an unimaginable act of pure goodness and love. A woman, nursemaid to one of the cousins, agreed to take me for a short time. She was part Polish and part German, known as Volksdeutsch, and enjoyed some extra privileges. I never saw my mother again. I left with the woman by train for Krakow.
The following day, my parents, along with thousands of others, reported to the stadium. They made another agonizing decision, to separate in the stadium, thinking that this maneuver would maximize the chance of at least one of them surviving. They were correct. Father was sent to the right; my mother, sent to the left, was taken to the forest on the outskirts of town along with several thousand other unfortunates and brutally shot to death.
My father was sent first to the Krakow ghetto, then to Plaszow concentration camp, the site of Spielberg's film Schindler's List, to work in a cable factory in Krakow. He told me he kept a small photograph of me on his machine where he worked. The memory of me gave him a reason to live. My father had various jobs in the camp. The last was to dig up dead bodies and burn them so that no evidence would remain. There was a mountain of ashes, and the smell of burning bodies drifted for miles. Once, late at night, when my father was in the latrine, smoking a cigarette butt he found there, he was shot and the bullet lodged in his cheek. He could not cry out or get medical attention, and the bullet remained in the cheek until the end of the war.
Staying with the Polish woman, I had many frightening experiences. Once, a Gestapo man came looking for Jews in hiding. He ransacked the apartment, looked at me, held my blond pigtail in his fingers, and left. I still remember his chilling smile, blond hair, and black-leather knee-high boots, that made a clicking sound as he descended the stairs.
While still in the ghetto, my father knew my stay with the Polish woman had to be temporary, and he had to figure out what to do with me. He was able to buy the birth certificate of a deceased Polish girl from a Catholic priest, and I became that girl. I had a new identity, a new name: Krystyna Antoszkiewicz. He also contacted our cousin, a young woman, who also had falsified Polish papers with the name Halina Walkowska. She agreed to take me, and we went to live in Myslenice, a town close to Krakow.
One day she told me she was going to meet her Polish boyfriend in a Krakow cafe. She instructed me to wait for her in the church across the street. Though I waited for hours, she did not return. When I walked out to the street I saw it was cordoned off. The Gestapo had arrested everyone in the cafe. It was May 21, 1943. There I was, seven years old, walking the streets and crying, completely bewildered and terrified, not knowing what to do. I was alone in the world. (I have learned that this cafe was a famous meeting place for the Polish resistance movement, and that my cousin and her friend belonged to the Armja Krajowa. An ammunition factory stood behind the boyfriend's shoe factory. I vividly recollect taking very heavy parcels to the post office to mail, some going to Russia).
An older woman came to me and asked what was the matter. She looked around, making sure no one was looking, placed me under her large cape, and quickly whisked me into the building housing the cafe. She was the caretaker of the building and took me upstairs to a woman named Alicja Golob. Alicja asked me, “Who are you, where do you come from?” I repeated a well-rehearsed phrase: “I come from Warsaw, my parents were killed in a bombing raid, my father was an officer in the Polish army.” That night Alicja's son, Stashek, took me to the farm, a four-kilometer walk. It was too dangerous to remain in that apartment, for the Gestapo always returned to the scene.
Alicja's mother was an active member of the Polish resistance. She housed ammunition and shortwave radios and maintained an in-house hospital for wounded men and women of the resistance. Hiding all the evidence was imperative. She was eventually arrested as a political prisoner. Because of the torture she endured, she died only a few days after her release from prison.
The farm was owned by the Catholic Church and administered by Jan Golob, Alicja's brother-in-law. Another brother, Julius Golob, a priest, hid a Jewish engineer in his rectory for the duration of the war. The man survived and, after the war, converted to Catholicism. Alicja's husband, Ludvig, was a judge. He and Julius saved two hundred Jews by giving them baptismal papers (I saw the records on a recent visit to Poland). They treated me like one of the family and asked me no more questions, since it was safer not to know my true identity. I could not go to school because people might get suspicious and ask too many questions. How could my presence be explained? I did not have my identification papers.
One day the Gestapo came. Right after slaughtering a pig - a criminal offense punishable by death - we were alerted that they were on the way. We quickly cleaned up and hid the evidence in the attic. When the Gestapo came, I am told I said, “Give them vodka,” and started to sing and dance in order to distract them. They were amused. They, laughed, joked and left. Our risky task went undetected. The Germans came frequently to the farm, appropriating meat, vegetables, milk, and cheese at will.
I remained with this Polish family until the end of the war, when my cousin's father came to take me. I was sad to leave, and the family wanted to keep me but felt that ethically and morally it was the wrong thing to do.
Out of a very large family, my father and I were the only survivors. Several of my relatives were ordered to march to the Jewish cemetery and dig their own graves; they were then shot. An uncle broke away and ran, but was shot in the back. Another uncle hid in a baker's oven. He was recognized, reported, and shot to death. Although my grandfather escaped to Krakow, someone recognized him and denounced him. He, too, was shot. Before reunion with my father, I was in the refugee center in Krakow, on Ulica Dluga, with a small number of Jewish children who had survived. Most of us were malnourished, frightened, and sick. There was no one to take care of us until Lena Kuchler made a commitment to do something with these broken lives. With great effort she started two orphanages. The one in Rabka was for children with tuberculosis. I went to live at the other one, in Zakopane. Lena, a young woman who had herself lost her child and husband, eventually took one hundred of the orphans out of Poland and brought them to Israel. I was one of the very few lucky ones, for my father had survived. Lena wrote a book, which was made into a television movie in 1987 - Lena: My One Hundred Children.
When I first saw my father I was terribly frightened of him. He looked like a skeleton, weighing only eighty pounds. I had not seen him in two and a half years and did not recognize him. Lena had become a mother to all the children and it was difficult for me to once more make a change. My father rented a room near the orphanage while he recuperated. We took some time to become reacquainted. My own health was not that good; I had malnutrition and a problem walking. Frequently, when the children went on hikes into the mountains, I could not go with them.
Anti-Semitism in Poland after the war was extreme. Frequently the Jewish children were beaten up when they went to school and many teachers condoned this behavior. When armed men on horseback attacked the orphanage, the older children with guns and ammunition successfully defended the home.
My father and I went back to our village. I was the only Jewish child from that town to survive. We lived in my grandparent's house with several other people who had returned. We had to live together for our own protection; our lives were threatened daily. Several of my father's friends were murdered after the war. We found notes posted on our door saying, “Hitler did not complete the job. We will kill you.” When my father went to the police asking for help, they told him they could do nothing. The police chief gave my father a gun, which he kept under his pillow when he slept, ready to protect us. We soon realized that our future was not in Poland, so we emigrated to the United States in March 1947.
My rescuers were unusual, special people. They did not stop to analyze their actions, did not waiver, hesitate, or even think about the tragedy that could result from their acts. Although they knew they were risking their own lives, they simply responded to the cries of an abandoned child. They did not care who I was or what religious background I came from. Their motive was pure and simple: to save a child. My rescuers are the genuine heroes. They asked for nothing and gave everything.
