Ela Waśniewska, born in 1930
Why, why, why…?
Interviewed by Katarzyna Meloch
ELA WAŚNIEWSKA: We lived in Warsaw. My parents had bought a plot in Henryków near Warsaw and started building a house. In 1938, the house was completed and we moved in. Before the war, we were affluent because, as one of very few families, we owned a car. My father and mother ran a store. My parents’ acquaintances and friends were mostly educated people: engineers, lawyers, doctors. They weren’t simple people. They were Jews but they weren’t “those Jews”…
KATARZYNA MELOCH: Not traditionalists?
No. Besides, my parents had many Polish friends. They simply traveled in various circles. There were no divisions whatsoever, that these friends were Poles, and these… Jews. I knew I was Polish. I was an only child. My parents loved me very much, especially my father was very lenient with me. My mom was incredibly demanding. If I did something wrong, I had to apologize straight away. My mom demanded it… I was stubborn and had my own opinions.My mom had bought me books ever since I was very little. I had my own library, my own bookplates. In a word, it was a real home.
We had a piano. My mom played it beautifully and she sang beautifully. She also had amazing art skills. I had my own room. Since I was a child, my mom would instill in me that you have to be honest, that if you find anything, you’d better “trip over it” before you take it. I remember a situation when I found a necklace. I brought it home and my mom told me to take it immediately to the priest so he would announce from the pulpit that such and such a necklace had been found. My mom instilled in me the rules I should live by. I think it was quite necessary and later it came in handy because I kept recalling, once I was by myself, that this was how you should act. The “skeleton” you take from home is the “skeleton” you’ll have later.
Other than that, my mom believed that a party was no place for a child. The child must go to sleep, the child must stay in her room. The party is for adults and the child mustn’t listen to adults’ conversations nor be among them. I rebelled against that. There was this one very ugly episode: there was some party. I was supposed to go to bed. Everything was prepared for the guests’ arrival. I climbed out of bed, entered the room where everything was laid out, and took a bite of all the cakes. Because I didn’t like the filling, I bit off the bottoms. When my mom entered with guests, the table was a mess. It looked awful. My mom wouldn’t forget this for the rest of her life, this embarrassment. My mom wasn’t keen on cooking. We had a maid. My father, on the other hand, was a great cook because he had many siblings. His father was an estate administrator and all the children were taught life skills. He could cook and bake.
If your parents’ marriage was mixed, then your father must have been bap- tized in order to marry a Polish Catholic?
I was a small child, that was of no interest to me. I know that my father’s name was Aleksander Jan. I don’t know his Jewish name, only Polish. He probably was baptized… I don’t know when my parents were born nor where. I only know that my grandfather’s name was Waśniewski and that was my mom’s maiden name. My great grandfather took part in the Uprising in 1863. For that, he was exiled to Siberia. He was a doctor. They brought him from Siberia to St. Petersburg, where he worked in a hospital.
First, my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away and my mom was put in a boarding school. Later, her father died and her aunt on her grandfather’s side (who had vineyards in Bessarabia) paid for my mom’s boarding home. I know this from family stories. My father was also in Russia. My parents met in Russia. They came from Russia to Poland and got married. Until ’39, I had had a wonderful childhood: loving parents who did everything to raise a smart, kind, and well-educated child, to give her a foundation for the future. Then the war broke out.
My father, who loved us very much, went voluntarily to the Warsaw ghetto while we went into hiding. Our house was taken over by the Germans. We hid at our maid’s, who was married to Jaś, and at home we would call her “Jasiowa.” We were at Grandma Jasiowa’s. She lived in an out-of-the-way village; it was near Białołęka. The house was at the edge of the village and few people reached that place. This woman hid us. We lived in foul conditions. My mom first went down with flu, which led to pulmonary and kidney tuberculosis, then aggressive “consumption” and a very quick death.
How old were you?
