Marian Finkielman, born in 1928
Wanderings
It is very difficult to write about oneself, especially when one’s experiences were so tragic. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, I was eleven years old. During that memorable September, my father was killed in the siege of Warsaw. Thus from the very beginning of the occupation, Mama and I were left without any means of support. In order to make ends meet, she began to sell off certain items from our home. Time was not on her side, because after the establishment of the ghetto, the number of such sellers kept increasing. Beginning with the spring of 1941, I took upon myself the sale of particular items and the buying of food supplies, making these transactions outside the ghetto walls.
Encouraged by my achievements on the “other side”, in June, I began going to the countryside to get provisions. I was helped by my “good looks” and good pronunciation—without a Yiddish accent. Thus, posing as a Polish Catholic boy, I managed to do well in the countryside. I also realized that if I wanted to spend the night there, I would need a permit from the village administrator. When a farmer saw such a note, he would not ask many questions and would serve me supper before going to bed and a hearty breakfast in the morning. In the countryside certain “manners” (specific types of behavior) were important. I quickly adopted them, which is why I had no major difficulties. Paying no heed to the great danger, I made rounds as a smuggler between the Otwock ghetto and the surrounding villages. I brought things wanted by the peasants and exchanged them for food articles. This acquired experience of moving about outside the ghetto was to help me survive in the later, more difficult, period. But for the time being, still in 1941, I was enjoying good food while spending nights with village farmers. Unfortunately, this was only a temporarily idyllic time. A typhus epidemic that decimated the population also affected Mama and me. When I left the hospital in the beginning of December, my mama was no longer among the living. The winter of 1941–42 was unusually cold and was particularly harsh on the people confined inside the ghetto. The freezing cold and the still spreading typhus increased the “reaper’s toll”.
In this atmosphere, I experienced my tragedy all alone, suffering at the same time from hunger. Despite the freezing cold, I again began going to the countryside. Perhaps this was what saved me, because I soon regained my psychological balance. Just the fact of being outside the walls of the ghetto demanded full concentration, which diverted my attention from other thoughts and the despair at having lost my mother. Thus, whenever the weather was favorable, I would get under way, marching along the Lublin highway to various villages. Having no problem obtaining permits from the administrator for staying the night, I would extend my stay in the countryside.
When I finally returned to Otwock, I stayed with my schoolmate, Juda Cytryn. One could say that at that time the Cytryns became my substitute family. I gave them provisions that I brought from the country. Even though I officially lived near the Marpa Sanitarium (while my mama was still alive), at that time, upon returning from the countryside, I stayed with my friend at 1 Dłuskiego Street. But in reality, I lived nowhere. I was simply going back and forth between the villages and the Otwock ghetto. I began to wonder whether these dangerous trips made any sense. I had an uncle who lived in Dubeczno, near Włodawa, on the Bug River, and therefore I decided to go to him.
At the end of March 1942 I said goodbye to my dear friends, the Cytryns, and left Otwock. I traveled to Włodawa by train, with a transfer at Chełm. By the time I left Włodawa and was on the way to Dubeczno, it was already evening. Where could I go at night, into the unknown? I therefore decided to use my old method of getting lodging with a permit from a village administrator. After having spent the night in a country hut, the next morning I marched off to Dubeczno and arrived at my destination in the evening. But, as it soon became apparent, this was only a short stopover in my travels. My unexpected appearance was an unpleasant surprise for my uncle and his family. I therefore decided to leave their inhospitable home.
Already earlier some villagers along the road to Lublin (near Kołbiela), had offered to hire me in the spring to mind their cows at pasture. I decided to do this near Dubeczno. Posing as a Polish Catholic boy from near Warsaw, I looked for such a job. I was hired to mind cows in the village of Kozaki, about eight kilometers from Dubeczno. But it turned out that it was easier for me to pose as someone I was not when I went to the village for provisions and stayed with a villager for just one night. On the other hand, it was totally different when I had a permanent job, and especially with a Ukrainian (this was a Ukrainian village). Because it was the beginning of my new job, I got confused as to how to behave. In addition, I had no documents to prove my identity. As a result, the villager immediately guessed who I was. At first he didn’t tell me about it, but somewhat later his wife did, threatening that she would put a noose around my neck and take me to the Germans.
I therefore ran away from this village, but my existence was dependent on my finding a job in the country. I therefore continued to go from village to village, looking for work. Because the local villages were mainly Ukrainian, I had additional troubles. I finally found a job after a few days, and I settled on appropriate wages. I minded cows, and in the evenings I helped to clean them. One day the farmer asked me whether I would like to stay with him through the winter. Of course, I agreed. He then told me that I would have to register, so I should write home to have them send me my birth certificate. The next day, when I drove the cows to pasture, I left them there, with regret. I don’t remember the name of this farmer, just as I don’t remember the names of the villages and the names of other farmers with whom I stayed briefly and then left when I sensed I could be recognized.
