Anna Goldman, born in 1937

I Knew I Had to Be a Good Girl

I was born in October 1937. My parents lived in Gnaszyn, five kilometers from Częstochowa, where they both worked in the Gnaszyn Manufactory. Father was a chief engineer, and mother—an accountant.

I spent the first two years of my life peacefully, surrounded by a large loving family. Father had two brothers and a sister, Mother had four sisters. My father’s eldest brother was a gynecologist. He worked in a hospital in Częstochowa, he had a wife and a daughter six months older than me. Father’s sister was a lawyer and together with her husband, also a lawyer, they ran a law firm. Father’s youngest brother was a ceramic engineer and got married just before the war. My mother’s sisters lived in Częstochowa, except for one, who in the 1920s left to work in France and lived there until 1998. In the meantime she lost her husband, who had participated in the Resistance Movement during the war. She stayed with her two children in Paris.

The war found us on vacation in Ciechocinek, so we immediately returned to Częstochowa. Father with his brothers and brother-in-law went east to fight. The eldest brother, the gynecologist, was drafted into the army and died on April 13, 1940, in Katyń. When my father and his brother-in-law returned, a ghetto was formed in Częstochowa, to which they deported us. We lived there together, about eight people, initially in two rooms, and after the ghetto’s area was reduced (to the so-called small ghetto), in one room. I won’t write about the hunger, fear, roundups, deportations to Treblinka, and executions on the spot at the Jewish cemetery, because I was only four years old, and we all know about it.

After a year and seven months in the ghetto, in the fall of 1942, right before Rosh Hashanah and the moment of the ghetto’s liquidation, with the help of our Polish friends, we (my mother, father and I, as well as my father’s sister, her husband and his niece, whose parents were killed in Treblinka) managed to escape from the ghetto and go to Warsaw. There we got “Aryan papers,” that is, “new” birth certificates with new names and surnames. My mother and I lived with the Nowak family, who were teachers. Father was put separately with his aunt, uncle, and his niece (now an Israeli writer, Irit Amiel, who writes about the Holocaust) in the area of the Warsaw University of Technology.

I knew that my name was Halinka Gawrońska and I ought to be a quiet, good girl. We kept in touch with Father, Aunt and Uncle, but often we couldn’t leave the house for long stretches because someone had run into us on the street and blackmailed us, threatening to take us to the Gestapo, but was ultimately content with a bribe. During those days, we were sitting quietly in the apartment, and to give me some fresh air in the evening, my mother would wrap me up in blankets and sit me by the open window with the light in the room turned off. I wasn’t allowed to make noise, run, talk loudly, or play. My mother told me many times after the war that if I hadn’t been a good child, we wouldn’t have survived. And I must have realized the gravity of the situation because I didn’t cause any trouble. Due to blackmail, we changed apartments several times, always under the care of our friends, the Nowaks, whom I treated as “aunt and uncle”.

My mother was a very attractive blonde woman, and sometimes she drew the Germans’ attention. I remember this incident: my mother went to the doctor with me because I was sick. A German in uniform sat in the waiting room and stared at Mama the whole time. When we entered the doctor’s office—it was Dr. Fisz (I think he was Silesian)—he noticed my mother’s anxiousness. He asked her what was going on and said: “Leave my office calmly, get a cab and go home, I’ll ask this officer into the office and stall him.” And that’s what happened.

The next day, for being polite and not crying despite my fear, my mother bought me my first toy, a wooden butterfly that folded its wings when pulled. My mother was seeing my father in the city while I was waiting at home watched by Aunt Nowakowa. When Mom came back, she always brought me something, usually a chocolate cupcake. I don’t know how she got it. Then she’d say: “Open your mouth, close your eyes, and you will see what pops in.” These are the few pleasant memories I have.

The Warsaw Uprising in 1944 found us at Wspólna Street. We were living together with the Nowak family on the second floor. I remember on August 1, 1944, at dusk, my mother, looking out of the window, noticed a priest in the yard with a red and white armband. There was no end to joy. Mother and Aunt were dancing around the table and then drinking some liquor from the cabinet.

