The shaky sense of security we had in Soviet-occupied Poland slipped away on June 22, 1941, when war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany decided it wanted to take over all of Europe and that the Soviet Union was the biggest thing standing in their way. That summer, German troops invaded Soviet-occupied territories on three separate fronts. The code name for this assault was Operation Barbarossa, and it was the largest German military offensive of World War II.
This German assault was what our secret, forbidden radios had warned us of, what the Communist propaganda we were taught in Russian class had put into verse, and what Renia had had nightmares about. At the end of June 1941, bombs fell fast on major cities in Soviet-occupied Poland, and Przemyśl, unfortunately, was one of the first hit.
13. JULY 1, 1941
Just like that, the German army came, bombs fell, lives were lost, and the Soviet army retreated. Then the Germans pushed east. To Lwów. To Kiev. And eventually, in the bitter, cold winter, to St. Petersburg.
Przemyśl was just a stop on the way for the Nazis, who’d been across the San River for two years, waiting for the order to attack. Almost immediately after they invaded, they began to suppress the Jews. First, they forced all employed Jews to register their names in the local labor office. Then they ordered all Jews over the age of twelve to wear armbands with a blue Star of David on them. If you were on the street and passed a German soldier, you had to show your armband. If you resisted, you could be imprisoned or killed on the spot.
I was not yet eleven, so I didn’t have to put one on, but when I first saw one, something in me died. My family and friends and neighbors who wore them weren’t people anymore. They were objects.
14. JULY 11, 1941
When the Germans came, getting work meant everything if you were Jewish. Maybe your work was dirty, unpleasant, or far below what you’d been trained for, but it didn’t matter. Doing anything that proved you were strong and capable enough to support the war effort might save your life.
At first, Zygmunt worked at a clinic, as Renia described. I’m sure this was happy work for him because he wanted to be a doctor, but that was the last intelligent job he had. The next summer, when all Jews were ordered to move into the ghetto, he and Maciek found work in a German storage depot that was located just outside Przemyśl at an army labor camp. They both sorted and organized uniforms there.
In his book, Remember: My Stories of Survival and Beyond, Maciek writes that their time in the factory almost got Zygmunt killed. Knowing that there were hardly any supplies in the ghetto and that he could trade a good pair of pants for food, Zygmunt decided to take a chance. He looked around and realized that no guards were watching him, and he put on six or seven pairs of army fatigues under the pants he’d come to work in. As he started to walk toward the door, looking like he’d put on thirty pounds since that morning, he was stopped by a guard.
“What’s going on there? What are you trying to do?” the guard asked.
Zygmunt knew he’d been caught and that he was going to be either beaten, jailed, or executed immediately, so he kept silent.
There was a young Jewish woman working in the administrative offices, and she liked Zygmunt. She also knew that the German soldier who’d just caught Zygmunt had a crush on her. Seeing that Zygmunt had gotten caught, she stood up from her desk and intervened.
“Please let him go. I can give you something.”
It’s unclear what she gave him—and I hope for her sake it wasn’t much—but she saved Zygmunt. Just to be extra careful, Zygmunt also slipped the German soldier a gold coin.
That incident was the first of many things Zygmunt survived in the war. Between getting work, making connections, and being resourceful, he and Maciek had more lives than almost anyone I grew up with.
15. AUGUST 25, 1941
After the Germans took over all of Poland, my mom’s letters came more frequently. As Renia wrote, it was one after the other after the other. I guess this was because mail didn’t have to pass from one occupied zone to another anymore, but it could have been something else, like Mama becoming friendly with someone at the post office. I didn’t ask at the time; I was just glad to hear from her.
With her new papers and name, my mom also had the freedom to travel to see us. It would be difficult and dangerous—she had to take time from work, she had to travel through a war zone, and, most likely, she had to lie about who she was seeing. The train trip was also over ten hours, with one transfer in Kraków.
But my mom hadn’t spent a significant, uninterrupted amount of time with her children for two years, and she had to. She missed us terribly. And we missed her!