When the war broke out, I was 9 years old, or maybe 7? I’m not sure. I know that I had started school. Because I was an intelligent child, I started school at the age of 6. This was possible before the war. My father went to the Warsaw ghetto, and because he was terribly worried about us, he left the ghetto through Sądy in Leszno. Later he ended up in the ghetto in Ludwisin [today a district of Legionowo]. The Germans established a ghetto near Warsaw in the town of Ludwisin near Jabłonna. They forced peasants out of their homes, fenced the territory, and the ghetto was there.
My mom died. She literally died within two weeks and I was by myself. Grandma Jasiowa said that she wouldn’t take care of me and I had to find my way to my father in the Ludwisin ghetto. It was a labor camp for Jews. Their job was to drain fields. I went to work with my dad. What could I possibly do there? But I had no choice. The conditions were horrible. The Germans had cut down all the trees for security reasons, which turned the area into a sort of “frying pan” with houses scattered around. The whole territory was fenced. Young birch and pine groves were outside the ghetto. Up to forty people lived in each house. There was so much filth. The conditions were horrendous, beyond imagination: lice, hunger, no water, people arguing. When so many people share one house, it breeds animosities.
My father had a feeling. He couldn’t get used to it. He was a man who had always lived comfortably, so he couldn’t get used to the conditions there. He couldn’t get used to this work. He was completely unfit for labor. His health started declining. He was feeling worse and worse. He had more and more health issues and it pained him so much that I was thin because there was no food. He would give me half of his rations. I ate it reluctantly because it didn’t taste good, but he’d explain that I had to eat it to live. At some point, my father got in touch with some man who came by one evening. There was a tunnel in the sand under the barbed wire and I slithered through this tunnel. Petite and slim like a young viper, I slithered under the wires and got to the other side, to the forest. In this forest, a man was waiting. He took me by the hand and off we went into the night, to a different world. After two or three days—I know this from Małgosia Bonikowska’s stories—the whole ghetto in Ludwisin was liquidated. Małgosia claimed that not a single man survived. Everyone was sent to Treblinka. My father was one of them. I was completely alone.
Terrified, scared of everything, crying, I spent several days with the man who took me. After that—because my father had given him an address—he took me to Warsaw to Krysia, the daughter of my mom’s friend. He left me there. I was at Krysia’s. In the kitchen, they had a box to store coal (in those days you burned coal). It was covered with a board, and I’d go inside this box under this board. There must have been some air holes. I would lie there in the fetal position in this coal box. Krysia was a teacher and gave clandestine lessons. Because she had a lot of visitors, I had to go into hiding all the time.
Her husband worked at the airport. He had played first violin in the Warsaw Philharmonic, but the Philharmonic wasn’t playing then, so he worked at the airport. He did something there, I don’t know what exactly. He wasn’t happy about a strange child living in their house. What’s more, he felt that they had so little money and I was a sponge, which he threw up at me many times. I had my chores there: I had to wash dishes and clean up. I was no good at this job because I was so small and terribly thin, and I had no energy. But I had to do it.
They had a neighbor. It was on Pańska in Warsaw. We used to live in the same house. And this neighbor used to be a blue policeman. He kept stopping by and they were terrified. That’s why they rented an apartment in Henryków. The mother of Krystyna (my mom’s friend) moved into Henryków along with their child, and one evening so did I. I had ginger, auburn hair. They covered my hair with a scarf and took me on a narrow-gauge train to Henryków (at that point, it was still running). I spent some time there. But again, it was dangerous because everyone knew me in Henryków. I wouldn’t leave the house. I didn’t go to school and only read the books that were there.
