Zbigniew Ryszard Grabowski, born in 1927
Chemistry – My Wartime Trophy
The prewar times
I was born in 1927 and until the war, I had lived in Krakow as Ryszard Adolf Abrahamer. My father, Szymon Abrahamer, was an economist. He was highly educated and very knowledgeable, and for family reasons he was in charge of the import-export office in my grandfather’s mill enterprise, “Górne Królewskie Młyny”. It was only after the war that he obtained his doctorate, published articles and two books on economics, and earned his habilitation degree.
Grandfather Izrael Abrahamer came from Rabka; he was an extremely hardworking man with an excellent head of business. Initially, he worked as a mill worker, then as a journeyman, and finally as a master. Over time, he bought and expanded the mill, opened a bakery, and set up an import-export grain trading company. When I was born, he was already one of the richer people in Krakow. Grandfather was the dominant person in our large family; he treated his sons with a firm hand, but he was generous in helping relatives in need.
My mother, Roma née Szereszewska, came from Łódź. She was a sculptor, a student of Laszczka in Krakow and Hanak in Vienna. She sculpted in wood and clay and took part in several exhibitions. From her pre-war sculptures, only the architectural sculptures in the house at 10 Asnyka Street in Krakow have survived.
I was an only child, but my cousin Witek and I grew up as brothers and lived next door to each other. My family was fully assimilated. I didn’t speak Yiddish, I was brought up by my mother and by my school in a Romantic and patriotic spirit. When I was six, I went with my father to enroll in school—and it was the oldest in Krakow, St. Wojciech Primary School No. 1, founded even before the partitions by the National Education Commission. My father, his four brothers, and sister had once attended this school. The headmaster of the school made me understand that I ought to skip religious education lessons because I was a Jew. It was a surprise to me. Until then, I used to go to church with our housekeeper and never suspected I was any different.
One day, I was watching a demonstration of the PPS at Basztowa Street. They walked with red banners in a large procession. Unexpectedly, one of them came up to me and said, “Better get out of here, kid, it can get ugly here. And remember, only we are protecting you!” It was unclear to me, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. In school, however, this distinction was important.
PPS—The Polish Socialist Party.
In our class, among the sixty boys, there were a dozen of us of the Jewish faith. We aroused the widespread envy of our Catholic classmates, because not only did we have time off when they had a religious education class with the priest, we also had our own code that was unreadable to them. In our afternoon religion lessons, we didn’t learn much about the Jewish tradition, but we got to know the Hebrew alphabet, which became a code for us—we wrote to each other in Polish with Hebrew letters…
My father was an agnostic rationalist, far from any faith. My mother, on the contrary, read a lot about different religions, distanced herself as much as possible from the Jewish religion and internally, felt like a Christian. In our family, an element of the Jewish tradition was represented by Grandfather Izrael. Grandfather was the chairman of the synagogue at 27 Szpitalna Street, but it was probably a progressive synagogue, because my grandfather was always clean shaven. On the main holidays in my grandparents’ house, there were gala dinners that attracted the whole family, which grew larger as more children were born. Everything I remember from the Jewish tradition I owe to my grandfather. When I was ten years old, my father and grandfather took me to the synagogue on the most important holidays.
Jews weren’t accepted into the ZHP—Polish Scouting Association. So I was a member of the Jewish Piłsudczykowski Scouting Organization, somehow affiliated with the Polish Scouting Association and having the same levels and skills, but instead of crosses, there was a lily with the Star of David. At the age of twelve, I already had the rank of Scout and I was a patrol leader. After August 20, 1939, when the political situation became very dangerous, my parents pulled me out of a Scout camp.
I returned to Krakow just in time to attend a great family meeting at Grandpa’s. He spread out a large map of Poland on the table and, based on the experiences of World War I, said, “We have to flee from Krakow, it’s too close to the German border. To make it worse, Slovakia’s to the south, and to the north is East Prussia. It’s possible that the Russians will also come from the east. So let’s get situated in the center—right here.” His finger pointed at Nałęczów. “They won’t get there, at least not for the first year of the war!” A day or two later, we were already on the train to Warsaw: Grandpa,
Aunt Helenka with her husband Marian, Mother, and I. My father and his brother Henryk were going to stay in Krakow until the last moment to ensure that flour and bread were supplied to the army. In order for them to escape, a Vauxhall car was purchased and a chauffeur was hired because they couldn’t drive. In the morning we arrived in Nałęczów. We moved into a local sanatorium building.
The war
On September 1 we heard the first bombs go off, at first in the distance. The Germans were attacking Poland. Contrary to my grandfather’s predictions, they were approaching fast both from the west and the north—East Prussia. There was no communication with Krakow; the city had probably been captured. On September 7, we left Nałęczów—on buses, hitch-hiking, on rented farm wagons—we fled east, beyond the Bug River, which was supposed to be the next line of defense. We were already bombarded between Nałęczów and Lublin; we ran off the highway into the fields, hiding in the furrows while the German airman circled low over us and machine-gunned us and other refugees. In Lublin, we survived a heavy air raid that demolished many houses at Krakowskie Przedmieście. We were passed there by the cabinet escaping from Warsaw, headed by Prime Minister Sławoj-Składkowski. On the other side of the Bug, in Zdołbunów in Volhynia, we experienced moments of terror again. Just before our arrival, a small Jewish town had been horribly bombed and burned down, the train station was destroyed. Finally, we reached the edge of the world—Ostróg by the Horyn. The Horyn was a border river, beyond that were the Soviets.
On September 15 or 16, my mother saw a Vauxhall car parked somewhere on the street with a familiar number plate—the car by which my father and his brother Henryk were supposed to leave Krakow. The police found the driver, who stated that he had driven them to Warsaw, but there the car and the driver had been confiscated in order to take Mrs. Grzybowska—the wife of the Polish ambassador to Moscow—to the Soviet border. He did take her there and she crossed the border in Ostróg. The police seized the car until the matter was investigated, but the car couldn’t help us much either, because at that point gasoline was nowhere to be found.
