Ludwik Brylant, born in 1933
Brylant… that’s a Jewish name
Ludwik Brylant is presented by Katarzyna Meloch
I was a rascal
My name is Ludwik Brylant. I was born in Warsaw on February 3, 1933. My earliest memories, the kind which made a mark on my life when I was a child, date back to 1938, when my parents split. I was 5 years old at the time. My sister Fela was two years older than me. The children were supposed to be divided up between the parents. I remember my parents’ divorce because my mother was supposed to take me, and my sister was to stay with my father. And I was even prepared for that because my mother was fonder of me. But the moment I saw my mother with a police officer, ready to pick me up, I refused to go. I ran away and stayed with my father. My mother left my father. Later, I saw pictures of her. She was a handsome woman. I was very attached to my mother.
All the family photographs have vanished. I don’t know what happened to them. Before the war, I remember that our home was a detached house in Warsaw in the district of Żoliborz, at 1 Feliński Street. There was a school nearby. Once, after the war, I tried to find the house. At that point, it was still there, on Feliński Street, by the school.
In 1940, before they took us to the ghetto, my father had written German officers asking to find my mother (he spoke German). The reply was that no one knew of her nor of her address. Maybe she had left with that police officer. At that point, people were fleeing en masse to the eastern border. Maybe she did, too. To this day there has been no news of her.
My mother’s name was Jadwiga Anastazja Wilczyk—that’s what her documents say. When I was born my father was 31, and my mother was 20. There was eleven years difference between them. My father was a clerk. He worked in starostwo [the district office—trans. note]. My father’s church documents read “biuralista” [old-fashioned clerk—trans. note]. I am circumcised. My grandpa was said to have stolen me eight days after I was born to perform the circumcision. And on June 12, 1933, our whole family was christened, the parents with the children.
I remember the year 1939 well—I was going to start school in September. The sirens went off. The alarm was sounded, the loudspeakers announced: “There has been an attack on Poland. Children, return to your homes.” Schools closed. It was my first day of school, the first grade. So I went home. Later, during air raids, blown-up horse carcasses lay out in the streets. Once, I was having liver (maybe horse’s) and I choked on it when the sirens went off to warn of an air raid. My father thumped me on the back and I spat out the liver… These are the moments that I remember. I also remember shattered cannons and dead soldiers.
Later, my father stopped working and would always go out to run some errands to put food on the table. What he did I don’t know. Sometimes he’d cook us potatoes. Until we received an order to move to the ghetto. Father told us to take what we could from the house. At first, it wasn’t all that awful. We were allowed to take our things. Father rented a cart and we loaded it with our personal things. We walked along. On the way, father talked to some man. Father said he was a good man. His name was Dąbrowski. I remember his words: “Leon, if you need anything, if the boy can make a run, send him, we’ll help out…”
Mr. Dąbrowski was my father’s friend. They were very close. The Dąbrowskis’ children are alive, their parents are gone. I had a chance to meet them in Lublin in 1954. They recognized me. I worked in the police station as a cashier. The tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of Poland was being celebrated with performances. I took part in these performances. Mr. Dąbrowski, an artist, did the decorations. After my performance, I went backstage and this is when he approached me, asking flat out: “You’re Brylant, aren’t you?”
“How’s your father? Alive?” he asked. I looked at him. I hesitated because I was hiding my origin. He went on: “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I remember one time when you made it out of the ghetto, you came to our place and I sent you to Father Ziemiński (Zimiński, Siemiński?).” The priest was the vicar of the church in Annopol.
In the Warsaw ghetto
In the ghetto, we shared the place with several families. At times, we’d leave the house. Father would tell me—especially later, after he’d fallen ill with typhoid – make a stop “there.” It wasn’t as awful as later on. Make a stop “there” because Poles would get near the ghetto and there was a swap—valuables for bread or potatoes. We had a thing or two. My father gave me, for instance, a ring. I was such a young boy, but I already knew what I had to do and so from time to time he would give me something to “swap.” And I’d bring back some potatoes, other times a loaf of bread… My sister was already weak, she’d gotten sick. In no time, she contracted tuberculosis. After the war she was already a first category invalid because of tuberculosis and gout. All broken, she could barely move around until she died on May 4, 2000.
