Krystyna Niekrasz, born in 1941

A Burning Scar

To my daughters, Ania and Eliza
and my granddaughters, Marysia and Antosia

There was a very formal dinner, alcohol was plentiful. After dinner, my parents went to sleep upstairs, and my uncle and I stayed on the ground floor, where there were two en-suite rooms. My uncle, in a slight alcohol daze, called me to him, then hugged me and mumbled the sentence: “You’re not part of our family… but we all love you,” and then he pushed me away, collapsed onto the bed and fell fast asleep.

I stood there, as if struck by lightning. I was eleven at the time. I remembered that as a six-year-old girl, when I went on vacation to Malbork and my uncle’s wife (and my godmother) took me shopping, we bumped into some neighbor. They were talking when the question was asked: “Jadzi-unia, and whose girl is that?” “Our Hania’s,” answered my aunt. “The one whose child died, and she adopted…”

Auntie grabbed my hand and, without ending the conversation, she hurriedly tugged me along. She was upset. “Aunt, what did that lady say?” I asked. “Oh, nothing. Don’t listen to her, her mind is confused, she is very sick.” I remember that quite often different people pointed out that I didn’t look at all like my parents. Besides, I’d always felt a strange coldness from my mother. She never hugged me, never kissed me. She always criticized me.

I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I cried a lot, but I didn’t want anyone to know about it. My world had collapsed completely. I had no one to confide in and nowhere to go. When it was dawn, I got dressed, went out of the window, and headed for a nearby forest. I came home after a few hours. Nobody was looking for me, because I often went to the forest to pick mushrooms with my friend Janka. I wasn’t crying anymore. I changed after this event. I was more aloof and depressed. However, I decided not to tell anyone. I was afraid to reveal even a single word. I think I grew up then.

Who am I? Where did I come from? I couldn’t ask anyone. There was a silent conspiracy around me. It was then that I began to understand why my mother didn’t like me. I remember her glaring at me and having a permanent scolding expression on her face. She liked to make fun of me. She constantly compared my appearance with that of my friends: I looked like a ghost, whereas they were blooming. She mocked me, and only tears in my eyes prevented further mockery.

Something was telling me, “I’m not her child. I can’t satisfy her.” She probably wanted a beautiful little girl to be proud of, but I was thin, clumsy, sad and always scared. I was hungry for even the slightest praise. I didn’t play with my friends. I used to stay at home and help clean as much as I could. That was in vain, because whenever my mother looked at me, I got butterfingers. Mother would then scream at me and spew malicious remarks at me for the hundredth time.
In such situations, my father defended me. This gave me an idea. “Daddy protects me—so I must be his daughter,” I thought. “My mother hates me because I’m another woman’s daughter” and “Daddy forced her to take me in…” I believed in this version of events that I had created so much that I rejected it only as an adult woman, knowing completely different facts, knowing what really happened.

I felt terrible in my “family” home. Probably that’s why I was so eager to go to school. I was liked there and constantly praised by teachers. I got the highest grades in all subjects in my class, and after graduating, I was given an evaluation for the General Secondary School: “an extremely talented student”. It’s a pity that my parents didn’t care about it and they didn’t make any efforts so that I could make use of these abilities properly.

The matter of my origin kept haunting me so much that years later, I dared to ask my older cousin who visited us (my parents) on vacation. I asked her for discretion, but she first burst out laughing and then went with my secret to my father. He said nothing, but I sensed that he got strangely “cold”. Until then, I had thought that my father loved me in his own way, but after that, it seemed to me that I had lost him too. It was very hard on me. I carried around this big secret, but I couldn’t share it with anyone. I had friends, but none of them seemed close enough to me. I was completely alone, so much so that loneliness hurt like a wound.

One time, quite unexpectedly, my cousin came to us, the same one from whom I wanted to get some information years earlier. She was furious with my parents. She took me for a walk and, to my surprise, started talking…

She said that my real father was the principal at the school in Rożyszcze, that he had taught mathematics. She didn’t remember his last name. All she said was that my biological parents were Jewish. She didn’t know what happened to them, but she remembered that one day, in the late fall, someone had dropped off a crying baby in the yard. She was twelve at the time. The yard belonged to a two-family house where she lived with her mother on one side, and the Zalechs on the other.
The baby was freezing, dirty and hungry, dressed in a white silk dress to which a note was pinned with the words: “For the Zalechs. Her name is Ewa.” That was me.

