She didn’t go into the abandoned apartment where her parents had lived, so she didn’t see that the piano was missing or that the cupboard in the living room didn’t have any dishes and silverware in it. She didn’t see the blank desk, where her father had signed all his contracts. But while she was in Przemyśl, someone gave her a small amulet that Renia used to wear. I think it was then my mom accepted that my sister was really gone.
Mom came back to Warsaw and retrieved me from the convent where I’d moved temporarily. Together, we took a trolley to the room she rented in an apartment in Zolybusz, a very nice neighborhood adjacent to Warsaw. Over the next few weeks, Mrs. Bereda’s connections got me papers that gave me a new identity, and I was baptized by the same priest who’d baptized my mother. Just like that, I was Catholic, with a new birthday and a new name: Elzbieta Leszczyńska. Just like that, the Polish Shirley Temple disappeared.
Even though Mama and I lived outside the ghetto, disguised as Polish Catholics, we still saw and felt the war every day. Because my mom had to work, I lived and studied at a convent school during the week, and on weekends, she picked me up and took me home. On Sundays, we went to church, embracing the religion that had saved our lives. We took a trolley to the church and back, just like my mom did every working day. During the war, trolley cars were divided in the middle, and in the front sat the Germans. In the back, the Poles.
One day after church, we planned to have dinner at the home of my mom’s boss, whose name was Kosiński. My mom worked at the Hotel Europejski as an assistant director. The trolley we’d boarded was moving along, with us seated comfortably in the back. It slowed down, then stopped, on its regular route, which took it next to the tall walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. There, a German army truck sat with its engine idling. Suddenly, the passenger-side door of the truck opened, and a Nazi soldier exited and walked up next to the trolley. He was holding a gun.
“Everyone out!” he yelled in German. “Germans on this side, Poles on this side. Exit!”
My mother grabbed my hand. At the time, there was something we called Ƚapanka, which meant “to round up people.” This practice, which had been around since the Germans first occupied Poland in 1939, referred to the act of removing people from somewhere—like a trolley—separating them into groups, forcing one group onto a truck, and taking them off to a labor camp. There, these people would assist with the German war effort, digging, shoveling, paving roads, operating machinery in a factory, or, likely, being beaten, starved, and killed.
I’d witnessed this in Przemyśl, and my mother had seen it in Warsaw. It was nothing new. My mom was having none of it, though. She was not going to lose another child.
Thanks to an education at universities in Berlin and Vienna and her work at the Hotel Europejski, my mom was fluent in German. Her head bowed, she grabbed my hand and started speaking to me in German, a language I couldn’t understand. But I played along, nodding at everything she said. Holding his gun, a guard approached us, overheard my mom talking, and motioned for us to stand to the side with the Germans. As we turned around, I was sure I was about to be shot in the back.
But we weren’t loaded onto a truck or killed. We were allowed to walk away, toward the Kosińskis’ home, which was at the hotel. We walked what felt like all day, hiding in different doorways when we sensed danger. Passing trucks full of people—more than I’d seen at any other time during the war—we arrived at dinner late but before the 8:00 p.m. curfew. After we ate, I collapsed into one of the Kosińskis’ beds. I lay there all night long, sweating from a fever, and the next day, my mom called the doctor. After he examined me, he told her that I’d developed yellow jaundice, and he believed it was brought on by fright.
* * *
After that night, Mr. Kosiński allowed my mom and me to live at the hotel. For weeks, I recovered there. When I was feeling better, we ate dinner with them. We went to church. We celebrated Christmas and Easter. My mother became friends with the girlfriend of the owner of a restaurant across the street, named Ziutka, and sometimes she fed us for free. She loved my mom. I went to komplety, which means I studied school privately, in secret. And day after day, my mother and I watched the Jews and Poles get trampled under the boots of the Germans. That’s how we lived.