16. SEPTEMBER 29, 1941
In 1939, the Germans had bombed the bridge that connected Zasanie—a part of Przemyśl on the left bank of the San—so people crossed on the railway bridge instead. But by September 1941, Jews were forbidden to use that bridge. The secret Renia writes about died with her, so I have no idea how we got over the San. Nor do I know why I went to see our mom before she did. Did our grandpa or mom bribe a German soldier? Did we walk with Dzidka’s father, who lied by saying, “These are my daughters”? I wish I remembered, but I don’t. All I know is that, when I mention to people that I saw my mom a few times during the war in Przemyśl and that she returned to Warsaw without me and Renia—their only question is, “Why didn’t you stay with her? You could have escaped!”
It wasn’t that easy. Death lurked around every corner, and it was an expensive and dangerous endeavor to start a new life. We didn’t have papers that would allow us to do it. Yet a new identity was the only way to get out, like Buluś had done.
17. OCTOBER 10, 1941
Soon after the summer of 1941, the Nazis began seizing the Jews’ valuables and household items. If you didn’t open up your door when they knocked, they forced their way in, and you were taken away and beaten or put in prison.
My granny and grandpa’s upright piano stood next to the balcony Renia was on when Zygmunt blew her a kiss before the Nazis arrived. For two years, we’d played that piano almost every day, and practicing never felt like a chore. We liked playing, and Granny liked helping us. For my grandparents, my sister, and me, that upright piano was a symbol of something strong and permanent. It stood on solid ground, as it had since my mother and my uncle Maurice were babies.
But the Nazis took whatever they wanted. Your money, your dishes, your clothes, your silverware, your children, or your life. The first thing they stole from us was my grandparents’ piano, a few soldiers entering the apartment one afternoon while I was out. They hauled it down the stairs and out the door, leaving a small pile of dust in the space where it had stood. When I came home, Granny was a different person, like her heart had been ripped out.
Not long after Germany invaded Przemyśl, they also forbid Jewish children from going to school. This policy wasn’t new for the Nazis, just to those of us in Przemyśl. In April 1933, the German government ordered that only 1 percent of the population within German universities could be Jewish. The problem was that 5 percent of the German population was Jewish. Then, in 1938, Jewish children were barred from enrolling in any German public school. Although Jewish teachers—all of whom had been fired from the public schools—were allowed to form their own Jewish schools, many mothers, grandmothers, older siblings, or neighbors chose instead to tutor their kids at home.
Renia and I had always gone to public schools, and during the Soviet occupation, nothing had stood in our way. Our friends and classmates were Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian, and we didn’t distinguish among them. Our teachers didn’t either. But when the Nazis came, I was forced to stay home. During those long days, I daydreamed or made up stories with my dolls. When I was so bored I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d put on my coat and go outside for a walk, counting the minutes until Dzidka was home from school and I could run over to her house.
Renia wrote in her diary, made up some poems, sent some letters, and looked out the wind
ow for hours, feeling nothing. Sometimes she’d sneak away to Norka’s house to study French or ancient history, relying on books rather than teachers. Luckily, Jerschina still came by for Polish lessons, and Renia always looked forward to that.
In 1944, I still hadn’t gone back to school, but I enrolled at a conservatory in Salzburg, which was as close to an education as I could get. I thought about my grandma the whole time. With my fingers stretched across the ivory keys, Granny would have been so proud of me. Today, I have an upright Steinway in my apartment, against the wall and near a large window just like my grandparents’ was. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I play the Polish and Russian folk songs my teachers taught me in my youth, when patriotic music was hopeful and defiant. The Nazis might have tried to take everything—our identities, our passions, and our education—but they couldn’t steal the music in our hearts.
18. NOVEMBER 7, 1941
The process leading to the creation of the Przemyśl Ghetto was slow, careful, and well thought out. In late autumn of 1941, the town quarter of Garbarze—which was bordered by the San on the west, north, and east, and on the south by the railway that connected Kraków and Lwów—was proclaimed to be a Jewish residential area. The quarter’s establishment took until the summer of 1942, and up to that time, Jews were allowed to walk freely through the streets, but with their armbands on.