In the ghetto I went around hungry. The boys would snatch bread from each other. The older ones would snatch it from the younger ones. That’s how I remember it. I was 7 or 8 years old at the time. Later when my father was really sick, he said: “Your sister won’t make it but you should try to get out, do whatever you have to.” And I, as a child, would jump onto streetcars, I’d grab onto streetcars… (At that time, streetcars still passed through the ghetto; sometimes they’d go really slow). I tried to escape. I’d jump on a streetcar, get closer to the gate… There was a wall and the crossing was by that wall. It was guarded by a Polish policeman and a German—a gendarme with a so-called “plate”, a badge. I hopped on the streetcar, I didn’t get inside. I squatted. I was riding on the platform… That was the first time. But the policeman caught me. He gave me a beating and took me back to the ghetto.
Another time, I made it out of the ghetto. The Polish policeman (the same one as before), caught me when I was already on the Aryan side and delivered me back to the ghetto even though I begged and sang in Polish. I was a rascal. My father would later say: “Keep on trying. You’re better off dead than alive in here.”
The third time (in 1941), I again hopped on a streetcar. It was already cold. I wasn’t dressed warmly. I was so cold. The streetcar’s platforms were open and to get inside you had to open the door. I hopped on and stooped. A man next to me held me down. A German must have been sitting inside. The Pole pressed me down even harder. He blocked me. At that point, I got a little scared. I thought: Is he going to turn me in? But I got a sense that he was doing this to protect me. On the third stop after exiting the ghetto, he said to me: “Get off, now!”
Before that, I’d had an accident. My friend and I were trying to run away, hand in hand. Later, actually after our escape, a German shot at us and hit my friend. I dragged him behind me, saying: “Get up, stop fooling around…” It didn’t occur to me that he was dead, that I could have died, too. I lacked imagination, and that’s why I didn’t know what real fear was.
Run away, then what?
It was October, maybe early November. My first steps… I remember—as Father told me—were straight to the Dąbrowskis’. They lived in the Old Town in Warsaw and I asked around there. I didn’t know the specific address. I wandered around a little but I found them. The Dąbrowskis had four children. I spent a few nights at their place. My father had them in mind when he would say: “If you manage to escape, stop by their place, they’ll help you.” This was the best connection my father had.
They immediately took me in, fed me, and stowed me away for a few days. A person they trusted showed up and said: “Come, I’ll take you to the priest”—because that priest probably knew my father—“and he’ll find you a place to stay.” The priest, first of all, gave me a bath. I had scabies, so he applied an ointment and had me put on a bag with a hole for the head. I had a great meal at his place. (His name was Zimiński, or Siemieński?). It was a parish in Annopol. Wasn’t I christened in that parish before the war? There was a rectory by the church. And I spent around ten days at the priest’s and from there I was sent to Child Services at Zegarmistrzowska Street. Later, they transferred us from Zegarmistrzowska to another street, and right after that, just before Christmas of 1941, several kids were taken by train out of Warsaw. That train was headed for Werbkowice and from there, by narrow-gauge railway to Turkowice, to the nuns. Coincidentally, this was right before the holidays in 1941, before the Christmas holidays.
In Turkowice
In Turkowice, there were a lot of children. Various children, some foundlings, as it often was in the Child Services. But that was an institute, not services. My father had said: “Once you get to the Dąbrowskis’ mention your sister.” So they would help me, if possible, to get her out of the ghetto as well. The nuns asked us children if we had family elsewhere. I said that I had a sister but I didn’t know where she might be. After a while, the nuns said: “We’ve found your sister.”
The story with my sister goes like this: I told the priest that I had a sister. The priest asked me where she was. I replied: she was still “there.” The priest responded: “I’ll try to get her out of there somehow.” My sister later told me that she was sitting in the ghetto out on the street, on the sidewalk, starving (our father had already died). Some man approached her and asked if her name was Feliksa Brylant. She probably figured out that it was about rescue. She went with him and he had her taken to Chotomów, the institute of the Servant Sisters in Stara Wieś. There she got treatment for tuberculosis and had her lungs expanded. I think in around 1943 she came from Chotomów to Turkowice.
I was happy that my sister was alive, and surprised that she got out. I asked her about our father. She replied: When he died, they put him on a cart and took him away. I asked: “Did you take anything from the house?” “No, I didn’t…” she replied.
I remember the priest from Annopol telling me in Warsaw: “We’ll do everything we can for her. You should think about yourself now and wherever you go, keep your origin to yourself.” He knew that in the institute there was a common bathhouse. “Try to turn around when you’re showering so they can’t see you from up close,” he’d say. Later, I figured out what he meant… He’d explain: “They can tell you’re Jewish by that.”
