He also did everything in his power to protect us.
On September 7, 1939, bombs started to fall on Przemyśl. The shopping center, Pasaz Gansa, caught fire, and as the Germans advanced, thousands fled—especially the Jews, whom the Germans began threatening, arresting, and killing. Many of them crossed over to the Soviet side looking for refuge.
The Polish army tried to fight back, but it only took a month and five days for the whole country to fall. The Germans and Soviets were well armed, coordinated, and much stronger than our foot soldiers, horses, bombers, and volunteers. We were targets—under attack and not safe in our own home—so my grandpa decided to take Renia and me out of Przemyśl when it went under siege. With no real plan, nothing except the clothes on our backs and a little money, we left the apartment and started to walk toward Lwów, which was about one hundred kilometers away. Lwów was where I’d gone with my mom and Renia to recite poetry on the radio, and I knew it wasn’t close—at all. But I kept my mouth closed because I trusted Grandpa. He and Granny and Renia were all I had.
My grandma stayed home with the maid, whose name was Pelagia Palivoda. She didn’t say why she refused to go, but I guess she was just too old and tired to walk that far. Pelagia would be good company, though. She and my granny were very different—Pelagia was a simple Polish woman who slept on a bed that folded down from the wall in the kitchen—but they were close. Pelagia had devoted her life to my grandparents.
As soon as we stepped onto one of the major streets leading out of Przemyśl, I remember seeing crowds of people fleeing with as little as we had, and those who could were running. There were more horses and carriages than cars where we lived, and we may have gotten a ride in a buggy at some point, but I can’t recall. All I remember is that it was pitch black, I was hungry and terrified, and nobody knew where we were going. Even to a naïve little girl, it seemed like we had no direction. All we understood was that the Germans were here, they were bombing our homes, and staying put wasn’t safe.
As we fled, we could hear German planes circling near us, the steady whir of engines roaring and the bang-boom of bombs falling on the ground. But we assumed that the enemy would bomb a town rather than outside of it. People lived in towns, in buildings, and if your goal is to kill as many of them as possible, the city is the place to bomb. We assumed we’d be safe in the fields or forest, so that’s where we headed.
September was harvesttime for wheat, and wheat is rough when you cut it. As my sister walked through the fields, she sometimes fell or brushed against a stalk that had been missed, and she scratched up her arms and legs, which started to bleed. We couldn’t stop for her, though; we had to keep moving away from the firing and bombing we could hear behind us.
We walked out from the wheat, passing the forest as we headed into another field. I looked around and noticed row after row of cabbages, round and ripening and almost ready to be picked.
“They look like heads,” Renia said. “I mean, like human heads, not just cabbage heads.”
Then Grandpa stopped, looked at us, and whispered, “Run to the forest, girls. Run! We can’t be here, because the German planes will see the cabbages and think they’re people. They’ll want to bomb right here.”
So we shifted directions and ran for our lives through the forest and toward Lwów.
6. NOVEMBER 6, 1939
I don’t remember this postcard from my dad. In fact, I don’t remember anything about him during the war. But it’s clear he’d lost our estate. The part of Poland where I’d been born was occupied by the Soviets, and they were Communist, so our land was now the government’s. Ticio had moved to Horodenka—a city just to the west of our old home—to find other work.
We weren’t aristocrats, so we didn’t have huge collections of art that the Soviets could steal like they did to so many other Polish landowners. We’d lived in a manor house, not a mansion. But we’d been comfortable. We’d had nannies and employees. We’d had a chicken coop and a place to store bushels and bushels of wheat. We’d grown sugar beets that we sold to the factories for sugar. But most important, we’d lived on acres of fertile land, and that’s what the Soviets wanted.
7. FEBRUARY 17, 1940
I don’t remember this visit from my father. I wish I did. I think it’s shocking how someone so close to you—your own blood relative—can fall so far away from you in such a short period of time. Now, after all these years have gone by, much of my understanding of him is constructed from things other people later told me.
