Rachela Malinger, born in 1927 (2)
Escape from Łódź
To my father and brother, who didn’t return from the war
The Second World War sucked millions of people into its vortex. Our family was among those millions. When my older brother was leaving for the war, he said to me, “I promise that when I come back, we’ll write down everything we’ve been through.” My brother didn’t come back from the front. I myself will try to fulfill my brother’s promise.
In occupied Łódź, the humiliation and fear were intensifying by the day, and to make things worse, we had no news about Father. He had been mobilized in the first days of the war. Where was he? How was he doing? Was he dead or alive? If Dad were with us, our fate would be immediately less gloomy. Dad was always good at predicting events and evaluating them. “Hitlerism is death,” he said back when Hitler seemed to be a jester, “a fakir for the hour,” whom no one took seriously and nobody could have guessed the role he would play in history. One day there was a knock on the door. A young man was standing on the threshold, looking very tired. “I brought you a letter, I met your husband in Białystok. I crossed the border yesterday,” he said. Dad! He was alive!
Daddy wrote: “Dear Luba! I’m in Białystok. Sell whatever you can immediately, leave the rest or throw it away. Take the children and try to get here without wasting a single day. I’m begging you, do not delay the escape, leave everything behind, life is at stake! My address in Białystok is 16 Polewaja Street. I’m sending my kisses to you and the children. Please, do not dawdle! Your Arnold”
The heavy black clouds that had hung over us parted. We shared our joy with our neighbors. Some mysterious councils of adults were taking place every day. They discussed the possibility of escape through two border points: Małkinia and the Bug River. They were considering which option was safer, where you could get shot, where the Germans could be bribed. People formed groups to escape together and developed detailed plans and routes.
I don’t know what influenced my mother’s decision to send my sister and brother first. It was possible that in occupied Łódź, where there were real manhunts, a young, beautiful girl and boy were the most exposed to danger and it was necessary to save them above all. Perhaps it was the other way around: going into an unknown, dangerous path with a small child and the weakest one was a greater risk. In any case, it’s hard for me to imagine how much it cost my mother to make this decision.
My brother and sister joined the group going through Małkinia. They took only the necessary things for the journey: soap, a towel, some food, and money. My mother put a small amount of cash in the lining of each of their coats.
They left, while my mother and I returned to the apartment, which immediately became empty and strange. The next days were filled with waiting. It was dangerous to go out into the street, and besides, a message could come at any moment.
However, our home had ceased to be our “fortress”. One evening we heard a loud knock on the door. We were scared—it was already past curfew, it couldn’t have been any of our friends. The knocking on the door grew persistent and increasingly loud. My mom pushed me into the room, went out into the hallway, and opened the door. A German soldier burst into the apartment, cursing and swearing, “Verfluchte Juden” [German: damn Jews].
“Where’s your husband?” he asked. “He’s gone, he died at the front.”
“And your son?” He clearly had gotten information about our family from someone.
“He’s left for Warsaw to visit relatives.”
The uninvited guest started to ransack the apartment. He looked into the kitchen, kicked my favorite kitten, Kajtuś. Judging from his behavior, my mother realized that this wasn’t a planned action, but rather an amateur stunt of the occupier who was randomly looking for something to eat.
“Maybe you need money?” my mother asked gently so as not to offend our “guest”. But courtesy was redundant here.
“Yes, hand it over,” the robber in the Wehrmacht uniform willingly agreed. We bought our lives for a small fee because it was just a small private venture of a single soldier.
The policy of the occupiers, on the other hand, was assuming ever more incomprehensible and terrible shapes. The ominous word “ghetto” appeared in people’s vocabularies and was used increasingly often.
It was getting more and more dangerous in Łódź. An apartment in the city center was exposed to robberies by German soldiers. After my siblings had left, my mother and I were alone. My mother decided to move to Piotrków, to her friend’s place. There, however, a ghetto was established very quickly. We lived in a crowded apartment, and to make matters worse, I fell seriously ill. It was probably spotted typhus, I was feverish and delirious. Somehow I recovered, but I was very weak.
Some time had passed since the departure of my brother and sister, when two young people arrived with a letter from my father, which we had awaited so eagerly. They took us out of the Piotrków ghetto and we returned to Łódź to go further east. I hadn’t entirely recovered yet.
These “shuttle” border crossings, as they were called then, between the parts of Poland occupied by Germany and Russia, were a source of income for many people, although they often risked their lives. They transported watches, fabrics, and leather to Russia, and we wouldn’t have had sympathy for these smugglers if they hadn’t also acted as postmen, of course not altruistically.
This time Dad wrote: Dear Luba! The kids found me. But I cannot endure the thought that you two are still over there. Please, do not linger! Leave everything behind, save the child and yourself! The man who will give you this letter will help you. Arnold
We had three days to get ready before our departure. We had to join a group that was going across the Bug River, because the Małkinia crossing had become more dangerous at that time. In addition, the man who was supposed to help us was in a hurry to get back. “Leave everything behind,” Dad wrote. “Everything” was three rooms with modest furnishings, but we were attached to each thing and losing it felt similar to losing a loved one.
Some of our neighbors and families of my friends were privy to our escape plans. Mom tried to convince them that running away was the only way to save yourself before the ghetto became a reality. They reacted differently. Mr. Berliński, the father of my friends Hala and Lila, said, “You may be taking the risk unnecessarily, and with a small child at that. The Germans are people, too. I make men’s shirts, they need them. They don’t touch business people. Not like those Soviets, they took all the factories away from people. It’s no place for me.”
The father of my friend Sala, Mr. Stankiewicz, a cobbler, also couldn’t understand my mother’s arguments. “You’re lucky, you take your child and off you go. And where am I supposed to put my machines, earned with sweat and toil? What good is a cobbler without his machines?”