I didn’t come to America immediately after the war. Sometime between the summers of 1942 and 1944, a German officer who lived at the hotel fell in love with my mom. He wanted to marry her. I don’t think she loved him back; it was simply a very beneficial arrangement for a woman who’d used every bone in her body becoming resourceful enough to survive. But as the Soviet army advanced toward Warsaw in early 1944, an underground movement plotted a rebellion against the German occupiers. The Warsaw Uprising started in August 1944, and Germany fought back with everything they had. In sixty-three days, almost 250,000 Poles were killed, and half the city was destroyed by bombs.
The German officer begged my mom to leave Warsaw when the violence was at its worst. “It’s too dangerous here,” he said. “I love you, and I can help you get out.”
My mom agreed, and the officer prepared papers for us. In the summer of 1944, my mom and I packed a few small suitcases. Before Warsaw surrendered, we escaped from Warsaw to Germany. Traveling through Germany was highly dangerous, and we passed Berlin and Dresden before finally crossing into Austria. Then we made our way toward a famous spa in Austria—where the officer told us wounded German officers and soldiers went to recover—via a Red Cross ambulance.
It was a dangerous trip. Fighting continued all around us as we traveled through the Austrian Alps. But when we arrived in the resort town of Bad Gastein, I realized the officer had been true to his word; there were thousands of wounded German soldiers there, and the hotels were all decorated with red crosses, signaling that they’d become convalescence hospitals. My mother soon got a job as a desk clerk at one of the hotels, called Straubinger, and we lived there from September 1944 to May 1945, when the American army arrived. Germany had been defeated by the Allies, and Europe was about to be liberated.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw American soldiers. They were standing in a line, handsome men with smiles on their faces. I liked them right away, but there was something about them that seemed strange.
“What’s going on with them?” I asked my mom. “Their mouths are moving, but they’re not talking!”
My mom laughed. “They’re chewing gum,” she answered.
I was a teenaged refugee who’d barely survived the Holocaust, and I’d never seen gum, much less chewed it.
* * *
My mother got a job with the American Army and tried to secure papers that would let us move to the US. But she also knew someone in New York, and through the Red Cross, she located her. That woman helped my mom find a cousin of my grandfather, who wrote us an affidavit of support, allowing us to leave Austria for the United States. But we didn’t go there directly; with the help of the Catholic Church, we ended up in a displaced persons’ camp in Munich. Then we were sent north to Bremen. My mom had reestablished contact with her brother in France, and he wrote to her, begging us to come to France to live near him. When she wasn’t responsive, he sent a car for us. It rolled up to the place we were staying, and when it stopped, a man named Major Zaremba, who was in the Polish army, stepped out. He was holding papers that gave us permission to settle in France.
Right then, my mother faced a decision.
“I’ve gone through too much in Europe,” she said to him. “I’ve lost everyone. I want to start a new life, and that life is in America.”
In December 1946, my mom and I gathered together our suitcases, plus $500 that my uncle Maurice had sent. We boarded a rickety boat called the Marine Marlin, and with the winds whipping and rain pouring as the boat tipped on its side, we sailed for five or six days across the Atlantic Ocean. We landed at a pier in Manhattan and were greeted by my grandfather’s cousin’s son, Dr. William Dubilier. He took us to New Rochelle, north of the city in Westchester C
ounty. We only stayed there for a few weeks, because my mom found a job in Greenwich, Connecticut. She worked there about a year, and then she moved us into a tiny room on West Ninetieth Street in Manhattan.
Other than a conservatory I’d attended in Austria sometime in 1944 or 1945, I hadn’t gone to a real school in about three years. My mother valued education above all else, so she found me a Catholic boarding school called Nazareth Academy in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, and I moved there. I hardly spoke any English, and I had maybe two skirts to my name. I felt dirt poor next to all the other girls, but I couldn’t tell them why. I didn’t even want to tell my new best friend, who was a Polish girl named Ewa. The truth was too much for me—let alone another teenager—to digest. I told myself, This is my new life. I’m in America, I’m Catholic, and I’m Elizabeth.