I asked, “Why them?” I was told that the fathers had known each other—one was a school principal, the other worked there as a janitor. The neighbors quickly found out about the child. One of them, a Ukrainian, reported it to the Gestapo. In this terrible situation, two people helped us. One of them was a local priest who testified under oath that I was a child of a town girl, but the sanctity of the confessional prevented him from revealing the details. The second person was a beautiful young Polish translator who worked with the Germans (one of the Germans was in love with her). Well, this girl somehow got the Germans to issue a document for my current parents, which stated that I was a child lost from a Polish transport. Now officially the Polish family was allowed to take me in. This is how I was saved for the second time.

The document issued by the Germans protected me and my new parents from unexpected inspections, but it couldn’t protect me from the neighbors. They were Ukrainians who collaborated with the Germans. The sudden appearance of an infant in a formerly childless home aroused their suspicions. They were thorough and they probably would have “snooped” until they had discovered the truth. Then, we would have all died.

There was no time to waste. My new father made the decision to leave Rożyszcze immediately. In his view, the most secure place was the village of Irena, near Dęblin, where his stepmother lived with her children, that is, with my father’s step-siblings. The living conditions there were very modest. My father’s stepmother wasn’t thrilled that the two rooms they had would now host another family with a child.

I don’t remember that period of my life very well, but certain episodes have stuck with me. I remember a large tiled kitchen stove and a tiny corner between it, the wall and the door, where my father’s brothers put two bricks for me, on which I sat all day. I wasn’t allowed to go out and “disturb” the adults. I also remember a tin cup with a little milk brought stealthily by my father’s brothers… They put me under the table and fed me “behind my grandmother’s back”…

When the war ended, news began to flow in about the expulsion of all Poles from the Eastern Borderlands and about the Repatriation Office, which was located in Łódź. My father decided to go there.
We were registered and settled in the village of Janów near Łódź. It was a tough time for us. The roof of the old cottage was rotten and didn’t even protect us from the rain. It was leaking from all sides. I remember that when it was raining, my parents had to find a place where they could move the one bed we had. Father repaired the roof, began to work the land, and somehow we got by.

In 1946, it turned out that someone was looking for me. My parents were scared. They had become attached to me and refused to give me back to anyone. They were afraid that my family might kidnap me. Mother, in an attempt to keep me at all costs, tried to instill in me a fear of strangers. Instead of fairy tales for children (I was about five at the time), she told me scary, even macabre stories. She said that children were kidnapped and later killed. I didn’t quite understand what she was trying to say, but my mother found a way. When a neighbor killed a pig and hung its carcass split open and dripping with blood on the barn door, my mother showed it to me, and then in a mysterious whisper she said, “Bad people do that to kids…” I was horrified. I often woke up screaming at night.

One day I was playing with our neighbors’ kids, who were older than me. The children were watching the cows and took me to the meadow with them. The meadow stretched along the road. The children started playing “tag, you’re it” and they told me to pick flowers. They were so busy playing that they didn’t notice when a young “lady from the town” approached me. She was very nice, she talked to me, smiling all the time. Since the children were far away, she offered to walk me home.

She took my hand and pulled me towards the road with her. She held me tight. Then I remembered my mother’s story, I thought that she was trying to kidnap and kill me, then turn me into sausage. I didn’t cry, but I tried to break free. The lady, not suspecting anything, let go of my hand to take something out of her purse (she had a sling bag over her shoulder) and I took off. The lady followed me, laughing, but then we were noticed by a neighbor mowing grass nearby. The lady gave up chasing me and quickly walked away. Meanwhile, I kept running as fast as I could. When I burst into our yard and saw my mother sitting on the doorstep, I collapsed onto her knees and passed out. Nobody knew what had happened. Terrified, my mom took me in her arms and started screaming. The neighbors came running. I don’t know how long that went on for. When I recovered from shock a few hours later, I told what happened. In the evening, the neighbor from the field came by and confirmed my story… For a long time afterwards, I had nightmares. I always played alone, never leaving the yard.