Later Warsaw was hit with bombs and projectiles from the Katyushas, which we called “cows” because you could hear a moo before the impact. We had to move to the basement. Lots of people were sitting there, it was cramped and dark. When the missile hit our building, the basement turned black with dust. Everyone had to have a wet cloth with them to cover their nose and mouth. Water was in the tap in the yard, you had to go outside to fetch it, which sometimes ended in death from a stray bullet. There was also no food, only a piece of bread here and there.

My toy then was a doll made from my coat fastened with buttons, and sleeves stuffed with scarves. I hugged her, reassuring her that nothing bad would happen to us so there was no reason to be scared. I think these words of encouragement were rather directed at me.

There was fighting and noise all around us, sometimes insurgents with rifles or young girls with stretchers were running through the basement. In each yard, there were small altars with a statue of the Virgin Mary, where the residents prayed during the battle breaks. To this day, I remember all the songs and prayers that I needed to know. After the failure of the Uprising on October 6, 1944, the Nazis expelled us from the basement with our small luggage and rushed us in columns towards Pruszków. That’s when I saw Warsaw burning and completely in ruins.

Onions were growing in the fields by the road. I was so hungry that I broke away from my mother, ran out of the column into the field, grabbed two onions and started to eat them, still covered with sand and dirt. They couldn’t pry those onions out of my hands. Fortunately, the German escorting us didn’t shoot me, my mother managed to turn me back to the column but the onions were mine!

There was a stop at night. Together with the Nowaks, we managed to move away from the column, and through the fields we found a decrepit shed. There, we waited out the night and the column’s departure, fighting the rats that roamed the shed. In the evening, I don’t know how, we managed to get to the village of Bąkowa Góra.

It was a small village with four cottages. Not knowing who we were, the people took us in—the refugees from Warsaw. We were fed and allowed to stay there until liberation in January 1945. The village was surrounded by forests. That year the winter was cold and snowy. There was no electricity there, it was lit with a carbide lamp, which barely gave any light but smelled terribly. Before Christmas my aunt and I made chains of colored paper and we decorated the Christmas tree.

One day a tall man emerged from the forest; he had blond hair, blue eyes, and a bushy mustache. He turned out to be my uncle, the husband of my father’s sister. They also had managed to escape from the convoy to Pruszków. They were in the village of Pocieszna Górka about ten miles from us, together with his wife and niece (Irit Amiel). Uncle walked around villages, traded and distributed secret newspapers. The meeting was a great joy because we didn’t know what had happened to them. Unfortunately, we had no news about my father. At the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, he lived in another part of Warsaw and we never met again. I don’t even know what my father’s last name was and how he died. In any case, he never returned to us, although for years my mother believed that he would be found.

When I read Michał Cichy’s article “Poles—Jews, Black Pages” in Gazeta Wyborcza about the pogrom of Jews in Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising at Prosta Street, where the Home Army soldiers killed a dozen or so Jewish survivors, I thought that my father might have died this way. I’ll never know…

I remember when the whole village was going to midnight Mass. It was very cold and snowy, everyone was walking through the forest to the church for a few miles, wrapped in woolen aprons, wearing felt slippers on their feet, the snow was sparkling and creaking underfoot.

In January 1945, the Russians  came.  Sometimes  they’d  burst into houses looking for vodka and then it was terrible. I remember this incident: when Russian soldiers barged in and there was an unlabeled bottle of vinegar on top of the wardrobe, one of them immediately ran up to it, knocking me over brutally because I was standing in his way. Terror was visible on my mother’s face, she was afraid that if he’d drunk this vinegar, he would have shot us all. Fortunately, dear Aunt Jadzia ran to the kitchen, where there was a bottle of moonshine and gave it to him, he smiled and calmed down. I also remember how Russian soldiers were transporting wounded Germans on a sleigh. The winter was harsh and snowy and they called for “Wasser” (water) and my dear mother immediately poured a glass of water and wanted to run towards them. Only Aunt Jadzia stopped her, reproachfully saying “Those are Germans,” and Mom came to her senses.