I graduated and went to college, first in Manhattan, then in Missouri, and then back in Manhattan at Columbia University. But one day in the early 1950s, while I was home visiting my mom in her tiny apartment, Zygmunt Schwarzer came to visit. This handsome green-eyed man who had loved my sister more than anything in the world hadn’t just survived the Holocaust; he’d become a doctor, just like he’d always wanted to be.
“I have something for you,” he said, extending a thick, blue-lined notebook toward my mom.
It was Renia’s diary, all seven hundred pages of it. My mom and I broke down in tears.
Zygmunt stayed for a little bit and told my mom and me how he’d survived after he’d smuggled me to Dzidka’s house. In late July 1942, he had avoided going to the Bełżec death camp because he’d finally gotten his stamp from the Gestapo, confirming his employment. Between July and November 1942, he worked as a forced laborer at the German military base on the right bank of the San River. When the base got busier due to soldiers coming back from the front, Zygmunt became a carpenter, and he was assigned to building barracks where the newly arrived were disinfected before they left to go home to Germany.
In November 1942, there was another displacement Aktion of the inhabitants of the Przemyśl Ghetto. By then, Zygmunt had lost his work permit, and he was in hiding with a few other people in the attic of one of the ghetto’s buildings. Somehow, they managed to survive until the end of the Aktion. I never confirmed it with Zygmunt, but I think this was when he left Renia’s diary with a friend outside the ghetto walls.
After the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943, Zygmunt was sent to the labor camp in Szebnie near Jasło, and from there—two months later—to Auschwitz. In October 1944, he was evacuated to the Sachsenhausen camp and worked at the Heinkel bomber aircraft works in Oranienburg. In December 1944, he was sent to the camp in Landsberg in Bavaria. In January 1945, he came down with typhus and managed to survive only thanks to the help of a doctor and a Lithuanian girl working in the kitchen. If you can believe it, that doctor was Josef Mengele, the death camp physician who’s famous for conducting horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners.
On April 30, 1945, the camp was liberated, and Zygmunt was finally free. He met his wife, Genia—who was called Jean in America—at a displaced persons’ camp, and that fall he started studying medicine at Heidelberg University. He graduated in 1949 and left for the United States, where sometime in the early 1950s he tracked down my mom and decided to pay her a visit.
Getting through college had been such a struggle for me. My mom and I had no money, and we lived in a fifth-floor walk-up on Third Avenue, where the rent was only fifty-five dollars a month and where elevated trains went by till 7:00 at night, every single day. I worked as a waitress when I wasn’t in class, and I was always so tired. My mom was, too. It wasn’t like her, but she even said to me once, “Why do you want to go to school? You’re just going to get married.”
“No,” I answered. “I want my degree.”
I finally got it in 1955—with a major in German and a minor in Russian—and I was so happy. I’d finally done it.
One day, just before I graduated, I got called into an office at Columbia by a man I’d never met. When I sat down across from him, he offered me a job.
“What kind of job?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a job where you can’t tell anybody what you’re doing.”
It was the CIA. They wanted me because I could speak and write Russian and German fluently. I didn’t have to think for a second about what I wanted, though.
“Thank you,” I said to him, “but I can’t take it. I’ve lived all my life in secret. I don’t want to do that anymore.”
But it’s hard to give up a secret life when it’s protected you for so long, so my mom and I still didn’t talk to people about who we were. She even married her second husband, Clyde, in the early 1960s and never told him about her past. I didn’t talk about where I came from to my friends at Columbia, where I stayed to get my master’s degree in child psychology. I made myself forgot the movies I’d been in, and I didn’t even see them until 2014, when Tomasz Magierski, a Polish filmmaker who’s been researching Renia’s and my story, found them in some archives and showed them to me. At the elementary school where I started to work in 1963 as a German and Russian teacher, I didn’t tell anyone I’d once been the Polish Shirley Temple. I just laughed when my students called me “Miss Niska” because they couldn’t pronounce Leszczyńska.