My parents were concerned by the appearance of the strange woman. Dad went to Łódź to find out more. It turned out that my father’s stepbrother lived in Łódź and when looking for me, my biological family first stumbled upon the traces of that brother. It was from him that that they learned that my foster parents were living with me in Janów. He was also asked to take pictures of me (he was provided with a camera). The lady who wanted to “kidnap” me had my photo. She worked for a legal office in Łódź.

When Dad returned home, he told us to pack immediately. Soon, we left Janów and with very few possessions, we went to the Recovered Territories. We ended up in Łeba. It was there that I found out that I wasn’t related to the family I had lived with since childhood.

Father obviously loved me in his own way but didn’t talk much about it. Mother, on the other hand, always kept her distance. My parents’ marriage could hardly be called happy. They were two strangers, constantly at odds with each other. I don’t know if that was what drove Dad into alcoholism or vice versa—his alcoholism led to this state of affairs. There were constant fights at home, often ending in physical violence. My parents also made serious suicide attempts. I remember four such events. To this day, thinking of it sends shivers down my spine.

I was a very sensitive and highly-strung child, but no one was interested in how domestic fights impacted my psyche. So when at the age of twelve, I fell ill with petit mal (seizures of individual muscles), this disease was linked to the accident I had suffered earlier (in the meadow, when I was picking flowers for a wreath, a foal jumped over me and kicked me on the head with its hoof). The connection to the experiences at home was overlooked because nobody knew about what was going on there.

Years went by. Once I stumbled upon the book Red Nights published by the Ministry of National Defense. This book described the fighting of Poles against Ukrainian bandits attacking them in Volhynia. I read there that one person who played an important part in the battle was a teacher from Rożyszcze, Jan Garczyński. A few weeks after I read this book, my mother received a letter from her sister-in-law. My mother often asked me to read her letters aloud. I came across the following sentence: “You know, Hania, that teacher from Rożyszcze, that Jan Garczyński, apparently lives in Gdańsk…” My voice broke, my hands began to shake terribly. Fortunately, my mother didn’t notice anything. After I calmed down, I decided to find this teacher. It was a trace I could follow, a chance to find my family.

I went to the main post office in Gdańsk (those were such strange times when only post offices had telephone books). I opened the book and started looking. I found three Garczyńskis. The first one I called was the one I was looking for. I asked if he came from Volhynia and if I could meet him. He was speechless. He was very surprised, but agreed to meet me. It turned out that he lived in the neighboring district, and for so many years, I hadn’t known anything about him! I received this message when I was already an adult, married, a mother of two daughters!

I couldn’t sleep all night. In the morning, jittery, I went there with my husband and a baby in a stroller (this baby was Elizka). My husband and child stayed in front of the house while I went to meet the man. An elderly, very handsome gentleman opened the door. He studied me closely, then invited me inside. “How can I help you?” he asked, his eyes fixed on me. I started with a trembling voice… “I’m looking for my parents… My father apparently taught at the school in Rożyszcze…” “Hold on, hold on!” said the old man. “You’re Putter’s daughter! God, you look just like him!” I was shaking like jelly while Mr. Garczyński told me about my father. He knew him well because my father was the head of the school at which Mr. Garczyński started working. He spoke of him as an energetic, well-balanced man, respected by the employees. In addition to managing the school, Dad taught math. Mr. Garczyński knew less about my mother because, when he found work at a school in Rożyszcze, my mother had stopped working—she was expecting a child (me!).

He only knew that she also taught at the same school (biology, history, and piano). Mr. Garczyński said that the notary, who was friends with my parents and who (ironically!) had lived in Stara Oliwa (next to me!!!) all that time, would know more about this. “Currently,” said Mr. Garczyński, “the notary is staying with her daughter in Vienna.” He promised to write to her immediately. Unfortunately, his letter reached her too late—she had died in Vienna. My quiet hopes of finding my family faded again. But I already had a foothold. I knew my father’s name, what his profession was, and where he’d worked. I decided to act. First, I sat for hours at the Main Post Office browsing through the telephone books in search of addresses of people named Putter living in various Polish cities. Then I wrote letters to them hoping they knew someone from my family. Many letters were unanswered, but there were also people who wrote back and regretted to say that they didn’t know such a person and couldn’t help me.

