After this short visit in Przemyśl, we took a train to Kraków, a beautiful old city at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. Kraków was lucky to be spared destruction as the Nazis retreated from the city. It had become a UNESCO world heritage city. Everywhere we went, we felt the Communist influence because the people were not open and were afraid to speak their minds.
The next day, we took a taxi to Auschwitz and spent four hours going from one building to another, looking at photographs, crying at brutally committed murders there during the war. There are pictures of children with shaved heads, frightened little children with tears in their eyes, naked children who could barely stand, their ribs protruding in starved bodies. I looked at these pictures thinking, “what if those children were my children?” We saw the gas chambers and the ovens where the bodies were burned. It is hard to describe all that we saw and harder still to describe how we felt about Auschwitz and what went on there, while the rest of the world looked the other way. I remember the brick wall against which victims had been shot. I remember a display of a variety of hair types that had been shaved: long, short, braided, blonde, brown, and many shades of gray. There were windows with displays of all kinds of shoes and another with eyeglasses and combs and suitcases with names and addresses of the many thousands of victims. Auschwitz gives one all the information about cruelty and torture that the Nazis inflicted on those who were about to be shot or gassed or burned in the ovens. On the way back in a taxi, we were silent; there were no more tears left, no more words to describe the atrocities committed, man’s inhumanity to man, the bestiality and complete lack of any guilt on the part of the murderers. I’m glad we went back to Poland, I’m glad I saw my town, and painful as it was, I wouldn’t have missed the experience of going through Auschwitz. I was grateful that I had not been one of its victims, as many of my closest relatives were. It was a grim and painful memorial to the more than a million Jews, Poles, and Roma murdered there. At the time we visited, Auschwitz had not become the major tourist destination it is today; thus there was little information upon entering and no guidebooks. Harold and I traveled there three more times, taking one of our children with us each time. By then, there were many more visitors, guidebooks, and long lines. On our last visit, there were kiosks that sold postcards and books, as well as a snack bar. It looked more like Disneyland than an encampment whose purpose was the wholesale massacre of European Jewry. Children, accompanying their families happily played hide and seek, totally unaware of what had taken place within the camp. By the grace of God, they were living in a time when they would not be starved, beaten, or forced to undergo sadistic medical experiments. In those years, few people asked survivors about their experiences, how they had survived, or what had happened to their families. People just did not ask such questions, and survivors were not forthcoming with their stories.
We left Poland, stopping in England to visit our relatives, grateful to be in a free country again. What a different feeling to see throngs of happy, smiling, colorful people!
Anka Piper
Anka survived the war and sometime in 1980s, long after I’d moved to America, I attended a meeting of The Children of The Holocaust, of which I am a member. There I met a man from England who happened to be Anka’s cousin. He told me that she was living in Israel. He gave me her address and I wrote to her in Polish, saying, “You survived and I survived! What are you doing now?” In her return letter, she said she hated the Polish language and would rather I wrote to her in English, because she was able to write in English to a degree. Since I wasn’t able to write Hebrew, I was glad to correspond with her in English; by then it was easier for me to write in English than in Polish.
Anka wrote back, saying that after the war she’d married a man much older than herself and that they had had two sons. They eventually divorced, and she was living on a kibbutz. For a time, we wrote back and forth, but after a while, we stopped.
Years later on a trip to Israel, I found her phone number and called her. She was still living in the kibbutz. Her first sentence to me was, “How did you get my phone number?”
“I’m in Israel, I’d love to see you,” I said.
“No, that’s impossible,” she said.
We’d rented a car, so I offered to come to her, but she was very adamant about not being able to see me under any circumstances. Harold thought she may have been embarrassed about her lifestyle. She sounded very depressed. I was sorry we couldn’t meet her because we’d been the only two Jewish students in Gimnazjum in Przemyśl and we’d both survived.
We didn’t see her then or any other time. She just wished us a nice time in Israel. Our correspondence stopped after that, and I was disappointed; meeting someone from my past would have meant a lot to me. I had hoped she might feel the same.
Letter from Eva Sokoluk
Eva Sokoluk’s family, Męciński, lived in our building before the war in an apartment above ours. After the war and after her aunts had died, Eva, a retired school teacher, was the only occupant in the apartment, which by then had one bedroom/living room, kitchen and bathroom. Even though I had sold the building several years earlier, I insisted that her rent should never be raised; we actually paid the new owner to install a tub in her bathroom. We saw Eva on each trip, brought her gifts, and took her out to restaurants, because it was a special treat for her. Eva lived a simple life on her retirement allowance, watching every grosz—penny. Unfortunately, on our last trip, she was unable to walk down a flight of stairs to see us and I couldn’t walk upstairs. She looked down at me from her window; I stood on the street, looking up at her, and we exchanged just a few words.
A few years earlier in 2002 or 2003, I had received a letter from Eva that made a great impression on me. It contained part of an article written by Anna Strońska about her aunt who used to take her shopping when she was a little girl to my father’s store. She went on at great length about the store, bringing back many childhood memories for me.
