Grandpa also taught me to play chess. “Chess sharpens the mind,” he would say. I knew that in the First World War he had received a citation for bravery from Polish marshal Józef Pilsudski, but Grandpa never wanted to talk about it.
Anti-Semitism in Poland was already a social disease before Hitler’s time. Although other minorities were treated fairly, Jews were made an exception. In the late 1930s in Poland, those who had previously sat on the fence joined Hitler in the Nazi’s racial policy. Even though we were born there, we were considered foreigners. For a Jew to be equal in Poland, he had to become a Christian first. While the Polish clergy didn’t advocate violence against us, they did not promote brotherly love either. My parents’ generation was willing to accept such an oppressed role in Polish society, but my generation found it difficult to live with. We were not Jews first and Poles second. We thought that if we adopted a new way of life and adhered to Polish customs, dress, culture, and language, non-Jews would tolerate us better, but nothing seemed to work. Nothing seemed more astonishing than the lie that the Jews in Poland lived in luxury.
Jews were verbally abused and often beaten in broad daylight. As long as a person was not visibly hurt, the police claimed that they could do nothing about it. The label on Jewish businessmen was handlarz, a term suggesting profiteer. Neither my brother nor I wanted to continue our father’s business, so we opted for a profession. Little did we know that whatever we became, the deep-rooted bias would persist.
In school our books ignored our history, our culture, and even our existence. The Dobra public school did not have a single Jewish teacher. Because of my given name, Berek, the non-Jews called me spitefully Beilis, after the Beilis Affair, in tsarist Russia, where a Jew by that name had been accused of ritual child killing. I was so embarrassed that before I attended secondary school, I changed my name to the Polish equivalent, Bronek.
In the mid-1930s the Farmers’ Union established farm cooperatives in Poland. Their purpose was obvious: to stop Jews from trading in farm products. The cooperative’s motto was “We, to Ours, for Ours.” This economic squeeze affected all Jewish businesses and, indeed, the entire Jewish population in Poland.
Attempts to set quotas at learning institutions were propagated. Banning shechita, kosher animal slaughter, was another overt act of anti-Semitism. Although Poland was close to war with Germany, Jews were the big enemy. Even the moderates tried to find ways to get rid of us. Taking a cue from the Nazis, the fascists demanded the expatriation of all Jewish people from Poland.
Excessive taxation was another of our dilemmas. Though we paid a parochial tax, Jewish schools and synagogues received no part of the money. I remember hearing Mama plead one day with a tax collector who came with a truck to take our furniture away to wait for Papa. He ignored her and called in his two helpers to take out our furniture. They threw our clean, freshly ironed clothes on the floor and stepped on them. Mama begged them to wait, to no avail. Suddenly lightning flashed, and thunder struck nearby. That shattered my mother’s nerves, and she trembled. “The lightning that may have struck someone innocent should have struck you,” she said, distressed, as she ran out.
Within weeks a trial against my mother began. She was accused of slandering the state. Twisting her words, the collector said that Mama had said that “the lightning should strike Poland.” His helpers supported this callous lie, and the judge convicted Mama and sentenced her to a year in jail. This falsehood created much concern among Jews, not because of the tax man’s cheap personal vengeance, but because the state had engaged in an act of overt anti-Semitism.
Jail for my mother was unthinkable, for she would certainly be killed by a patriotic zealot there. Since this was an election year, we hoped that eventually the new government would pardon people sentenced for minor political offenses, so Mama went into hiding, moving regularly from place to place.
Occasionally she dared to come home. On one such night, we heard a fierce knocking on the front door. “Open! Police!” a voice demanded.
“Wait,” my grandfather answered them, and he let some time go by.
When he finally opened the door, two police officers pushed in. “Where is Ester?” they asked Grandpa.
“I don’t know,” Grandpa answered calmly. Appearing unconcerned, he returned to bed, turned over, and seemed to go back to sleep. We knew that it wouldn’t be long before they discovered Mother. Each time they were to emerge from searching a room, I closed my eyes in fear that they would have found Mama and handcuffed her. To our surprise, however, they did not. They asked me, then, where my mother was. I bit my lip, and I said, “She is not here.” I wondered how well I lied. Nonetheless, they claimed to know that Mama was in the house.
