Katarzyna Meloch, born in 1932 (2) [name during the occupation Irena Dąbrowska]
My mother wrote the script of my salvation
On March 2, 1946, almost a year after the war, I wrote the following in a Jewish psychological counseling center for children at Szeroka Street in Warsaw: “My wish is to move to the second grade because if I don’t, I will have wasted a whole year and my work will have been for nothing. Also, I would be terribly ashamed. Actually, this isn’t my first wish. Here it is: I would like very much for my parents to be found. This is my greatest wish. My third wish is to pay back everyone who has done something good for me, because I think this is my duty.” I was 13 years old at the time.
My father, Maksymilian Meloch, died probably during the first days of the German-Soviet War in 1941. My mother, Wanda Meloch, was the first and most important person among those who saved me. I was 9 years old when the Germans arrested and executed her in Białystok. She knew she was going to die. She wasn’t able to resist her destiny. What she could do was make me believe that I could survive. She had an idea of how to save her child. Day and night in Białystok, she made me memorize the address of her brother, Jacek Goldman, in the Warsaw ghetto: “12 Elektoralna.” I couldn’t forget it. She’d wake me up at night and check if I remembered. I’ve never forgotten.
Jacek was more than her brother. He was her friend. She knew him as a man of action who could manage both rock climbing and everyday life. Jacek’s address, impressed on her child’s memory, was a kind of testament, a request to the beloved brother to be her child’s mother and father when she was gone. She knew that by directing me to Jacek, I’d get access to the people with whom she’d shared her youth and early middle age (she died at the age of 36). Her mother, “Grandma Michalina” was staying in the Warsaw ghetto while her Polish friends and students were on the “Aryan” side. She could count on them.
Motherless, in the Białystok ghetto at the Jewish Orphanage, I managed to get a message to Jacek, to the Warsaw ghetto. This letter made my Warsaw family transfer me illegally to the Warsaw ghetto. A woman paid by my relatives brought me via train. Wanda Meloch gave me life twice. First, when she gave birth to me, and the second time, by inventing a script for my salvation.
By moving to Warsaw, I avoided the plight of the children from the Białystok ghetto. They were transported to a demonstration ghetto in Terezin in Czechoslovakia, and from there to Auschwitz for extermination (I know this from a participant of the Białystok ghetto uprising, Chajka Grossman).
The Białystok Orphanage at Częstochowska Street was preserved in a photograph in a Jewish album printed in New York in 1951 and in my memory. Recently, I found out that transferring a Jewish child to the Warsaw ghetto against the official prohibition could cost as much as 2000 zloty. My relatives from Warsaw weren’t rich…
My grandma Michalina, my mom’s mother, welcomed me in Warsaw with a cry: “Child, where are your parents?” I didn’t tell her the truth (Jacek didn’t allow me) but she could have suspected. When the so-called Aktions began in the Warsaw ghetto in July 1942, we had our own family hiding place. Jacek, an infallible caretaker and pre-war mountaineer, had found a closet under the chimney in one of the partly burned down buildings of the former St. Spirit’s Hospital on Elektoralna Street.
It was a hot July day. I don’t remember why or for what I left the hiding place. I got caught by Jewish policemen and they wanted to take me to the Umschlagplatz. I felt that the Umschlagplatz meant death.
I cried out loudly. My grandma Michalina heard my crying and left the safe hiding place in the middle of the roundup. She chatted up one of the policemen while giving me a sign to scamper. I took off to the nearby pharmacy, and there, Jacek’s wife, the pharmacist Eugenia Sigalin, hid me in the pharmacy’s storage space between big boxes.
Grandma Michalina was taken to the Umschlagplatz instead of me. She was a link in the chain of my salvation. She came back to us on Elektoralna. She was the mother of a worker in the ghetto’s hospital. It saved her that time. She could have perished in Treblinka with the rest of the transport. I wouldn’t have come back from the Umschlagplatz, but I had decided in Białystok that I would survive. This is what my mother expected of me in the last hours of her life.
