My father’s parents were born near Brzozow, in the Southeast of Poland. They left for America by 1915, but a good part of their family was still there when the Germans invaded. Most died locally, en masse in August 1942, but a few were harbored by neighboring families. I had the name and address of the family who saved my father’s cousin Millie Zuckerman and her family, and I wanted to visit the village, and them.
The Shoah had never been too far away while I was growing up, most tangibly represented always by cousin Millie, and her husband, Abe who survived a succession of concentration camps.
In order to get acquainted with Poland, I took a tour of "Jewish Warsaw" from a man who was very articulate, quite bitter about the Poles, and only moderately interested in my cousins’ story. He reminded me that Jews also died in the years after WWII. He came from an agency of young Polish Jews who cater to the tourist trade, which has boomed in the aftermath of Schindler’s List.
A guide for a similar tour of Cracow was like a character from a Sholom Aleichem story, highly eccentric and very knowledgeable. His clothes needed a good wash, but he’d written a respected book on Cracow’s Jewish history. He should consider a career other than tour guide.
His father had done slave labor in Germany, his mother in Siberia, and, lacking any alternative, they came back to Poland to live as post-war Jews. He also dispensed considerable vitriol at the Poles.
Everywhere I went I saw large groups of Israeli teenagers visiting formerly Jewish areas and holocaust memorial sites. They make the trip prior to joining the army, and march through the local streets singing. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is compared with Masada and their sleek buses are preceded by advance details of plainclothes security barking into cell phones in Hebrew in the market square.
My visit to Auschwitz had two guides, a bubbly young one who rattled amiably on the bus out and back, and a more serious older one on site, who did the dirty work of showing the gas chambers, ovens, and slave quarters.
The Visit To The Village:
The translator who accompanied me to the village was a young Pole who works for a "Jewish Cultural Foundation" which is composed of non-Jews. It reminded me that interest by young people in Jewish folk arts was an act of cultural resistance in East European countries during the waning years of socialism.
Robert (named by his mother after Mr. Redford) Gdanek’s agency wasn’t admired by my previous guides, but he displayed a good knowledge of history, spoke culturally-attuned English, and was a real hit in the village, where he essentially blended into all the families who’s stories he was carefully handing back and forth.
Our pulses quickened after a 3 1/2 hour ride when we saw the sign marking Humiska, a farming village with a bit of light industry. We followed a hand-drawn map that showed our points of interest.
The first passerby pointed us to the home of Zofia, who launched headlong into her story immediately after the minimal formality of washing her hands so she could shake ours. She was a teenager during the war, and stole about at night shuttling scarce food. Her narrative was peppered with an almost mantra-like repetition of "Proshe Pani", an honorific entreaty which loosely translates as "please sir". She spoke as if there wouldn’t be time to finish her story.
Her younger sister Hella was more deliberate and more reflective. She chose to talk to us on a stroll (she uses a walker) down the country lanes which connect the farms in the area.
Zofia lives in the house that had been the home of my cousins, The Marks, who were saved by Zofia’s mother, Michalina Kedra. Zofia’s brother’s home, down the road a bit, formerly had the stable in whose loft the Marks family hid most of the time.
If strangers came, someone would bang on the ceiling and they’d scamper down the trapdoor into a false wall, which was built for this purpose. They said it was 50 cm wide, you could only stand up. The first floor was used for keeping animals, which helped to obscure the wall. But then one winter the Germans came and took all the animals. That’s when food became a real problem.
It was really Mrs. Kedra who was responsible for the decision to harbor the Marks. She risked certain death for doing so, but, as a young widow with four children, she remembered that Mr. Mark had frequently extended credit to her for groceries in his store.
There were many stories of the searches that resulted from persistent rumors of Jews hidden in the village. On one, after Mrs. Kedra couldn’t slow the Germans down any longer, they found a chamber pot in the loft. She said "Well, my relatives have to stay here sometime if they can’t leave for home before the curfew". There were some Catholic icons up there to bolster the claim. She also was said to have successfully plied them with liquor on multiple occasions.
Standing in this loft, I could imagine the claustrophobia and powerlessness while a search was going on below, though I couldn’t begin to comprehend the tedium of stifling and freezing for endless months.
There were many other stories of harrowing ordeals and narrow escapes, many with details and characters that are tough to pin down. In general, they give the impression that, while Poles who risked their lives to save Jews were very much in the minority, there was at least some gray area between Poles who collaborated and Poles who resisted German genocide.
The village had a bit of an untouched quality to it. A horse drawn cart shared the street with cars. One rickety old Lada (a Fiat clone made in Russia) rumbled by with a farmer at the helm, a slobbery bulldog in the front passenger seat, and two babushka-wrapped women in back. I could feel some sense of what it must have been like in the past, except for whatever strands of the local fabric were once contributed by Jews.
The Final Analysis
On return to JFK, I had a Russian Jewish cab driver from Siberia. They know a thing or two about WWII there so I told him my story. He thought it was just wonderful that the Mark’s neighbors had acted so honorably in life-and-death circumstances. Then he asked where I was from and when I mentioned the NJ town where I spent my childhood, He said it was nice there until the (bleep) Schwartzas and Puerto Ricans moved in. I said it was that kind of talk that gave us the holocaust. I guess he agreed with me, he didn’t say another word for the rest of the ride.