I also mailed queries to the Red Cross, the United States, and Israel. I didn’t get any answer from the States, and from Jerusalem I got a reply that nobody like that had been found.

Years later, when I happened to be in Haifa, I looked in the telephone book there, and I had no trouble finding three people named Putter. Years went by and nothing new came to light. I remember it was a beautiful summer. I invited my friend Maryla R. with her husband to our summer house. I learned that Maryla had received a scholarship, and in a few days she was leaving for the university in Montreal, Canada. Some inner voice suggested to me that I should tell her my secret and ask for help. I said, “Let’s take a walk.” When I began my story, Maryla got pale, said nothing, asked no questions. She was very serious and promised to look for my family in Canada.

Then I found out that the professor thanks to whom Maryla had received the scholarship was actively involved in the search. Professor Eisenberg is a Jew and it wasn’t until his visit to Poland for a scientific convention a few years ago that he admitted to having Polish roots too.
During his stay in Poland, he expressed his desire to meet me, and I had the honor of hosting him in my home. On the professor’s recommendation, my friend reached out to the appropriate office in Canada. There, all the data she could provide was written down, and a notice was drawn up and sent out to various newspapers in Canada and New York. Life is ruled by chance and coincidence. In New York’s Brooklyn, there was an old, poor woman whose only entertainment was to occasionally buy a Polish-language newspaper and read it cover to cover. After the war she had ended up in America and, although she had been living there for years, she hadn’t learned the English language. She read “my” advertisement in that newspaper and thought it was a miracle.

It turned out that the old woman was the sister of my late aunt, the wife of one of my father’s brothers. She became very interested in me because she owed a debt of gratitude to my late father. Why? My father’s brother got married against the wishes of the whole family. Neither my grandparents nor any other family member, except for my father, attended this wedding. My grandfather—a rich factory owner (he had several agricultural machinery factories in various Polish cities)—disinherited his son! Because my uncle belonged to the so-called golden youth, he suddenly became destitute. His newly married wife came from a very poor family, her parents were dead, and she had to support her siblings—her sister and younger brother. My father decided to help them out and he supported them all until the war. So when she read that “the daughter of Dawid Putter from Rożyszcze is looking for her family…” she responded immediately. To get my address, she lied and pretended to be my father’s sister! My dad had two brothers and one sister Miriam, who was the youngest. She died at the age of five with her mother (and my grandmother) at Majdanek. But I found out about that much later.

The first time my “aunt” called me from New York, I passed out. It was such an overwhelming experience that when I came round (my husband Janusz was by my side), I was unable to utter a word. Janusz told my “aunt” what had happened, so she decided to call the next day. Anxious, I tossed and turned all night. When the phone finally rang I was overjoyed! I cried happy tears! I had finally found my real family! At the end of the conversation, she said something that immediately brought me down to earth: “Krysia, I’m not really your aunt. I’ll explain everything in a letter…” I felt the rug was pulled from under my feet. Thousands of thoughts swirled in my head. “So they got scared of me, they’re worried I’ll ask them for money… They don’t want me… They rejected me even before they met me…” It’s difficult to describe what I’d been through and what I’d suffered before I received the letter with explanations.

Lying was a necessary ruse to get in touch with me (the details of the seeker aren’t disclosed to strangers). I found out that my uncle and aunt were long dead but she was inviting me to New York to tell me many things about my family. Before I got the invitation, I’d managed to obtain permission to leave Poland (it was the 1980s—no one was allowed to leave just like that).

My “aunt”, with the help of her adult children, found my real uncle in Israel. Before the war, at the age of seventeen, he’d left Poland for Palestine as a volunteer to build the Jewish state. They found my uncle and gave him my address. The reaction was immediate. I received a phone call from my uncle and his wife telling me that they would come to Poland as soon as possible to meet me and my family. They came after just two weeks! I was so happy I was in a trance. I learned a lot about my family on my father’s side.

Grandpa, as I’ve mentioned, was a wealthy man. He owned agricultural machinery factories: “Farm machinery—Putter and Sons” located in several places across Poland (Zamość, Łódź, Warsaw and Lublin). Grandma was the daughter of an esteemed rabbi, she ran her house according to very strict rules. My grandparents had three sons and one daughter. Grandfather wished for his sons to continue the family business after graduating. The young people weren’t keen on this proposal.