The summer of 1942 was a scorcher. The sun was beating down mercilessly in August when I was taken to the Aryan side. This was the first step to freedom. I left the ghetto entirely legally. No policeman had to be bribed and there was no need to search for a hole in the wall. It was probably Ala Grynberg, a nurse who had a pass to the Aryan side, who took me out of the ghetto. She was a friend of Jacek’s and a friend of Jadwiga Deneka’s, who was my mother’s Polish friend. Jacek put me in her care. Not far from one of the ghetto’s gates, he said goodbye to me as if we were going to see each other in a few hours or days. But he disappeared from my life forever. I never saw him again.
After the war, I learned that he had left the ghetto to fight with the partisans. He did warn us that he wasn’t going to “sit in a wardrobe”, although he had plenty of friends who were ready to “stash” him. For a while, he also hid with an old servant, Eugenia Gryczuk. He disappeared without a trace on his way to the partisans. He died like everyone else I loved.
Barbara Wardzianka, another nurse in the chain of my salvation, was waiting for me behind the wall of the ghetto, in the gateway of one of the houses. Basia—as I was allowed to call her—knew my parents and Jacek from the Zakopane trails. I felt safe when this 30-year-old woman took me briskly by the hand. By tram, we reached Warsaw’s Koło district, at 76 Obozowa Street, where Jadwiga Deneka’s apartment was located. At that point this old student of my mother’s would take my life in her hands.
The school ID card shows a picture of Jadwiga Deneka, Sałek at the time. Her face was more serious than her age would indicate, not that of a middle school girl. Her short hair was carefully waved. She wore beads on a slender, girlish neck, and had a perfectly white collar. When I met her, she was already an adult. Maybe she was always so mature? She taught me prayers and acquainted me with Christian customs. She managed to get an authentic church certificate of a Polish girl, a year older than me, named Irena Dąbrowska—the daughter of Anna née Gąska, baptized in the 1930s at the church in Targówek.
Jadwiga Deneka, for me “Mrs. Wisia,” was only six years younger than my mom. My mom had taught her Latin in a middle school in Łódź. Over time, the teacher and the pupil became very close. Jadwiga was a leftist, much like Wanda Meloch and most pre-war friends of my parents, who were Poles and Polonized Jews. I’ll quote Andrzej Wajda: these were Romantic daredevils!
In 1986 when Jadwiga’s brother requested Yad Vashem to award her the medal of “The Righteous Among the Nations,” which I supported (and not in vain), I learned that “Mrs. Wisia” had lost her daughter in 1939. It wasn’t until then, in the Jewish Historical Institute, that I read about the Jews she’d saved, the post-war Israelis. I had known that she was rescuing the members of my closest family since the time of the occupation.
At Obozowa, I wasn’t put in a wardrobe or behind a wardrobe. I was there with my grandma Michalina, who had left the ghetto. Despite the danger, we’d go to Mrs. Wisia’s summer house and walk around in the nearby forest. In the winter of 1942/43, another encrypted signal came to Turkowice in a seemingly innocent letter. This way, Irena Sendler notified the nuns that one or more Jewish children needed to be taken to Turkowice. The nuns decoded this encryption faultlessly. Having received such a letter, Sister Irena (Antonina Manaszczuk) would start for Warsaw. In the winter of 1942/43, she brought me back.
Various dangers lurked on our path. We had to spend the night in the station’s waiting room in Lublin or Rejowiec. Travelers’, especially children’s, faces were examined. But our long journey ended safely. Behind the door of the Turkowice girls’ home, with a poster “Jews are lice and typhus,” Jewish girls saved from the Holocaust led peaceful lives! In the fairytale landscape of the Zamość region, this poster—a symbol of hate—seemed unreal to me. It didn’t scare me at all.
Understanding how my salvation came about…
I am the daughter of a historian. From my father, Maksymilian Meloch, a historian of Polish national uprisings, I inherited a historical sense and the need to tell the truth about the past. I try to do justice to anyone who rescued us, especially the nuns, who didn’t seek fame. My own memories are not enough. What could a 9- or 10-year-old girl know? Since I became an adult, I’ve been eager to listen to the participants and witnesses of those events. I read the accounts filed for Yad Vashem at the Jewish Historical Institute.