Several years ago on a visit to Przemyśl, I had seen in an antique store a very attractive painting of a little girl holding a teddy bear. I wanted to buy it. The painter was Marian Stroński, an artist from Przemyśl. I found out that his daughter, Anna, the little girl in the painting, was still living in town. We asked at the antique store if we might meet Anna, and they said she worked at the library, which had once been an old synagogue—the only synagogue not destroyed by the Nazis. We knew well the building’s location as we had passed by it many times, wondering what it looked like inside.
We met Anna at the library and arranged to meet at her home after she finished work. I wanted to see her father’s other paintings, still in her possession. She told us that she would show us the pieces but wouldn’t sell them. Subsequently, I did buy the painting from the antique shop, because it was charming. Since we had time on our hands, we went to the city museum where we saw quite a few of Marian Stroński’s paintings. He had been a prolific artist who’d painted all his life and had even managed to sell enough of his work during the war to support his family. He painted both portraits and landscapes. His styles varied, but I liked all the paintings we saw. I also bought a book of his paintings.
That evening, we went to Anna’s home. She was married to a local artist, but from the appearance of the house they seemed quite poor. It was a huge, sprawling house, which had belonged to her family and must have been beautiful at one time. It stood high on a very steep and narrow street near Zamek. As we entered, the smell of cat urine was strong throughout the house. Cats were everywhere on the furniture, on the table, the upholstery had been shredded, and the floors were dirty. Anna offered us tea, and though I wasn’t certain how clean the cups were, we accepted the drink to be polite.
She showed us a few paintings and among them was a watercolor of a tower, which reminded me of the Fredreum Tower in the park. I told her I’d like to buy it. She talked it over with her husband and came to the conclusion that though she was reluctant to sell any of her father’s a
rt, their roof needed repair and they needed money for the project. They decided to let us buy the watercolor. We then had two of Marian’s paintings, one a watercolor, the other an oil. Anna told us a bit about her father and her childhood. She remembered specifically when her father had painted her, so owning the painting and meeting the model was icing on the cake. All the while we talked, Anna smoked one cigarette after another and coughed a typical smoker’s cough.
Two years later, we went to Przemyśl again. We went to the library to see Anna, but another librarian informed us that Anna had died of lung cancer. We were shocked. Though only in her forties, she’d been a chain smoker. Her husband remarried soon after her death, and no one knew the current owners of her large, rambling house. Again we went to the antique shop, where there were two more paintings by Stroński. This particular antique shop had a narrow room that was always cold and crammed with knick-knacks, icons, furniture, broken and chipped pottery, dusty old books, bits of cloth and lace, silver and jewelry, and one wall crowded with old photographs and paintings. It was hard to get close to the wall as the light was very poor. The shop had no electricity, probably because it was part of an old passageway. We asked to have a painting taken down so we could see it in the daylight. The painting was of a fisherman in a boat on the lake and seemed peaceful, reminding me of the American artist, Winslow Homer.
We bought the painting, though it cost more than it should have, since the owner of the store knew us by then.
Going back to Eva’s letter, she enclosed a copy of an article from Sennik Galicjanski, a title that translates as a Sleepy Galician, but it is also the name of a pamphlet. In the article, Anna muses about her childhood in Przemyśl. She mentions visits to a dentist who accepted Stroński’s paintings for his services. She also wrote about her mother and aunt shopping for fabrics at the Krebs store. She wrote that selecting fabrics was a very important task in those days. One needed to consider all possibilities, and my father treated his “special” customers with great delicacy and understanding, avoiding mention of the price of the fabric. The article says that my father was very patient with his customers, whispering to them to take their time and to extend their visit as long as they wished—as if his whole day was at their disposal. She said that he loved selling, loved telling them where the given fabric came from, how it was made, and how to clean or wash the garment. She does not exactly remember my father because she was just a little girl standing beside her aunt, but to her, the store was filled with multicolored silks, ribbons, chiffons, crêpe de chines and georgettes, all of the finest quality. The article brought me back to the days when I would go to the shop and be on my best behavior. After all, children were supposed to be seen and not heard in those days and could definitely not interfere with grownup business and conversation. Those were times when children knew their place and certainly did not dare to embarrass their parents with rude behavior.
My dear daddy. It was thrilling to discover how well his clients thought of him and how gallant he could be with them, and how much they trusted his taste and knowledge of fabrics.
I wish I had at least one photo of my father. I have just the memory of his photo when he was a handsome young student in Gimnazjum, wearing a velveteen uniform and holding his hat in his hand, blond wavy hair still growing on his head. He had a short little nose and always wore a smile on his face. He was not terribly tall by today’s standards. He was chunky but muscular, a good swimmer and dancer, and a connoisseur of good food. He was my daddy.
