Seweryn, born in 1931

My Mother Told Me to Run

I was born in Warsaw, according to documents, in 1934. This is an incorrect date because in 1938 I went to the first grade and in 1939 I was in the second grade, which means that my year of birth must be 1931.

My family was moderately wealthy. We had a housekeeper and four rooms. Mother didn’t work. Father worked in an oil company. How do I know that? I was with him once at work with my mother. It was a small white building outside the city. Next to it there were rails with huge fuel tanks. There were big dogs and two revolvers hidden for the night watchmen.

We lived in three rooms, the fourth was taken by a biology or zoology teacher. She had a skeleton in the corner of the room. I was a little afraid of it, but not terribly.

We had a normal life. We went kayaking on the Vistula on Sundays. No special impressions. I was an only child. In the memorable 1939, when the men left Warsaw by order of the president, I stayed with my mother. War, bombing… After which, I don’t know how, we left with my mother towards the East.

We crossed the German-Russian border twice and the Russians gave us back to the Germans twice. Only on the third time did we cross the border on a boat. We succeeded. We were walking in a plowed field, where the soil clung to our heels and the heels got “crusty”, making it difficult to walk. Mother had a beautiful brown scarf, and I said, “Mom, the way you tossed your scarf shows which way we came from.” But we managed to reach a peasant hut. Then in the morning we got on a train to Lvov.

We met my father in Lvov. I was supposed to start second grade then, but the Russians put us back a year. I did first grade twice. From Lvov, we left for the nearby village of Kamieniopol, where my grandfather had four horses and two cows. He transported milk from the farm to Lvov (about nine miles one way, every day). The horses were huge. Beautiful. And I had my favorite horse, Chestnut, whose legs I tethered. I put a bridle on him. He looked at me with a good-natured look and let me do whatever I wanted with him. Once he accidentally stepped on my foot. I screamed. Instantly, he lifted his hoof.

This is how life continued until 1941. Summer 1941, June. The war with Germany. The Germans came to Lvov. My father worked as a glazier somewhere. They gathered about fifteen of us in one apartment. On the streets—manhunts (that is, “actions”).

At that point, I lived at the corner of Janowska and Grodecka Streets in Lvov, near the Church of St. Anna. Columns of people were walking that way towards the Janów Cemetery and the Janowski camp. I remember the smell of the crematorium (from the Janowski camp) to this day. It immediately makes me think back to those times.

During one of the big actions, Germans from the Luftwaffe gave us Jews refuge. There were barracks at Grodecka Street, between Grodecka and Janowska Streets. And there was a Luftwaffe unit, somewhere on the third floor. There were a lot of us (in hiding). Someone snitched on us to the Gestapo. And then the German airmen led us (the whole group) out. They led us out under bayonets. They noted that, if stopped, they would say, “We’ve caught this group of Jews, and we’re taking them.” In this way, we managed to escape and save our lives. They began organizing the ghetto. We didn’t want to go there. My father got hired in a labor camp in Winniki, and my mother and I were sent to the local women and children’s camp. We stayed there until late fall of 1942. Even then, the word Stalingrad was heard.

Luftwaffe—the German Air Force.One time we woke up in the morning surrounded by the police. They told us to get our things. They put people in threes and led them towards Lvov. We knew that we were going either to the ghetto or to the Janów Cemetery, to the camp. People were walking in threes, I was the fourth one next to Mother. My mother told me to run. I couldn’t, didn’t want to. And I was afraid… Mother kept saying, “Run away, run away…”

There was no way to run. At one point, I saw that on the road, in the direction where we were marching, there was a wagon drawn by two horses. That’s when I made up my mind, because I wasn’t afraid of the horse. Because at my grandfather’s I knew how to walk around horses. I went to “relieve myself”. I stood behind the horses, pretending I was peeing. The column was moving forward, and I was slowly moving back behind the horses and the cart. The coachman, who was transporting German officers in the cart, turned round; he looked at me, but didn’t say a word. The man who was sitting in the cart didn’t say a word either. The column passed. It disappeared without a trace and so did my mother.

I stayed on the road. It was winter. It was already November 1942. A strange cart, strange horses, a strange man. He turned his horses towards Winnik. I clung to the back of the cart and rode like that. As we were approaching the city, I jumped off so that nobody could blame the coachman for giving a ride to a Jew.

In Winniki, I knew a woman to whom we once had brought firewood. She fed us then. I went to her. Only now do I imagine how terrified she was to see a Jewish child. But she didn’t chase me away. She managed to contact my father, who was in the men’s camp. And who, like many others, was transported to Lvov every day to the Janów Cemetery.