My caretaker decided to hand me over to nuns. She left me at the Sisters of Resurrection’s because she had studied at the Teachers University there and they knew her. She told them everything: that she had this child and she needed appropriate shelter. The nuns took me in but they required a fee. My caretaker had no money. Her husband’s father paid for me. He was a director at a shoe factory for the German army. He had a wife and two of his own children, but his wife was a good person and paid for my stay at the convent. I first lived in Warsaw at Szczekocińska Street in Mokotów. I think that there were more Jewish children there. The Germans would frequently come around and the nuns had to move the children to other places. They had big and little children. I couldn’t grasp it. I didn’t understand why this was happening: I was born in Poland, I spoke Polish. What was the problem??? I couldn’t comprehend any of this, that I had suddenly lost everything, that I had no father nor mother, that I didn’t own anything, and I was permanently scared.
After some time, the nuns said that they had too many children and they were again looking for a new place for me. I would spend three days in one house, three days in another, so I don’t remember any names or address- es. Because there was curfew, I would scamper from gate to gate in the middle of the night in order to get to a house where I was supposed to stay. No school, only reading some books which weren’t always for children. Later the nuns took me in again because they couldn’t find another shelter for me. It was a different convent in Chłodna Street so I was back with the nuns.
I can’t say that I had bad conditions there. I started learning a bit and I became very devout. I remember they had a chapel, and to go to that chapel, you had to wear a beret. First a veil, then a beret. They taught us chants to Gregorian masses. We had to sing them. And we did, we were very devout. The Blessed Sacrament was very often displayed. I remember that it was very important to me to kneel at the kneeler in the chapel in front of this Blessed Sacrament. It was important for me to stay there for a long time because I thought that I’d be better, that my life would get better, that I would receive something.
And how did you react to the chants that were sung in this chapel about what Jews did to Christ? Did you have any reaction?
I heard it but it the words were over my head and I felt that this issue didn’t affect me. I felt it didn’t affect me because I was Polish, and what was going on… I didn’t know why I was suffering, for what? I kept asking myself: What did I do to deserve this? Wasn’t I a good girl? I didn’t do anything wrong. Why were these sad events happening to me? Why was I alone? Why was nobody visiting me? Why didn’t I get anything nice? Why were other kids going to their families on holidays? Why did other kids get visitors and gifts, and I was at the mercy of the person paying for me? At some point—and this happened a lot—he stopped paying and then these wonderful nuns said that I couldn’t stay there anymore because nobody was paying for me.
So I moved on to the next facility. I remember that this facility was in the Old Town at some kind of “closet” nuns. Nobody was paying for me there and I stayed there. But I don’t remember now how this facility closed down. I ended up in another facility located in Leszno. There were children and adults, and families there. At some point, I couldn’t stay there anymore either, and my caretaker took me to the train station. She was in the Home Army and knew a lot of things. A transport of people from the East was coming and she blended me into that transport. When people were getting off the train, she simply pushed me between the crowds and told me to go. I did. I ended up in a kind of small ghetto. It was at Ogrodowa Street. People didn’t go outside. There were Russians, various people, some Kalmyks. You couldn’t leave the house. The Germans guarded it. The Germans felt really sorry for me because there were mostly families there but I was alone. These people were kind to me. Someone gave me some melted butter, one German gave me a piece of bread. These German guards showed me the most sympathy because they pitied a child who was alone and didn’t even have bedding. Other people there had some rags which they laid out on the floor and I had nothing. We never went outside.
My caretaker showed up again and paid the Germans something. The Germans felt really sorry for me, and I left with her. She gave them something, and they let me go. They liked me. They had their own children and felt sorry for me—that whole families were there, there were mamas, papas, and children, and I was alone, going around, moping, looking out of the window, and no one would take care of me; I was so forlorn, subdued, miserable. I was a child but I was acting like an old woman.
Where did she take you?
Again, she put me in some lodging.
A convent?
No, civilian. She couldn’t find another family for me because people were simply afraid. This was already on the Polish side, on the Aryan side. I felt like a trapped dog. I had no personal belongings. I couldn’t stay anywhere for too long. I kept bouncing from place to place. That’s why I can’t remember any names or addresses.