Niusia’s parents, on the other hand, said, “We’re old, where are we going to go? We have some money, we hid it here under the wallpaper. We’ll survive somehow. After all, not all Germans are monsters. Our older daughter refuses to stay, so let her go.” This is how nineteen-year-old Renia joined our group. Before the departure, we took a photo together: me, Lila, Hala, Sala, and my favorite kitten, Kajtuś, “a keepsake, forevermore”.
The time of departure had come
We got to Warsaw at night. The city was in ruins. Fortunately, the house where our friends lived was still standing. Terrified, they let us in. The next day—a departure to Siedlce. I spent only one day of my life there, but the memory of that day has been haunting me ever since.
We were standing on the platform, full of refugees like us, when a train, unannounced, pulled into the other track and stopped. But there was something unusual about its appearance. The doors were sealed, the windows closed with curtains. Armed Germans jumped out of nowhere and, cursing and pushing away curious people, walked along the carriages. Human voices, lamentation and screams, came from the train. As the escorts moved away, through the opened curtains, we saw tired female faces and unshaven male faces. They used sign language to communicate to the people on the platform that they were hungry and thirsty, they were licking the sweaty windows and could barely move in the crowded compartments. When someone managed to crack open a window, people on the platform bought bread from the vendors hanging around at the station and threw them to the wretches. We watched in horror as hungry people fought for each bread roll. Where were these people from? Where were they being taken? At that point, no one could even imagine that death camps for millions of people might exist, no one had heard of Oświęcim, Brzezinka, Treblinka. Where did these people come from—France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands? Or were they Polish Jews? We’ll never know… We couldn’t shake off the horror for a long time.
We came to our senses when a woman approached us and quietly asked if we needed an overnight stay and a crossing over the Bug. We followed her. The two rooms on the second floor of a wooden house were packed. For us, there was a scrap of floor by the door. It was noisy and crowded there, the air was heavy, people slept without undressing, smoked, ate, shared their experiences. Boys and girls slept together on one wide bed, you could hear giggles.
The night passed uneasily. Every now and then, some people went out, others came, stepping over us. In the morning, it was our turn. Two carts pulled up in front of the house. We got on them and rode to the Bug River, to the border village of Mordy. Along the way, similar carts, overflowing with refugees with meager possessions, joined from different sides. As if out of spite, it was raining all the time. I caught a cold and had a fever the entire way. The closer to the border, the more often the Germans extorted money by threatening them with harm. People emptied their pockets, happy to be able to redeem themselves.
Completely exhausted, drenched but hopeful, we finally reached the border village. In a terribly overcrowded cottage we were supposed to wait our turn to cross the Bug River. We weren’t lucky. One of the guides had been shot the night before and the frightened villagers refused to help us. People ripped up their coat linings, extracting the last valuables and adding them to the previously agreed upon fee of fifty zloty per person. Fortunately, it worked.
The transfer of refugees to the right bank of the Bug had become a source of considerable income for the inhabitants of the riverside village. The rate per person depended on the situation at the border and increased with the risk. The Germans, on the other hand, understood that tolerating refugees would bring them more profits than killing them, so they also turned a blind eye to this smuggling of people. The villagers generously paid the Germans for their understanding.
Before dawn we were divided into groups and the guides escorted us to the riverbank. Still feverish, in a thick fog, I almost got lost. I paused for a moment to adjust the strap of my heavy backpack. As I followed the group, barely visible in the thick fog, I heard my mother’s muffled voice calling me from a completely different side. This way, I almost got separated from my mother, which could have been a real tragedy.
We finally sat down in the thick bushes. Every now and then the soft splash of oars was heard. It was our turn. The boat was small and when eight people got in, it almost completely submerged in the water. It was quiet, the oars didn’t creak, they slipped into water without splashing, and finally we were on the other bank—the one we had dreamed of.
The terrible tension that hadn’t left us since the beginning of the occupation disappeared. It was as if the air we breathed in this morning mist was completely different. We sat down with my mother on a high sandy bank, awaiting the second batch of people, which included Renia and two boys who’d joined us in Siedlce. Suddenly the silence was broken by shots, shouts of people, and yells of German and Russian border guards. What about Renia? You could hear the splashing of water, it was Renia; she was wet because after the shots the carrier threw people into the water. She reached us and collapsed on the sand without any strength…
Unexpectedly, someone started pressing against my mother. I turned my head and was terrified. A soldier in a long coat and some strange pointy hat was prodding Mom with his rifle butt. However, he didn’t have a swastika on his cap, but a red star—at that point, for us it was a symbol of rescue, a symbol of life.
On the other riverbank
The first phrase we heard on “that” bank was the Russian “Dawaj, dawaj” [Come on, move]. It resounded increasingly loud all over the riverbank. “Move, move,” said the soldier, and with his rifle he showed us the direction in which we were supposed to go. We got up from the embankment and my mother eagerly, this time in Russian, started explaining to the soldier that we were running away from the Germans, that we were on our way to Father, who was waiting for us in Białystok, that we were threatened with humiliation and death on the abandoned bank, and that he could do with us whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t turn us back.
With curiosity, the soldier studied us and our clothes with the stars of David sewn on and kept silent. After a while, he began to go through our bundles and his curious gaze stopped on the fur muff that hung on the string around my neck. He noticed a pocket closed with a zipper. In this pocket, Renia hid a family jewel (“they won’t search a child”)—a Swiss watch in the form of a blue enamel sphere on a gold chain.
The soldier eyed the watch for a long time, as if hesitating whether he should take it or give it back. Mom helped him fight his doubts. Her story of how Renia’s parents had given their family heirloom to their daughter fleeing from the Germans made the boy so upset that he put the watch back in my pocket and even closed the zipper himself. Meanwhile, dawn was breaking and the silhouettes of people were visible along the entire riverbank. The border guards were rushing them with the familiar “dawaj, dawaj”. At noon, when all the fugitives were gathered together and their baggage ransacked, several carts pulled up. Possessions as well as weak and sick people were loaded. Where were they taking us? What were they going to do with us? These were unanswered questions.