There, the Jews smashed matzevot from which the road was built. I stayed at this woman’s for a few days, I don’t remember—five or six. But there was an incident that has stuck in my memory to this day. I was eleven then. The landlady’s daughter, the girl was maybe sixteen, was going to the movies. I also wanted to go, but I knew that I wasn’t allowed to appear on the street. So I was crying a little, and the girl said, “I’m tired of this little brat and his whining.” It hurt me a lot, but later I was ready to build her a gold statue. She hardened me for fifty years.

She taught me to live. “Grit your teeth.” “Keep it to yourself.” “Things are going well? Don’t boast too much.”

Several days passed. One day I was taken to the street. In the morning! A car with Jewish workers going to Lvov stopped and we went with my father to Lvov. We got to the Jewish cemetery in Lvov. There was a night watchman, a Jew, where the workers left their hammers, crowbars, and other tools. I stayed there for several days.

At that time, my father contacted one of my aunts who had American papers and was free to move around. And she found my father’s friend who, like him, had worked in the oil industry before the war. His name was Józef Rybicki. He took me in. One evening I was led out onto the street. A stranger took my hand. We got on a tram. He stood in such a way as to cover my face. I went to his place. (He lived in Lvov at Jasna Street). I stayed there from December 1, ’42 to July 27, ‘44, when the Russians entered the city.

I was a so-called wardrobe kid. When someone came in, I had to be in the other room. I had a hiding place behind the wardrobe and a second hiding place in a table that slid apart. I never used the latter, but I did use the hiding place behind the wardrobe—several times. Of course, I had to be very quiet. I wasn’t allowed to get near the window. Nobody could see me. I can only imagine what problems they had when they had to wash my child’s clothes. They couldn’t hang them up with the adults’ laundry, because the neighbors would see it right away. (This didn’t occur to me until many, many years later).

We were liberated by the Red Army. A Russian officer came to our house. In the staircase I heard, “Niemcy jest? “Nyet” [“German here?”—(in Russian) “No”]—replied the residents. It was then that I realized that I was finally a free man—I could simply go out onto the street.

I want to go back to what happened before. When we were in the camp in Winniki, in the summer of ’42, German commissions started making rounds. They checked whether there were too many women and children in the camps. So the head of the camp, a German, ordered some of the women and children to be put on two carts and had them transported to another camp, which the commission had already visited. We spent several days and nights there. Then we came back. That German somehow saved us. But later, he couldn’t do anything for us…

Another time, I remember, I was still in Lvov, there was a big manhunt. I lived on Janowska Street. There was a bathroom behind which there was a small room blocked with a wardrobe behind which Jews were hiding. A German officer looked, pretended he didn’t see anything…

Only a Ukrainian policeman, when he saw it, called his colleagues. The wardrobe (it was a white cupboard) was pushed aside and he took out all the Jews who were in hiding. We never saw them again. We were afraid of walking down the street, but sometimes you were less afraid of the Germans than of the Polish “navy-blue” policemen and of Ukrainian and Jewish policemen (with yellow bands on their left sleeves).

The war period, before I was sent to the labor camp, was characterized by the sound of hobnailed boots and a car stopping somewhere nearby. You could hear a pounding at your neighbors’ door or your own door. It destroyed our nerves, frightened us the most. Besides, one could hear all the time: this one was gone, that one was missing.

The adults tried not to involve children in such conversations, but when there were six or eight people in one room, you could hear everything whether you wanted to or not. All these things made such an impression on me that I shut down. Especially the words of that girl…

They toughened me up later. When I went to the fifth grade in ’45, I may not have been the oldest, but I had been through the most. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I had documents in the name of Juliusz Krawiecki, son of Antoni, born in ’32 in Kosovo. (An original Roman Catholic birth certificate which I have to this day). I used these documents until ’52.

Where did I get the documents? You bought them, you got them. It’s difficult for me to say how I got hold of that document. Emotionally, I was much older than my peers who hadn’t gone through what I had. (They grew up as children more or less burdened with the responsibility or hardships of this war.) I didn’t tell anyone about my real experiences because I couldn’t reveal how I got into the Soviet zone in ’39. This is what I came up with: in August 1939, we went with my mother and father to my grandparents near Lvov, and in September, there was nothing to come back to in Warsaw. As Broniewski said, the Germans bombed my building in September. My family made-up story worked flawlessly. My parents died. I was asked where, I said, “I don’t know.” They went out, they left, and they died. Their friends took me in. This was the story I told until 1952.