For example, Renia had a nanny named Klara when she and my parents lived on the estate where she’d been born. Apparently, Klara was a very skinny woman and wasn’t beautiful like my mom, yet I heard later that my mother believed my father had an affair with her. I don’t even remember who told me this; it was just family gossip, passed along from person to person, and now it feels as real as any other truth I know.
I was also told my mom lost a baby between Renia and me because she’d caught a venereal disease from my dad. Everyone suspected him of having an affair with a woman who worked on the farm and that she’d been the source of it. Was my dad a womanizer? I’ll never really know, but I still believe he was just because of those two stories.
Regardless, my parents clearly had problems, and it must have been part of the reason Buluś moved to Warsaw with me. Or maybe my father just didn’t take much interest in us girls. Maybe he wanted a boy to help him on the estate, which was what good sons did in those days.
8. OCTOBER 12, 1940
I never would have guessed that Zygmunt Schwarzer—or Zygo, as Renia sometimes called him—would play such a major role in my life. That he would change my life, really. But he did, and, more important than that, he made the last two years of my sister’s life better in so many ways. With Zygmunt, she knew the strongest, most romantic love she’d ever experienced.
Zygmunt was born in 1923 in Jarosław, where my grandma was from. I didn’t know his family well, but I understood that my mother had gone to gymnasium with his mother, and his father, Wilhelm Schwarzer, had been a respected doctor in Jarosław. When the Germans invaded Poland, the Schwarzers fled to Przemyśl, just like my grandma’s family had. In Przemyśl, Dr. Schwarzer picked up his practice right away, even though he had a brand-new home and the country was in the middle of an occupation. That kind of toughness is what Zygmunt also possessed, though I wouldn’t realize it for a while.
I always thought Zygmunt was so handsome, and that drove my sister crazy. “You’re such a flirt!” she’d yell at me, and I’d say back, “He’s your boyfriend, not mine!” I promise you I didn’t have a crush on him. I was just a dramatic little girl who loved to follow my sister around and make friends with her friends. And Zygmunt was so easy to be friends with.
Zygmunt had black, curly hair, bright green eyes, and dimples on the sides of his cheeks that got deeper every time he smiled—which was a lot. Zygmunt was one year older than Renia, which made him seven years older than I was, but despite our difference in age, I always felt warm and comfortable around him. So did Renia. My sister liked him very, very much.
Zygmunt’s best friend was named Maciek Tuchman. Maciek was about the same age as Zygmunt, and he was jolly and kind of plump. He always had a crush on my sister, and even though she loved being with him, Renia only had eyes for Zygmunt. Though I know there was some playful competition between Zygmunt and Maciek, they really were a team. “We were tied to each another and living each other’s lives,” Maciek—who was called Marcel when he got to America after the war—once said in an interview.
I don’t know exactly how Zygmunt, Maciek, Irka, and Nora became such close friends. It must have been school, since my sister was now going to school with boys. But Zygmunt occupied all her thoughts. They fought sometimes, but it wasn’t serious; their little arguments were just the ups and downs of kids in love.
9. DECEMBER 25, 1940
Between October and November 1940, the Nazi German government created the Warsa
w Ghetto across 1.3 square miles of the northern part of the city, right at the center of the Jewish quarter. Immediately, the entire remaining Jewish population of the city—many of whom were refugees rather than Warsaw natives—were forced into it. About four hundred thousand Jews squeezed into a space that held about nine people per room, and a giant brick wall encircled them. A train line ran just outside the ghetto walls, with several stops to load passengers and take them away to the death camps.
The formation of the ghetto wasn’t a surprise to anyone; the Jews had been persecuted ever since the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Starting that November, Jewish businesses had been forced to display the Star of David, Jewish bank accounts had been frozen, and Jews around the city had been ordered to wear armbands. All of this—plus a real fear of deportation or execution—was why so many Jews had fled the German-occupied portion of Poland.