However, the mere fact that we were moving away from the hateful “German” riverbank had a calming effect on us. The relaxation that followed the happy crossing of the border made me feel better, the fever dropped, and I refused to use the cart, I went on foot. I held only a small bag of sugar cubes, in case there was an opportunity to get some boiling water and have refreshment on the way. A young escort, walking alongside, peeked into the bag, and tasted a cube. He liked it so much that at the end of the seven-and-a-half-mile-long way, the pouch was completely empty.
We finally reached our destination, which turned out to be the border service headquarters. We settled in the yard, right on the ground, like a gypsy camp. And the baggage search started again. What were they looking for? It turned out that, apart from the meager treasures of the refugees, some suitcases and bundles contained whole batches of fabrics, leathers, watches and other so-called “contraband goods”—there was a shortage of everything in the Soviet Union at the time.
Hours went by, new soldiers appeared in the yard, they checked our baggage again, but no one informed us about our fate. What awaited us? Would they send us back to the Germans together with the smugglers?!
The torment of long waiting on the ground made my health deteriorate again. Mom, worried about me, sprang into action. Among the officers bustling around in the yard, she chose one that seemed to her the most kind-hearted, approached him, and animatedly began to tell him in Russian about a hungry and sick child who needed to be fed and warmed. The officer tried to lose the intrusive woman, but my poor appearance gave my mother courage and she repeated these “attacks” on the officer. Finally, tired of her intrusiveness, he waved his hand, and said, “Go now, go!” Having obtained a partial victory, my mother decided to go for it.
“Can I take my things with me?” she asked. “Damn it, take them!” The tired officer was sick of her. We quickly gathered our bundles and walked over to the gateway, while the others looked at us, astonished. The guard released us, and the bolts screeched again.
The next day, Mom helped the boys from Łódź who were traveling with us get released from the headquarters. This way, we unexpectedly regained full freedom. Now we were on our own. But what could you do with a sick child? Someone’s help was needed and my mother knocked on the door of a nearby house. Probably this wonderful family is long gone. They were teachers. We stayed with them for a whole week before I recovered and was fit for the road.
We also covered the distance to Białystok in a cart. At that point, fate wanted us to find out that evil is punished after all. On the way, we saw a wagon in which a man was lying in bloody bandages. It was the same young man that Daddy had sent to help us and who shamelessly robbed us in Łódź. During one of the border crossings, he had been shot and now, with a shattered, bleeding thigh, he was being taken to a hospital.
We got to Białystok. Mom left me on the porch of some house, and she went to look for where Dad lived. And suddenly I saw my dad! Yes, it was him! In an unfamiliar gray raincoat and hat, he walked past the porch where I was sitting. Dad stopped short. “Daddy!” I yelled and threw myself on his neck. Daddy grabbed me in his arms and hugged me, unable to speak.
In 1939, Białystok resembled the biblical Tower of Babel. Thousands of runaways from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other European countries rushed there in the hope that the Soviet Union wouldn’t refuse them shelter, would help save their lives, and protect them from the Nazis. There was a multilingual crowd in the streets; a market for currencies and various things was spontaneously created. People met, told their complicated stories, tried to find relatives and friends lost in the war. An avalanche of people overwhelmed this small and—until the war—quiet city, bringing along a lot of problems. You had to put them somewhere, feed them, give them jobs.
My brother had been under Soviet rule for two months now. Everything was extraordinary, it caused his admiration and amazement. “You see,” he taught me in a figurative way the principles of communism, “here everything is shared, everything belongs to everyone.” He already spoke Russian quite well and he delightedly sang Russian songs for me.
Slowly, step by step, we got to know a new life. The New Year came, a time of holidays and Christmas trees. For us, the children wronged by the war, the Christmas tree celebration was a big deal.
In Poland, Christmas trees were put up mostly in Christian families. I had a playmate, Janka Gdula. I helped her decorate the Christmas tree: we made angels with paper wings, glued chains, learned Christmas carols and helped her mother beat egg whites into stiff foam for the “nothing” soup. The foam noodles disappeared in the mouth immediately so that you swallowed nothing, they only left a slightly sweet aftertaste.
The Christmas tree for the New Year in Białystok, which was organized by some charity organizations for the children of refugees, was a great event for us. Our hearts, seized up with fear for a long time, could relax; the tension melted away and a feeling of joy came over us, so needed by children victimized by war.
Our parents’ lives, on the other hand, were full of worries. The small city couldn’t provide food, housing, and work for thousands of newcomers. In the morning, the unemployed lined up at the employment office. Dad waited in this line for days, but each time, he came back with nothing. The little money we owned had run out. The owner of the apartment, where we rented a small room, was forcing us out. The situation was impossible and my mother decided to make one last attempt to find a job for my father.
She ironed her old brimmed hat, decorated it with a veil, put on her high-heeled shoes, which had miraculously survived, threw a silver fox stole, borrowed from the owner of the house, around her neck, and walked decisively to the entrance of the employment office. She took the stairs confidently.
“Who have you come to see?” asked the doorman. “Mrs. Malinger is here,” my mother said without even blinking an eye. In her youth, my mother was an actress in the theater of the famous Ida Kamińska and now she successfully used her acting skills. Elegance and confidence made such an impression on the doorman that, of course, he opened the door for her. Mom immediately described Dad’s assets to the employment official, especially emphasizing that he spoke the Russian language perfectly.
The next day, at nine o’clock in the morning, Dad started working as an interpreter at the employment office, where workers were recruited for the coal industry in Kazakhstan.