My father decided to keep studying. He studied mathematics at the University of Lvov. He was a man of many talents because, in addition to studying science, he also ran a student theater. After graduation, he met my mother (I don’t know the story of how they met, maybe my mother was also a student) and they decided to get married. As my mother’s family had lived in Volhynia for generations (the town of Rożyszcze, the Łuck district), my parents also settled there.
My father didn’t want to work in Grandpa’s factory, so he stayed in Rożyszcze as the head of the Polish school. It wasn’t easy to get this position because education, as well as other important areas of life in this town, were managed by the local nobleman, Zapolski.
I don’t know anything about my mother’s family other than that Grandpa was a rich grain merchant. I found a mention of him in The Polish Address Book for Trade, Industry, Crafts and Agriculture from 1929.

A few months later, at the invitation of my “aunt”, I managed to go to New York. What I saw there (I mean, the conditions in which these good, nice people lived) surprised me, although I myself lived modestly in People’s Poland. For them, time had stopped a long time ago. They ate very modestly; in their apartment, there was neither TV nor radio! There was a short-wave receiver (yes !!!), which was turned on for short messages once a day (in Polish, of course). There was a Polish newspaper once a week, and that was it. The place was rather crummy, but I was happy anyway! I listened carefully to each sentence; I studied their habits; I participated in Sabbath dinners, which were attended by the host’s daughter with her family and an old, lonely Jew from Poland. My favorite part was when Idyl, my “aunt’s” husband, started the Sabbath singing. He had a beautiful, strong voice and he sang with such melancholy that even now, after so many years, I tear up thinking about it… He sang and cried.

Then he told me that his family had included over forty people. No one of this large family survived the war. He was the only one left. At night, he had nightmares. He’d get up with dark circles under his eyes and wouldn’t have breakfast, said nothing. It was as if he were in another world. I realized that my biological family had suffered the same terrible fate. It’s difficult to understand that there are people in this world who aren’t moved by the experiences of others, even the most terrible ones.

I remember one episode from when I was a student at the School of Medical Laboratory Technicians in Gdańsk. One of the required subjects was “Medical Microbiology”. The lecturer, Prof. Bławat, was feared by all the students. One of my friends at the time was extremely ambitious. She wanted to become the best student of our year. So she crammed the material day and night, but had bad luck. Professor Bławat clearly didn’t like her and whenever he wanted to check her knowledge, he always called on me for an answer. She recited whole passages she’d memorized, while I gave briefly the main points.

Usually, I ended up with an A, whereas she only got a C. She’d cry and feel wronged. One day, she lost it and, walking away from the lectern, she hissed: “I wish the Germans had killed you off when they had a chance…” Everyone heard it, the room got so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. The professor threw her out of the lecture hall, pointing his finger at the door.

I felt like I had been struck by lightning. I left the room as soon as possible and ran to the nearest woods. I cried there. Her words took me by surprise. How did she know? No one, not a single soul knew about my origins, even I didn’t know much. Was it written on my face that I was Jewish? If so, why am I still alive? I wanted to die. I resented my biological parents for not letting me die with them… Sometimes dying is easier than living…

It was dusk, and I was still sitting under a tree, unable to find the strength to go back to the dorm. My friends Basia and Malina started to look for me. They found me and we went back together. Apparently, after I left the lecture hall, there was a heated discussion, as a result of which the malicious and envious Elżbieta was publicly shamed. Nobody would hang out with her. Professor Bławat informed the principal of the school and the teaching body about the whole incident. It didn’t help me; though, I found it hard to recover from that blow.

It was then that I realized that in order to be accepted by your surroundings, you should be stupider than others and not stand out. My peaceful existence depended on mediocrity. I decided to live like this, but I didn’t always succeed. Sometimes, I got carried away. Lecturers often talked about me. They thought that the School of Laboratory Technicians wasn’t a good fit for me and that I should study medicine. I was good not only in Professor Bławat’s microbiology. Personally, I liked chemistry the most—in my free time, I solved chemical problems for fun. It was noticed by my lecturer—Dr. Makarewicz (now he is a full professor and rector of the Medical Academy—for the second term), who came up with a clever idea. He taught chemistry to first-year students of the Medical School. He selected those students who had a hard time with the material and offered them tutoring with a student of the School of Laboratory Technicians. Some of them took him up on this offer. I was very nervous, but I accepted the challenge. Apparently I did well—that’s what Dr. Makarewicz told me.

