Lidia, born in 1929

Far from the road

I was born in 1929 in Białystok. My mother was Jewish. I was raised by her parents, my grandparents, the Melchiors. I look back very fondly at my childhood there. My grandparents weren’t wealthy, but they surrounded me with love and did everything to alleviate the separation from my mother. I suspect that my grandmother received help from her son Wacław, who lived and worked in Argentina. Despite her poor health, my grandma would take me on walks to the park, to the Jordan Garden, so I could play with other kids and not feel so abandoned. She’d also take me on summer holidays to Zielonka near Warsaw.

When I started my education, my grandma always walked me to school and helped me with homework. My happy childhood ends when my grandma dies in 1938. I returned to my family home. While I was staying at my grandparents’, my mother had gotten married to a Catholic and I’m introduced to my siblings—my sister Teresa and my brother Tadeusz.

When September 1939 comes, like everyone else we’re asking each other: “What will happen to us? What’s next?” Our horror peaks when the German army enters Białystok. What does it mean for a family where the mother is Jewish? After the first period of fear, we relax after we learn that by the agreement between the Germans and the USSR, the German army retreats behind the line of the Bug river.

However, war between the Germans and the USSR breaks out. The German army enters Białystok. When that happens, we are afraid of being arrested and often change addresses. Father works in the health department, in the sanitary unit. In the first half of 1943, Father still gets arrested and put in the Gestapo prison, and later in the camp in the region of Białystok. When she learns that, our mother fears for her own and our safety and places us with Aryan papers at some old man’s house and she disappears, we don’t know where.

With Grandpa being infirm, I, as the eldest of my siblings, am responsible for finding food and fuel, etc. Around that time, I am forced to work at a German sewing factory where work was organized in three shifts. For a 13-year-old girl this job was very hard. I was often beaten by the German supervisor. I used the time between shifts to provide my family with potatoes and vegetables, which I stole with my pals from nearby fields, and coal from train cars.

One day a stranger turned up with the news that Father had escaped from the transport and is hiding near Knyszyn. He was asking for civilian clothes. Of course, father didn’t know that we children were without our mother. I, as the eldest, packed his clothes and a little food, and headed towards Knyszyn, which was around thirty kilometers away from Białystok. So as not to get lost, I walked along the road, terrified of running into the German patrols.

Today, I can’t really reconstruct the circumstances of meeting with Father. I remember that at that point, we started roaming from one nearby village to another. We stayed the longest at the village of Długołęka, where Father helped a farmer in exchange for food and a roof over our heads. Oftentimes, we had to hide in the basement or in the stable when the German soldiers arrived in the village looking for fugitives and partisans.

After the eastern lands had been liberated from the German occupation, we returned to Białystok and were reunited with our family. My brother Tadeusz resembled our mother and had Semitic features. That’s why for most of his stay at the old man’s he had to hide inside, which affected his health (he stuttered and was fearful) and probably his looks because I didn’t recognize him at first. I will never forget wandering across the fields of Białystok with my father. The horrific sight of human corpses and dead horses and cows is with me to this day.

After the war I went to school. In 1950 I married an officer of the Polish Army and we left Białystok never to return. We lived in various places and in 1966 we settled in Warsaw.