On the morning of September 17, we were awakened by a heavy, monotonous rumble—an endless column of Soviet tanks and tractors pulling cannons rolled through the city. Before dawn the Russians attacked the KOP outpost and after a short fight all the border guards were killed. But in the city the military knew nothing about it. So the Russians entered the city shouting that we were allies, that they were going to fight the Germans, that they would go to Berlin with us! The overjoyed commander of the small Polish garrison sent a unit of lancers to go ahead of the Soviet tanks. They were supposed to move the refugees out of the way, clearing the way for our allies! Only around noon, the rest of the Polish soldiers were gathered in Ostróg, surrounded, and disarmed… The occupation became a fact.
KOP— The Border Protection Corps.
Soviet occupation
I remember Molotov’s radio speech from the first day of the occupation; he stated that Poland had ceased to exist and would never rise again. I also remember the evening when Uncle Marian and I carefully buried in the garden his Virtuti Militari and other orders from the Bolshevik War of 1920. After a few days we got a message that my father was in Sarny in Volhynia. He was there with his brother, wounded by a shot from a German plane. After reuniting with my father, we moved to Lvov, where I survived the Soviet occupation and completed two junior high school grades.
On November 11, 1939, I participated in a Scout demonstration—probably the first one under the Soviet occupation. A message circulated among the schools: gather at the Cemetery of the Eaglets. Several hundred people came. We sang solemnly, with great passion, the relevant “Poland Is Not Yet Lost” and other patriotic songs. The lookouts warned us: the police!—and then the order was given, “Disperse!” We scattered in different directions, jumping over fences.
At school—where Polish was the language of instruction—we were intensively Russified (six hours of Russian a week) and Ukrainianized (four or five hours), while we had only two hours of the Polish language. As a rule, young people were patriotic and not keen on the communism propagated from all sides. Only very few enrolled in “Komsomol”—there was only one Komsomol woman in my class, a Ukrainian.
Komsomol—the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League.
Mother, earning next to nothing, worked in a sculpture factory (the artist’s individuality was repressed then, and attempts were made to reduce art to craftsmanship—and best done as a team!). My father worked as a planownik in “Mjasotrest”, and his salary was very low. Sometimes I earned something as a furniture mover. I was already a strong 13-year-old boy.
planownik —a Soviet planner, who calculated work efficiency.
I’ll mention two events from the period of the Soviet occupation. My father’s immediate boss was a wonderful man and soon our great friend, Alexei Ivanovich Timchenko. Timchenko was a Ukrainian from Kiev. As the son of an Orthodox priest, he became a liszeniec after the revolution—a pariah deprived of all civil rights. He survived prisons and purges, deportations and terror. He managed to keep a lot of sincere humor and a good heart. He taught us how to survive the Soviet rule. I think he liked me; I got interesting books from him as a gift. He was honest with my father and we owed him a lot. Once, in June 1940, he warned us, “Sobolew from the NKVD lives with me. He said he wouldn’t be home tonight. This means that they’re planning some action, probably deportations. Don’t stay at home tonight!”
So we hid in the canteen of the Artists’ Union: in the evening, when the canteen was being closed, the three of us hid under a table covered by a long tablecloth. After the canteen was closed, others gradually appeared, coming from under the other tables, including Adam Ważyk (!), a leading literary politician in Lvov at the time… In the morning we were very sleepy, but soon our sleepiness was gone when it turned out that the NKVD really had come to our house to get us at night! As if nothing had happened, my father went to work in the morning—where Sobolew was also employed—and I went to school.
Timchenko instructed us that if the NKVD came to arrest people according to the list, and no one was found at home, you should stay away for another two or three nights—“they always come at night!”—and then the action would be completed and you could sleep well—until the next action. That and the next night, they deported many people, mainly Jews who had fled from the Germans, to Lvov and deep into Russia, to the Urals and Kazakhstan. My Uncle Józek with his wife and little children, my Aunt Olga Lisiewiczowa with her infant daughter, and many other relatives and friends of our family were deported. They also took my grandfather at night. When Aunt Helenka (his daughter) found out about it, she alerted her school friend, a leading communist, Wanda Wasilewska. She ran along the closed trains at the station, found Grandpa, and managed to get him out of there. Wasilewska told her then, “I’m doing this for your father, but it will end badly for you anyway!”—and it did… Grandpa had had enough. He decided to return home, “I’d rather die at home than in Siberia.” In the fall of 1940 he returned to Krakow, taken across the “green border”. In the summer of 1942 the Germans expelled all Jews from the vicinity of Krakow and made them go to the ghetto in Skawina. Outside Skawina the Germans made a selection: all the elderly and sick were taken to the Tyniec forest and shot. Grandpa was one of them. And Helenka died under the German occupation, having poisoned herself with Uncle Marian when the Gestapo came after them as a result of a denunciation. We were staying in two rooms of a huge apartment owned by Mrs.
Szarski in Nabielak Street, where many interesting people lived in various rooms. My room was a wonderful library of Mr. Szarski, who was staying abroad, with lots of leather-bound collected works of outstanding writers. I read there in every free moment. It was these readings that led me to the conclusion that a boy who is to achieve something in his life, by the age of 13 at the latest, should run away from home, get himself hired in some port as a deckhand on a ship, and set out into the world. And I was already 13 years old!
On June 22, 1941, at dawn, again we were woken up by the roar of exploding bombs. The Germans were launching an attack on Russia. The violent war had been going on for half a day before the Russian radio gave the first news of it. On the next day, the Russians began to flee Lvov in panic. The street cannonade of the Ukrainian uprising was heard, there were inscriptions about samostijnej Ukraini, and Lachy i Żidy het’ za San!
samostijnej Ukraini—independent Ukraine.
Lachy i Żidy het’ za San!—out with Lachy (a group of ethnic Poles) and Jews beyond the San River.
The day after, however, trucks with Russians turned back and the Soviet army returned. Street fighting broke out more intensively. After a day or two, however, the Germans came.
German occupation in Lvov
In the Brygidki Prison, the bodies of many prisoners massacred by the NKVD just before the capture of Lvov were discovered. Pogroms of Jews ensued. Few Jews lived in our neighborhood, so at first we were spared. But after a few days, they caught my father in the street and dragged him to the terrible Janowski camp. Luckily, he returned in the evening, beaten, emaciated, in tattered clothes—but alive and in one piece! He wouldn’t tell us anything about what had happened there, he kept repeating, “It was terrible… don’t ask me anything…”.
