From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  Another Russian patrol found her and brought her to a hospital. After recovering her strength, she went back to Radom in search of her family, but she was conscripted to work in a hotel serving the German high command. The back side of the building looked down into the Jewish ghetto, and after watching from a window as a Gestapo force swept through the area, gunning down helpless victims, she decided to act. The next day she stole some food from the hotel and pushed it under the ghetto fence.

  A few weeks later she saw a Nazi officer fling a Jewish baby into the air and then shoot it with his pistol as the baby’s mother watched. Something cracked deep inside her. “Like a little child, I have tantrum with my maker,” she recalled, her English still tinged with a Polish accent. “But in the morning, there was an answer in my soul, in my heart. God gives us free will, to be good or bad. I asked God at that moment for the opportunity to help.” A resistance fighter was born. Gradually she took bigger and bigger steps: from stealing food and passing secrets to hiding Jewish fugitives and raiding Nazi convoys. As her work got riskier, she realized she could be discovered and executed at any moment, but the knowledge that she “could only be killed once” kept her going. In her memoirs, Irene writes: “I only wanted not to die in too much pain, and to foil the Germans as much as I could before I went.”

  Transferred by the Nazis to the Ukrainian city of Ternopol, she met a group of Jewish laborers assigned to the laundry she was running for the German officers. Through her contacts with the laborers she smuggled food and intelligence to the Jewish underground hiding in the nearby forests. But when word came that the Gestapo was planning to liquidate every Jew in the city, including the slave laborers, her friends were suddenly facing mortal danger. She promised she would help, but one of the men, older and gloomier than the others, dismissed her with a shrug: “You’re only a young girl. What can you do?”

  Quite a lot, it turned out, but Irene refuses to take all the credit. “I believe a miracle happened,” she says simply. The German major she was working for commandeered a large villa and put Irene in charge of the housekeeping. Designed by a Jewish architect, the basement of the villa contained a network of secret rooms and passages, and just hours before the Gestapo arrived, she hid a dozen of her friends in the major’s house.

  They lived there for nine months. During the day, after the major left, the Jews would emerge from the cellar and help Irene run the house. At night they would return to their hiding place, and one frequent dinner guest was the local head of the Gestapo, who never knew he was eating meals prepared by Jews living literally beneath his feet. The scheme was working well until one of the Jewish women discovered she was pregnant. The group decided to abort the baby—any other course was too dangerous—but Irene pleaded with them. Wait, don’t let Hitler have this life, too. The Russians are advancing and something could happen.

  But then danger appeared from another direction. One day Irene was walking back to the villa and ran into a crowd blocking a square where a gallows had been built. A Polish couple and their two small children were being hanged for hiding a Jewish family. Irene was so upset that when she got back to the villa, she forgot to lock the front door behind her. Two Jewish girls, about her age, came up from the basement to console her, and suddenly, without warning, the German major walked in.

  He did not know that ten others were in the cellar, but he was still furious. That night the Nazi officer exacted a bargain from Irene: I’ll protect your friends if you become my mistress. The next morning, she writes, she fled the major’s bedroom and filled a tub: “I sank into water so hot it made me cry, and my tears plinked into the water as I scrubbed myself. This was worse than rape.” And yet she kept her bargain with the major. “I had banked on his affection for me for too long, used him for too long,” she writes. “I could not be surprised now that it had come to this accounting.” And besides, she adds, her shame “was a small price to pay for so many lives.”

  Sixteen lives in all, plus the baby conceived in the basement of the villa. With Russian forces approaching Ternopol, the Nazis fled and Irene smuggled her charges into the forest, to join the Jewish underground, and that’s where the baby was born a few months later. The German major took Irene with him on the retreat westward, but she managed to evade him in the city of Kielce and join a band of Polish partisans who were harassing any target they could find, German or Russian. She took the nom de guerre “Mala,” Polish for “little,” and fell in love with the group’s leader, Janek. They were planning to marry and settled on May 5, 1944, as their wedding day. Three days before, she was at the home of Janek’s parents, trying on her wedding dress, when her groom burst in the door, surprising her. “It’s bad luck to see the bride in her dress before the wedding,” his mother scolded, but he had news. A German transport was moving through the area that night and he would lead a raid against it. Irene pleaded with him not to go. “But, sweetheart,” he teased, “I’m the fearless leader.” Janek was killed in the ambush and buried in the forest.