Finally, I ended up in a house with lots of kids. I don’t know if it wasn’t “Korczak’s Home.” I think so, because the description from the book I read resembled this house a lot. A family who lived there took care of me. They had two girls and their mother was pregnant. The baby was coming but they didn’t even have a little tub… The three of us went to Mokotów for the tub and this is when the Warsaw Uprising broke out. We were standing at the streetcar stop at Puławska. There was a Wedel store across the street. So we were standing at the stop, the three of us, with this tub, by a house full of the Home Army soldiers. Behind the house, there was a gendarmerie at Dworkowa Street and they were shooting at that gendarmerie from the windows of the staircase and the apartments. Obviously, the force was next to nothing, no fire power, no will to fight. There was only a handful of Polish soldiers. The Germans quickly subdued this attack and all of us: the residents and people at the stop and in the gate were marched to the gendarmerie yard. They already had machine guns set up and they wanted to execute all of us in this yard. But they saw how many of us there were and they changed their mind. They took us out of the gendarmerie towards the allotments. But to get there you had to climb up the stairs, and at the top there were machine guns. The people who ran were mostly killed because they were shooting them with these machine guns.
I was wearing wooden clogs. One of them fell off because someone stepped on my foot or kicked me. These shoes were extremely important to me because I didn’t have another pair. I only had these wooden clogs. Although they were still shooting, although everyone was running, I came back to find my clog. This is when the last wave of people was coming down and I fell over, and they fell on top of me. There was a heap of people and I was somewhere at the bottom. There is a commemorative plaque there saying that this was a place of execution. When I visited Warsaw I went to see it. It made me sad. A lot of people died there and the writing on the plaque doesn’t say much.
Finally, some people turned up. It was a Red Cross patrol. Someone said to get up if you could, and if you couldn’t, to prop yourself up or give a sign you were alive so they would come back and pick up the survivors. I continued to lie down like I was dead. There was someone’s blood, someone’s brain on me. I looked like I was dead. Someone stepped on my hand and I didn’t even budge but when they came back for us, I started to dig my way out. They helped me out. I couldn’t believe I could walk. They pulled me out. I checked to see if I could stand—it turned out I could. We were taken to the nuns at Belwederska Street.
So we were at these nuns’, a handful of us, and the nuns were pondering what to do. They were afraid to keep us there. I ended up in the house in Grottger Street where Kornel Makuszyński lived. Kornel Makuszyński had food provisions for several months. They set up a committee that assigned provisions. They cooked soups there and everyone got food. We lived in the basement of that house. We lived there for a while but I can’t recall now for how long.
One day, a lot of Germans showed up and chased all the Poles out of these houses on Grottger Street. They wanted to start a German colony there. So they chased everyone out… The Makuszyńskis left Warsaw while me and that girl… She wanted to go with her parents but I wanted to go back to that house because I’d left my coat there. So we walked down Belwederska towards the Trzy Krzyże Square or St. Aleksander Square. We were walking down the street, which was covered with bodies. We reached the point where on one side there was Mokotowska Street, on the other Marszałkowska and some other street—I can’t remember. The Germans wanted to take out the barricade, the one at Marszałkowska. So they were pushing us—and quite a lot of people were there—down this street, in front of a tank. We were supposed to shield this tank because that’s how they wanted to take out the barricade.
We got right to the barricade like human shields. At some point, on the left side by the barricade, I heard a voice speaking Polish. I dashed over there and jumped to the other side of the barricade. I was in the section taken by the Poles. My friend didn’t follow me, I lost touch with her. I don’t know if she died or survived because the insurgents were shooting. They tried not to kill people but it was combat. It was taking out the barricade and we served as tank shields.
As I got to the other side of the barricade, someone there immediately took me by the hand and led me to some house. Of course, there was nothing in this house because there were only soldiers there, and I was determined to go back to the house in Leszno because I’d left my coat there. For a child who has one coat, this coat is invaluable. Although it was summer, I thought ahead that I wouldn’t have this coat… And where would I find a coat? It was an invaluable object to me.