One day my dad came home from work very animated. From the doorway he asked, “Do you want to go to Kazan, the capital of the Tatar Republic? They’re hiring for construction work. This isn’t work under ground. So, what do you think?”
In our imagination, figures of warlike Tatars, galloping on horses with crooked sabers in their hands, emerged—the kind we were told about in history lessons. Tatarstan was exotic, extraordinary! Sure we wanted to go! In the evening, we discussed this proposal thoroughly. Mr. Sandler, my father’s friend from Łódź, who also ended up in Białystok, tried to discourage us. “What are you doing? Construction work is hard! There’s famine there. I’ve seen people running away from there. No, I’d better go to Romania or Hungary, there are no Germans there. This is still Europe, civilization, not those savage Tatars.” These conversations, however, didn’t shake my dad’s conviction that we had made the right decision. We started getting ready.
This is what Tatarstan is like
The transport with the refugees moved east in January 1940. We were riding in the so-called cattle cars, equipped with two rows of bunks and an iron stove, popularly known as the “bourgeoisie”. This stove gave the car the name “tieplushka”.
Our family was traveling in one car with two representatives of the company escorting us. It was possible that the role of these “company representatives” was twofold and they were employees of the security service at the time—the NKVD. One was the taciturn Russian Razumov, and the other one was plump Altynbayev, whose face seemed to be made of a soft sponge. He was the first Tatar we saw, but to our surprise, he had neither a horse nor a crooked saber.
Dad continued to act as an interpreter, and that is why our car was the most important. People from all over the transport came to us with their problems, which were numerous during the thirteen days of the journey into the unknown. Dad translated, explained, helped to communicate with the guards, calmed people down. He held these functions for a long time, until the people in our transport learned to cope by themselves in this new and not very easy life.
One day my dad left for a stop and soon returned red from the frost and smiling mysteriously. He was holding a few small packages in his hands. We immediately jumped off the top bunk. “Daddy, what is this?” we asked looking at the small square parcels. “Butter”? “Halva?” my brother was guessing. “Wafers?” I tried a guess. “No, it’s none of these, it’s ice cream,” said Dad. We were dumbfounded. “Ice cream? In this temperature?” In Łódz we used to eat ice cream in the summer.
We came to Kazan in the evening. We hadn’t even disembarked the “tieplushkas”, when we children were handed some cookies—“prianiki” [Russian: gingerbread]—on the platform. We learned a new word while eating the unknown delicacy. People approached my dad, asking what would happen to them next. Dad, who already had information, reassured them that the baggage would be handled and people would go to the “bania”. “Bania? What for?” people got worried, not connecting this word with a bathhouse.
Unlike in Russia, there was no custom of going to the baths in Poland. The poorest used the shared baths. The wealthier ones took a bath in their own tub, and those who didn’t have one washed up in a basin.
We badly needed the bathhouse in Kazan, where we were taken straight from the train station. After a bath we felt refreshed; a blissful mood overwhelmed us. Not yet familiar with the so-called “maczałka” [Russian: sponge], to the surprise of the Russians, we washed ourselves with handkerchiefs.
After tea with “prianiki” we were taken by buses to the so-called “posiołek”, the complex where we were going to live. Two barracks with scrubbed, yellow floors were designated for us. The warmth and cleanliness, which we so missed while wandering around strangers’ homes and traveling on cattle trains, were a true miracle for us. We got a room on the first floor. When we opened the door, we couldn’t believe it was ours.
In a square room, there were four beds covered with white bedding. There was a small nightstand next to each bed. In the center of the room—a table and four chairs. The shared kitchen was at the end of a long corridor. It would seem nothing extraordinary, but only those who have been expelled from their country and their home, those who have been deprived of a roof over their heads, all possessions, the simple right to human dignity, and the right to life, will understand what these four iron beds, covered with white bedding, meant for us.
We began to settle in cheerfully and energetically. In the evenings, children and young people gathered in the corridors and staircases. There were also locals who shyly collected in the corners and stared at the foreigners, fearing any contact. But after a while, the ice melted and the spontaneous lessons of the Russian language began.
At first, the adults had no serious concerns. We, exhausted and starved, who were unfamiliar with the new conditions, were fed free of charge in the common canteen. At the same time, efforts were made to organize jobs as quickly as possible. It turned out that among the newcomers who had volunteered to work in the construction industry, no one had any idea about the trowel and brick laying. There were, however, skilled craftsmen—tailors, cobblers, furriers, and bookbinders.
The carefree life didn’t last long. Instead of ready-made dinners, we were given supplies, and when almost everyone had gotten a job in their profession, we were finally pushed into the deep end so that we could cope by ourselves. And in those conditions it wasn’t easy to cope —there was a war with Finland and we suffered along with the entire population. The day had finally arrived when I went to school. And that first school day ended with tears for me. I couldn’t read and write in Russian, I spoke very incorrectly, so I was placed in the third grade.
The kids circled me from all sides, marveled at my unusual clothes, and touched my black curls with their fingers. I felt like a small animal on display, I couldn’t take it, and tears streamed down my face. At home, I flatly refused to go to one class with these little kids. The next day I was provisionally put in the fourth grade. I don’t know how today’s educators would evaluate the method of teaching a foreign language used by my first Russian teacher, Ivan Ivanovich. Life proved that he used a natural and therefore most effective way.
The entire class took a spelling test daily. Ivan Ivanovich sat me at one desk with the best student, Kacia Yevdokimova. He gave me a piece of paper, a pen and… left me alone. I watched Kacia and imitated the movements of her pen. For several days, Ivan Ivanovich didn’t even mark my mistakes, then a red pencil was used here and there, and after a few weeks I got my first grades.
