and smoked them all – about a hundred of them. We threw the dog ends and ash behind the bed, thinking Mama wouldn’t notice. She was really angry with us – I can’t remember her ever being like that again.’
‘It was warmer by then, probably the start of spring 1940, and we left Pińsk for good. They announced that anyone who wanted could go across to the German side, taking thirty kilos of luggage with them. Mama didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the fact that she was leaving a fully furnished house, surely realizing she would never return to it. She put me and Rysiek on the wagon and we set off on our way. I remember a train ride after that. Before we crossed the border, first we went to Przemyśl, where my father’s parents lived. My grandfather was fairly fit, but for years my grandmother had suffered from paralysis in both arms and needed to be looked after on the arduous journey.
‘On the Soviet–German border we had to hand over money, jewellery and any valuables. On the German side they shaved our heads, because the Germans thought everyone coming from the East had lice. First they smeared some white paste on our heads, then they cut our hair. The boys were shaved bald, and the girls had their hair cut short.
‘I cannot remember how we met up with my father, but in any case we all went to live together in Sieraków outside Warsaw. It was a two-storey house, with one room downstairs, where my father ran a one-class school; he was the only teacher. Up thirteen stairs, there were two rooms with sloping walls under the roof. My grandparents, Rysiek and I slept in one, and my parents in the other.
‘My father was a strict teacher, and used to whack the pupils on the hands with a ruler; he told me to write a word out twenty times which I had written wrongly.
‘Did we suffer from hunger? Not at that point, but it was tough, and we were all pretty thin. At home there was a large cast-iron pot in which Mama used to make soup. There was soup every day – after all, we were living in the countryside. The children used to bring something as “payment” for school, a litre of milk, or some potatoes . . . Sometimes there wasn’t enough soup for everyone, and then Mama would say she wasn’t hungry.’
Hunger followed us here from Pińsk, and I was always looking for something to eat, a crust of bread, a carrot, anything at all. Once my father, having no alternative, said in class: ‘Children, anyone who wants to come to school tomorrow must bring one potato’ . . . The next day half the class did not come at all. Some of the children brought half, others a quarter of a potato. A whole potato was a great treasure.9
‘Rysiek and his friends invented a game which involved sprinkling gunpowder into a small metal pipe, and then throwing the pipe as hard as you could at the ceiling – that’s how I remembered it. There was a fiery explosion – luckily it didn’t burn our faces, or our eyes; there could have been a tragedy.
‘After about a year living in Sieraków we moved to Izabelin, where we had fabulous conditions for those days: a house with two rooms, a kitchen, hall and veranda. We also had a garden, where we grew vegetables, a few fruit trees – apples and plums – and in a wooden outbuilding there were rabbits and hens, which meant we had eggs on a daily basis. Dad rode a bike to the school in Sieraków, and Mama babysat the local children, for which she got jam and honey. Rysiek and I went to school in Izabelin.’
‘There were often at least a dozen bikes “parked” outside our house. Underground meetings were held there – my father was in the Home Army [Armia Krajowa, or AK – the Polish resistance] – which unfortunately was evident to all. And dangerous. Our neighbour Grothe, the shop owner, was Volksdeutsch [an ethnic German]. He had a wife and three daughters, one of whom, Iza, I befriended. One day, when I had come home from seeing her, an operation began at Grothe’s house. The AK had passed a death sentence on him, though luckily they hadn’t appointed my father to carry it out. We heard shouting and cries for help. There was nothing we could do. Later we found out that in trying to defend himself, Grothe had thrown acid at one of his attackers and barricaded himself into the shop. They had shot him through the door.
‘The next day a nightmare began. A lorry full of gendarmes drove into the village. There were cars, motorbikes, dogs – a general uproar. They dragged out our neighbour Wojtek Borzęcki, who was someone in the area, a handsome man who went about in jodhpurs and knee-high riding boots; I think he was a count. They started torturing him in full view of everyone. They stuck nails under his fingernails, and he howled so loud I can still hear that howling now. Rysiek and I are watching this, glued to the window. Then they drag out the teacher, Franciszek Pięta. They drive him about the village by car, strip the skin off his face and sprinkle salt on it. Mama and I kneel down and pray at an accelerated rate, as if a rapid prayer were going to bring him aid faster.
‘We were afraid for my father. He had gone to Sieraków that morning and he wasn’t back. It turned out the Germans had launched a crackdown throughout the district. In Sieraków, as he was closing the school, they were already waiting for him. From what he told us afterwards, somewhere by a roadside cross they divided the men they had rounded up into two groups. They took some with them, but luckily our father was in the group of men they let go. During the selection he had managed to throw to the ground some small pieces of paper containing secret information and bury them with his foot.
‘By the time he came home, it was night. We hadn’t slept a wink; we were terrified. That night my parents made the decision to run away. In the morning our father went to work in Sieraków, but didn’t come back – afterwards he went straight to Warsaw. He spent the next few nights in various places, staying with friends. Every night he had a problem, because he had to organize a different place to stay.’
At night the partisans come . . . One time they came, as usual, at night. It was autumn and it was raining. They talked to my mother about something in a whisper (I hadn’t seen my father for a month and I would not see him until the end of the war, as he was in hiding). We had to get dressed quickly and leave: there was a round-up in the district, they were transporting whole villages to the camps. We escaped to Warsaw, to a designated safe house. It was the first time I had been in the big city, the first time I ever saw a tram, high multi-story tenements, and rows of big shops.10
‘Rysiek, Mama and I spent several months living with a friend of my parents from Warsaw, Jadwiga Skupiewska. My father occasionally dropped in for the night, but he was not usually there. Where exactly the flat was, I don’t know; I remember a tenement with a central well. We weren’t allowed to go up to the windows, because staying with someone without being registered was strictly forbidden. So both we and the friends who gave us shelter were taking a risk.’
We were living in Warsaw then [as the winter of 1942 approached], on Krochmalna Street, near the gate to the ghetto, in the apartment of the Skupiewskis. Mr Skupiewski had a little cottage industry making bars of green bathroom soap. ‘I will give you some bars on consignment,’ he said. ‘When you sell four hundred, you will have enough for your shoes, and you can pay me back after the war.’ People then still believed that the war would end soon. He advised me to work along the route of the Warsaw–Otwock railway line, frequented by holiday travellers; vacationers will want to pamper themselves a little, he counselled, by buying a bar of soap. I listened to him. I was ten years old, and I cried half the tears of a lifetime then, because in fact no one wanted to buy the little soaps. In a whole day of walking I would sell none – or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright red with happiness.
After pressing the buzzer I would start to pray fervently: God, please have them buy something, have them buy at least one! I was actually engaged in a form of begging, trying to arouse pity. I would enter an apartment and say: ‘Please, madam, buy a soap from me. It costs only one zloty, winter is coming and I have no shoes.’ This worked sometimes, but not always, because there were many other children also trying to get over somehow – by stealing something, swindling someone, trafficking in this or that.
Cold autumn