I came across Jan Dobraczyński’s memoir Tylko w jednym życiu (“Only in one life”). Dobraczyński was the director of the so-called social office at the Department of Welfare of the City Board of Warsaw. Irena Sendler met him there. Several decades ago, he wrote about the action of putting Jewish children in orphanages and children’s institutes: “My contribution to this action was minimal. It wasn’t me who sought out the children, I didn’t bring them, I didn’t forge their records.” It was possible for me to stay in the Turkowice institute thanks to this action. The author of Najeźdźcy (“The invaders”) signed the forged records of Jewish children with his name. Who knows, perhaps he did mine, Irena Dąbrowska’s, the daughter of Anna Gąska. This way, he too would have participated in the act of my salvation… Conjecture is all I have…
In the beginning, there was an intuitive script written with a mother’s love for her child. My mother. Next was the chain of salvation. Only a few links of the salvation chain were visible to the rescued child. I wouldn’t learn about some until years later. I may never know about others. Each link was vital. The chain wasn’t broken even once. During the occupation, of course, I had no idea about “Żegota.” I hadn’t known Irena Sendler then. I met her after the war. She rescued me in the 1990s when I was suffering rejection in my family circle. Irena comforted me day after day, hour after hour. She passed on some of her fortitude to me. Her friendship also supported me when someone very close needed more than a helping hand.
When I was a child, I didn’t know that the efforts made for my salvation were a part of a bigger project. It was about saving Jewish children. Neither did I know that the steps which “Mrs. Wisia” took were necessary but, in a sense, that they were also routine. Today, this is how I see the fact that an authentic baptismal certificate of Irka Dąbrowska was obtained in Targówek for Kasia Meloch, and that the renamed girl was sent to the Children’s Home in Warsaw, that is, the Baudouin Orphanage in Warsaw. It was all so that I could legally, going through the proper channels, be directed to the children’s institute run by the nuns.
Irena Dąbrowska’s baptismal certificate was probably provided to Jadwiga Deneka by Father Andrzej Kubiak, the parish priest in the Targówek district of Warsaw. I had been rescued much earlier before “Żegota” was formed. Jewish children had been rescued by the employees of the City Board of Warsaw long before the historical decision was made to form this illegal organization.
As early as 1939, after the Germans entered Warsaw, the circle of employees at the Department of Welfare of the City Board of Warsaw declared their private war on our occupier. The underground meeting, aside from Irena Sendler, was attended by: Jan Dobraczyński, Jadwiga Deneka, Jadwiga Piotrowska, and Irena Schultz. Against the German regulations, they decided to help Jewish wards who had officially lost their civic and human rights. Irena Sendler names Jadwiga Deneka as one of her liaisons. I’ll never know if my caretaker became Irena’s liaison with the approval of the party authorities of the RPPS—the party that didn’t recognize the Polish Government in Exile—or if she did that because her conscience dictated it.
As the years go by, I reflect on “Mrs. Wisia” more frequently. I’m aware that if she hadn’t been a socialist in the left-wing of the PPS, if she hadn’t been involved with “Żegota,” she still would have rescued us, the persecuted. The last time I saw her was when she dropped me off at the Baudouin Orphanage in Warsaw, but she didn’t stop watching over me. She also took care of me when I got to Turkowice. She sent me packages and letters to the institute. She did her best to intuit my needs and even wishes. As a member of the Socialist Left, she went underground more and more deeply. She was in charge of the so-called “tech”: she was responsible for printing and distributing the RPPS’s Bulletin. She engaged in dangerous undertakings: hiding Jews—not only in the small apartment in Warsaw—was only one of them. She could suspect that sooner or later, the Gestapo would sniff her out. Fearing that she couldn’t endure torture if she was interrogated, she requested the mother superior in Turkowice to transfer me to a different institute. Stanisława Polechajłło, the superior, flatly refused. She explained that I was safe only in Turkowice. But “just in case,” she crossed Irena Dąbrowska out of the records of Turkowice children. After that, I was staying at the Turkowice rescue home illegally on two accounts. Thanks to Mother Superior’s decision, I stayed in Turkowice until the end of the war (I learned about the whole issue only after the liberation).