Kacia tried to introduce me to all school subjects. But there was something I couldn’t understand. In the USSR history textbook, portraits of some historical figures were crossed with thick black strokes. “Why is that?” I asked Kacia. “You’re not supposed to write in textbooks. These are the enemies of the nation,” she replied, “Blucher, Tukhachevsky, Bukharin, Uborevich…”
“The enemies of the nation?” I didn’t understand, but I didn’t inquire about details, because I sensed some dark secret in Kacia’s voice. The more so because my still poor Russian didn’t let me discuss such serious topics. Four months later, I successfully passed all the exams and was promoted to the fifth grade with honors.
Something incomprehensible happened. Our men said goodbye to their families, left Kazan and went to their assigned posts. Daddy had to settle down in the nearby village of Tietiusha. He worked as a guard watching some timber. He lived in a small shed and missed his family and basic living conditions that he was deprived of. Our rare visits brightened up his sad life a little. It was difficult to recognize my father, who had always been elegant, shaved, and smelling of cologne.
Now, dressed in a cotton-waded jacket, he was throwing wood into an iron “burzhuik” stove. But when my mother and I appeared on the doorstep of his shed, his face lit up with a smile that made me recognize my old beloved Daddy. But maybe because he was so strangely dressed and so greedily ate the food that we’d brought him, it seemed to me as if he was guilty of something and I felt sorry for him.
Daddy lived away from his family for about a year, after which he was allowed to return to Kazan for no apparent reason. Did they come to the conclusion that now he was trustworthy? Or did they try to rectify the previous misunderstanding? In either case, for us, both his transfer and his return remained incomprehensible actions of the authorities. It was also unexpected for us to see my cousin Tadeusz at our home. We had known nothing about the fate of one of my father’s many brothers who lived in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a small town in southern Poland. And suddenly this visit! Tadeusz—Tadek, as they called him at home—was one of the four children of Dad’s older brother, Uncle Hilary.
He appeared unexpectedly, it’s unclear how he found us in this turmoil of war. He came to us with compan—an escort who transported him from Arkhangelsk Oblast in stages to another town. Tadeusz wore glasses and had the look of an intellectual. Emaciated and unshaven, he was delighted to be able to wash away the many days of dirt in the basin with warm water, which my mother changed a few times.
The escort drank the tea he was served and listened with interest to the conversation in the unknown Polish language, which the man he guarded longed to hear. My cousin, now clean-shaven, wearing my father’s fresh shirt, which his body had missed so much, sat at the table and talked, talked endlessly.
From time to time he glanced at his escort, as if asking: is it okay that I speak in a foreign language? To which the other man smiled and waved his hand, “Go ahead, talk, if you were so lucky that they let you out with me. We’re alone here. Nobody will know.” It was evident that he felt sympathy for the boy he was guarding.
We learned from Tadeusz’s stories that out of his uncle’s family, only he and his older sister Irena had managed to escape to the East. Later their fates were out of their hands. Together with other Poles who were in the eastern lands, they were deported north to the Arkhangelsk Oblast. Communication with Irena broke off, and now he was again transported in an unknown direction. His escort, who behaved rather gently and humanely, when asked where they were going now, briefly replied, “Where we need to go.”
We also found out that my father’s younger sister, Aunt Stella, with her husband and son were taken in the same way to Siberia to the Bodaybinsky region. Yes, not understanding the actions of the Soviet authority towards us, but grateful for being saved from fascism, we endured with the entire population the harsh conditions that prevailed in the country waging a war against Finland while Europe was being enveloped by the ominous shadow of the fascist occupation.
War again
More than a year had passed before the war caught up with us again. This time, to bring heavy losses to our family. In November 1944 my father was drafted into the Soviet Army. Fate made him, a man created for peace, take up arms for the third time. He died in heavy fighting in East Prussia on February 16, 1945. Unfortunately, this loss wasn’t the last.
The war took my mother’s only son, and my beloved brother, a tireless fantasist and a dreamer, a cheerful prankster and poet. At the beginning of the war, when the entire burden of housework fell on my young shoulders, not paying attention to the fact that apart from school, his challenging task was to stand in lines and buy assigned food rations, he, a teenager, tried with some cheerful ideas to turn my difficult duties into a fun game. Cleaning: my brother drew beds number 1, 2, 3 and 4 on slips of paper.
He numbered the chairs and cupboards in the same way, drew a broom, and a tap with a sink, which meant washing dishes. He twisted the papers into tickets and put them in a cap. We drew: I got bed number 2, so I made it. He fished out chair number 3 so he cleaned all the things from it. The game engrossed me so much that when he picked a ticket he disliked—a tap with a whole lot of dirty dishes, I gladly exchanged it for chair number 1, from which you only needed to take a towel.
One day, when I fell ill with tropical malaria somehow brought to Kazan, my brother came running to the hospital, where I was admitted at that time. He was clearly very worried about something. With the money for the household, he bought… a piglet at the market.
Of course, Daddy chased him and the piglet out of the house. He had to take it back to the market and sell it. “How can he not get it,” my brother complained about Dad, “so many different kinds of grass grow outside our window near the house—we could feed it and have meat for the whole winter.”
My brother sold the piglet, but after some time he came by the hospital window with another piece of news. This time he had bought… a microscope. “Daddy yelled at me again.” My brother was looking for sympathy. “When it’s so interesting! It magnifies everything: a hair looks like a log, and there’s all sorts of things in an ordinary drop of water! When you leave the hospital, you’ll see for yourself.”
After my brother’s visit, each day dragged on. I wanted to be home as soon as possible, to see with my own eyes how a thin hair could be a thick log, how a regular fly had a hairy leg with huge claws, and how microorganisms danced in a droplet of water.