Sometime in the middle of July 1941, the front had already moved far east, and the victory of the Germans seemed inevitable. I came to the conclusion that it was high time for me to leave home and sign on a ship. I decided to escape the Germans, go through the Balkans to Turkey, and join the Polish armed forces somewhere, on a Polish ship. I collected maps of other countries—Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. I took a compass, a backpack with a loaf of bread, and wearing my junior high school coat and scout hat, I snuck out of the house, leaving a letter to my parents so that they wouldn’t worry. I explained in it that I didn’t want to live under occupation, that I could handle it, and I’d let them know how I was doing…
I walked south, across the fields, sometimes down the road, sometimes riding on a peasant’s cart. Towards the evening, one of the peasants I came across gave me a critical look and told me not to go any further, because there were Ukrainian villages there, and if they saw me in such a uniform, they would most likely cut my throat… It was already dark and past the curfew. I went to a field of high grain so that I wouldn’t be seen. It drizzled and grew chilly. I lay down amid the crop, wrapped my coat around myself, and tried to sleep. Only then did it occur to me what a blow I had dealt to my parents. Regret and remorse made me get up and return, through the fields, at night, towards Lvov. I was approaching the city at dawn. On the Wuleckie Hills (where a few days earlier the Germans had shot Lvov professors, including Boy-Żeleński, which I had no idea about) I saw two figures from a distance. They were my parents, and despite the curfew, they were walking around town looking for me. I never really managed to apologize to them for that (and worse, I ran away again three years later…). I considered myself defeated by fate, because my plan to join the ship failed—did I miss my last chance to become someone in life?
Soon, however, we had to leave the apartment and, in the crowd of people moving whatever way they could, we had to carry our very small baggage to the emerging ghetto. Before my father lost his job he’d befriended a very talented young lawyer, Izydor Reisler, son-in-law of the famous Lvov defense attorney Leib Landau. We moved into a small room in their shared apartment at 10 Jachowicza Street, which was already in the ghetto territory. At that time, the ghetto wasn’t yet enclosed by a wall, but it was necessary to wear an armband with the Star of David, which I avoided whenever I could. My school friend, Zbyszek Gajewicz, gave me his school ID and I moved around the city with it.
In the area where the ghetto was being formed, the Germans robbed and shot. Shots were heard every night. I also remember how several times after the curfew, three or four uniformed Germans wearing helmets noisily entered the apartment, and, threatening us with weapons, put us against the walls, went through the wardrobes and drawers, and took whatever they found that was valuable.
Even among the Jews, I felt a stranger in this quarter. I remember going out to buy our assigned portion of black bread. I was standing in a long line of nervous people. Someone said something to me and I didn’t understand Yiddish. It caused an outcry. Furious, the people pushed me out of the line, ordering me to go to the goyim. So I couldn’t buy bread.
Meanwhile, the living conditions in the ghetto worsened day by day; there were more actions, deportations, and murders. In the near future the ghetto was going to be closed off completely, cutting us off from the Aryan part of the city. Long before that, we had decided to run away, now that conditions were good for it. Thanks to the help of Professor Hubert, a lawyer from the Jan Kazimierz University, my parents obtained fantastic original documents of his relatives, people of a similar age: Czesław Grabowski, a former Polish MP in Brazil, and his wife Joanna. They both had died abroad, so it wasn’t recorded in the local files. With me, the matter was even more interesting. Shortly before the war, a certain Mrs. Biłobranowa, a young and beautiful woman, had been accused of some serious crime. In a trial in which she allegedly was bound to lose, our friend, the lawyer Izydor Reisler, defended her and she was acquitted. From then on, she was extremely grateful to him and must have been in love with him. She handed over her husband’s documents to him, and her own to his wife Hanka (who was murdered by the Germans in Warsaw a few months later).
In any case, having heard about the need for good Aryan papers for me, she stole a birth certificate and various school certificates from her nephew, the same age as me, Zbyszek Szychowski from Sokal, and handed me all these documents. From that point on until the end of the occupation, I was Zbigniew Szychowski. Since my namesake was alive and didn’t know anything about it, I promised her that I wouldn’t use his surname after the war.
When my parents were still preparing our escape, I had already left the ghetto and stayed for a week or two at Sapieha Street at my mother’s distant cousin’s, Mania Bett, a refugee from Vienna. She lived with her friend, a known astrologer at the time, Starża-Dzierzbicki. He was a nice man, full of artistic fantasy. I spent a few nice days with them. I don’t know what exactly happened to her, but she didn’t survive the war.
Escape to Warsaw
We planned to escape to Warsaw because it was a large city where it was easier to hide, and also hardly anyone on the Aryan side in Warsaw knew my parents. When in April 1942 the crossing had already been prepared, together with my parents—but separately, pretending to be strangers—we set off by train to Krakow. There, hidden in a cab (so that the well- known faces of my parents weren’t visible), we went to spend the night at their friend Tika’s. The next day, cautiously and without any undesirable adventures, we managed to reach Warsaw by train.
My uncle, whom I hadn’t known at that point, Antoni Dreling, the husband of Stacha, my mother’s sister, was waiting for us on the platform. He came from a family of small landowners from Nowogrodek. His father was murdered there in 1939 by the Bolsheviks. Being a Catholic and true gentry, Antoni was the only member of our immediate family who spoke Yiddish fluently! In pre-war times, without it, he wouldn’t have been able to sell the farm’s produce at the market in Nowogrodek and do business there. Antoni played a huge role in our lives, he saved us many times.
So we came to their apartment at 9 Warecka Street, and shortly thereafter we moved in (with almost no possessions, but seemingly carrying some empty suitcases that we had borrowed) into a large room rented in a huge apartment by Mr. Wrzecianów at Zielna Street. Apart from us, a young seminarian, Stanisław Kowalski, lived there, and there were many rooms that were either empty or filled with furniture.
During the first months of my stay on the Aryan side, I tried to learn how to be invisible—or rather inconspicuous. It wasn’t enough to try to look like the others—and it wasn’t easy with my not so Aryan appearance—you had to behave freely like the others, and not stand out. And when I met a stranger, for example an assistant in a store, I always observed his behavior carefully. If, after looking at me, he went to the back room for a moment—it was a signal for me that it was better to get out of there. If I saw a sudden flash of recognition in the eyes of a man staring at me, I knew it would be safer to avoid that person from then on.
