Joanna Kaltman, born in 1929
I’ve procrastinated for half a century
I was born in Warsaw. My father, Dr. Henryk Kaltman, was a health service physician in a hospital in the Solec district. My mother, Dr. Ewa Kaltman, worked in the Infant Jesus Hospital on Nowogrodzka Street, and the year before the war, in the municipal hospital in the Czyste district (_). I attended the A. Wazówna School in Warsaw. My father was mobilized already in 1938 and served in the hospital of the Brzesko Fortress, from which, after September 17, 1939 (__), he crossed over with his unit to Hungary. There, he died of tuberculosis in an internment camp.
Hospital in the Czyste district – refers to the Jewish Hospital (today it is the hospital on Kasprzaka Street in the Wola district). (Author’s note)
September 17, 1939 – the day the Russians entered to occupy eastern Poland.
The beginning of the war found my mother and me in Warsaw in a house at 36 Nowogrodzka Street. As early as the winter of 1939, we were thrown out of our apartment because our house was occupied by Germans. We moved to Mylna Street, already on the grounds of then planned Jewish quarter, to the apartment of Father’s cousin, Henryk Blaufeld. (He had worked before the war for many years as an engineer in Austria. After the occupation of Austria by the Third Reich, he, his wife, a Viennese, and their two children were forced to leave and moved to Warsaw.) After the ghetto was closed, Mama still worked for a certain time in the hospital in the Czyste district (she had a pass at the time) and then transferred to the hospital at 3 Leszno Street.
Living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto are well known––the ever growing feeling of being in danger, the crowding, the growing shortage of food and decreasing rations gotten with cards, decimating typhus, forced labor in the “shops”, nightmarish guard posts from which they shot for amusement and hunted for hungry children who were attempting to smuggle some food supplies through the walls. In the streets, there were ever larger numbers of people dead from hunger and exhaustion or simply illness, bodies lying everywhere covered by newspapers until they were collected on carts so they could be buried somewhere like decomposing carcasses. And with all this, the “Jewish Gestapo,” headquartered at 13 Leszno Street, serving the Germans, brutal “actions” by the Jewish “militiamen”—all of this has frequently been described.
But there is one matter which I want to write about in detail because it was the most difficult experience for me during the entire war (it is not an accident, after all, that it took half a century for me to bring myself to tell about it for the first time). In this same apartment building on Mylna Street (I do not remember the house number, but it was a multistory building behind the former Evangelical Hospital on Leszno Street, the backyard of which was adjacent to the hospital but separated from it by a wall), on the third floor, there was an apartment separated from ours by the kitchen staircase. In it lived a family of teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Różycki with, I believe, a seven-year- old son, little Olek, and a paralyzed father, and also, displaced from Brwinów, their brother-in-law, Mr. Wilner, with his wife and two sons. (I think one was 16 or 17, and the other was more or less my age.)
The Różyckis conducted private classes, and I studied with them, together with a group of other children, following the normal school program. It must have been late spring 1942 (unfortunately, I no longer remember the date). We were awakened, at night, by the loud barking out of orders, in German, as if during a drill. The entire building, enormous for this district, was ghostly quiet. One could almost sense physically that everyone was listening in horror, but, all around, there was an eerie silence, all windows slightly ajar and dark.
There were lights in only one apartment, and in it, shadows moving behind the shades, as if someone were being forced to sit up and down following chortling commands. But then, suddenly, a movement began around one of the windows, and we heard the terrible cry of a woman, the desperate stammering of the paralyzed father of Mrs. Różycka, and the shattering sound of window glass breaking. The enormous wheelchair, together with the paralyzed and strapped-in old man, was pushed out of the window. A moment after, the nightmarish thud of his fall onto the courtyard reverberated. Minutes later, there were noises in the stairwell and shots almost right at our door.
It was then that my mother, unable to stand the ghastly horror of helplessness, tore herself away from the landlady blocking the door, and ran out into the stairwell. Mr. Różycki was lying there, shot in the neck. Gestapo men had run down and were shooting in the direction of the outside yard of that wing of the house. It was Mr. Wilner who jumped out through the window in the stairwell when they were taking him and Mr. Różycki out of the apartment. They then shot Mr. Różycki and ran after his brother-in- law. My mother tried to dress his wounds, and then she ran back through our apartment to the neighbor across the front stairwell, a surgeon, for assistance and dressings. At that point, another series of shots rang out in that part of the house, and a short time later, everything quieted down.
My mother came running back with the surgeon (I don’t remember his name) to Mr. Różycki. After a while, I heard the voice of our neighbor, “Madame Doctor, nothing more can really be done here!” And then, Mama’s voice, “They finished him off.” It turned out that, infuriated by the attempted escape, the Gestapo men had returned and, indeed, had finished off or killed almost all of them––only Mrs. Różycka with her little boy survived. But I found that out only much later. After that night, I have a sort of black hole in my memory. My last recollection of the apartment building on Mylna Street is the view of the courtyard with a broken wheelchair. Evidently, the bodies of the murdered victims had already been removed.