Lecturers often tried to talk me into transferring to the medical school but I wasn’t interested. I pretended to be indifferent, even though my heart was in my throat, because since I was a child, I’d dreamed of studying at the Medical University of Gdańsk. However, I couldn’t. Why? First of all, I had no one to help me financially (my parents were poor people, they believed that you need to get trained and start working as soon as possible). Although there were scholarships, who would grant one to an only child? I was considered someone who lived comfortably. There was also the second reason, more important. The school’s principal kept hammering into our heads that the state was paying our tuition and that if someone wanted to quit school to study at university, they would have to reimburse the school for tuition and accommodation costs. Who would bear these costs for me? I was afraid that if one of my friends informed the principal about my dreams, they would throw me out of school before graduation!

When I was in my second year at the School of Laboratory Technicians, something strange happened. When I was going to a lecture with my roommates, I was stopped by the school secretary. She informed me that I had to go to the principal’s office instead of the lecture. When I entered there, I found four strange men. The principal introduced me and then told me that the men had a few questions for me. Then she stepped out the office, leaving me alone with these people.

The men took turns asking me a lot of questions, I felt like I was in an interrogation room. I had seen such scenes in movies, the only thing missing was a blinding light bulb. They asked all sorts of questions to throw me off. “Who is Jadwiga Karczewska? State her home address.” “Who is Piotr Karczewski? Address?” And so on. I figured it was about my adoptive mother’s family, but I couldn’t understand why they were asking me that. Anyway, the pace of asking questions was so fast that I didn’t have time to think. Among the basic questions, they snuck in: “Are you going to go on to further studies? The lecturers say you are extraordinarily gifted…?” Fear paralyzed me. “Oh, so someone did report me,” I thought. Once I realized that I couldn’t win in this situation, I started to act more freely.

So when the following statement was made to confuse me: “Apparently, you get regular packages from home? Can you please tell me what’s in them?” I replied calmly and quite ironically, “I get my mother’s wonderful cakes in them, if the gentlemen would like to try them, it will pain me, but I will share them.” There was a moment of silence, then one of the men said, “So it is true that you’re quite clever.” The interrogation lasted for over an hour. Then I was told to leave and the principal was asked back in. After a while, the men were finished and pulled away from the school parking lot in two elegant black cars. One of them had Warsaw plates.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I went to the principal to find out who these men were and why they asked me so many questions.

The principal, without looking up from her documents, told me that they were with the Department of Education. I wasn’t entirely convinced. It made me anxious. I had a thought that maybe my dad did something wrong (he often hit the bottle and had various minor conflicts with the law). I wrote a letter home right away, describing the whole incident. I mailed it from the main post office, convinced that someone might be following me. I didn’t know that my father, after receiving the letter from me, would go to the police with it. He reported that someone was trying to kidnap me. For some time after this incident, a gloomy-looking guy was still following me. I was scared, I wouldn’t go anywhere by myself, instead, I asked two or three people to keep me company.

Many years went by. I worked, got married, had a child. I learned that a group of graduates was organizing a reunion for the school’s thirtieth anniversary. At this reunion, I met my former principal. I went up to her and asked if she remembered me or the event from years earlier. Of course she remembered. Only then could she tell me who these men were. They were officers of the Security Office! Why were they interested in my humble person? Because documents demanding my release from Poland had come from abroad (probably from the USA).

The men were checking whether I knew about it and whether I was preparing to make this “leap”. Later, I tried to find out what those documents were and who was behind them, who wanted to see me so badly. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn anything, and “friendly people” advised me not to dig any deeper.