I finished school in ’51, and in ’52 I was summoned… My uncle started looking for our family with the help of the Red Cross. In 1952, I was called to the police station and told that I wasn’t Krawiecki Juliusz, son of Antoni, but Woloch Seweryn, son of Pinkus, and that I needed to change my documents. I didn’t want to. But as the senior policeman said, “Moskwa prikazała a prikaz Moskwy nie absużdajut” [Russian: Moscow gave the order, and orders from Moscow are not negotiable], Rome has spoken, the discussion is over [a Latin phrase, “Roma locuta, causa finita”]. Since I’d always been cheeky, when he told me to report within twenty-four hours, I replied, “I need forty-eight hours, not twenty-four, because it takes forty-eight hours to get a document photo.”

I went after forty-eight hours. The passport was already written out on the table, it was only necessary to paste in the photos and put a stamp on it. I paid three rubles. I went in under one name and I left under another. Then I had to update my military bilet, high school diploma, trade union bilet, and Komsomol bilet [Russian: ID]—four documents.

Wherever I went, they looked at me like I was crazy. It was one guy, now it’s a different guy… When someone didn’t understand, I’d say, “A prikaz [Russian: order] came from Moscow, there’s nothing I can do.” It worked…

There was a problem: how to tell all my colleagues about it. But one of my friends said to me, “Listen, we know everything. Don’t worry about it.” I think he said, “Don’t freak out” or something like that. “How do you know?” I asked. “You were out once. Someone suggested, ‘Wait for him at his desk. He may have books there.’ I looked, some papers were on top…” He wouldn’t have “sniffed” around someone else’s drawer, but the papers were right on top. He read them. He told my colleagues—the words that I remember to this day, although more than half a century has passed, “For us, you are and always will be Julek.”

They know that I’m Seweryn, but they call me Julek, and even one friend from school, when we meet, still calls me “Krawcuś”.
In 1953, on January 2, I started working in the Lvov radio center. In September I entered the technical college. As I was working shifts, I was able to get my technician diploma after two and a half years. At the beginning I worked as a fitter, then as a technician. In 1959 I got married. Unfortunately, my wife died after giving birth. They had left a piece of cotton wool inside her. She suffered for two and a half months and died. After three years, I got married a second time. The child from the first marriage was saved. I have two children with my second wife. I worked, lived my life.

Krawcuś—a diminutive form of the author’s assumed last name—Krawiecki.

From ’62, I worked in Lvov with the Polish amateur theater. Although it was amateur, it wasn’t amateurish. We staged Słowacki’s play Fantazy, Wyspiański’s The Wedding, for which we received costumes from Poland (via the consulate in Kiev). We had Shakespeare evenings, Mickiewicz and Słowacki poetry evenings. I performed in Słowacki’s Fantazy and in Józef Korzeniowski’s Karpaccy górale. This is how twenty-nine years passed until 1990. The children grew up. My wife worked at the school I’d graduated from, and so had she, and so had our children. It was a family school.

In the late 90s, I started applying for an entry to Poland. (My wife is Polish). It wasn’t that easy because we didn’t have an apartment. We tried for two years, we wrote letters… Various offices refused our application. And it wasn’t until my cousin had bought us an apartment that the Polish authorities allowed us to move to Poland. I was a Warsaw native, my wife was born in Busko, and we live in Bytom. My wife gets a pension, and I also earned my pension.

Escapes, the fact that I was a child “from the wardrobe” (the result of the occupation), taught me to be cautious. Maybe overly. Unfortunately, it taught me that your own people will betray you. And your best friend is the one who knows the least about you. Maybe it was too pessimistic, but the years that followed were a mixed bag. Not that I was suspicious of everyone, but I couldn’t always open up, not to everyone. I rarely “opened up”. I really opened up in Śródborów to people who understood me.

Both wives (Polish, not Jewish) knew about me, but very superficially. I never told the children anything special. If they ask, I’ll tell them. These are the things you just have to experience. It hardened me, but at the same time, I was a little barren. As if the words of that girl who had gotten bored with that sniffling kid made me build a wall around myself and not want to show my feelings.

I couldn’t play with children, even after the war. I was already a father, I could take care of a child, but I couldn’t play with them. And now, having grandchildren, I can’t play with those children either…
I built a “wall” around myself. I took down this “wall” in Śródborów, during psychotherapy, but not right away. I realized that there are people who had similar lives and they will understand me, they won’t just nod their heads and think, “Oh God, you’re so boring.” But they will see a piece of their life in my story, the way I saw a piece of my life in a number of their stories.

Interview with Katarzyna Meloch 2005