  With her love lost and her heart shattered, Irene made contact with some of the Jews she’d helped to save. The Germans were gone, and the Jews felt free to emerge from hiding, but the Russian occupation weighed heavily. Irene was particularly anxious to see the baby, Roman Haller, who’d been born in the forest, and her eagerness dulled her survival instincts. Just blocks from the Hallers’ house, she was arrested by Russian police and interrogated for days about her partisan comrades. Again she escaped, but there was nothing left for her in Poland. If she looked for her family, she would place them in grave danger. In a final irony, her Jewish friends found her a forged transit pass with a Jewish alias, Sonia Sofierstein. With her blond hair dyed black, she took a train to Germany, and in May of 1946, she settled into life at a DP camp near the city of Hessich-Lichtenau. She’d been in the camp more than three years on the day, in the summer of 1949, that William Opdyke arrived to interview the residents.

  It was a rabbi in the camp who introduced them. As she remembers: “We had six languages between us but not one in common—except the language of laughter. We could not help chuckling at the predicament we were in. He called across the room to a colleague, and in a few moments we had another American with us, one who spoke German.” Opdyke asked a few questions but mainly let her talk. As she writes in her memoir: “I left nothing out. I think I wanted to shock him, to tell this well-fed American what a simple Polish girl was capable of. Opdyke had been taking notes, but he finally just put his pen down and stared at me. For a moment, I feared that he did not believe what I had told him. He said something to the interpreter in a gruff voice. ‘Mr. Opdyke says he feels honored to have met you, and that the United States would be proud to have you as a citizen.’” In our conversations with her, Irene embellished the story: “I liked him very much, a man with black hair with lots of silver in it. Tall, very distinguished, that reminded me of my father.” But she says sternly, “there was no romance” at the time. He was married, and he left without giving her an address or a telephone number in America.

  Later that year she arrived in New York aboard the troopship John Muir, which was carrying refugees from Europe. The Jewish Resettlement Organization found her a place to live in Brooklyn and a job in a corset factory, but they could not replace what she had lost: “I was alone without money, or family, or marketable skills.” After getting her first wages from the factory, she remembers: “I was so proud of myself—I could earn money!” But she lived quietly, still nursing her emotional wounds. When we asked if she had any social life in those years, Irene replied: “No, no. I was scared of men. I didn’t want to have anything to do with men.” She deliberately dressed to hide her beauty, in drab dark clothes, without any makeup. Still, one day when she was heading for work, a group of young men whistled at her. “In Poland, they do that for prostitutes, and when I came to the factory, I was so upset,” she says. “I asked the other girls, ‘Why did they do that to me?’” But she got a quick, amused reply: “In Amer
ica, when they stop doing that you’re in trouble.”

  After several years in the corset factory, Irene met Ruth Altman, a Jewish dressmaker originally from Poland. Ruth hired Irene for her business and the two women became friends and roommates. They went to movies and plays together, and the chill that had gripped Irene’s heart for so long began to thaw. “I was already six years in the United States and I quieted down,” she remembers. “I started having dreams. I wanted a normal life.” Then one day Ruth sent her on an errand, and Bill Opdyke sat down at her table. During lunch, he explained to her that his wife had died, and as they were finishing, he asked, “May I call you?” Irene’s English was still so poor she had trouble explaining to him where she lived, but he figured it out. On their first date they went to a nightclub and everybody else was laughing at the jokes. Irene didn’t get most of them, but apparently it didn’t matter. They danced instead—“he was a wonderful dancer and played the piano beautifully”—and she went home and prayed that he would call her again. He did, and when he proposed six weeks later, Irene remembers: “I was ready to accept. I was a woman, I wanted a child.”