I walked down the street through basements, and I reached Aleje Jerozolimskie. I wanted to cross to get to my destination. I was waiting for the fire to subside from the side of the PKP train station and BGK bank. There were sandbags laid out on the street, and you had to crawl along them. There was a signal that you could try to cross. Some soldiers went ahead, one was killed. I got across unscathed. The crossing was discontinued. I went ahead. I finally stopped at some house. I was very tired, and a woman asked me where I was from because I didn’t live in that tenement house. I told her where I was coming from… After a little rest, I got up and continued walking to the next tenement house at Sienna Street because that house was still there. Again, some people took me in. I slept in the basement on the ground covered with a sack.
I got sores all over my body. The biggest one, the size of a hand, was on my stomach. It hurt a lot. Doctors in the nearest mobile hospital treated me. They cut the sore open and cleaned the wound without anesthetic. Just at that moment there was an air raid. Bombs were falling and the doctors took shelter, while I stayed alone on the table. When they came back they explained that if they had died, their patients would have been left without medical care.
I got back to the house where I was staying. There was no chance to have my dressing changed, no chance to wash up. Someone gave me the clothes of their son who had gone to fight. I got pants that were so big on me that they had to be tied up twice (at the waist and at the neck). There was horrible hunger. We had absolutely nothing to eat. They killed a horse and cut out pieces of meat for food. One street over, at Krochmalna Street, there was a Haberbusch brewery so they sent me there. I went and brought sugar from there (they had a lot of it) and I also brought beer for the people I was staying with. They were happy that there was sugar because they didn’t have any. The host was pleased that he got beer and everyone had some. After having some beer, the people were less scared, their moods improved, everything wasn’t so bleak.
There was one more gruesome experience. They started building a cemetery next to the house where I was staying. They would bury people there in debris (where else?) and a “Big Bertha” howitzer shell hit this cemetery. There were severed hands and legs. A dog was walking around over it. This is a gruesome sight that stays with you forever.
They found a shoe store somewhere but they couldn’t open the door so they broke a window over it and gave me a boost because I was thin and very nimble. I entered this store through this hole and tossed shoe boxes or just shoes out onto the street. I tossed and people caught. Of course, while I was tossing them, I forgot that I needed shoes too because I didn’t have any, and that someone should pull me out of there, through that window. Terrified, I started screaming and crying that I would die there alone because there were bars, but they snatched the shoes and left. Finally, a man helped me out, pulled me out of the window. And I still didn’t have shoes. The ground was covered with empty shoe boxes. People took shoes, dumped the boxes, and left.
Next to the PAST (it was all near the PAST), there was a huge crater in the ground. You had to go down there to draw water. These people who gave me shelter sent me for water (they were elderly people), so I went to get water. Again, they were shooting, some people were killed and I left the crater with water. I had plenty of situations where I nearly died. It continued until the end of the Warsaw Uprising: my life was very turbulent.
PAST—a tall building of the Polish Telephone Joint-stock Company—trans. note.
And how did you get out of Warsaw?
The Germans came and forced everyone out into the courtyard. They were throwing a bunch of grenades into the basements. If you hadn’t come out, you’d have died. I came out of the basement into the courtyard. They herded us to the Western Station, to Pruszków. I was in Pruszków. I slept on a piece of cardboard and some straw. Pus continued to trickle out of my wound. This wound stuck to my clothes. I was alone. I had a necklace. Someone ripped it off at night, cutting my neck.
A water tank with soup would come there (I have a book about this camp in Pruszków). There was a path made of balusters. You came in one way, exited another. A German was standing there so no one could go in twice. I found a can and I was happy that I would get some soup in that can. I stood in line for soup. It was my turn and it was the last portion, which they poured for me. I exited the other way and someone who was standing in line and didn’t get soup jostled my hand and I spilled my soup. And I couldn’t get back in line! I couldn’t even count on this tiny bit of soup. What happened in the camp in Pruszków is beyond description. For example, the latrine was a huge pit with only a beam at the bottom, and you had to go publicly (which I could never do). It was simply horrible.