One day in 1964—after I’d left a job teaching business at Newtown High School in Queens and settled into a sixth-grade teaching position on Staten Island—I got invited to a party for the United Federation of Teachers, a teacher’s union. The party was at a friend’s big house in Queens, and she had a piano in her living room. It might have been thirty years since I’d acted, but I was still a performer, so I decided to sit on the piano bench and start playing and singing my Polish and Russian repertoire songs. When I finished one, a tall, handsome man who was a few years younger than I approached me. He was George Bellak, a teacher from Newtown who I’d always thought was very nice. He’d been born in Vienna, so we’d sometimes spoken German to each other, but I’d never considered him more than a friend.
“You play very well,” he said, then smiled. “How are you getting home from the party?”
We talked all night and got on the subway at 2:00 a.m. When we stepped off, George walked me back to my apartment. That’s how our romance started.
Everything happened so fast after that. We got married at city hall in June 1965 on a weekday that we both had off. We laughed when the officiant stuttered my name, “L … L … L … shhh … ka,” and we celebrated that night at the Russian Tea Room. Within a few months, I was pregnant with our son, Andrew.
It took a long time for me to tell my husband who I was. Even though George was so much like me—he was Jewish, though his family had fled Austria in 1939—I wasn’t sure I could stand to face the pain of talking about my past. I also wasn’t sure he’d accept me. The war was over, and I didn’t want to think about it. I had spent years trying to forget that I was the little girl who’d made it out of Poland alive but whose sister had not.
That’s why, when my mother passed away from cancer on November 23, 1969—just a few months before my daughter, Alexandra Renata, was born—I placed Renia’s diary in a safe-deposit box at a Chase Bank in Manhattan. “The past is the past,” my uncle Maurice had always said, and that’s the way I treated it.
It wasn’t until my kids started asking questions that I told Andrew and Alexandra the truth.
“I’m Jewish,” I said to them, “and it’s time I tell you my story. I think you’re ready for it.”
The past still makes my heart race and my stomach sick, and reading Renia’s diary gives me panic attacks. George, Andrew, Alexandra, and I visited Poland in the early 2000s—the first time I’d been there since I’d fled—and I couldn’t make it as far as Przemyśl or to my family’s old estate on the Dniester. I saw Maciek after I got back in town and told him about the trip, and I mentioned that I was still anxious and struggling to breathe well. He looked me up and down,
then shook his head.
“If I knew you were going,” he said, “I would have stopped you.”
I can’t imagine the pain my sister went through in her last moments, seeing me leave for a new life while she was left to her fate. I can’t explain why I was allowed to live, and that’s why I’ve tried for so long to turn my mind away from it.
Before his death on April 1, 1992, Zygmunt had learned to process the past in a different way. He’d retired from his successful pediatrics practice on Long Island, and he’d created a space in his basement for Renia’s diary. He’d photocopied all its seven hundred pages, and he’d laid them out carefully like they were treasures. Every few days or nights, he’d wander down to his basement, and he’d read and study the diary near a photo of Renia he’d hung on the wall. His son, Mitchell, said spending time down there was almost a spiritual experience for him—like Renia was his muse.
In one of the very few times I saw him, he opened the pages of Renia’s diary and wrote,
Another month of May is coming, the month of love … Today is 23 April 1989. I’m with Renusia’s sister—Jarusia. This blood link is all I have left. It’s been 47 years since I have lost Renusia. When I think about her, I feel so small and unimportant. I owe her so much. Thanks to Renia I fell in love for the first time in my life, deeply and sincerely. And I was loved back by her in an extraordinary, unearthly, incredibly passionate way. It was an amazing, delicate emotion. Our love grew and developed thanks to her. I can’t express how much I loved her. And it will never change until the end … Zygmunt.
I think all of us—and I especially—can learn from Zygmunt’s example. The past isn’t long gone; it’s present in our hearts, our actions, and the lessons we teach our children. For Renia and Zygmunt, the past stood for love, and I will thank Zygmunt till the day I die not just for saving my life, but also for opening that chapter of my life again. Facing what you thought you’d put behind you may be painful, but learning and growing from it is the only way I can live now.
Renia's Diary Page 29