Our life was difficult because we were always overwhelmed with fear, and we didn’t have money, but in really critical moments Antoni always supported us. Mother found some sources of smuggled coffee beans and delivered them to a couple of coffee shops. My father found employment as a salesman in the Żubr company, which produced substitutes for food spices: quasi-pepper, pseudo-allspice, etc. Therefore, he had to visit a lot of food wholesalers in Praga, which was his “sales area”, drink with them, take many tram rides. Every morning we said goodbye knowing that it might be the last time.
Men were more exposed than women because they bore the indelible mark of the Abrahamic covenant with God. But my mother remembered what she once read in the book Hellenism and Judaism by Tadeusz Zieliński, a great expert in antiquity. At sports competitions in the Hellenistic era, where people ran naked, Jewish athletes were ashamed of their circumcision. They turned to the surgeons at the time who had a way to remove this sign of the Covenant. Thanks to the pre-war contacts with doctors and the comprehensive help of my new Uncle Antoni, one day my mother managed to transform Stacha and Antoni’s dining room into a makeshift operating room. The first patient on the operating table was I, then my father, and then Uncle Henryk. The surgery was painful, and what’s worse—ineffective. It was only successful for Uncle Henryk—and he luckily never had to take advantage of its beneficial effects, because no one suspected him during the German occupation.
1942 was another terrible year of progressive extermination. The Germans ruled all of Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus and from Nordkapp to Crete. There seemed to be no hope left. It was then, in July 1942, that I had a dream that played a great role in my life. I dreamed that ten years had passed, it was July 1952, Germany ruled everywhere, and I was in France working in the maquis, in the underground. I was in Lyon and entered a house, as arranged. It was quite dark in the stairwell, I was going upstairs, when a door opened in front of me, a man jumped out with a gun, and fired right at me. I felt pain, fell backward, down the stairs—and was dead. I woke up—not out of fear but relief! So I still had ten years of life ahead of me. I had nothing to fear now! Believing in this dream helped me like nothing else in the most difficult moments. I knew that I would also survive this.
Chemistry comes into my life
Meanwhile, here on the Aryan side, life seemed to be normal. At first, I wasn’t even afraid to walk the streets, ride trams around distant districts, and get to know Warsaw, previously unknown to me. I systematically marked the city map with the damage from the siege of 1939.
Throughout the occupation, I studied alone, and when we were together I sometimes asked my parents for help. My father had a very broad knowledge, he tried to interest me in the humanities and mathematics. My mother taught me languages, especially French and Russian.
Once, however, I tried to take a risk and go to an openly run school, the so-called vocational school (because junior high schools were closed). The curriculum included some junior high school subjects and others imposed by the Germans. On that day, when I first went to class, Rassenkunde had just started—the science of races! The teacher summoned the boys, used calipers and a ruler to measure their various parameters of the skull, and defined “racial” features. Then he pointed at me. Again, he measured my ear-to-nose distances and something else, noting the distinct features of the… Mongoloid race. There was unambiguous laughter from the students. At the next break, I left school quickly and walked home in a roundabout way, checking to see if any of my classmates were following me. Of course, I didn’t make such attempts anymore and I studied by myself. A high school chemistry textbook sparked my interest in chemistry.
Thanks to my father and the owner of the company, Mr. Leon Wieczorek, I also had an Ausweis [German: an identification document] from Żubr and I tried to earn something by offering their products in a few small shops on quiet, less busy streets. It didn’t last long, but I used the little money I earned for my home laboratory. I bought a couple of the simplest glass laboratory vessels, and I purchased the chemicals in a small soap factory in a neighboring house (back then the soap factory sold, for instance, concentrated acids, bases, sulfur, various salts—it was a real chemist’s paradise). I conducted experiments in the kitchen. I read once that ethyl alcohol could be obtained synthetically from acetylene. Acetylene—the gas burning in the carbide tubes used for lighting during the continual power cuts, was readily available and cheap. Since vodka was then the most useful exchangeable coin, I decided to master this synthesis, and help my parents out financially. In the first stage of the synthesis, I passed acetylene through a mercury salt solution. A sediment was formed that I knew nothing about from the books. To have a better look at it, I shook the vessel—and then there was a loud explosion. The kitchen window pane fell out, I injured myself, and went deaf for a few days.
But that was nothing, the worse part was that when a few days later, I went to “my” soap factory, the owner said in the back to her husband, “Look, that’s the one who’s making bombs next door…” And this made me think that I was adding another black mark to our already doomed fate, something else that could attract the attention of the Germans. Much later, I found out that I had accidentally produced one of the most highly explosive substances—mercury acetylide—which was sometimes used as a detonator in ammunition. So I gave up on alcohol synthesis, but not on experiments, but from then on I only performed them in the bathroom, where there was no window.
I was reading more and more about chemistry, and my parents decided to provide me with real chemistry lessons with a pre-war assistant at the Technical School, Mr. Kalkhoff. So once a week I did a polytechnic course in chemical analysis with him.
The terrible year of 1943
The terrible year of 1943 came. On April 19, 1943, the ghetto uprising broke out. We, the powerless witnesses on the Aryan side, were in despair. I circled carefully around Krasińskich Square and Bonifraterska Street, filled with pain and admiration. Specks of charred papers were falling from the sky everywhere, and flames and smoke rose over the ghetto. Mr. Kalkhoff came over, he went to the window and said with a satisfied smile, “The little Jews are frying!” Deeply shaken, I told him I had the flu, and after that, we lost touch. But his attitude, although rather unusual for the intelligentsia, was unfortunately quite typical among the common people of Warsaw.
All my life I’ve had remorse for not taking part in the Uprising; I only hid more and more from people and wrote sad poems about the Uprising—one or two of which survived… in Israel. Not only around the burning ghetto, but throughout Aryan Warsaw, the hunt for Jews increased on a large scale—blackmailers and Gestapo agents tracked anyone who had managed to escape and hide on the other side of the walls. At that time, in the late spring of 1943, my father was pointed out to the Germans on a tram by… a Jewish Gestapo agent. The Jews serving the Gestapo recognized other Jews best! Father ended up at Szucha Avenue.