This area wasn’t called a ghetto—yet. It was a residential area for Jews, and when a policeman came knocking at our door in early November 1941, he wanted us to move there. I don’t know who bribed him, though I’m sure it was my grandpa. Maybe he appealed to the fact that he was Polish like us and that the Germans might be able to take our possessions and homes, but they couldn’t take who we were. But I bet my grandpa didn’t say much. He probably rummaged around in his desk, grabbed a few gold coins, and muttered, “Here, take these. Just please let my family stay. Please, just for now.”
But I know my grandpa realized that the next time a soldier or policeman came knocking at the door, he might be giving final orders to go, now, with only twenty-five kilograms of our worldly possessions packed in a suitcase. Maybe my grandpa could attempt to bribe this next person, but you can only do that for so long. We were going to lose our possessions and our homes, and we had to prepare.
At some point during the fall of 1941, my grandparents boxed up all the silver they’d stored along with their Seder china in the large cupboard in their living room. Lining a big, wooden box with paper and cloth, they placed spoons, knives, forks, serving platters, candlesticks, and any piece of silver in the house and bundled it up tightly. Then they closed the lid and nailed it shut. Late one night, my grandfather crawled into their tiny basement and buried it with a shovel. For all I know, that box is still there.
19. NOVEMBER 24, 1941
I’m not sure what Renia meant by Buluś moving the house. Did my mom clear out the possessions she knew the Germans would take? The family photos, the silverware, and the articles of clothing that reminded her of home? That had to be it. Hiding your possessions was one small act of control and defiance, and if my mother did anything in her life, she took charge of a situation.
My mom died in late 1969 from cancer. It had started in her breast, but they didn’t have mammograms in those days, so she didn’t find out till it had metastasized into her hip bone. She had been sick since about 1960, and she’d married a man named Clyde because she knew he could help take care of her. He was kind to her, but he wasn’t fond of foreigners, even though he had immigrant friends, one of whom had introduced him to my mom.
That wasn’t the only secret she’d kept. When I cleaned out her apartment, I found two small suitcases she’d hidden away in her closet. Inside one of them were two tiny silver spoons, a stack of faded family photographs, a pair of pearl earrings, a few gold bracelets, and a beaded chain made of coral. These were the treasures from my childhood, the memories I’d stored in my brain, too afraid to dig up because they might make me cry. In the other small suitcase, I found the embroidered, beaded traditional Polish vests that Renia and I had worn at the harvest festival in Zaleszczyki. They were Krakowski Strój, meaning the traditional garb from the Kraków region. Right there in those suitcases sat my childhood. Right there was Poland. And I have no idea how my mother carried all of it from our estate to Przemyśl to Warsaw to Austria to all the dozen other places we’d lived after the war, without me knowing.
20. DECEMBER 8, 1941
The news about my father and Lila living in a ghetto is one of the few solid pieces of evidence I have about where my dad was at the end of 1941. Unfortunately, what Renia wrote doesn’t give much away. I don’t know which ghetto my dad and Lila were living in, though it was probably in Horodenka, where they’d fled when they were forced out of our estate. The Germans created the ghetto in Horodenka around April 1941, establishing it in a part of the city that was one-third the size of the area where most Jews had previously lived.
If my dad and Lila were there, I’m sure they didn’t make it out. That’s because, on December 5, the Nazis executed their “First Action” in Horodenka, assembling a murder squad to wipe out the ghetto. They lured out 2,500 Jews—which was half of the ghetto’s population—telling them that they’d be receiving a typhus vaccine. Instead, everyone was murdered in the nearby forest. Those that were left in the ghetto were sealed off in a four-block stretch, living practically on top of each other until September 2, 1942, when almost all of them were shipped to the concentration camp at Majdanek, about four hundred kilometers northwest.