When I finally left the hospital, thin and yellow as a lemon from Akrikhin, I put my hands on the microscope, and there wasn’t a single grain of sand around the house that we didn’t study at a high and low magnification. But then my brother took the microscope back to a pawn shop where, to our great joy, it was sold almost without a loss. Strange, in these hard times, such a thing as a microscope was still in great demand. “How great would it be,” dreamed my brother, a great admirer of cinema, who, due to the lack of money, couldn’t enjoy this entertainment too often, “to lie in your bed and watch movies at home, on the wall.” My poor brother, just ten more years, and he would have lived to fulfill his dream—he would have known television.
My brother was an excellent student, he enjoyed the process of learning and absorbed everything like a sponge. But after the eighth grade when the family was experiencing financial difficulties, he went to work in a textile factory. With the same interest with which he studied each novelty, he learned to tie broken strands, wind them on spools, and do whatever the adult weavers at the loom cared to teach him.
He hated fascists with boyish exaltation, and unable to keep these feelings to himself, he spoke in poetry. Poetically weak, full of spelling mistakes because he had only recently started to learn the Russian language, these poems were nevertheless very sincere and full of faith in the victory of truth and nobility. He must have written them in class because I found them scribbled on the back cover of a textbook.
Soon after my father left, in November 1944, my brother was called to the Polish army, to the Kościuszko Division, which was established in the Soviet Union under the command of General Berling. Fighting alongside the Red Army, he took part in the liberation of Poland. And here I’m opening and reading the triangular letters that have yellowed after forty years and postcards with stamps of the field mail.
November 8, 1944 Dear Mom!
Yesterday I saw Majdanek. I saw with my own eyes the furnaces in which the Germans burned their victims. But the warehouse of shoes that the Germans took off the prisoners made the most powerful impression on me. I was walking over this mountain of shoes. There were hundreds of thousands of pairs of footwear of people of different ages, even tiny children’s, from different European countries. I will remember this sight for the rest of my life.
February 3, 1945 Dear Mom!
I’ve recently come to a new place. From here I will probably be referred to another place. I went to Okopowa Street, it isn’t far from us. The house at 31 where we used to live has been completely destroyed and is nothing but a heap of rubble.
During the war, it was forbidden to reveal in the letters the place where the field mail was located. But we understood that that letter was written from the already liberated Warsaw. It seemed that the victory was within reach…
April 1, 1945 Dear Mom!
Today is my birthday, I am 21 years old. I’m sure you remember about that day and I think you sent me a letter with wishes, which I haven’t received yet, but for which I thank you very much.
My brother didn’t celebrate any more birthdays. “I will remember it for the rest of my life”—he wrote about the terrible impression in Majdanek, not knowing that he had so unfairly little of this “rest of his life” left… My brother’s last letter was dated April 26, 1945. There were only 12 more days to victory…
Victory. What’s next?
The day of joy and tears was over, May 9. Peace came. All refugees from our transport gathered at the Kazan Press House, where our Union of Polish Patriots was located. Many of our Russian friends came, and the celebratory evening began. A choir was formed spontaneously, which sang Polish songs on the stage, and we girls walked around the room and pinned tiny white and red bows to the lapels of the attendees and raised a piggy bank with the same bow. The audience donated money for the rebuilding of Warsaw and I was bursting with pride because of this very important social mission.
The days of waiting came. We had already mourned the news of Father’s death on the front in East Prussia, although we believed that miracles could happen. People said that in a neighboring house, a long- mourned soldier returned alive, even though a death notification had been issued… With each doorbell, my heart pounded like a hammer… Maybe the door would open, and it would be… Daddy, back from the war, alive…
The last letter from my brother was written on April 26. And there was no news after that. But there was no “pochoronka”—a notification of death—so it meant that he was alive and any day he might return… But days passed, night after night, and there was no news from my brother.
My mother’s deep sighs and restrained sobbing, which she tried to hide from me during the day, were heard more clearly at night. My heart was heavy with sorrow, but I lay quietly in my bed so as not to shatter the illusion with which she tried to breathe hope into us for the return of my brother. And with each passing day and month we were left with less and less hope. We knew how attached my brother was to the family; if he were alive, he wouldn’t have kept us waiting for a message from him. The search began: the Military Museum, the Polish Red Cross, the Soviet Red Cross, later Arolsen in Germany, and even the archives of the Soviet gulags. As you know, during Stalin’s time, after the end of the war, many people were imprisoned in camps. But all these institutions sent us the same answer, which didn’t bring us peace. On the contrary, we were even more perplexed, because these answers were somehow incomprehensible, even mysterious, “The lists do not include the killed, the wounded, the captured and the missing.”
It’s been forty years since the end of the war, and a fantastic vision is created in my imagination for which I would give the rest of my life if it could come true: there is a call from my sister in Kazan. “Don’t get upset,” says my sister, her voice breaking with emotion, “he’s back! Our brother is back! He lived in hiding, on some special mission. He’s now in his sixties, has hardly changed, only he’s gray. He’s flying out to you! Go out to meet him!”
There are wounds that never heal, only get covered with a very thin, sensitive film. Many of the men in our transport never returned to their families. The question they faced was: what to do? Orphaned families had to solve this difficult problem on their own.
Homeland—in this deeply meaningful word, only the notion “land” was still real, because our “homes” were no longer there. Poland, which had found itself at the epicenter of hostilities in Europe, was in ruins.
And yet, without thinking, people gave up their better or worse living situation, work, and new friends to start their lives from scratch on the ruins of their homes. They knew that their relatives and loved ones would return from all sides to the same rubble, if only they managed to draw a lucky ticket and stayed alive after this bloody war.
We faced the same problem. Only the decision had to be made without my dad—it was he who knew how to handle any difficult decision—and without my brother, whose invincible optimism turned all hardships and doubts into little aggravations.