The Gestapo officer who interrogated him asked how he knew the German language so well. Having heard that he had studied in Berlin and Vienna and, moreover, he had been an officer in the k. k. Austrian army in World War I, the Gestapo officer asked him about details: the regiment, commanders, other officers, places of battles… Hearing the answers, he shook his hand and said, “So we are Front-Kameraden from the same regiment. I’m Austrian, we served together. You’re free to go. If anyone gives you or your family trouble, contact me!” It was amazing: the loyalty to a former comrade-in-arms outweighed that of a Nazi and Gestapo man (and what kind!). My father told me all this in detail—the room number, furniture, surname, appearance of the Gestapo man. “You may need it!” I remembered. A year and a half later, knowing those circumstances was really going to save my life.
k. k—Kaiserlich-königlich, German: imperial-royal, authorities of the Austrian Empire.
In the summer of 1943—when I was hiding outside Warsaw—my parents were blackmailed (unsuccessfully) by the superintendent of the building at 45 Zielna Street where we lived. When another attempt at blackmailing was made, and the blackmailers were once again thrown out the door, they called the Germans. My parents were taken to the Gestapo at Szucha Street. But once there, a short telephone conversation between my father and that Gestapo officer led to their immediate release!
When the Ghetto Uprising was over and the hunt for Jews was still going on, I was once approached by our neighbor, a seminarian, Stanisław Kowalski. He was deeply involved in the underground activity of some extreme Catholic-nationalist organization, “Sword and Plow” or “Cross and Sword”, he gave me their newspapers to read. Poland was supposed to stretch from Crimea to the pre-Slavic Rügen. So imagine my surprise when he said that it would be safer if I went to his brother’s, to Henryków. Henryków near Warsaw was then a village (today it’s a district of Warsaw). Scoutmaster Antoni Kowalski lived in a house surrounded by a garden and orchard, quite far from other people. He was cordial and selfless, while he was putting his whole family at risk. The brother of the two Kowalskis was a priest in nearby Płudy. I lived there in the summer of 1943, deeply breathing in the atmosphere of kindness and warmth that radiated from this family. I took advantage of the interesting discussions I had with my host and the rich resources of his library. One of the neighbors, “the countess”, would sometimes come by. I saw that she gave me these disapproving looks. Once after her visit, Antoni Kowalski informed me, sad and indignant, that the countess had said she felt threatened by my presence there and that if I didn’t move out, she would have to notify the authorities. So I returned to Warsaw. Nevertheless, the stay in Henryków and the help of the Kowalski brothers are bright memories in an otherwise gloomy period.
I was able to meet Henryk Ehrlich in the summer or fall of 1943. He was my schoolmate and dear friend, the son of a Krakow lawyer who was killed by the Germans. Henryk then lived with his mother and two sisters in Warsaw on Aryan papers. Through mutual friends, we found out about each other. We arranged a meeting at a tram stop and pretended we didn’t know each other. We got off at Ujazdowskie Avenue (one at the front exit, the other at the back) and entered Ujazdowski Park at a considerable distance from each other. There we looked for some secluded thick bushes and when no one was in sight, we hid in them. For about two hours, we discussed important matters of this world—philosophy, biology, books, interests, and plans. As far as I remember, we didn’t talk at all about our situation, about the Germans, the Holocaust, or the threat of death that hung over us at every moment, even during that conversation. After a while, carefully, one of us went one way, the other one the other way. And we never saw each other again. As I found out later, Henryk was also living with his uncle, who was… Paweł Finder, the head of the PPR at the time. As a result of someone’s denunciation, the Germans went there and killed everyone…
PPR—Polska Parta Robotnicza, the Polish Workers’ Party.
Meanwhile, after the blackmails, knowing that we were treading on thin ice, my parents looked for another apartment. But finding a new, relatively safe place to stay in Warsaw wasn’t easy at that time. All of the apartments offered to us were vacant… as a result of the recent removal by the Germans of Jews hiding there. Of course, we immediately changed our minds about moving in there. Only studio apartment no. 5 at 91 Saska Street didn’t bear the stigma that triggered further suspicions. A Gestapo agent, Porębski, had recently been shot there at the order of the underground court. “Nobody wants to live there, it’s haunted. There are still bullet marks and blood stains,” we were told. And indeed, there were. It didn’t bother us in this case, it even cheered us up. I spent 1943-44 there, without leaving the house, hiding in the wardrobe whenever someone rang the doorbell.
Every day when my father left for work, we said our goodbyes briefly, but cordially—aware that we might not see each other again. Sometimes we were visited by some of my parents’ friends, most often Dr. Stanisław Liwszyc, a wise physician and a socialist activist from Żoliborz, who was active in the underground and in the Żegota campaign. He brought us underground newspapers and some cash benefits that allowed us to survive. I begged him to involve me in the organization, but he refused, explaining that because of my appearance I would only endanger others.
The August Uprising
Meanwhile, the Russian front was approaching, and in the spring of 1944 the ground carried the dull rumble of artillery for hundreds of miles. A hope for survival sprouted in our hearts. At the end of July the front was very close, the Germans ordered people to take part in digging fortifications in the eastern outskirts of Warsaw; rumors spoke of the imminent evacuation of Saska Kępa. It seemed that it would be safer for us to disappear in Śródmieście. On July 31 we moved to Śródmieście, to Aunt Stacha and Antoni’s at 9 Warecka Street. And the next day the August Uprising broke out. There was fighting around Napoleon Square. In the evening the area had already been taken over by the insurgents. The next morning, I reported to the Home Army.
The Uprising was probably the most important and—at the beginning—the happiest period of my life. I was euphoric. Like all Warsaw youth, I was dazzled by freedom, the red and white armband, and the longed-for fight with the Germans. For me, it was the reaction of a seventeen-year-old recluse after the terrible, endlessly long, years of the German occupation.
As there weren’t enough weapons, I was drafted into a unit of the auxiliary engineer service of the “Kiliński” battalion, where I spent the Uprising (on the Home Army ID card, I gave the pseudonym “Chemist”—because I wanted so much to be considered a chemist!). This unit was commanded by Engineer Ciepłowski (a.k.a. “Transformer”) from the power plant in Powiśle.