In Turkowice, there were two groups of boys and two groups of girls; they also had infants. Now that I think about it, the nuns really sacrificed themselves. The institute was a kind of educational facility, a former Orthodox monastery, also for nuns, built during the Russian partition. It was Marshal Piłsudski who dedicated these buildings to the Legionnaires’ orphans. Later, the nuns accepted all children, even foundlings. But originally, they were meant for the Legionnaires’ orphans. A lot of children had disappeared from there, as the book The Children of the Holocaust Speak mentions. A nun with nine children vanished without a trace. Michał Głowiński recalled that. He was there too. He was quiet and would keep to himself. I was more of a rascal. They’d say a Jew is always a coward, but I could fight with two boys at once. There were these two brothers and I could take them on. I showed them that they were wrong. I was like that…
Life there was always filled with anxiety. One day a Ukrainian village was ablaze, the next day, the next night, a Polish village was on fire. On one side of the Huczwa River, there were Polish partisans, on the other (across from the Malicki Forest), the Ukrainian squads were prowling. A lot of Ukrainians dressed up as Poles. They would wear white and red armbands and pretend to be Polish partisans. A Polish boy from Sister Róża’s group went missing in the forest. The Ukrainians murdered him. He had a chain wrapped around his neck and splinters under his fingernails. We found him. He was all covered in blood.
The nuns knew
The name Brylant is Jewish. It was clear that I was a Jewish child, that is, the nuns had no doubt. They knew. In Turkowice, most children were older, at an age when they could already be taken to Germany for labor. When the Germans inspected the children, the nun who supervised my group (her religious name was Róża) always tried to put me behind someone tall, taller than me, in the second or third row. She was hiding me. I knew why. When I was at the nuns’, I was older, so I already knew fear. One time, when they were doing an inspection, Sister Róża didn’t send me anymore but locked me in a wardrobe. She said, “You’ll wait here for now. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.” As long as I didn’t come out. But I was already older.
The older boys there would call me “Jew.” I still remember the one who said “Jude” when there was an inspection of the children in Turkowice. His name was Kruczkowski. A German was walking by at that time, he turned around. Because Sister Róża was right next to him, she started speaking to the German (she spoke German) and he moved on. At that point, this was my biggest fear. In Turkowice, Kruczkowski was cocky. Later, when we transferred to Lublin, I picked up boxing. He got a taste of it. And I told him: That’s for that “Jude” back then.
After the war
After you completed elementary school, you were transferred from Turkowice to Lublin, to Grodzka. Before the war it was a shelter for Jewish children. After the war it was the Doctor Dańkowski Youth Center. Today there’s a plaque there. I arrived there in 1948.
And in Turkowice, during the war, we went to school. Barefoot, even in the winter. In elementary school in Turkowice, the education level was low. Only nuns taught there (the Polish language, math, basic subjects…). For a year, I attended a middle school in Lublin but I didn’t make it to the next grade. I transferred to a vocational school (I studied commerce). When I was 16 or 17, I was on my own. I was trying to figure out the next step. I enrolled in the Officer Training School.
A year after me, my sister left Turkowice for Puławy, to the Orphanage and went to a tailor school there. Next, she worked somewhere in a state farm in the accountancy department. She got pregnant out of wedlock and had a son. Later, after she graduated, she came to Lublin and rented a room. She picked up work when she could. She didn’t go to school anymore. She did various jobs, her health was deteriorating… Later she got married.
My health didn’t allow me to complete the officer school. In 1946 I stayed in the hospital in Hrubieszów. I had arthritis. The disease was a result of suffering from the cold in the Warsaw ghetto. In 1946 I had my first serious operation for acute inflammation; my joints had swollen up. In 1950 I had an operation for osteomyelitis, three times.
I came to Lublin, and later reported to the army commission. There, a police officer in civilian clothes approached me. He was the HR director. He told me: “I need a cashier.” He knew I had studied in the officer school in the finance department. I didn’t want to be on the force. But I agreed. I worked in the regional headquarters as a cashier. My “education” was higher than that of the regional commandant himself! Again, they sent me to the Higher Police Academy in Szczytno. I completed a year there. Later I worked as an investigation officer, but my supervisors were forcing me to do certain things. It didn’t sit well with me and I did everything to get dismissed. In 1957 I was dismissed.
I got married in 1953. I had a church wedding because I was Catholic. So was my wife. I have two sons from that marriage. I got divorced and later re-married. When I was in the army or even when I worked on the force, I didn’t experience antisemitism, because I was hiding my origin. Perhaps I joined the police force because they promised to give me an apartment straightaway. And they did.