One officer said to Papa: “Look, Wigdor, we know that Ester is here. Where is she?”
Papa told them that they were wrong: “She isn’t here,” he said matter-of-factly.
They finally left, still shaking their heads in disbelief. We too wondered where Mama was. She couldn’t have just vanished into thin air. Then Grandpa asked us to check to see if the policemen were really leaving. Assured that they were, he got out of bed, and we saw where Mama was hidden—in the bed behind her father! A little bit later Papa filled the wagon with hay and buried Mama in it. Then he drove her to a new hiding place. In time, after the elections were over, the hoped-for pardon came. Although Mama had escaped jail, she had served a personal sentence by hiding for more than eight months.
The world depression cast a long shadow over Poland, and it became hard to scratch out a living. To exacerbate matters, Papa had guaranteed bank loans for a German Junker, Herr Heller, and when he went bankrupt Papa had to make good on the loans. Herr Heller coerced Papa into guaranteeing a further loan, with the assurance that he would be repaid with the coming harvest. Papa, trying to rescue himself from his previous loss, agreed. It was a clever deception, for Herr Heller never paid us back and almost bankrupted us. We were deeply in debt, and the vegetables from my garden provided our dinner on many a day. As hard as those years were for us, though, many others in our village were worse off. Knowing a family was in want, those who were better off would help. I remember many times as a child that Mother sent me before the Shabbat with a gift package for the poor.
As grim as the situation got, we had nowhere else to go. The British mandate over Palestine presented great obstacles for our immigration there. The League of Nations debated resettling Jews in Birobidzhan in the Soviet Union or Madagascar. Even though support for Jews in Poland melted, the belief in nazism was not universal. All Christians did not believe in a world built on hatred and deceit, and many went on helping us. My own survival, as the succeeding pages will show, was also due to the help of many kind Christians.
In 1938 Hitler demanded from Poland the Corridor, a narrow strip of land that separated East Prussia from the German mainland. Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigy, who succeeded Pisudski in 1935, said, “Not one button will we surrender!”
CHAPTER III
The Blitzkrieg
Throughout the summer of 1939 the threat that Germany would invade Poland intensified. Since Dobra was only about 160 kilometers east of Germany, we had good reason to be concerned. My parents, who remembered the First World War, feared war more than the threat from the Germans. Their war experiences hung over them like a bad dream. I was not quite twenty, though, and I was more intrigued by war than scared.
Josek had served two years in the Yellow Cavalry of the Polish army. Consequently, as war hysteria began, he was recalled and moved with his unit to the Polish border. September 1, 1939, came, and the tense waiting ended, for Hitler’s armies crossed into Poland and the Second World War began. Many people enlisted, and although it was against my mother’s wishes, I also tried to join up. However, the draft age in Poland was twenty-one then. The recruiting officer sent me home. “We’ll call you when we need you,” he said. Perhaps he already knew that fighting the well-equipped Nazi armies was senseless.
The
next day the nearby mental hospital released all its patients, and hundreds of the insane paraded through the village, creating unbelievable scenes. One man mimicked Napoleon Bonaparte and claimed his armies were coming to fight the Germans. Another, marching as if on parade, saluted everything in sight. A pretty young girl, who seemed perfectly normal at first, suddenly burst into a confused tirade. It was pitiful and grotesque to see them all wandering the streets, staring off into the distance. When the Germans arrived, they put them against a wall and executed them.
On September 3 the Nazi armies were just thirty kilometers away. They would soon be marching on the village. Our retreating soldiers vowed to take a stand and fight at the Warta River, the most logical place to resist the German advance. Our parents remembered a similar situation in the First World War, when our village changed hands several times. We prepared to leave. Just before we left, Josek appeared. “Our battalion,” he said, “had only rifles and lances. We were forced into a chaotic retreat.”
On Monday, September 4, we decided to leave Dobra. Our truck, an old Peugeot, seemed only to run when we did not need it, so to be safe Papa hitched two horses to a wagon and tied a third to the rear as a spare. After we packed the most essential provisions, clothes and valuables, blankets and bedding, we were ready to leave.