I then found myself once again in a Ukrainian village, called Sokoły, working for a villager by the name of Franiuk. I spoke only Ukrainian with the boys out in the pasture and thanks to that improved my knowledge of that language. When the beginning of October came, the local administrators were ordered to deliver horse-drawn carts for the transport of Jews from a nearby town to an assembly point. Franiuk was the local administrator, and upon getting back from the town offices, he told me that I must leave him, because he had to comply with the registration rules, and, as I had no documents, I could not be registered. He also discouraged me from going to the nearby town. The next morning, kind old Franiuk, dishing out my food, once again admonished me, “Remember, don’t go to Persowo!” I decided to return to my uncle, and I soon found out why Franiuk had advised me against going to the nearby town. Walking through fields and meadows, I reached the road leading to Dubeczno, and after two days of travel (I slept in a haystack), I reached my destination.
I was once again in my uncle’s house, where everyone, including the neighbors, were gathered in the kitchen. When she saw me, my aunt exclaimed, “Look at him! Why did you come back here? Tomorrow morning we are all going to Sobibór.” Then a neighbor said, “You know what? Let’s stoke up the stove, stick some shoes into it, drink some vodka, and when we fall asleep, we’ll all suffocate right here. Why should we go to Sobibór, just to be put in an oven there?” Hearing this, I jumped up from my seat and yelled, “I’m not going to Sobibór! I’d rather die from a bullet. I will hide as long as I can, and when they finally catch me, they’ll at least shoot me on the spot.”
Sobibór was a death camp five miles south of Włodawa, where 250,000 victims, mostly Jews, were killed.
I lay down on a bench near the stove and immediately fell asleep. In the morning, my aunt woke me up, “Get up! It’s six o’clock already; the gendarmes may show up at any moment to take us to Sobibór.” I got up and noticed that everyone sat numb in the same place where they had been in the evening. No one had drunk vodka, and no one was able to bring himself to start the fire. Exhaustion and despair were written all over their faces. I got up, picked out some shoes lying on the floor, put them on my feet, and left. It had been easy to say I would hide, but where? Somehow, despite myself, I turned in the direction from which I had come.
When I again arrived in the village of Sokoły, it was already evening. I went there in desperation, because I simply did not know where I could go. Besides, in my youthful naiveté (I was fourteen), I thought Franiuk would help me. When I entered the kitchen, Franiuk’s wife looked at me as if she had seen a ghost. She crossed herself and exclaimed, “Oh, God! Why did you come here?” I told her about what happened in Dubeczno and about my intention to build myself a hideout in the forest and that therefore I needed a shovel and an ax. I asked about her husband. “Go behind the barn and wait. I’ll tell him you are here when he comes back.” I went behind the barn, and Franiuk appeared after a time.
Handing me some bread, he said, “Forgive me, but I cannot help you with hiding in the forest and have you come to my house. I can’t risk that, because I have children. Don’t come here again. Go! But don’t go through the village; someone could notice you. Go back through here behind the barns.” I went to the meadow and dug myself a place to sleep in a haystack. Sobbing and eating the bread I had been given, I fell asleep.
A heavy rain was falling the next morning. Nobody brought the cows to pasture, so nobody saw me. There was another village on the other side of the meadow, and thus I headed in that direction. In a house along the way, I was told that by going farther down the road, I would get to the small town of Komarówka, about twenty kilometers away. Toward evening I arrived in this town, in which a deportation was to take place the next morning. A Jewish policeman stopped me and led me to a shed with several people already inside. More arrived throughout the night. The policemen made sure that the German order to deport people for extermination was carried out precisely.
The rain stopped at dawn, and a beautiful and sunny morning followed. The doors of the shed slid open, and on the left-hand side of the shed stood a row of horse-drawn carts, which drove up one by one, and each was loaded with four people. I noticed that on the other side of the street there was a fence with a gate through which townspeople were also coming with their small bundles in hand and boarding the carts. Soon I also found myself on a cart and, like the others, I knew I was heading to my death. The carts set out in the direction of Międzyrzec Podlaski, to the railroad station.
The policemen kept order, while the soldiers armed with rifles ensured that no one escaped. Despite this, I constantly thought about escaping.
After several hours of riding, the carts drove into a forest. “Finally there is a chance to escape,” I thought. Looking to see to which side I should jump from the cart, I spotted a soldier waiting for potential escapees behind a tree.