I got re-married. (I have a daughter from that marriage.) Again, I got divorced. I got married for a third time. I have a son (the youngest) from that marriage. My wife died in a car crash, at a tram stop in Lublin. The boy was 3 years old at the time, my wife was 40. That was in 1982. My wife died, leaving me with a 3-year-old child, and a step-daughter who was 16. Later, I had various problems. I worked and dropped my son off at daycare. He was the one who found himself a mother, and me a wife, the fourth one. She lived in the same apartment building. One time, my son said: “Daddy, why don’t you marry Mommy?” And I did. She raised him like he was her own. He got a university degree and works for IBM. He’s an IT specialist.
My second wife, with whom I had my adult daughter, knew about my origin. She’s deceased. We had papers to go to Israel, but she got into trouble with the law, and I didn’t want to go with her anymore and drag her, as a Pole, over there. She had stolen something or other and went to jail.
I may have regrets
When in Turkowice, I didn’t know much. Everyone who had a Jewish origin had to lie low and hide. In 1946 some representatives of Jewish organizations came and were going to take us from the institute. I remember three men. They took the younger Jewish children with them. Even Fredzia, my sister’s friend. Her name was Fredzia Kowalczyk. I didn’t know, I’d never have guessed that she was Jewish. She must have been hiding her origin too.
She was in my sister’s group, whose caretaker was Sister Konstancja. I also talked to the three men. But the nuns must have talked to my sister Fela. They told her not to go to Palestine because it could be dangerous there. They said: “We’ve saved you, you’re alive and if you go there, you may die.” So my sister didn’t want to leave Turkowice and neither did I.
I may have regrets that in the very beginning, when they were recruiting Jewish children from Turkowice to go to Palestine right after the war, I didn’t go. Maybe my life would have looked different. I’ve had difficult situations in my personal and family life. Maybe I would have avoided that… But at least I have children – adult sons and grandchildren.
I wasn’t really affected by March ‘68 because I had been hiding my origin until then. If anything, they’d call me a Gypsy. They thought I might be a Gypsy, but a Jew? The more so that in Lublin, there were Gypsies, I knew them. The singer Michaj Burano, among others, lived there. And I was in touch with his brother. There was a period—in 1968—that I was especially close to the Gypsies in order to conceal my origin. The year 1968 was horrible for Jews. And I kind of looked like a Gypsy.
Although I worked in the police force, I wasn’t a member of the PZPR [The Polish United Workers’ Party—trans. note]. They were pushing me to sign up. They agitated. But they failed. In Turkowice, I went to church every Sunday and at least once a month to confession. I had my First Communion there. I was also confirmed there. Even in 1953 when I was getting married, I had a church wedding. Of course, at that point, I was also hiding my origin because I was still afraid. I was afraid of persecution. Even when I was told: “Don’t be such a Jew,” I pretended I didn’t hear… I wouldn’t react. It didn’t particularly faze me. I knew that if I got mad, I would confirm it. In Turkowice I was an altar boy – and one of the best altar boys, at that. At 6 am, I was ready to serve in the Mass, I had had my communion. Sister Róża would say: remember, this will conceal the truth about you.
I searched for my relatives through the Polish Red Cross. There was no response. It would definitely make me happy to find a member of my family. To meet up, at least, to learn a little more about my father, how it came about that my father converted… I often have dreams that make me scream. My wife reaches over, asks what the matter is. My dreams remind me of my first or second escape attempt, when the police officer brings me back to the ghetto and beats me. I escape, can’t make it, and I return. Like a child, I can feel that pain and I scream. My wife comes and calms me down.
I would like to thank Joanna Sobolewska-Pyz for the permission to use the fragments of her interview with Ludwik Brylant from 13 February 1998.
Now—Ludwik Brylant writes a few things about himself (the year 2006)
I’ll tell the truth: until I joined the Association of Children of the Holocaust in Poland, I had been hiding my Jewish origin. But this isn’t all that I want to add to the description of the memories that are tormenting me.
In 1946, when the representatives of the Central Jewish Committee came to Turkowice for the Jewish children, the Mother Superior of our institute (Aniela Polechajłło) and Sister Róża (our group’s caretaker) told me that my mother was Polish so my sister, Feliksa Danuta, and I had no reason to go to Palestine. They also said that they’d been hiding us so that we would live and not die. (At that time, there was fighting before the formation of the State of Israel.)
The future priest Grzegorz Pawłowski, a Jewish boy rescued by monks, was with me in the Youth Center in Lublin, at 11 Grodzka Street. We knew nothing about our origin. Later, in the course of my correspondence with Grzegorz, when he was already a priest in Israel, I mentioned that my children didn’t know anything about my origin. He wrote back that my children should learn about it from me and not from strangers.