We dug connection ditches and trenches at night, preparing the roads for attacks, numerous barricades, above ground and underground passages (through Nowy Świat and Jerozolimskie Avenue) as well as shields and shooting positions. We reinforced the shields of the headquarters at 7 Mazowiecka Street, and in front of the NSZ’s telephone exchange at Górskiego Street I dug out ammunition hidden there in 1939. I moved barley from the warehouses of the Haberbusch and Schiele breweries. Together with others, I put out fires on roofs from incendiary bombs, carried the wounded… On August 21 I took part in the siege and in setting fire to the PAST building, which was the last great success of the Uprising. Under the command of Engineer Ciepłowski, we transported barrels of fuel and took part in pouring oil and setting fire to that defensive skyscraper. One of our most difficult and dangerous actions was building the overground, and then the underground, passage across Jerozolimskie Avenue under fire from tanks and buildings manned by the Germans.
NSZ—Narodowe Siły Zbrojne—National Armed Forces, a Polish right-wing underground military organization.
PAST—Polska Akcyjna Spółka Telefoniczna—the Telephone Joint-Stock Company was a Polish telephone company; its headquarters was the tallest building of Warsaw at the time.
But even in the Uprising, I didn’t feel like revealing my identity, because I remembered the flashes of recognition in my fellow fighters’ eyes and—sometimes—the effects. Now the threat of the Gestapo no longer hung over me, but the terror was still there—not only from the Germans. Someone who didn’t survive the occupation doesn’t know, and many of those who survived it don’t realize or can’t remember, how devastating the systematic German antisemitic propaganda was on the subconscious mind of our society, which was otherwise so hostile to the Germans. Unfortunately, it fell on ground that was very receptive and well-prepared before the war by the National Democracy and the Church. The uncritical thinkers and primitive believers were encouraged to despise their neighbors, humiliate them, kill them with impunity, or profitably send them to death.
So, even in the Uprising, in the Home Army, I had no intention of revealing my carefully protected secret and boasting that I had survived, although there were wonderful people around me, including the organizer and commander of our team, Transformer, whom I sincerely admired.
I’ll cite two events here. I was building shooting fortifications at the cornerof Marszałkowska Streetand Jerozolimskie Avenue, wherethe PKO rotunda stands today. A sergeant, who also wore a Home Army armband, approached me. He looked at me and, holding out a pistol, shouted, “Hey, Jew, the Germans didn’t finish you off, so I will!” Fortunately, he was drunk and I was half his age. I managed to escape him in the ruins, and his shots missed me. But he did fire them!
PKO—Poland’s largest bank.
One night we were building an overground passage between sandbags, across Jerozolimskie Avenue, connecting the north with the south of the downtown area. At that time, three emaciated and ragged young people came to us, stating that they were Jews who had survived and wanted to take part in the fight against the Germans.
The Home Army lieutenant in charge of the action—I can’t remember, “Leszek” or “Gray”—immediately gave them a very dangerous task, justifying it with something along these lines: “Show us that although you’re Jews, you aren’t cowards. Your lives as Jews aren’t worth much anyway, so don’t be afraid of death. You’ve survived thanks to us, so go first now, it might spare our boys.”
This contempt and a feeling of unjustified superiority (instilled by the German example and Nazi propaganda) appeared even among otherwise brave and seemingly decent people. I wouldn’t like to generalize, I know of opposite examples, too. My friend Bogdan Deczkowski (“Laudański”) with the Zośka battalion saved hundreds of Jews (mainly Greek ones) from Gęsiówka during the Uprising, and they were welcomed as brothers. And yet, I didn’t show off my origins. After two months of fighting, however, there was a capitulation—and as for me, I was again threatened by the Germans, a threat that for a time had seemed so distant. I buried my Home Army ID card and the insurgent armband in a metal can in the basement of the house at 3 Komitetowa Street. In 1945 I didn’t manage to dig them out from under the rubble.
Gęsiówka—a prison turned into a concentration camp.
I left with the civilian population on October 2, 1944, together with my parents. I was wearing a postman’s cap from the Main Post Office at Napoleon Square, and two linen work garments, one on top of the other. On my back I carried a small sack with all my belongings, and they were two thick and heavy university chemistry textbooks. We walked along the road to Krakow towards the transit camp in Pruszków—a many-mile-long emaciated and hungry crowd. The German soldiers stood every twenty-something yards, forming a line of guards.
Beyond Okęcie we saw fields—so there was still greenery in this gray, smoke-filled world! I managed to pluck a head of cabbage from a field and ate it all at once. The farther away, the more spread out the German line was, but there were also individual soldiers walking along our procession and guarding us. One of them asked us in an undertone, “Qui parle français? Qui parle français?” My father replied, and the soldier hastily blurted out that he was Alsatian, that there were many of them—the French from the areas annexed to the Reich. “In our hearts, we were on your side in the uprising, we admire you, we didn’t shoot at you. Sorry, we were powerless, scattered among the Germans. I’m not German, I’m Alsatian…”, and he kept walking, asking, “Qui parle français? Qui parle français?”
After Raszyn, we managed to escape, and we found our first shelter at a rectory, in a large shed full of Warsaw natives. After dark, a soldier in a German uniform appeared in the doorway and asked if anyone spoke Russian. My father volunteered again and so did I. This soldier sat down with us on the threshold and gave his confession in the dark: he was Russian, taken prisoner, forced to serve the Germans in the face of starvation. He spoke of the Uprising in a similar way that the Alsatian had done. But he had no hope for himself. “In due time, we will do everything for Stalin’s victory. But then we will die on Stalin’s orders.”
We lived—if you could call it that—on the outskirts of Grodzisk, in Mr. Białek’s cottage, sleeping on pallets which were put out in the corridor for the night and escaping into the fields when some Germans approached. But even this seemed to me a bourgeois way of life. I left my parents a farewell note and set off, wanting to cross the front to the Russians on one of the bridgeheads they had created on the left bank of the Vistula. I wandered around the villages, always with some meager commodity, justifying my journey—sometimes I sold matches, other times, handkerchiefs… I marched for eighteen miles a day, and once German soldiers picked me up with their truck and I traveled with them a long distance.
I will mention two adventures here. Walking from Milanówek to Piaseczno, I came across a priest walking in the same direction. We had discussions on the way for a few hours, and then he suggested that I should become a teacher at the well-known Rev. Archutowski Catholic Junior High School, evacuated near Piaseczno. It was an attractive offer, but I declined. I was afraid of being found out in an overly Catholic environment, and most of all, I wanted to achieve my goal: to join the Russians and fight the Germans.