  They were married quietly, on November 14, 1956, and Irene invited only two guests, Ruth Altman and Ruth’s mother. In the wedding pictures she is wearing a silk cocktail dress, with a short white veil—nothing like the fancy gown she was trying on that day, more than twelve years before, when her beloved Janek was killed. But she is clearly happy, slender and blond, beaming up at her husband who is almost a head taller. When it came to sex, she was both very innocent and deeply scarred, and as she puts it: “Bill knew my story, so he was very gentle with me.”

  She was so inexperienced that when she got pregnant a few months later, she didn’t know the signs. But when she started asking for some Polish food she hadn’t eaten in years, a friend took her to the doctor and he confirmed her condition. Bill was fifteen years older, he already had three children by his first marriage, and Irene was nervous about how he would take the news. He was pleased for her, but not exactly a modern, engaged father. After their daughter, Janina, was born—named for Irene’s favorite sister back in Poland—Bill “never changed a diaper, he didn’t know what to do, he was more like a grandfather.”

  Their time together was happy but brief. Bill was stricken with Alzheimer’s, and as Irene recalls: “He became a man I did not know. He would go into these rages and I thought he did not love me. It’s the most painful sickness, people change in front of your eyes.” Money was running low, the family was in danger of losing their house. And then, says Irene, “a miracle happened—again.” A rabbi who knew her story interceded. The Jewish old-age home in the area took in Bill Opdyke, a Christian, without charging a fee, and he died there five years later.

  Today Bill and Irene’s daughter, Janina Opdyke Smith, is the mother of two sons, and the grandmother of two girls, and Irene says proudly, “I’m a great-grandmother now.” Her marriage did not last long, but it lasted long enough. The man who gave her a new home in America also gave her something else. He gave back her life.

  Abe and Miriam Rogow: A Photo in the Window Sam and Norma Weiss: A Book of Poems

  These are two family sagas that Steve has told for years. For this book he interviewed several elderly relatives, filling gaps and correcting mistakes, and he retells the stories here.

  My grandfather, Abe Rogow, was always a restless person, full of schemes and dreams. As a boy, he helped his father in the textile business, running errands and collecting shipments of cloth at the train station. His hometown of Bialystok, now in eastern Poland, was then under Russian domination, and his older sister became an early convert to Bolshevism. Family legend has it that his sister would occasionally ask young Abe to pick up a package for her, and since he was well known at the station, no questions were asked. But they should have been. His sister’s packages contained copies of Iskra, the Leninist newspaper, that were being smuggled into Russia. If the bundles had broken, and revealed their contents, Abe would have been shot on the spot, but fortunately for me that never happened.

  It was Zionism, not communism, that fired Abe’s imagination, and he was still a teenager when he stole money from his father and made his way to Palestine. I have a photo of him working on the first road ever built in Tel Aviv, and his plan was to settle there and help build a new Jewish state. One problem: if a young man was drafted into the czar’s army, and failed to appear for induction, the penalties on his family could be severe. So after a few years away, Abe returned home, a chalutz, a pioneer, with the dust and the dash of foreign lands still clinging to his clothes. He would go into the army, save his parents a problem, and see what happened.

  Meanwhile, a young woman named Miriam Wasilsky had come to Bialystok from the village of Eishishok, probably to find a job and a husband. She had her picture taken by a local photographer, and he displayed it in his shop window as a sample of his work. While Abe was waiting for his draft notice, he had a lot of time on his hands, and as he roamed around Bialystok, he noticed the photo of the girl. Every day he’d pass the shop window, and gradually he fell in love. As the legend goes, he finally met Miriam one night at a gathering of young people and stammered, “You’re the girl in the photograph.”

  Soon they agreed to be married, and I have a set of photographs taken at about this time. The date on one is stamped 1912, and it shows my grandparents gazing straight into the camera, their heads tilted toward each other, barely touching, as they faced a very uncertain future. She’s wearing a dark dress, with a lace panel at her throat, and a slightly saucy expression. He’s wearing a white shirt with a banded collar, in the Russian style, and looks a bit nervous. There’s another shot, of Miriam alone, that shows why Abe fell in love with her. Her huge dark eyes leap through time and space, looking directly into mine. And as I look back at her, I find myself thinking, “Oh, Grandma, if you knew then what I know now…”

  Under Russian rules, once you were drafted you were the responsibility of the army, not your parents, so Abe hit on a scheme. After he joined up, he’d escape as soon as possible, get back to Palestine, and send for Miriam. His mother aided the plan by making him a special cap. On one side it looked like an army cap, but when you flipped it over, it became a civilian hat. As he left for training camp, he put on a layer of his own clothes under his uniform, and as best I can tell, he spent no more than a couple of hours in the service. The first time the train stopped, he leaped out, stripped off his uniform, flipped over his cap, and took off.