I believe, although I don’t remember it, that Mama then took me to the hospital, and I remained there until the end of my stay in the ghetto. Anyway, there were quite a few of us, in general, younger than I, “hospital children.” The elderly Dr. Mesz (Natan? Stanisław?) used to tell us fables and taught us to make folded toys out of paper so that we would sit quietly, because we were there, of course, totally illegally. Moreover, we were not protected in any way from German inspections by any hospital immunity, because none existed, but only by the amassing of many typhus patients in all parts of the building of whom Germans were deadly afraid.
It was there that the news reached us that my uncle, Dr. Edward Rozencwajg had committed suicide. (He was a chemical engineer and managed to prepare poison for himself.) And, it was from there, probably in the early fall of 1942, that my mother sent me out of the ghetto, and she herself, moved to the hospital on Umschlagplatz.
Umschlagplatz – large square on the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto which was the transfer point for Jews rounded up to be shipped to labor or extermination camps. A building next to the square was used as a detention area.
I went out to the Aryan side with a group of laborers still being taken to work in one of the “shops” (perhaps Toebbens, somewhere in the region of Żelazna or Chłodna Street). I was supposed to go to 90 Sienna Street to my former babysitter, later seamstress, Mrs. Maria Ostrowska. She used to come to our place in the ghetto, as long as she could, and helped however and whomever she could.
Shops – a workshop in the ghetto run by the German firm Toebbens.
I left the ghetto, separated from my group without any major difficulty, and arrived at Maria’s on Sienna Street. Maria occupied one small room off a common corridor with several neighbors. Although she told them that a niece who was to help her with the sewing had come to live with her, it was, nevertheless, clear to everybody, from the beginning, that it was an agreed-upon story to be used with the building superintendent and more distant neighbors or clients.
Maria procured for me the birth certificate of her real niece, Teresa. (This was done frequently to get additional food ration cards.) She was only one year younger than I. (The difference in the date of birth and the first name, added to mine, as well as the surname, have stayed with me until today, although the real name of my father and my birthplace were corrected in the documents after the war.) Because clients used to come to Maria, the neighbor ladies conveniently invited me to stay with them for the day in order to avoid questions and explanations.
I was at Maria’s on Sienna Street until the winter of 1942–43, when my mother arrived from the ghetto. She also stayed for some time with a neighbor of Maria, a Mrs. Ginalska. She then arranged to get some false papers for herself under the name of Jadwiga Kopalska. It was only then that she found an apartment for both of us in the Żoliborz district with a registered nurse, Mrs. Halina Antonowicz.
Mrs. Antonowicz turned a single room over to us and arranged to have us registered normally based on the false papers. We obtained food ration cards, and we seemingly lived completely legally. Halina had a son, Leszek, a little younger than I, and a very small little girl. (The child, parenthetically speaking, saved her life. When, after some raid, she was arrested by the Gestapo for conspiratorial activity in the Home Army, she was in a state of advanced pregnancy. After Aleje Szucha, she was detained in Pawiak Prison and condemned to Auschwitz. Because the shipment of her transport coincided more or less with her due date, she was held back in the prison hospital at Pawiak. After the birth of the baby, it somehow became possible to get her out of there, together with the child.)
Thus, the story was that a distant cousin was taking care of the house and the children so that Halina could work. We had no stored supplies, valuables, or money. Therefore, we lived more than modestly, supplementing income however we could. Among other things, I worked in the reading room on Mickiewicz Street, we sewed buttons on undergarments, working at home, and I made toys from paper and coral beads.
At the same time, I discovered in Żoliborz the teacher from my class in school who also had to hide. (Although, it can be said, for a totally opposite reason. Like most teachers from the Rej and Wazówna Schools, she was a Protestant and a German by background. And like almost all members of the Evangelical Augsburg Community, she had refused to sign the so-called Reichsliste. For this, the German court condemned to death or confined in a concentration camp all those whom they managed to arrest for “betrayal of the Third Reich.”) Although she was supporting herself by baking cakes, she was, of course, conducting normal private classes, so that I was again able to study a little.
It was difficult, but we lived almost like everybody else then in occupied Warsaw, avoiding roundups, taking pleasure in every successful act of retaliation and each newsletter with news, and in Żoliborz, there were many of them. We lived from day to day, waiting for the day when, finally, the course of the war would turn around, because, of course, nobody doubted it. The problem was only how to last until then. What was most difficult was not at all the sense of danger to oneself. To that one could adjust. Almost no one thought of it on a daily basis, because it would have been impossible to live at all. But it was the nightmarish feeling of helplessness, first with respect to the tragedy of the uprising in the ghetto, later the growing terror in Warsaw, the murders, deportation, and arrests taking people to the torture place of the Gestapo, reports about camps and ceaseless fear about close ones and friends who had not yet been lost.