The Nazis kept meticulous records in the camps, but we don’t have my dad’s birth date, so we don’t know if he was there. The same goes for Lila.
21. DECEMBER 28, 1941
On December 26, 1941, the Nazis announced that Jews had to hand over their furs because the German troops needed them on the battlefield. German and Polish police—like the one we’d paid off months before—entered homes and seized furs, and on the streets, German police stopped Jewish men and women, ripped out the fur linings of their hats or coats, and moved on. In some cases, women on the street were also ordered to remove their shoes. They took them off and walked home along the cobblestones in their stockings.
My grandma had hired a tailor to make our coats. My sister’s coat was fully lined with a fur collar, my grandpa’s went below his knees and was entirely fur lined, and my grandmother’s was just the same. Mine was a smaller version of Renia’s, and we always wore them out with tights and hats in the winter. We had other coats, but these were our best—what we wore on special occasions and when winter was at its worst.
When Grandpa heard the Germans had sent out an edict about our furs, he didn’t panic. Some hopeful part of him decided that the war would be over soon. He’d survive. He might lose his family’s furs now, but he could get them back when everything was all said and done and the Germans had retreated.
So he made a plan and asked a friend for a favor.
My grandpa sometimes worked with a Ukrainian man who had a business making keys. They liked and trusted each other, so Grandpa gathered together all our furs, placed them in a suitcase, and walked to the Ukrainian man’s store, which was nearby.
“Take these coats,” he said. “Please save them for me. I’ll back for them after the war’s over.”
I guess I don’t have to tell you that we never got those coats back. Everyone except for me and maybe the locksmith was dead before the next winter.
22. APRIL 9, 1942
When you were shut into your quarter, it wasn’t with walls or barbed wire, like we’d soon be in the ghetto. Instead, you couldn’t leave your neighborhood without special permission from the Germans. My grandparents’ house was on the main street of town, and while I know Norka lived in a different quarter from the one we lived in, I don’t remember which it was. I know she lived on a small street—not one of the main ones—but our town was small, so Renia could walk there easily. In any case, my sister’s chances of seeing Norka ev
ery day, like she always had, were slim because she didn’t have the right papers.
Around that time, though, even worse things were happening near where the main road made its way toward the suburbs. Przemyśl’s Jewish cemetery is located just off Slowackiego and was built on a hill around 1860, when the old cemetery became full. I’ve heard it’s still beautiful today: hilly, wooded, and overgrown in the middle where the oldest graves are, some of which have toppled a little bit to their sides over time. The newer graves are toward the outside, and you can usually find flowers or photos sitting at their bases.
This was one of the places where Gestapo officials decided to execute Jews starting in the spring of 1942, when Renia realized she’d never see Norka again. It was also where Maciek’s mom was taken on September 3, 1943, after she’d been found hiding in a bunker in the ghetto with thirty other Jews. Before the Gestapo took her to the cemetery, where they’d force her to strip naked and dig her own grave, she looked at one of the guards and said, “Yes, you may have me, you bastards, but you will not catch my son and my husband.”
23. MAY 12, 1942
I never understood my parents’ relationship in the way that Renia did. In my earliest memories, my parents were separated because my mother was managing my career in Warsaw, and my father had his business on the estate. Was anything wrong? Not that I knew, but I was a busy little girl who’d never really had a relationship with my dad. What was there to understand? Renia was almost a teenager by the time my mom and I moved to Warsaw, so she had years and years before me to see things I didn’t and feel things I never did. I think that’s why my mom told her she was going to ask for a divorce. She knew Renia would understand it, even if it was hard for her to accept it.
Renia didn’t tell me anything, but that was like her. Even though she complained about me being too flirtatious, annoying, or smart-mouthed, I was her baby sister, and she wanted to protect me. I also never asked my mom what made her want the divorce. Sure, she hadn’t seen my father in years as far as I knew, but divorce was a major decision that would change her life. Women didn’t do that in those days.
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