Mommy was Jewish, so of course Renia assumed she was inside the ghetto walls. But she wasn’t; she’d avoided the ghetto by securing false papers with a Polish, Roman Catholic name. Sometime after the Germans arrived, my mom had connected with an old friend named Halina Bereda, who was also Jewish but had married a wealthy Polish Roman Catholic and converted. One of Halina’s husband’s great-uncles was a cardinal in the Polish Roman Catholic Diocese, in fact. Halina and her husband knew people who could arrange for Polish papers, so they paid them to create some for my mom. In February 1940, my mom became Maria Leszczyńska, was baptized by a priest named Fajecki into the Roman Catholic faith, and—just like that—she blended in.
Renia and I knew none of this at first. If we were lucky, we received letters from Buluś maybe twice a year because it was almost impossible to send mail from the Nazi-occupied zone to the Soviet-occupied zone. All outgoing mail was read and censored by the Gestapo. That didn’t stop my mom from trying, though. Around the time the ghetto went up, my mother paid a Polish man from Warsaw to cross the river San with a letter for us. When he showed up at our door, we were so excited! Then he went back to Warsaw, found my mother, and threatened to report her to the Gestapo if she didn’t pay him more. She fled her apartment and moved to escape him.
My mother was charming, capable, intelligent—and fluent in German. She’d gone to university in Berlin, then Vienna, and she’d learned the language there during her years of study. Sometime after 1939, she became the assistant director of the Hotel Europjski, a gorgeous historical hotel with a grand staircase, a ballroom, and a large terrace that spilled out onto Pilsudski Square. During the German occupation, three hundred Wehrmacht officers lived there, and the German government had renamed it Europäisches Hotel. Mommy was dedicated to her job, and she was so good at it that she worked there several years during the war.
I know now she rented an apartment in Żoliborz, which was a neighborhood just north of the city center on the western bank of the Vistula River. She’d gotten the place thanks again to Mrs. Bereda. But other than Mrs. Bereda and her husband, I’m not sure who her friends were. Outside of working, I don’t know how she spent her time. When I had lived with her in Warsaw, she’d had a male friend who I now assume was her boyfriend, but I don’t know if they stayed together after 1939. Regardless of who she was with, I know she must have been lonely because the few letters that made it through to us said she missed us terribly. Imagine being a young mother separated from your children for two years because of war? I have two kids, and my heart aches just to think about it.
10. DECEMBER 31, 1940
As I said before, a teenager’s life in Przemyśl revolved around school, and there were constantly parties, dances, and get-togethers. I know I went to at least one event with Renia—and I loved every single second of it—but most of the time, I was more interested in being with my own friends. The best of those was a little blond girl named Dzidka.
Dzidka Leszczyński—whose real first name was Zosia—was the youngest of three daughters in a Roman Catholic family that owned and ran a small tinned coffee factory at 41 Mickiewicz Street in Przemyśl. Her dad, Ludomir, was tall, slender, and aristocratic-looking, with a thick mustache and a confident way of walking and talking. I didn’t know it till much later, but during the German occupation, he was in Żegota—a member of the Council to Aid Jews—and that gave him some influence. Mr. Leszczyński was devoutly religious, but he didn’t see barriers among people. In his business and his life, Jews, Roman Catholics, Ukrainians, Poles, and more worked together for the good of society and their families, and for that reason, his youngest daughter’s best friend might as well have been his own. Or at least that’s how he always made me feel.
Dzidka was skinny, fair, and a little taller than I was. One of her older sisters—either Ludomira or Janina, I can’t remember which—went to school with Renia, and they sometimes spent time together creating poems in their little leather-bound notebooks. Renia would write them and her friend would illustrate them. Dzidka and I were probably off together while they did. She and I used to sing songs, play with dolls, and walk hand in hand around town after school. We were inseparable.
Dzidka’s dad saved my life, and I talk about that in the epilogue that follows Renia’s diary. But, even though I never saw my best friend again after I escaped Przemyśl, being close to her is the single greatest bit of good fortune I’ve ever had. I don’t know how Dzidka made it through the war, but I found out, thankfully, that she did. She moved to Kraków, married, adopted children, and died a few years ago from Alzheimer’s. My dear Dzidka, I missed all those years.