The caravan of carts kept moving ahead all day without stopping, and in the evening, the carts arrived in a large village. The Germans allowed the peasants to feed and water their horses, and they let the people get off the carts, also, to drink some water. I jumped off the cart and headed for some farm buildings on the other side of the road. When I got closer, I noticed that there was nobody in the area of the farm. Heading for the well, I passed it by and walked toward a barn from which a path led to a garden gate.
Farther, beyond the garden, the path led to a haystack in a meadow. I turned to look around only after I got to the haystack. There was no one around. Quickly and skillfully, I pulled the hay out of the haystack to make myself a hole in which to hide.
Early in the morning, after leaving my hideout, I walked toward a field and some railroad tracks, which I had noticed from a distance. Along the way, I pulled up swedes and briskly walked ahead. I was happy to have escaped from the transport. For such an eventuality the Germans had issued a special order ahead of time, that anyone helping, hiding, or providing food to Jews would receive the death penalty. So after having escaped the transport, my chances of surviving—without help from anyone—were minimal.
Walking along the tracks, thinking about how many more villages I would still encounter in which I could stay over the night before I reached the town of Gołąbki, and then farther to Siedlce, I met a railroad worker returning from inspecting a rail switch. After scolding me for walking on the tracks, he started talking to me, questioning me about a multitude of things. In the end, he offered me work on his small farm. Of course he thought I was a Polish boy.
So in the middle of October 1942, after my escape from the transport, I found a roof over my head as a servant, and what was most important, I was treated like a member of the household. During long winter evenings I was able to read books, and above all, I read and memorized entire sections of catechism. I realized that one inappropriate gesture, one word spoken wrong, could mean disaster for me. That’s why I tried to make myself think that I really was the person I pretended to be. To underscore this, I would kneel and say my prayers in the morning and evening, cross myself at the table before meals, and go to church on Sundays.
But despite all my efforts, I still had no documents to prove my identity as Czesław Pinkowski. Knowing well my situation, I tried to create an alibi, claiming that I had come from Dubeczno. This place was not known to many people. As a base, I used my uncle’s house, which I described in detail, but I would say that my mother lived there. I often talked about Dubeczno and its surroundings, saying, consistent with the truth, that Ukrainians lived in some of the villages. The local Poles, in addition to their own language, also spoke Ukrainian, and that is why I knew the language. Evenings, while weaving baskets, I deliberately sang Ukrainian songs.
In the early spring, walking through the village, I made an agreement to mind another villager’s cows during the summer. After six months of my stay with the railroad worker, for whom I have retained much gratitude in my heart, I left for another farmer (a wealthier one). It was a cold, rainy Saturday at the end of March 1943 when I went to my new employer, Jan Siedlecki. From the beginning of my stay, I slept in the room of his mother—“Grandma”, as they all called her. Of course, just as at the railroad worker’s place, I behaved like a devout Catholic boy. Grandma liked that a lot and often told me I was “well brought up”.
Her son was not as trusting. He knew that I had no documents and yet was in no hurry to write to my home in Dubeczno, from where I had supposedly come, so that they would be sent to me. He began to suspect me, and my prior stay with another farmer in the village meant little to him. My employer, Jan Siedlecki, began to treat me with disdain, cursed me, and called me names. But because he was not particularly gentle in treating others in the household, I was not on my guard.
In reality, I should have left this farmer, left the village, as I had done many times before. Unfortunately, in occupied Poland in April 1943, a surviving Jewish boy could not freely wander around villages looking for work. Besides, I was a year older, and nobody would hire me without my showing Aryan identification papers. Realizing this, I submitted to the ill-treatment, not knowing what great danger awaited me from my host and his friend Klimek. If at that point in time, in April, they had carried out their plan of examining me, as they intended, I would have lost my life.
Aryan identification papers/Aryan papers – documents attesting that the person named in them was Aryan, not Jewish. Jews who were able to obtain falsified Aryan papers were able to live on the Aryan side, though always in danger of being uncovered and denounced. Aryan side: Outside the ghetto, where only non-Jews were permitted to live.
At the end of April I began my real job. The pasture, intermingled with woods, was where I met other boys from the village, whose carefree lives I envied. I often dreamed—what if I had one of their birth certificates? I never really expected that I would realize my dream in that village.
One July afternoon, when the farmer was away, his wife, while serving me my food, began to tell me about the plan her husband and his friend Klimek had made. They wanted to lure me into the forest under the pretext of cutting down trees and to check me over. If, after pulling down my pants, their suspicions were to be confirmed, they intended to tie me up and take me to the police in town.