Jadwiga Deneka—using the underground pseudonym “Kasia”—was arrested while making copies of the RPPS’s Bulletin at the distribution center of the RPPS’s press at 16 Nowiniarska Street, of which she was in charge. This was also a hiding place for a group of Jews. “Kasia” was imprisoned in Pawiak, from where she sent secret letters with warnings. Tortured in the Gestapo headquarters, she didn’t give anyone away. On January 6, 1944, in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, she was executed along with eleven Jewish women.
Stanisława Polechajłło, a woman who was descended from a family of Polish Tatars, knew no fear. She treated danger like a challenge. She was the driving force behind everything in Turkowice. Long before the war, her iron will had made the Turkowice orphanage unparalleled in the Lublin region, and even outstanding among other Polish orphanages run by nuns. During the Holocaust, “the republic of Turkowice” was a home for thirty- six rescued Jewish children. They made up over 12 per cent of all children in Turkowice. Over half a century after the war, I’m able to name thirteen rescued Jewish children by their first and last name. If you could find shelter in Turkowice, in an institution run by the Servant Sisters of Stara Wieś, you couldn’t have been in a better place! A layman, Edmund Bojanowski, a Romantic poet and Byron’s translator, founded the congregation of the Servant Sisters in the nineteenth century. The landowner from the Poznań region devoted all of his wealth and efforts to the poor and sick, but mostly to children. The sisters from Turkowice continued his work.
Under the care of Sister Irena (Antonina Manaszczuk), Turkowice was a home to dark-haired Stacha, plump Stefa, a gorgeous girl from Lvov (I won’t name her), and myself—a war-time namesake of Sister Irena who caused her trouble. I roamed the recreation room unafraid of the Germans who would visit the institute. Sister Irena even had to caution me not to attract their attention. This is how safe, how at home, I felt. Usually, Sister Irena looked after us discreetly. No wonder we thought that we were no different from the girls in our group who had nothing to hide. I could forget about who I was before I left the walls of the Warsaw ghetto or that I was in grave danger, and because of me, so were the institute’s wards. Sister Irena was with us day and night. She spent the night in our common bedroom. She kept vigil behind a grille.
Saturnin Jarmulski, an inspector from Lublin, asked her to keep us, the children in her care, away from the bleakness of the war. (He told me about this in the 1980s). She somehow managed to do it. Her cheerfulness was contagious. She knew how to engage us in joyful games, sing evening songs, or organize performances. While I breathed freely, Sister Irena was prepared to die every day. However, she was going to outlive all the nuns in Turkowice and collect her medal of “The Righteous Among the Nations” in Jerusalem. In order to do her justice, I’d have to talk about the nights and days in Turkowice. The Turkowice path of my salvation also included “secondary” rescuers. Without them, saving Jewish children wouldn’t have been possible. I call Saturnin Jarmulski, “Mister Inspector” from Lublin, my “secondary” rescuer. He had known Mother Superior before the war. She had no secrets from him. She told him about the Jewish children in our institute. He demanded only one thing: that all the Jewish wards had their “Aryan” papers in order. Miraculously, he managed to keep his old position in the official German hierarchy. Even more: he obtained guarantees for Turkowice, which only the title staatlich—state—could offer.
Father Stanisław Bajko, a Jesuit, referred to as a spiritual father, treated his role of a father literally. He participated in the Turkowice cause by allowing Jewish children, including those who hadn’t been baptized, to receive the sacraments. After the war, he told me in the Jesuit home in Bydgoszcz: “Mother Superior decided that. She was inspired by the Holy Spirit.” I shall never forget these people as long as I live…