Grandpa refused to come with us. He did not fear German soldiers. “We fought them in the last war. Soldiers are soldiers. They won’t harm an old man,” he said calmly. And so we left him behind and entered a congested trail of war refugees.
The road was packed with horse-drawn vehicles. Some families even took their cows to provide milk for their children. There were few automobiles, for the army had confiscated them. Our horses were long past their prime, so we walked on foot behind the wagon at each hill. After an hour of slow travel, we heard the sound of approaching airplanes. At first we believed they were Polish. As they came closer, however, we clearly saw that they were not. Their unusual heavy roar and their black cross insignias were enough to tell us that they held the enemy. However fearful we were, we knew that they could see that only civilians were on the road.
When they glided down, we thought it was just to see if we were innocent civilians. We were sure they would not harm us then. Yet to our surprise, they fired at us, creating a mass panic. On the right was the Warta, on the left a field. Only a few trees lined the roadside. We were trapped, with nowhere to run. Since the vehicles followed one another only centimeters apart, every salvo of bullets took a toll. Our three animals rose and whinnied in alarm and tried to tear themselves free of the wagon. After the assault, the bombers rose up and departed, leaving death and destruction behind. Strewn about were dead and injured people and animals and wrecked wagons. This was my first taste of war. What followed convinced me of the validity of my parents’ concerns.
A few kilometers farther on we were spotted by two other German planes. Since there were no Polish airplanes to fight them off, we knew what to expect. We had good reason to be frightened. On the right of the road an embankment ran down to the river. Suddenly an army unit passed us on the left, pushing us onto the slippery, grass-covered embankment. Papa jumped down and gripped the horses’ reins close to their mouths to steady them. “Out of the way,” people shouted, jockeying for space. At that point Mama, Pola, Josek, and I were walking behind the wagon. Suddenly Papa yelled, “Untie the horse in the back!” Just as my brother did, a bomb fell into the river, and an explosion drenched the road. Our wagon was pushed further to the side, and gravity pulled the horses and wagon down into the river. The Warta parted. After a gigantic splash, the water churned, foamed, and sent our belongings and valuables to the bottom of the river. Large waves rolled away in a circle and then dissipated. Only ripples covered our property and the grave of two horses. We had nothing left except what we wore and the horse Josek held on to. The Stukas departed, and we were stunned and horrified. People who had seen what had happened streamed by. They were frightened, and everyone just wanted us out of the way.
Papa suggested that we go to his brother’s home in Uniejów. “We’ll stay there until the war is over,” he said.
Uncle Chaim, Papa’s older brother, was a very orthodox and extremely pious Jew who often neglected his family. He and his wife and nine children lived on the edge of poverty in a small apartment. Toba, his oldest daughter, had lived with us for years. But in the months before the war she had returned home.
When we arrived at Uncle Chaim’s, the apartment was empty. Like most people in Uniejów, they had realized that our army couldn’t stop the Germans. They too were probably heading eastward. We could not turn back; we had to go on. Dragging our one horse farther made no sense. We left it grazing in a field, and bedraggled, despondent, and hungry, we left Uniejów.
Outside the town we heard Papa’s name being called. It was Mr. Chmielinski. A few years back he had bought Herr Heller’s bankrupted estate. My father had had lots of dealings with him since. It was an unexpected miracle. “Wigdor! What are you doing here?” he yelled. “Is that your wife and your children? Come on, we will take you with us,” he shouted, unable to stop for us in the traffic.
His tall, spacious wagon, pulled by stalwart Belgian horses, was a stark contrast to our scanty rig. We jogged along next to it long enough for him and his son, Karol, to help us up. Then Papa explained our dilemma. Chmielinski and his wife sat in front. Mama and Papa sat on the same seat facing the rear. The rest of us sat on the bench in the rear with Karol. We are more comfortable now, I thought.
When the traffic thinned out, Chmielinski pulled the wagon off the road so the horses could feed. He hung bags filled with oats on their necks and spread hay on the ground. Then the family shared what they had with us—home-baked bread, butter, and milk—with a hospitality that was easy to accept.