However, towards the end of 1943, the time arrived when we had a visit from a szmalcownik (blackmailer). He appeared in the evening, after police hours, and dressed in civilian clothes. (Later we learned that he was an employee of one of the commissariats of the state police who cooperated with the Germans and was an older son of the storekeeper in our house.) He declared that he knew of the false papers of Mama, but if she paid, at which point he mentioned an astronomical sum, he would not put this knowledge to use. My mother was a rather impulsive woman and brave by nature. She heard him out, did not contradict him, and said briefly and unequivocally, “I know that some people engage in such a practice, but here you have missed your mark. I shall not pay you because I have no money. You can do as you wish. You can even go to the Gestapo. During a war, many people perish. Today, I will perish, tomorrow, it will be you, and, at that, killed as a scoundrel. I am the wife of an officer, and there will be those who will settle accounts with you. And now, please get out of here!” And he got out. I think that this was partly out of surprise. Although, in the doorway, he still said something to the effect of “I advise you to think it over, and I give you three days time.”
When Halina arrived, Mama told her about what happened. She concluded that, in any event, she had no right to endanger Halina and her children, and thus, we must move out immediately. This was not a simple matter, however, and, in addition, it required a little time.
We started to think about who had reported the matter and who was this szmalcownik himself. Because we could not rule out one of the women neighbors employed in the municipal office at that time, perhaps in the Office of Registration, our finding some apartment and registering ourselves on the same papers (and without them there would be no ration cards) would have only confirmed the fact. (_) It would have facilitated extortion, which would no longer be taking place “in our own home.” We had no money for new papers. The only solution was to leave Warsaw, but this required preparation. Halina then told us, “It can’t be helped, whatever happens to you will also happen to me. Please stay until something sensible can be found.” And that is what happened.
…“confirmed the fact” – the fact that they were Jewish and on false papers.
We stayed there several more days still. With Halina’s help, we secretly carried out our belongings, fortunately not very numerous, to the suburb of Praga to the apartment of a former custodian of my mother’s hospital on Nowogrodzka Street. Afterward, we relocated to her place for a few days, without registering ourselves, of course. In the meanwhile, Mama managed, through some acquaintance, to find an apartment in Otwock under the pretext that a stay there was necessary because of a threat of tuberculosis. Otwock, or rather its neighboring town of Śródborów, was a well-known tuberculosis sanitarium center.
The situation in Otwock took the same form as in Żoliborz. I believe that both for our hosts and in the private classes to which I was admitted almost immediately after moving, in spite of the good official documents and a reasonably believable story, the true state of affairs was quite clear.
One can surmise this from the behavior of our landlady, who during the more turbulent periods of roundups and ransacking by the Gestapo in Otwock, would come to us, sometimes at night, to lift our spirits. Also, from the fact that the vicar priest who was then effectively the spiritual leader of Otwock, Father Raczyński, would push into my hands notes certifying to my alleged confession. I would later hand these in to the same Chaplain Raczyński during religion lessons in the private classes, as this was compulsory for pupils during the preholiday period. (I had no idea then that Mrs. Różycka, who escaped the ghetto with little Olek, was hiding with him in the presbytery at that time). We could also tell from many other small, but then very meaningful, gestures of assistance and goodwill on the part of various people.
And finally, right there, in the last week of July, we lived to see the flight of the Germans and the taking over (totally without a fight, at least in our part of the town) of Otwock by a Soviet armored unit and later by units of the First Polish Army.
First Polish Army an army formed by the Soviets toward the end of the war, which was composed of Poles who, for one reason or another, found themselves in the Soviet Union..
A few days later, Mama went to Lublin and joined the army as a military doctor, was assigned to a hospital stationed in Otwock, and received permission to take me with her when the hospital was to move on. Until January 1945, we were stationed there, this time having looked on equally helplessly at the smoke of the burning city of Warsaw, aware of the tragic collapse of the uprising.
In August, our private classes were converted into the high school of Otwock, and in September, normal instruction began in the school which I attended until the liberation of Warsaw when our hospital was transferred precisely there. It was, in fact, the only unit other than the Sappers that was stationed on the left bank of Warsaw (in the building that was once the hospital of the School of Nurses on Koszykowa Street and where, to this day, there is still a military hospital). The school certificate received then, issued in my name from the occupation period (because after all, I had no other documents) caused me to keep this name even later, as a practical matter, because this continued from one school certificate to another.
Sappers – the Polish army corps of engineers.
The end of the war found us in Bydgoszcz. (There, I also managed to attend school a little.) Subsequently, a colleague of Father, returning from the same camp in Hungary, discovered us and gave us the news of his death and the place where he was buried.
And so began for me the postwar period of my life. (But this, as Kipling says, is already a completely different story.)
Warsaw, December 3, 1992