In further conversation, the farmer’s wife asked me why I went to town so often, since I didn’t have any documents. She said that if I were stopped, I could be taken for a Jew. Putting on a good face in a bad situation, I laughed and said, “But, I only go to church and sometimes to the post office to send a letter to my mother. Besides, if I did get stopped, the police could check in Dubeczno, where I come from, so everything would get cleared up anyway.” My impudence may have given me courage and perhaps convinced the woman, but the danger had not passed and still hung heavily over me like the proverbial sword of Damocles.
I constantly dreamed and thought about securing Aryan papers that would help me survive. I finally was able to realize my dream, due to the fact that I slept in Grandma’s room. It just happened, simply dropped from the sky. Everybody knows that some older people like to talk a lot, and so it was with Grandma, Jan’s mother, who, in the evenings, told tales about people in the village. In this way I learned about many neighbors, their families, and many stories about them. She also told me about the family of a boy whom I met every day in the pasture. This is how Jan Czerwiński, without his knowledge and against his will, realized my dream of securing false documents. Grandma particularly liked to talk about this family. She said it was a noble family, because Jan’s mother descended “from nobility”.
If I were to believe in the supernatural, I would say that this Grandma, like the railroad worker, had been sent to me by God himself. It was thanks to her stories about her neighbors that I got enough information to get a Catholic birth certificate. What made things easier was the fact that the parish office, located in town, served many villages. Therefore it was impossible for the priest to remember all the boys in every village.
It was November 1943. One afternoon I told my employers that I was going to the post office in town. I went to the parish office and told the secretary that I needed a birth certificate, giving all “my” data. After filling out my certificate, she sent me to the priest for his signature and stamp. After paying five złotys for this, I became the owner of an authentic birth certificate. I left my farmer after a few days. This time I followed the tracks in the opposite direction, distancing myself from the town of Gołąbki.
According to an old custom, servants were hired for the entire year at Christmastime. I knew these customs—and the work on a farm as well. In my pocket I had a safe conduct document in the form of an authentic birth certificate, so I felt safe. Therefore I requested a high price for my services.
The farmer who hired me for the year demanded that I register myself there. Because of this, besides my birth certificate, it was necessary for me to have proof that I had registered my departure from my previous place of residence. I decided to once again try my luck. To accomplish this, I needed to go to the local administrative office on the other side of the tracks, right across from the village where I took the cows to pasture and from which, according to my birth certificate, I was supposed to have come. When I arrived at my destination, I stood before the building where the local administrative office was located. I hesitated. Might the clerk know the Czerwiński family? After all, their village was located less than four kilometers away, just on the other side of the tracks. My entire future existence depended on my registering my departure, so after a moment’s hesitation, I requested a document certifying the registration of my departure, paying my three złotys. Now I had all the needed documents I had dreamed about for over a year. I soon registered as Jan Czerwiński from the village of Ustrzesz, employed as a farm worker. After filing my application for a Kennkarte in the local administrative office at Radzyń Podlaski, I got a temporary identification card. They promised to send the actual Kennkarte in a couple of months to the administrator of the village in which I was staying.
A Kennkarte was an identification document issued by the Germans to those authorized to work and receive ration cards.
In January 1944 I was again looking for a new place. I found work with a farmer called Albin, in a village about ten kilometers away from Radzyń. I began my work there full of hope that I was finally safe. Due to bad luck, before I got my Kennkarte, partisans came to the house. They sat comfortably on the chairs and began asking questions about family members and various things about the farm. Then, pointing to me, “What about that boy?” “That’s my helper,” the farmer answered. Then one of these would-be partisans said, “He’s a Jew!” He then turned to me, “Come outside with us! We’ll check, and if it turns out you’re a Jew, then look here.” He pointed to the barrel of his gun.
The “partisans” insisted that I go with them outside to check. This was the second time that being examined was to decide my life; this time at the point of a gun. But Albin did not know about my true origins, and to avoid a commotion, he came to my defense. Using all his powers of persuasion, he told them, “Come on, gentlemen! I know his family. I personally brought him from his home in a village near Gołąbki. Janek! Show them your document. Look, gentlemen, it is a temporary identification card issued by the same administrative office where he applied for a Kennkarte.” In the meantime, his wife brought sausages and home-distilled liquor, and these “gentlemen” got fully absorbed in it.
In February, shortly after this event, I went to the village administrator in Ustrzesz, who already had the documents for me. Thus, in February 1944, I finally became the owner of a Kennkarte. At the end of July of the same year, the Lublin region was liberated from German occupation.