“Where should we go, kids?” My mother sought our advice. “There is no one alive there. Will we be able to start life anew on the graves of our loved ones? Or should we go farther, to Aunt Sonia, to Canada? And wander around the world again… does it make sense? Do you remember the letter from ‘Madame Farkert’?”
We remembered that letter well. My mother’s younger sister, Aunt Sonia, was thrown from Poland to Canada by the wave of emigration after World War I. In one of her first letters, my aunt wrote, “I’m very comfortable here. I have a wonderful house, Uncle found a good job and makes a good living. We have a lot of friends here with whom we spend our time in an interesting way.” After the usual, “I send my love”, the letter was signed with: “Madame Farkert”. Aunt Sonia’s real surname was completely different, and at first we couldn’t figure out who the mysterious Madame was. Finally my mother solved it. She didn’t know any Madame Farkert, but she did know that the word farkert in Yiddish means “the other way around”. This is how wise Aunt Sonia wanted to fool the censorship in order to tell us the truth about her “happy” life in the New World.
We remembered another, later letter from Aunt Sonia, “Now we have everything, we run a successful company, have two cars, a house, the children are doing well. But I would pay dearly to be in Vilnius again, on our poor street, where sometimes we had nothing to eat, but we were at home, all together, and we were happy.”
“So is it worth destroying everything we have gained here and embark on a new wandering?” Mom was trying to get us to support her inclination. We agreed with my mother. We were already caught up in the vortex of the local life, it was hard to imagine that we would have to abandon our friends and acquaintances who helped us to get used to the new living conditions in a foreign country.
I’m starting a new, independent life
In 1948 I completed ten grades of school. I had to choose the next path for my life. I was torn. My best friend was going to study philology, another one history. And I dreamed about… theater. In my pre-war childhood, I liked to organize a “real” theater. I was the main director, and the prima donna, of course. The curtain was a sheet hung on a string. You entered the “theater” room with tickets that I made myself, perforating one side with a sewing machine, which was torn off by the ticket inspector. The ticket cost five grosze. When the room was full and the audience was mostly parents and grandparents of the actors, the curtains parted and the magic of the theater began.
To a very wistful melody, I, a tiny skinny girl with legs as thin as matchsticks, performed the dance of a dying butterfly saying goodbye to life, mournfully flapping my wings made of my mother’s colorful bathrobe. At the end of the melody, the butterfly folded its wings and froze on the floor to the loud applause of the audience. Some people were even moved to tears and reached for handkerchiefs.
The desire to become an actress was so great that I was trying to phase out my guttural “r” and the Polish accent. It seemed that the path to acting studies was open to me… But I was interrupted by… having too much respect for the people of the theater. For me, the people of the theater were a head taller than everyone else, and my matchstick-thin legs didn’t allow me to compare myself with these “idols”.
I shared my dream with a literature teacher whom I liked very much. “Give it a try,” he said, “take a chance, go to Moscow.” I didn’t take the risk. Almost feeling sorry for myself, I applied for medical studies. I was accepted. Accustomed to systematic work and the desire to learn what is new helped me overcome the difficulties of the first two theoretical courses. And in the third one… I fell in love with surgery.
Meeting with the past
Thirty-four years have passed since I had to leave Poland, where I was born, where I said my first words. I was a child then. Now I was about to spend my vacation there.
I had just finished a challenging surgery. The nurse called me to the phone. I nervously picked up the phone. Yes, that was the expected call. My travel papers were ready. Here I come!
The Moscow-Warsaw train arrived at Brest. Border control. I heard Polish speech in the carriage. A young soldier of the Polish border guard appeared in the compartment, he was wearing the konfederatka cap. He saluted us with two fingers, asked for our documents. I wanted to say at least a word in Polish, but I held back, thinking that he’d be very surprised.
konfederatka cap—a four-cornered cap worn by various Polish military formations.
He saluted us with two fingers—the Soviet soldiers wore round caps and saluted with their whole hand.
I felt the seriousness of the moment when we were crossing the border. We passed the border post with the sign USSR. They changed our undercarriage. Along narrower tracks, our train traveled on Polish soil. I pressed my face against the window. I soaked up the views, familiar from my childhood: Polish signs, a soldier in a konfederatka cap with an eagle, a cart on rubber wheels pulled by a horse… The train slowed down. Station. Platform. Something seemed familiar to me. I read the name of the station: SIEDLCE. My God, the same Siedlce! Now the station was almost empty. Individual passengers walked along the platform and it was hard to believe that this was the same station that had left a terrible impression on me for my whole life.
After a few hours, I was walking the streets of Warsaw, so fantastically rebuilt after it had been completely destroyed during the war. Walking through the streets, I would often stop near the places that were holy for every Pole, the places of execution of the victims of this terrible massacre, organized on Polish soil by the fascists. A few stones, a plaque about the number of Poles lost there, a candle and a bunch of flowers suggested that the victims weren’t forgotten.
I visited the place where Daddy died. At that time, it was the town of Strassfort in the territory of East Prussia. Now it was Polish land, Wał Pomorski, for which there had been heavy fighting. On February 16, 1945, the Germans forced themselves six or seven miles into the territory. Fighting back this attack cost both sides huge casualties. My father died on that same day. From the former town of Strassfort, only the foundations covered with grass have survived. On the stone obelisk, a plaque described the fighting that had taken place there and read that the ashes of Polish and Soviet soldiers who died there were transferred to the town of Złotów, where they were buried in the war cemetery. On the list of the fallen that I found in the municipal archive of Złotów, there was my father’s name.