Another time I was put up by kind peasants in Radzanów, in the Radom region. But it turned out that there was some name day, so they invited me to the table where there were already a few neighbors, vodka, sausage; I had to talk about the Uprising. Then, as was often the case, the conversation turned to Jews. I was terrified by the hatred of these people towards Jews, who were murdered right in front of them. One of the peasants boasted, “I’ll always spot a Jew—he never drinks, never swears—then you know he’s a Jew!” Indeed, I realized I didn’t have these habits! That evening I cursed and drank so much that in the morning, I continued my journey along the road, struggling to maintain the direction.
I reached a town that was no longer there, nobody was there. Only the charred brick chimneys of the burned houses were standing. It was Przytyk, a Jewish town before the war, notorious for the pogrom in the 1930s…
My efforts to get to the front at the Warka-Magnuszew bridgehead failed —the Germans watched it too closely. So I went to Kozienice and Garbatka to try to get to the Puławy bridgehead. There I was suddenly captured by two hidden soldiers—they wore German uniforms, but had wide, Mongolian faces. When they heard me speaking Russian—they rejoiced. “You won’t get any further, the front is a few hundred yards away, but not even a mouse can slip through there. You’re lucky that the German corporal has just left, because he would have ordered you to be shot immediately.” They led me to a safe place, to the back of the German positions, and showed me the direction to return as soon as possible. That time, I owed my life to the fact that I spoke Russian fluently.
I was arrested in a raid in Radom, and after being beaten and interrogated in the station bunker, along with many others, I was taken to the Germans. As we figured out later, the Germans were looking for railroad workers—some of us had hats or uniforms, and I wore the postman’s hat, which was probably indistinguishable from that of a railwayman. Once in the Reich, near Kutno, I managed to jump out of the moving train with two other boys. We were walking towards the border of the General Government at dawn, but suddenly a “Halt!” from the soldiers hidden under the bridge that we were crossing stopped us. Soon I found myself at the Gestapo’s station in Kutno.
There I underwent a long and painful investigation. I was interrogated by two soldiers: a German, senior in rank, and another, a ginger, freckled one, who also spoke Polish, probably a Volksdeutsch. I pretended I didn’t understand German. The German asked questions, and I had a moment to think while the redhead was translating them into Polish.
They demanded that I admit that I was a Soviet subversive, but then suddenly, they were shouting that I was a Jew. I explained that I had a Jewish grandmother (in the real record of Zbyszek Szychowski there was a grandmother named Hoffmann—and one grandmother didn’t condemn you to death!), and that I owed my unfortunate appearance to her.
Finally, I made a reference to that officer from the Warsaw Gestapo at Szucha Avenue, saying that he had let me go after checking my family. The red-haired Gestapo officer told his boss, “I served there before the Uprising. I’ll ask him!” and he began to ask me about the details.
So I gave him the name of this officer, described his appearance, offered the number and description of the room, just as my father had taught me. Finally, the redhead said to his boss in German, “Everything is correct. He was the head of the Jewish section in Warsaw.
No Jew left his room alive. There is no doubt—this boy is not a Jew!” And I was sent to prison, but not as a Jew—as a Pole. And the Gestapo man interrogating me failed to check the most unequivocal evidence!
As I was leaving, I heard the senior Gestapo officer say, “Aber er hat solche jüdische Augen…” [German: But he has such Jewish eyes].
I spent December 1944 in prisons: in Kutno (a few days), and the rest of the month in Łódź in the Radogoszcz prison. In the prison in Kutno, during the “medical examination”, a Polish paramedic pointed me out to a uniformed German—the prison doctor, “But he is a Jew!” The German hit me so hard on the jaw that I fell against the wall. When I got up, the paramedic was gone, and the German officer-doctor spoke to me kindly and instructed me not to wear glasses, because I looked very Semitic in them, and also—to steer clear of the paramedic because it could cost me my life. That uniformed German purposely saved my life.
Perhaps the most terrible period of my life was a few weeks in the Radogoszcz prison in Łódź. Hunger and terror prevailed there. In the former factory various groups of prisoners were crammed into different floors: “political,” “regular” ones, and Russian prisoners. The Jews who had been hiding after the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto were brought individually or in small groups and were shot immediately in the prison yard. I was one of the “regular” prisoners; there were those who had escaped from forced labor, those who’d been caught on the street after curfew, victims of denunciations and roundups, or those taken to the Gestapo for “investigation”. All prisoners of a given floor (several hundred of them) stayed and slept in a large factory hall that took up the entire floor. In its center were long bunks on which we slept side by side, squeezed so tightly that you could turn on your other side only if everyone did that at once.
From the moment we arrived at the prison, every time we went up or down the wide stairway (“Faster!”), we were beaten with metal-tipped whips by cordons of SS-men, between which we ran down to the roll call or back up to the halls. Arriving on the first day in Radogoszcz, I already had five bloody scars on my shaved head. An SS-man, a Volksdeutsch known as “Józio”, excelled in tormenting the prisoners. He was glad when he managed to hit the head of a running prisoner with his whip and knock his eye out. He was the one who often shot prisoners under a pear tree growing in the prison yard and tortured them for minor “offenses”. The constant roll calls, selections, and publicly administered humiliating and cruel punishments were horrible.
Several times I was taken for backbreaking work in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto. We loaded bricks on a cart and transported them, harnessed to the cart instead of horses. It was, however, safer than being in the prison at that time, where you risked death or disability at any moment.
On December 29, 1944, I was transported to the prison camp in Sikawa in Łódź. As I found out later, it was the last transport from the prison in Radogoszcz. Shortly thereafter, escaping from the Russians, the Germans brought prisoners from other prisons to Radogoszcz, locked them up, and set them on fire. About 3,000 people were burned alive there! In Sikawa, under the prison regime, I stayed before and after the
New Year 1945. It was only a few days, but I will remember them forever. The arrival, roll call, beating—the usual procedure in German prisons, and then our transport was driven to a cell, known as “cugantka”. It was freezing cold outside, –20°C (–4°F). With cruel bullwhips, more and more desperate and terrified prisoners were pushed into our cell, which was located in a low concrete building and was around thirteen by twenty feet. Despite the terrible frost, it became hot and stuffy in the cell, and above all, it became excruciatingly cramped. We stood—perhaps a hundred people—tightly packed next to each other, there was no possibility not only to fall asleep lying down, but even to sit or crouch. It was almost impossible to shove through to the only toilet. There was only one barred window. It got increasingly muggy. We were only released in the morning and evening for the assembly; it was our only chance to quickly use the latrine and the water tap. Finally, after the roll call, we got a little soup or a piece of bread and “coffee”. And then again, we were driven into this terrible cell by beatings.