11. MARCH 9, 1941
I had a diary? I don’t even remember it! But I knew Maciek Tuchman for over eighty years, and if he had a crush on my sister, I am sure it was harmless. He and Zygmunt were the best of friends, and Maciek would never try to steal Renia from him. He was a joker then, and he was for the rest of his long life, too.
Maciek and I were friends in New York until he passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-seven. He was also my internist until the end of his long career. When he came to America, people began calling him Marcel, and I usually did, too, because it became his identity in the same way Elizabeth became mine. But in my memory, he’s Maciek, and in Renia’s world, that’s who he’ll always be.
Like Zygmunt, Maciek secured a work permit before being sent to the Przemyśl Ghetto in 1942. He lived there with his parents until the ghetto was swept clean, the Nazis shooting the people who still lived there in the back of the head. His mother was one of them; she was taken out of the ghetto and murdered in the Przemyśl Jewish cemetery. Maciek and his father were hiding in an attic, listening all night to the sound of gunshots.
Sometime in 1942, he and his dad were shipped off to Auschwitz, and there, they were ordered to work in a Siemens factory that was just outside the camp. Along with a hundred other prisoners, they labored as slaves until the SS forced them out in a death march in 1945. They made it—alive—from Buchenwald to Berlin, where they were liberated at the end of the war. At a displaced persons’ camp in Bergen-Belsen, he met his wife, a Czech woman named Shoshana.
Like Zygmunt, Maciek wanted to be a doctor, yet there were few opportunities for a survivor in Europe to get an education. Maciek and Zygmunt applied to and were accepted by a special program at Heidelberg University, and they, their wives, and eight hundred other survivors lived and studied surrounded by former Nazis. Maciek graduated with honors in 1949, then moved to New York City, where he because an internist at NYU. He was there for fifty years.
In 1963, I was working at NYU’s medical school, and one afternoon, I walked into the cafeteria. Suddenly, I heard a voice yelling out. It had the same Polish accent I have.
“Arianka! Arianka!”
It was Maciek! Smiling, jolly, warm, familiar Maciek from Przemyśl, who had made it through the ghetto and the camps and had lost half his family just as I had. He was alive, and he was in a New York City cafeteria with his arms wide open, ready to embrace me.
Maciek was my internist for many decades, until he retired after he�
�d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I visited him at his home after he left his practice, and he didn’t remember recent events, like the death of his son, Jeffrey, from cancer in 2017. But he could recall things from the time of the war. We held hands and sang a few old, traditional Polish songs, and he said each word perfectly. He could even recite Pushkin in Russian.
Maciek died on November 10, 2018, and I attended his funeral on my birthday, November 18. Afterward, my family and I went to my favorite Italian restaurant, where we toasted Maciek’s ninety-seven years—and my birthday as well. What a miracle to have made it through so much and to have lived for so long.
12. JUNE 21, 1941
It’s been almost eighty years since I last saw my sister. That’s a lifetime since I heard her laugh ringing out from the kitchen, saw her looking up from one of her leather notebooks, her bright blue eyes shining, or felt the familiar touch of her hand holding mine. Yet her presence is one of the largest in my life. A photo of her hangs in the entry of my apartment, looking out over the center of my living room, and it’s a constant reminder of the past. Seeing Renia’s smile every day, I remember the good times, but I also remember how the world shifted suddenly and spared me, while it sacrificed so many others, including her.
I’m not sure I fully realized how traumatic my childhood was until I was well into adulthood. War is too big and too scary for most children to understand, and I was no exception. But in her deeply poetic way, I think Renia grasped what was happening around us. She just saw the world differently. Her fatefulness, her carefulness, her subtle, perceptive observations about the pace and meaning of every moment show me how she processed the passage of time. She realized she was witnessing the calm before the storm, and she captured it. She savored it, knowing it was fleeting.
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