The Polish soldiers that passed us along the road didn’t resemble an army anymore. “Where are the Germans?” we asked.
“Keep going, keep going,” they replied. Although it was getting dark, we took their advice. Chmielinski set the horses off at a brisk trot. With fewer army vehicles crowding the road, we made better time.
Karol was a good-humored young man of twenty-seven who had been studying at Jagiello University in Kraków. He liked to talk about Marxism, pacifism, and Hitler. The falling dusk and the rhythmic sway of the wagon made me drowsy, and before long I was sound asleep.
It didn’t seem that I had slept long when I awoke to a familiar sound. I looked to the west and saw two dots on the horizon. The roar grew louder, and the dots grew bigger, until I could see the much-feared Messerschmitt. Chmielinski turned the wagon into a field that had already been harvested, and we climbed out. People ran, frenzied, slipping, staggering, desperate, but there was no place to hide. The roar was deafening as two bombers, side by side, circled above us. Suddenly I heard the bombs whistle. I dropped to the ground. The explosion sent earth flying, leaving huge craters behind. Terrified by the noise, the horses, sniffing blood and the odor of death, rose up on their hind legs. Although we were civilians and there was nothing military in sight, the Germans kept blasting their machine guns.
Finally, simply because they were out of ammunition, they flew off. I stood up, shaken. My heart was pounding. Above a wrecked wagon and a dead horse hung a bloodied jacket with part of an arm still in it on a telephone pole. We were all scared, and we thanked God that we had survived. There had been wars before but none like this. This wasn’t war, people were saying. It was cold-blooded murder. “This is the result of the new terrible weapons,” Karol mumbled, shaking his head.
As we continued moving east, the sun rose high. It baked us in an unusual September heat. We came across dozens of dead animals and wrecked vehicles. The smell of carrion was everywhere. I could not shake off my memory of the arm dangling from that telephone pole. After a few kilometers we stopped, and when Papa tried to buy provisions for zlotys, he discovered that what was plentiful just a few days before had all but disappeared. Although our
friends’ food was almost depleted, they continued to share with us what they had.
We had a few hours’ relief from the bombings, but soon the familiar roar reminded us that the Germans ruled the skies. We now knew what to expect, and when the wagon pulled off the road we swiftly ran for cover. I followed my brother into some dry and thorny bushes. We flattened ourselves, to be as obscure as possible. The planes came as before. Swooping down, they covered the area with machine-gun fire and dropped bombs. But their guns did the most damage. I checked myself after each salvo to see if I was hit and bleeding.
Not far from us, someone lay slumped over. We went over, and we could see blood trickling from his right temple. A bullet had ended his life. A woman in her middle forties came screaming, “It’s Stasiek. My God, it’s Stasiek!” Two men were behind her. There was sadness and sorrow and much sympathy, but people were afraid. All knew they could be next and tried to get away. The cries of “Stasiek!” rang in my ears for a long time.
I understood then why my parents had so feared war. It was on this day, in the middle of a Polish field under a sky filled with the rapid fire of airborne machine guns, that I lost the illusion that war was an adventure. As we continued on, we passed Lodz and drove on eastward toward Warsaw. We had decided not to stop before dawn. We knew now that daytime travel was dangerous, and from here on we would move only by night. Living off our benefactors became increasingly embarrassing. Besides, their food was nearly gone. We agreed that we would stop in the next village and again try to buy provisions.
Dark clouds hung in the sky, threatening rain, but as the sun came out they dispersed into another sunny morning. We knew it wouldn’t be long until the planes returned. We feared the next bombing, concerned that eventually we would have casualties. But we had to go on. We were near the Kampinoska barrens. The village of Kampinos was dead ahead. We stopped at the first farmhouse. No doubt, a land baron carried weight, and Mr. Chmielinski’s status was the reason for the remarkable greeting we received. The exceedingly hospitable peasant allowed us to move not only into his yard but also into his barn. He kept chattering in a dialect that was difficult for us to understand. When he realized that we could hardly follow him, he began gesturing with his hands.
The Dentist of Auschwitz Page 2