Now I know that my grandfather, my mother’s father, was looking for me. The poor man was trying to find me for the rest of his life. I was his only relative who had survived. He had two sons and one daughter—they all died. Ever since he found out that his only granddaughter was alive, he searched for me, involving lawyers, to the day he died. Once he even almost found me. I learned about it by accident from my schoolmate from Łeba. I found out about it in 2003, and it had happened in 1958! It was during the summer holidays, when I was probably visiting my aunt for a few days in Parzęczew. Back then, Łeba was still a small town and the visit of a stranger who spoke with a foreign accent caused a stir. The elegant gentleman asked people about me, he really wanted to see me. He was told I was away on vacation. He asked about a place to eat around there, and was shown the diner “Morskie Oko”. Then the “informant” quickly went to my father and said that someone “from abroad” wanted to see me. My father knew immediately what was going on. To boost his courage, he had a drink at a nearby pub and then went to “Morskie Oko”. They had a fight there (it came to blows) and the police had to intervene. As a result, Grandpa’s attorney was forced out of Poland.

Years later, when I went to New York at the invitation of my aunt’s family, I didn’t know that Grandpa was looking for me. He had been long dead. Perhaps, he left behind some inheritance, but neither I (I couldn’t speak the language) nor those simple people I went to visit knew how to inquire about it. A year after my return from the States, I received an invitation from my uncle in Israel. I decided to go there with all my family. It was 1986. Leaving Poland in that direction was practically impossible, and trips with the family were out of the question. I wrote to various offices and organizations, looking into various options—to no avail.

Until one day, the weekly Polityka published an interview with the Minister of the Interior at the time, Czesław Kiszczak, under the very promising title: “I will talk to everyone.” My husband, Janusz, came up with the idea to use it and wrote to the Minister (on my behalf, of course), describing my story. He hit the bull’s eye. We got passports and went to Israel. It was an amazing experience! I’m not going to describe what it was like to meet my family, who had been so looking forward to meeting us that they all came from Haifa to the Tel Aviv airport, and at night, to welcome us. There were tears, flowers and stories told until dawn. What surprised me completely and will remain vividly in my memory for the rest of my life is rather inexpressible.

A group of people who came from Rożyszcze (the town where I was born) learned about my arrival in Israel. They had founded the Rozhishch Society in Israel. They are based there and meet with each other once a month. Well, these people, who knew my grandfather Bojmel (on my mother’s side), decided to invite me and the whole family to a general meeting. It was very solemn. Everyone cried. Everyone wanted to touch me! There was no end to recounting memories and telling stories. They accepted me as a member of one big family, as a “liaison” with the other, no longer existing world. I was very close to them. I cried too. My husband was stealthily wiping away his tears. During the gala dinner, they gave me two gifts—one of them was a gold necklace. The second gift, much more valuable to me, was the book Rożyszcze—My Old Home, published in Hebrew and English.

These were personal accounts. Each of the authors wrote what stuck in their memory the most: told their own stories and the stories of their families after the outbreak of World War II.

One of the memoirs, written by the Zukermann family, contains a brief reference to my family: “Another family with a baby was hiding with us in the forest. It was the Bojmels. None of us knew what happened to them afterwards…” It mentions my mother’s family name, known in Rożyszcze. Everyone knew who Bojmel was, but the name Putter was difficult for them to get used to. My father came from Lublin, and he hadn’t lived long in Rożyszcze.

“Nobody knew what happened to them…” Nobody knew, but now I do. I found a trace at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. My parents and I, caught by the Ukrainians at the edge of the forest, were transported to the ghetto. There, they bribed a policeman who took me out of the ghetto and dropped me off (as it was agreed with my father) in the Zalechs’ backyard. My parents died shortly afterwards.

Many years have passed. Fate smiled at me. Along the way, I met a man who has supported me throughout my life. Janusz has always cared for me, surrounded me with care and love. We started a happy family together. First, our daughter Ania was born, and nine years later, we had our second daughter, Eliza. They have both started their own families. Two years ago, Eliza became the happy mother of wonderful Marysieńka—our granddaughter. Life is great. Even so, sometimes memories come back. They are stuck in me like a burning scar that I can’t get rid of in any way.

There are good and bad memories. Each of us would like to keep the good ones forever so that we can recall them in a moment of sadness. The bad, unpleasant, and sometimes terrible memories have left a vicious mark on us. These cannot be forgotten.

Gdańsk 2005