Some were sick, some died. Some who had the means got out by bribing the Germans. One day—it was already the fall and it was cold—a German came and told everyone to go outside, and so we did. We went out and started walking down the path between the barracks (there was a tram loop in Pruszków by the transitory camp). We were out, and there were two desks. I didn’t know which one to approach. I came up to one of them and it turned out it was a desk for so-called freedom. We went out. They loaded us on cattle wagons and off we went. It took eleven days. We were covered in urine, feces, with no food or water. It was horrible. It was increasingly colder, and when there were air raids, these wagons were shunted onto side-tracks and we didn’t move.
After eleven days, we reached Skawina. They opened the wagons there. Some people were dead and frozen, some were alive but they were the living dead. Peasants with carts collected people and “distributed” them around the local villages… I ended up in a family who lived near Mogilany in Chorowice. This is where I ended up. A woman took me in to help around the house. She had adult children who worked at the manor (it was the Doboszyńskis’ manor in Chorowice). Her only son was drafted to dig trenches. And I stayed at this woman’s until the liberation. There was constant fighting in Mogilany, the Mogilany mountain. One moment these villages were in the hands of the Russians, the next in the hands of the Germans.
If it was the Germans, I couldn’t really complain about them because they pitied me, a child. They’d tell me stories, that they had left behind a wife, their children, and they gave me some soup, some chocolate (they had field-ration chocolates) or a piece of bread. But the Russians, that was a different story, that was bad. The Russians made a huge mess of the farmhouse. There was a room, a kitchen, and across from it, there was a stable. And a hallway inside, and that was it. One time, my hostess, who feared for her children and her cows, went to the forest, where there were potatoes, in order to hide with her children and the cows. She left me in the farmhouse to watch over it, and take care of it. The Germans couldn’t understand how you could leave a child alone in the farmhouse. I told them (in broken German) that she wasn’t my mother.
There was also this gruesome situation. The fighting was rough there. A “slaughterhouse,” a lot of Germans and a lot of Russians died.
They dug out deep trenches and tossed the bodies into those trenches. It was winter. They kept adding the bodies… There was one more indescribable story. The woman treated me as labor and gave us food in one bowl. I didn’t know how to eat from one bowl. That one bowl was for everyone. Her children were used to it. Before I got a bite, they had already finished eating. They asked her to give me a couple of potatoes separately. She refused and added: “She needs to learn. She either learns or starves.” This continued for the rest of the war.
An old teacher took an interest in me. She thought that I had some potential and that my staying in the country would be a complete waste. I fed cows, picked beets, minded the child, shelled peas. It was a hard life and over time, I was going backward. Right after the liberation, when the Russians had freed Kraków, this teacher sent me to the Emergency Shelter in Kraków. I got there. The children were in a horrible condition: they came from camps, forced labor. They were sick and had mange. The Shelter was in abject poverty. They had nothing. Older girls had to travel across the city, all the way to Szlak Street…. with a huge pot to get soup from soup kitchens. Later this soup was distributed to the children. Sometimes it was soup, other times groats…This was in ’45, right after the liberation. I entered the room and saw the kids that had mange, mange all over. I didn’t feel like getting mange, I already had lice and sores. And mange was the last thing I needed. I decided: “I’d rather lie down on the floor under the table” (in a room with twenty other children). I was 15 years old at the time…
Because the women at the Shelter thought that I was intelligent, I was moved to the Orphanage in Kraków. There used to be a transfusion center there. When you entered, you could see sinks filled with blood. It was gruesome. There was nothing to sleep on. They brought a lot of straw to the courtyard. We’d stuff this straw into straw mattresses and we’d sleep on them. There was no food. They continued to bring food from soup kitchens. At that point, I was a 15-year-old girl who had no school certificate although I was at a middle school age. The Orphanage sent me to middle school. There’s still one thing I can’t understand: how did I manage to learn without going to school the entire occupation, living in the ghetto, living in the camps, working as kitchen help? How did I manage at school? I don’t know. It’s another miracle.
