Maja Hrabowska, born in 1929

Twice in the Shadow of Death

Warsaw 1942
Before the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, I worked in Schultz’s workshop to help my family get by. I had stated that I was 14, even though I was only 12, to avoid being considered a child. It was known that the Germans slated children for extermination, and I so wanted to live. The company, initially owned by the German industrialist Karol Gustaw Schultz and his Jewish partner, was completely taken over by the Germans. There were two Schultz enterprises: “Big Schultz”, run by a German from Gdańsk who traded in furs and had stores at Nowolipki, Nowolipie, Karmelicka and Smocza Streets, employing hundreds of people, and “Little Schultz”, with stores at Ogrodowa Street and Leszno. Jews who worked outside the ghetto were escorted to and from work by armed guards. I worked in a “szop” in Leszno, in a building that before the war had housed a school and later a hospital. Even though the payment was meager and the working conditions were difficult, I felt happy. During this period, an employment certificate from Schultz protected against deportation.

“Szopy” were small factories or workshops owned by the Germans and producing for the Third Reich. Up to a point, employment certificates protected people against being removed from the ghetto. Work in a “szop” was truly slave labor.

About six hundred Jews worked for “Little Schultz”, many of them with higher education. But after “actions” the number of workers increased significantly, because distressed people wanted to get employment certificates for themselves, their wives, and children at all costs.

The situation worsened in September 1942, when a large roundup took place, a “kocioł” (cauldron). About fifteen thousand people employed in the Schultz and Toebbens factories were detained and sent to Treblinka. These workshops continued to operate as before, employing some old and new workers from the ghetto. Everyone was happy to have been spared.

Then there was a period of relative peace, the killing happened sporadically, and street roundups took place only during working hours. At that time, most of the unemployed, including children, had already been “eliminated”. My family then moved from our apartment at Zamenhof Street, to the area intended “only for working people” in Leszno. Then a rumor began to circulate about the liquidation or relocation of all the workshops. Indeed, at the end of 1942, some workshops were moved to the vicinity of Lublin. It was an SS Gauleiter order issued under the pretext that disobedient Jews who worked outside the ghetto smuggled food and hid children and other “unproductive individuals”.

A Gauleiter was the second highest Nazi Party paramilitary rank

Himmler’s visit to the ghetto in January 1943 resulted in new actions in the workshops and on the ghetto’s territory. Most of the people were caught and sent to their deaths. Due to the protests of German entrepreneurs who made a lot of money by employing cheap labor, it was decided that all the workshops would be moved to Poniatowa and Trawniki (near Lublin). There, all the workers were murdered at the end of 1943. After the January action in 1943 [in the Warsaw ghetto], all workshops, except for the “szczotkarze” (brush makers), were liquidated.

In January 1943, I was taken outside the ghetto to the Aryan side. I spent the remaining years of the war in hiding under an assumed name as Maria Szmigielska. My mother was already dead then and it was my grandmother who arranged for me to be taken out of the ghetto with the help of Żegota, an underground organization. I never saw my family again.

New York, September 11, 2001
It was a beautiful morning, not much different from the one in Warsaw in 1939, when I experienced the horror of war for the first time. When the plane hit, I was sitting at my computer in the New York office of the Metropolitan Transportation Council on the eighty-second floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center. The explosion caused a sudden change in air pressure. The impact was so strong that I was thrown out of my chair. The door slammed shut and papers flew in the air. For a few seconds, the building rocked violently in all directions.

I grabbed my purse and lunged through the black smoke and flames into the hallway, where I joined the other staff. We immediately started going down the stairs. There was no panic, but everyone was serious. Several young men asked me repeatedly if I needed any help. In front of me, a guide dog was leading a blind man. We let him through. Cell phones didn’t work. The sprinklers soaked the stairs.

On the 30th floor, we met the first group of firefighters going upstairs. They looked tired, they were carrying heavy equipment. We stopped to let them pass, applauding them, unaware that they were going to meet their death. They passed, and I still remember the young blond boy who smiled when I greeted him.

I got very tired but kept going. After nearly an hour we reached the ground floor. Everything was on fire. Burning debris of various objects was falling from the upper floors. Police officers and security guards led us to an underground corridor, still lit but full of water. Stores were abandoned. Expensive goods lay scattered among broken glass and debris. We were directed to exit to Vesey and Church Streets.

I was finally outside! Everything looked like a war zone. Both towers were covered with black smoke. I had a coughing fit and my mouth and lungs were full of ash. There was a corpse on the ground. Ruins of buildings, broken glass, closed streets, and people covered with dust and blood reminded me of Warsaw in the fall of 1944. Suddenly, people started shouting, “Run, run, the tower’s collapsing!” I looked up and saw the second tower was falling. Its huge fragments flew through the air. They all ran; even paramedics abandoned the ambulances.

I was too exhausted to run. I spotted a green van and crawled between its wheels—hearing at the same moment a tremendous roar of the falling building. All the lights went out and the earth shook beneath me. The blast ripped my purse away and shredded my clothes. I was literally buried in powdered rubble. The woman next to me was hit by a large object and blood was dripping from her leg. The van was completely covered in debris, but I was intact.

After a few minutes it got quiet. I crawled out, still blinded, half naked but alive. I ran, along with the other people, towards the City Hall, and a few minutes later Tower One collapsed. The City Hall square was full of police and ambulances. Since neither the subways nor buses were running, I started walking towards my apartment building at Ninety- sixth Street. On the Upper East Side, the woman in charge of traffic stopped a passing car and told the driver to take me home. Looking out the window, I was shocked to see how ordinary and calm people in this part of the city looked. Suddenly, it occurred to me that this was what the Aryan side of Warsaw looked like when I escaped from the ghetto in early 1943. In the ghetto there prevailed emptiness, ruins, attempted escapes, blood, hiding places. And a few houses away, on the Aryan side, ordinary, everyday life—shopping, playing, and working—went on.

Finally at home! My purse was lost, but the superintendent had spare keys to the apartment. I took off my torn and dirty clothes and took a long hot shower, trying to soothe my swollen eyes and cuts. The phone kept ringing. My children in other parts of the city were in hysterics. A friend took me to the hospital, where my infected eyes and open wounds were treated.

I spent the next few days calling my co-workers, and I found out that five people had died. It was the second time when people said I was lucky.

The Polish version was translated by Halina Szostkiewicz