Afterbeingliberatedfromthe Germans, wereturnedto Częstochowa. A handful of us from the whole family survived: Mom and I, Aunt (Father’s sister) with her husband and his niece Irit Amiel. The rest of the family died. Father in the Warsaw Uprising, Uncle in Katyń, his wife and daughter in Treblinka, Father’s second brother with his wife in Krakow in the prison on Montelupich Street. Out of my mother’s sisters, it was the youngest one that survived, having worked in the “Hasag” labor camp in Częstochowa throughout the war.

There, a few hundred young Jews survived the war doing back- breaking work and in terrible conditions, recalibrating cartridges for the Germans. But they survived. Most of them left Poland immediately after the war, and so did my aunt. She had gotten married here and left with her husband for Palestine, where she died in the 1970s. She witnessed the death of her father and my grandfather. When they were being chased in the column, Grandfather, who had asthma, couldn’t keep up, so a German shot him in front of my aunt. I don’t know where he is buried.

In 1948, my uncle’s niece fled with a group of young people—she was fourteen then. They made their way through the Alps to the sea, where they were taken on a ship to Palestine, but were returned from Haifa to Cyprus because they weren’t wanted in Palestine. When the State of Israel was established, they were brought to Haifa. There, Irit worked in a kibbutz, got married, had two children and six grandchildren. She lost one family to the war and now has another one. At the age of sixty, when her granddaughter asked her to tell her something about the Holocaust because she had to write an essay about it, Irit figured that once we died, no one would talk about it. And she decided to write about the Holocaust. She published several volumes of poems and stories about the fate of Jews in Israel, Poland, Hungary, and England. She is one of the famous writers in Israel, writing about the Holocaust in Polish, English and Hebrew.

My “leftover” family, which survived thanks to good people, Aryan papers, and Żegota, wouldn’t talk about their war experiences after the war. It was a time when the wounds were too fresh to be torn open. And I was too young and stupid to ask questions, especially since I knew how much these memories hurt them.

It’s telling that I knew from my mother about her two sisters, the one who had left for France and the one who went to Palestine after the war. Mom never said she had two more sisters. Only after my mother’s death in 1980, when I was visiting her sister in Paris, I heard from her: “We were five sisters, we were all tall, how come you’re so short?” Then I started asking questions and it turned out that they both had lived in the ghetto in Częstochowa. One was shot in bed with two children, and the other participated in an armed rebellion of Jewish youth in the ghetto and died in a bunker. My mom never talked about them. Auntie gave me a copy of a photo of my grandfather with his five daughters. Grandma died young of cancer and Grandpa was raising his daughters by himself. What he did and what his profession was, I don’t know, I didn’t ask.

I’m angry with myself that I didn’t learn more about my family, but those were the times. Unfortunately, the world became interested in this topic after my relatives, the survivors, had already died. I was left completely alone, without a family and without any detailed knowledge about them. Even in the wild, overgrown Jewish cemetery in Częstochowa, I can’t find the grave of my father’s grandparents who died long before the war. After the war, my mother told me that my name wasn’t Halinka Gawrońska but Ania Goldman, without further explanation. I took it for granted.

I graduated from high school in Częstochowa, then studied medicine in Zabrze. I worked in a hospital from 1965 and then in a clinic up until now (for 42 years). I am a GP. I work so as not to feel lonely, to be among people, and keep active in my profession, even though I could have retired nine years ago.

I’ve never changed my name, except for the occupation period, everyone knows that I’m Jewish. I’ve never encountered antisemitism directed at my person. However, I often see it, it hurts me a lot and I always react sharply. In the ‘90s, I heard about the Association of Children of the Holocaust in Warsaw on television. I wrote about myself, attaching some documents I had, and found friends with whom I feel like we’re family.

So far, I’ve been in good shape physically, not so great mentally. After the death of the last person in my family who had survived the Holocaust, I became depressed and a psychiatrist pulled me out of it. Unfortunately, I have frequent relapses—dreams, anxieties, a fear of a lonely, infirm old age. Although I have a lot of friends, I feel best during psychotherapy in Śródborów and at the meetings of the Association. Then I’m among my fellow, similarly “scorched”, people.

I often feel guilty as to why others died and I live. Is it fair? I’m still looking for an answer and can’t find it.

The year 2007