I thought about what he had said and decided to tell my children. They took this news well, especially my eldest son, who had suspected the truth about it. I don’t remember the exact date, but I think it was during the celebration of the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the celebration took place in the Warsaw Philharmonic… I brought the Turkowice Sister Irena (Antonina Manaszczuk) to this celebration from Feliński Street in Warsaw. It was then that I met Rozalia Rońska. She told me that if I wanted to learn more about my roots, about my family, I had to look for information in Radom, where my father, grandparents, and uncle had lived. She had known my grandfather well. I reported all this to my son, Krzysiek. At that point, we had already been going together to Śródborów for psychotherapy for Children of the Holocaust. He supported me. He went with me to Radom. There, at the State Archive and the Registry Office, I obtained extremely valuable documents. (I remember as a 4-year-old child going to Radom with my father before the war.)
At the State Archive in Radom I learned from the books of the followers of Judaism that my grandfather Ludwik Brylant and grandmother Eleonora Goldsobel had lived in Radom, and that my father had lived in Radom at 25 Żeromski Street, along with my father’s brother, Jerzy Jakub Brylant, who had an optician’s practice there. The Registry Office’s books also included birth certificates for the names Izabela Brylant No. 131/1903/8, born on 02 May 1903 and Anna Brylant No. 131/1903/8, born on 02 May 1903. They were the children, twins, of Ludwik and Eleonora née Goldsobel—the daughters of my grandmother. Also, the Registry Office in Radom issued me an extract from the marriage certificate of my parents: father, Leon Brylant, and mother, Sznajdla née Wilczyk, born in Nowy Korczyn, to the father Nusyn Wilczyk and the mother Chana Śpiewak. This marriage certificate convinced me that my mother wasn’t Polish-Christian but Jewish.
I also obtained an extract from the marriage certificate of my father’s brother, Jakub Brylant, to Rywka Ruchla Gleichgewicht. My son and I decided to look for my uncle’s children as well as investigate why my birth certificate didn’t state my mother’s birth name, but Jadwiga Anastazja instead. I knew that I was christened, and so was my sister. When I was getting married in church, I didn’t know where I could get a copy of my full birth certificate. I only remembered that when my father had told me to flee the ghetto, he said that if I was asked where I was baptized, I should remember that it was in the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary in Bródno.
Continuing my research with my son Krzyś, I went to Warsaw to the parish in the neighborhood of Bródno, and to our great surprise, Father K. Abramowski brought out a thick book of baptized Jews. In this book, I read that on June 12, 1933, my entire family was christened. I was baptized and recorded in this book under the number 258/1933. I was given the names Ludwik Zdzisław. I was four months and nine days old at the time. (I still wonder what name I was given at the moment of my circumcision.)
When I was in that church and talking to the priest, I asked about the reason why so many Jews had converted to Catholicism. The answer I got was that the year 1933 was the year Hitler seized power in Germany. In Poland, in order to get a good job and assimilate with Poles, you had to be a convert.
I will also say how I found my cousins. During the first congress of “Children of the Holocaust” in the district of Miedzeszyn, I was approached by one of our members and asked if my name was Brylant. He was asking because he lived in Radom and went to school with another Brylant. He promised that if he managed to contact him, he would ask for his telephone number and address. And he did. After a year or two, I got the phone number of the Brylant from Radom. I gave him a call. This is how I found my cousins, whom I visited with my son Krzyś. We talked, we cried, and now we’re in touch. His father did what my father did. His parents got baptized. His name is Władysław, and his sister, Zofia. He’s older than me by two months. I talk to him, try to convince him to join our “family,” return to his roots – but it’s a process. My cousin gave me a copy of the article from Dziennik Radomski from March 11–13, 1994, which describes “The first democratic City Council in Radom.” Our grandfather, Ludwik Brylant, an optician from the merchant-craftsmen list, was elected to the City Council on March 9, 1919. He was very active among the Jewish councilors.
I’m glad that I learned a lot of good things about my family, but I still think that it’s too little because the Brylant family was very large. They were wealthy people and were active in many Polish institutions. My father was educated and spoke foreign languages. He held a number of respectable positions. I didn’t succeed in life, neither personally nor professionally. I’m happy that my children are employed as educated people. My eldest son is retired. So am I. My only wish is to go to Israel and see the country of my ancestors. Perhaps, if I have it in me, I’d like to write something about myself and my life. Writing all this made me feel strange, different from normal. I don’t feel like I’m useful to anyone anymore. I’m going through some crisis… I managed to find a picture of my father in the archive in Radom. It was used for my father’s personal identification in 1928, when he still lived in Radom and was a single man. It was very damaged.