The cemetery is looked after by the Secondary School of Economics in this small, clean, former Prussian town. The staff of this School welcomed me very warmly and did their best to restore the name of one of the nameless graves marked with a red star. Now on one of the stone slabs, under the red star, there is an inscription:
MALINGER ARNOLD ABRAMOWICZ kp-c 1897-1945
Every year, on Victory Day, May 9, and on November 1, on All Souls’ Day, our Polish friends bring Dad flowers and light a candle. In Warsaw, I met a distant relative who lost her entire family. She managed to survive by hiding with a Polish family. Risking her life, she was a liaison officer between the Łódź ghetto and the Aryan side. From her I learned about the terrible fate of my father’s brothers and sisters who lived in various Polish cities until the war.
Uncle Hilary and Aunt Roma from Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski… I was once sent to them by my father “to put some meat on my bones”, because I wouldn’t eat at home and I was skinny and “green”. My uncle was a well-known dentist. He took care of himself, regularly drank garlic juice and meticulously counted the iodine drops which he drank in milk—he wanted to save himself from arteriosclerosis.
Aunt Roma—a wonderful housekeeper… Every week I helped her wrap chicken and home-made cake in parchment paper to send a package to Warsaw for her son Tadeusz, who was studying dentistry there.
My uncle’s three daughters—Irena, Wandzia, and Janka—were very different from each other. The eldest, Irena, cared for her beauty very much and often got an earful from her father for buying another set of underwear on credit without his permission, for which he had to pay serious money. Wanda worked in a kindergarten and taught me good manners and the piano. She probably did it with some success, because at home my brother and sister jokingly called me the “lady”. We had cordial conversations with Janka while we washed and prepared tools for the next day’s work in my uncle’s office, which smelled of medication.
Uncle Olek, also a dentist, lived in Skarżysko-Kamienna. My brother visited him once. Uncle Mietek’s little son suffered from asthma. During car rides he felt better sitting with the window open. Uncle bought a car and my brother told me with delight how he’d participated in these car trips, holding the little one on his lap.
Small, almost insignificant details that stuck in a child’s memory and remained there for life. I haven’t been to Treblinka, but I put a bouquet of chrysanthemums by the memorial wall in Auschwitz. The prisoners of all death camps, those unbelievable, terrifying works of fascists, where a man with his unique individuality was turned into an extermination unit—they all shared the same fate.
Sometimes in my lonely hours I look at photo albums from the old days. The first pages contain the photos that, in secret from my mother, I managed to save and take with me when we escaped from Łódź. Here is a photo very dear to me, with the footprints of the shoes I pulled it out from under. A one-year-old baby wearing a hat with a pompom is sitting in a highchair. This is my brother. Big round eyes are staring at the world—what awaits him there?
And here is my mother, in an elegant hat with a brim and high heels, embracing a llama around the neck. Next to her, squinting in the sun, is Daddy. A pre-war photo, taken at the Warsaw Zoo.
A large portrait of an elderly gentleman with noble features. This is my paternal grandfather, a famous doctor in his time. He was known for not collecting fees from poor patients, on the contrary—he tried to secretly put money for medicine under the pillows of his patients.
Uncle Olek is standing by his car. He’s hugging two boys. The smaller one is Mietek, the bigger one—wearing knee-length shorts, fashionable at the time—is my brother Izrael.
I’m looking at my farewell photo, taken in occupied Łódź “as a memento, forevermore”. Two sisters Hala and Lila Berliński are sitting in the front. Hala is sad, she’s probably upset that I, her best friend, am leaving. On Lila’s face there’s a nice smile. Renia’s sister, Niusia, always with a smile on her face, is sitting next to us, she’s wearing a dark school pinafore with a white collar. She was the sister of the Renia who decided to join us on the dangerous escape to the East. At the back is Ania Sznol—the daughter of a shoemaker; on her behalf I wrote a letter to President Mościcki. Sala—a tall, shapely girl—is looking into the camera lens with her large dark eyes, round like cherries. In the middle, I’m leaning over my friends, and between the long, hanging curls, you can see the whiskered, striped head of my favorite pet—Kajtuś the kitten.
Poor girls—where and how did they find their deaths? Did they suffer locked in the ghetto? Did they suffocate in gas chambers, or were they burnt in crematoria furnaces? I don’t know. One can only assume the torments of their parents, who didn’t find enough strength to part with their property and naively believed that among the fascist beasts there were normal people. They didn’t take advantage of this narrow window in occupied Łódź, thanks to which my father saved our family.
Yes, I was lucky. I stayed alive. My father could predict the future better. His political orientation showed him the only way out of the situation into which Fate had thrown us. But this solution, too, like other similar ones, was only a lucky coincidence. Out of the family I’m writing about in this memoir, there are only two left—my sister and I. But no matter how heavy our losses were, we find solace in the fact that death caught up with Daddy when he was fighting against the enemy.
For almost forty years of mourning our brother, we have been grateful that when Fate was taking his life, it made him feel a certain victory over the enemy and he was spared the humiliation in the ghetto and in the death camp. When mourning the death of our mother, who passed away in 1969, we feel relieved at the thought that she escaped the immense pain experienced by those mothers who gave their children to torment and suffering in extermination camps. The torment and degrading death didn’t come at the hands of individual sadists but was destined for all people of the “inferior race” by the genocidal philosophy called FASCISM.
I wrote down this memoir a long time ago when in 1993 I returned to Poland for good. My son, born and raised in Russia, prompted me to return here, when he chose to live in Poland with his family. I didn’t want to be alone, my sister had died in Kazan at the age of 71. And I couldn’t be parted from my son.
Piastów 2007
Rachel Malinger with her brother Israel Malinger
Arnold Malinger with his wife Luba Malinger, children Israel and Rachel, 1937/38
Rachela (on the right) with her friends, 1938, Łódź
Arnold Malinger (wearing a hat) in 1940 during an escape with his companions, whose surnames I don’t know.
Israel Malinger Arnold Malinger
My Mom—Luba Malinger; my older sister Dora and I, in 1944 in Kazan (the USSR, Tatarstan)
418 Rachela Malinger, born in 1927