Przemyśl
During one of our trips to Przemyśl in the late 1990s, Harold, Julia, and I stayed at the Biały Orzeł, The White Eagle Hotel, on the same street where my house stood. While having breakfast in the hotel, we met three men in the dining room who were speaking English. It was a most unusual occurrence to hear English in Przemyśl at the time. For that matter, one saw very few foreigners in Przemyśl in those years. We asked the men what they were doing in the city. Two of them were businessmen from Canada, trying to help Poles start and develop businesses. The third man was a Pole who spoke fairly good English. He was the intermediary between the Canadians and Polish business people.
The Polish gentleman asked us what we were doing in Przemyśl. I told him that the house on Piłsudskiego Street had belonged to my parents and that I had lived there before the war. He became very excited, insisting that we meet his mother who lived on the other side of the River San. Though we were ready to leave Przemyśl after breakfast, we asked our driver to take us to the apartment of the young man’s mother for a short visit.
The short visit turned into a long visit. First we were served tea and homemade apple cake. Then the woman told us a story.
Her grandmother’s maiden name was Goliger (my mother’s maiden name) and she’d married a Catholic. They lived in Przemyśl. I had never before heard her name mentioned. It must have been a family secret; as a child I’d known nothing about it. The woman said that during the Nazi occupation, her father had been arrested and interrogated several times by the Gestapo. The Nazis had considered her father Jewish (a second or third generation descendant of a Jew), and so her father was called into the police station several times for questioning. He was lucky to be released each time. On one such occasion, our hostess had gone with her father to the police. She was petrified of the Nazis. All the Gestapo members acted very scary, as if they were ready to kill or arrest you. She didn’t see any maltreatment, but when they were finally released and allowed to leave the police station and go home, the young girl was so angry with her father that she beat him with her small fists, crying and asking why he had to have a Jewish relative, why he would have anything to do with Jews.
On the day she told us that story, she admitted that she felt actually more Jewish than Catholic, saying that since we were sort of related, she was very happy to have met me. She was about my age and we corresponded for a while. We saw her on another visit to Przemyśl, but she behaved rather oddly. It was hard to have a conversation with her. When we invited her to a restaurant, she didn’t order any food but sat at the table, drinking tea and watching us eat. She didn’t trust any food she hadn’t cooked herself.
I knew nothing about my grandparents; I’d never met them nor asked my parents about them. And I didn’t know the first name of the woman’s grandmother. I don’t know how religious my grandparents were, but it seems they did not want to consider her part of the Goliger family, given that she’d married a Catholic. She’d stopped existing for them. I wondered how many other family secrets I didn’t know. I’ll probably never know…
Return to Lwów
For years, I wanted to return to Lwów. Though the city had been part of Poland for 400 years and again following the end of the First World War, Lwów was declared part of an independent Ukraine in 1991. In 2002, Harold and I planned to visit Lwów. We called the Ukrainian embassy in Washington to obtain a visa. Unfortunately, the embassy does not answer their mail nor do they answer their phone. The situation became even more frustrating when I contacted the travel agency. We were told that we could obtain a visa, but it would take several weeks. We didn’t have the time: we were leaving for Europe in two weeks. Furthermore, we would have had to send our passports to the travel agency, $100 dollars apiece, plus $50 for postage and another $100 dollars for their services.
“All of this for a two-day visa?” Harold asked.
Ultimately, he refused to put our passports in the mail for safety’s sake. We had pretty much decided not to go, but then I had an inspiration. I contacted a professor who’d been managing the Jewish Cultural Center in Kraków. The professor returned my email, answering that he’d contact the Ukrainian embassy in Kraków to make an appointment for us to obtain visas in just a few hours. Sure enough, the day after our arrival in Kraków, we hurried to the embassy at 10:00 a.m., and after depositing cash of $200 dollars into a specific bank, we were given a visa, stamped into our passports.17
What was so important that I felt I had to
visit Lwów? Perhaps I felt I had to see the Janowska Street camp or what was left of it. We don’t hear much about that camp or about the Bełżec extermination camp, about the Piaski Mountain, about the Kleparów railroad station from which so many Jews were deported, about the railroad station where hundreds and thousands of Jews were sent to Bełżec to be gassed. How many people have now heard of these names? Many people have heard of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Treblinka, but the names of the camps in Eastern Poland have been largely neglected and forgotten. That was why I had to go there once more: as a pilgrimage to the land where my parents had lived and where they’d been murdered
In the 1960s or 1970s, I learned more concrete information from a man, a Dr. Drix, who’d written a book about his experiences in Janowska Street Camp. The Nazis had built a sub-camp on the Janowska Street section of Lwów, where most victims were brought before going to Bełżec. The camp remained active until the end of the war and Dr. Drix had miraculously survived, working as a doctor at Janowska Street camp. After reading his book, I called him in New York, where he resided and still practiced medicine. I asked him if, by some unlikely chance, he had met my mother after she’d been rounded up from the ghetto. He answered, “My dear lady, my own mother and my sister were both taken during the same akcja. They had no chance of survival because they were taken straight to Bełżec extermination camp in Eastern Poland. No one survived Bełżec.”
The Girl in the Cellar Page 14