  Abe wound up in Odessa, a Black Sea port where ships left for Palestine, but since he had no papers and was a deserter from the army, he couldn’t sail legally. As he used to tell the story, he met a family with twelve children. And when the youngest one died, he stepped in as the oldest child and everybody else moved down one rung. Of course, the genders on the papers no longer matched, but the customs officials were too lazy to check. They lined the kids up on a bench, counted twenty-four knees, and allowed the family to board.

  When he finally got back to Palestine, Abe realized it was not a good place to bring a young bride. The Arabs were rebelling, World War I was approaching, and he decided to switch course. He wrote to Miriam and said, meet me in New York, not Tel Aviv. She already had a brother in America, who would take her in until Abe arrived, but Grandpa did not make a good first impression when he landed in his new country. Getting off the boat, he tried to look debonair by twirling a cane. My mother says Miriam’s brother was so incensed at the greenhorn that he took the cane, broke it in half, and snapped at Abe: “In the United States, we don’t use canes.”

  Grandma’s brother tried to break off the relationship as well, but he didn’t succeed. These two young people had risked too much and come too far to be kept apart. After they were married, my dad was born a year or two later, in 1916, and the family settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, not far from where my mother’s family, the Schanbams, were also living. In fact, Abe Rogow and Harry Schanbam met long before their child
ren married—and never liked each other. Harry’s family owned a dairy farm, and one story has it that Harry fired Abe from a job delivering milk. Years later, after Abe became quite successful, Harry would brag that he gave Abe his start in this country. But he’d usually leave out the part about firing him. My parents were still living in Harry’s house by the time I was born in 1943, and Abe and Miriam lived just a few blocks away. I have from those years another photo I cherish: my brother Marc and I are three or four, dressed in our Sunday best, white shirts and navy blue short pants, and sitting on a couch with our grandparents. Miriam is much grayer and heavier than in her earlier pictures, but you can still see flashes of the girl Abe first noticed. The girl with the slight smile and smoldering eyes. The girl in the photographer’s window.

  The other family fable starts back in Eishishok, Miriam’s home village. As a young man, her father, Max, was a bookbinder, hardly a lucrative trade, and as my mother remembers the story, Max “spent more time reading books than binding them.” He fell in love with Bodonna, a girl from a wealthy family, which looked down on the poor bookbinder. I always heard that Bodonna was sent away to break up the romance but her granddaughter, Norma Weiss, says that Bodonna and Max were actually engaged, and that she went to America assuming he would follow her. “He never got here,” says Norma. Whatever the details, we know this: before Bodonna left, Max bound a book with his own hands, inscribed it in Yiddish, and gave it to her as a going-away present. My father always said it was a book of love poems. Norma insists it was a Bible. I’ll accept her version, grudgingly, but I prefer my father’s.

  In any case, Bodonna took the book to America, and the two young lovers never saw each other again. They both married others and had many children. I have a photo of Max and the woman he did marry—my great-grandmother—a rather stern and unappealing person, to tell you the truth. Surrounded by his family, Max wears a skullcap and a full beard, and there’s my grandmother Miriam in the back row, as always looking fearlessly forward. After Miriam came to America and married Abe, she was joined by her other brothers. One of them was a monument carver by trade and his life was shadowed by tragedy. In 1925, while his wife was pregnant with their seventh child, he died in a flu epidemic. The first two children, twins, had died at birth, a son had died in an accident, and the latest blow was too much for his wife. She suffered an emotional and physical collapse and could no longer care for her children. The four surviving kids were sent to the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they remained until they went to work or were taken in by relatives.