I did well with some subjects at school, not all of them. In Polish, I did well because I was well-read. I spoke correctly so I could express myself. I could learn geography or history. But I had huge gaps in math, because you needed to have the foundations to continue learning at a higher level. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t finish the first year of middle school. I repeated the year because I didn’t have the basics. Later, once I repeated the first year, it got better. At some point, it turned out that I had serious thyroid issues. From a smart kid, I turned into a child who couldn’t remember anything. It was because of my thyroid. Nobody could comprehend why I became such a bad student. I started getting a thyroid treatment.
People would turn up to adopt children. I had several opportunities. A single, childless teacher wanted to adopt me. Her name was Zofia Wilczyńska. There was this forester’s family who also wanted to adopt me. There was a third person—a lady who had lost her husband and son. (Her husband was caught in one of the Germans’ roundups. When her son was sent to bring him warm clothes, he too was arrested and they both died. The Germans set up a “slaughterhouse” there and killed all these people). This lady made a mausoleum for her son… There was his sailor’s suit and his toys. This woman had me over and showed me his room. It terrified me, I couldn’t imagine living with that lady.
Right after I moved to the Orphanage, I experienced something that affected my later decisions. Some couple took a child in. She didn’t meet their expectations and they brought her back to the Orphanage. The girl was devastated, she couldn’t live it down. Having seen this girl despair and cry so much that you couldn’t communicate with her because she was constantly stressed out and lost, I thought to myself: I’m not easy, they can be disappointed, I’m stubborn. I may not meet their expectations. I preferred to be in debt to the State than to some person… I didn’t take advantage of these families’ propositions.
In the Orphanage, I was believed to be an intelligent child. That’s why when people came and wanted to adopt a child, they’d send me, among others. After several attempts (I lived with one lady, with another, then there was the third family), I said: no more. And I stayed at the Orphanage. I completed middle school and secondary school there, but then I had no place to go because I had no family. I had this terrible thirst for knowledge, as if I wanted to stock up this knowledge for the rest of my life. In middle school, and later in general secondary school, I did a scouting course, a library course, and a two-year pedagogical course (all while studying in secondary school). I got licensed (the course only included pedagogical subjects, but the secondary school offered general classes and they transferred all my credit. I earned my Pedagogical Study certificate). I started working at the school while living at the Orphanage.
I was very young. I’d had successes but I continued to want more. One day I went to a meeting at the Jewish Socio-Cultural Association. A speaker came to talk about Jewry. She said something that stuck in my mind: There are a lot of prominent Jews because Jews have always had a thirst for knowledge. They started very early, had a thirst for knowledge, and continued to deepen their knowledge. They achieved a lot because Jews had no home, no homeland, no possessions. Their only possession was their knowledge because no one could take it away from them. They could lose their house, they could be exiled from their country, but they wouldn’t lose their knowledge.
When I heard that, it became my “idée fixe.” Since I had nothing (no family, no possessions, no one to support me, back me up, and help me), I had to get as much knowledge as possible. I enrolled in the College of Culture and Education for Adults, which I completed (its faculty were university professors). You had to write a thesis. I wanted more. Without having to take entrance exams, I was accepted at the Jagiellonian University in the department of pedagogy, where I majored in culture and education. Back then, you first completed first-degree studies, and later second. Only the best were accepted for the second degree, not everyone. I got accepted but only thanks to really hard work… No parties, no dates. I was always studying. Thanks to that, I have the satisfaction of having achieved something with my work alone.
“Do you know what it’s like to have no home,
To keep hiding in the night,
What it feels like to be all alone,
To not know where you’ll sleep tonight…?”
[translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster]