In extreme exhaustion, I fought for a place to crouch between the legs of my fellow inmates—I fought for it by force, because I had to sit down for a while. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. With violence, brutally fighting for it, I squashed some more of my neighbors, who—like me—were barely alive. For the first time, I didn’t feel like a human, but like a hunted animal. I’m still ashamed of it. I spent two days in cugantka, fighting for air in the heat and crowds.
At the same time, however, from the other side of the concrete wall we could hear strange sounds of running, stomping, and loud screams of despair. It turned out that they were three Germans, imprisoned for some crimes. They had to be kept—as a superior race—separate from the Polish Untermenschen [German: subhumans]. So they were freezing in their empty cell in this –20° centigrade frost, running around in circles… envying us our warmth and cursing their fate.
On January 4, 1945, I was transferred to a “temporary prison” at Kopernika Street in Łódź, then to a transit camp near Pabianice. There, finally, after a few days, we heard the approaching roar of cannons. The Russian offensive had started! On January 18, when the front was approaching, the SS-men fled, handing the camp over to the Wehrmacht. A German colonel gathered us and declared that we were free. Everyone got back their prison deposits, for which they had to sign off (“so you know that the Germans aren’t thieves…”). I received my watch and wallet with money. Only my Kennkarte was gone, and instead, I got prison and camp documents. I still have them today.
I made my way to a nearby village. The front was getting closer, artillery rumbled, machine guns, airplane fire. We saw fleeing German troops. Shamefully, the last of the runaways (the rear guard?) were soldiers in black SS uniforms with the inscription POLEN!
The liberation
At night the Russians came to the cottage where I was staying. I was liberated… by the field kitchen! The Soviet officer hugged me, he was very cordial—but after a while, he ordered me to give him my watch. When I explained to him that the Germans had just returned it to me, he took out his gun and gave me five minutes to think. I chose life. I set off towards Łódź to get to Grodzisk, to my parents, as soon as possible. On that first day of freedom, flags had just been hung up in Pabianice. The flags, to my surprise, were red and white. I asked one of the superintendents about it. He said, “By order of the police.” They said that now, red would be on top! And this turned out to be true for many years.
I kept walking, but I was struggling more and more. In the suburbs of Łódź, in Ruda Pabianicka, some good women took me half-conscious from the street and put me to bed. I had a high fever, as it turned out later it was diphtheria. Lying in bed, I had the opportunity to listen to the story that a Soviet officer stationed at their house was boasting about. He had served in intelligence, he was a paratrooper in the German rear. “When we were flying over the front, we picked our Jewish comrades among us, took their parachutes away, and threw them out of the flying plane! Because we don’t need Jews!”
I realized that liberation from the Germans didn’t take away the destiny of the chosen people. A year later, my uncle, who, having survived in Hungary, returned to his home in Zielonki near Krakow and was shot. Both in Poland and Russia, those few Jews were blamed for coming out of it alive. In the morning, I was transported by cart to the hospital (in Radogoszcz, near the burnt prison) and I lay there without strength for several weeks. When I left, my legs were failing me (for a long time). At the station, I wanted to go towards Warsaw—but I didn’t have the strength to board the train. After many hours, some good people helped me up. I arrived in Grodzisk and at night—like a resurrected spirit—I was reunited with my parents, who were still waiting for me. And that was already a month after the liberation.
Then I tried to forget about those years. I studied, became a chemist, and as a chemist I managed to do something in life. I’ve achieved everything that a scientist can dream of in Poland—titles, awards, medals. Even the antisemitism that I felt around me didn’t hurt me. I tried to be honest and sincere, which sometimes made my life difficult. I’ve been happily married—we’ve just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary. We have a daughter and a son whom we are proud of, and three grandchildren in whom we place our hopes. I’ve lived unexpectedly long and only now, after a life full of activity, do I reach back into the past.
For the first fifteen years after the war, I woke up screaming at night because I was still dreaming about my interrogation by the Gestapo in Kutno. Then I went to Germany for a few months as an American scholarship holder. At the University of Stuttgart, I met completely different Germans, scholars from the circle close to Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been executed by the Nazis. I’ve been friends with them to this day. And from then on I had no more nightmares about the Gestapo.
From the 7505 file, IPN-Łódź,
Report of the interrogation at the Gestapo in Kutno
Kutno, December 8, 1944
In custody: Szychowski, Zbigniew, a Pole born on January 14, 1928 in Switarzów, Catholic, bachelor, student residing in Warsaw, 91 Saska Street cautioned, he states the following as the truth:
Before the Polish uprising, I was with my parents. After the capitulation, I went to my uncle’s in Grodzisk, in the General Government. At the beginning of December, I went to Radom to ask my relatives about my parents, who had disappeared after the uprising. On December 6, ’44, I was at the railway station in Radom. I was arrested by the railway police because I could not produce my employment book. On December 7, I was assigned to a transport of workers to the Reich. There were nine of us, we were supposed to go towards Berlin under the guard of three railwaymen. As far as I know, we were supposed to get to Wilhelmshagen near Berlin. The railwaymen took our Kennkarten. Near Skarżysko, one of the Poles jumped off the train. Near Koluszki, another Pole escaped from the transport. In Łódź, the transport manager exchanged our money. When around 9.30 p.m. we were approaching Kutno, I noticed that the railwayman who was guarding us had fallen asleep. The other two railwaymen were in the adjoining compartment. I used this opportunity to escape from the transport with my two colleagues. It was possible when the train slowed down. We wanted to go back to the General Government and were walking along the tracks. When we approached a bridge, we were captured by the Wehrmacht guards.
The (gold) rings I had on me came from Mrs. Halina Kowalska, Warsaw, 3 Komitetowa Street, with whom I had stayed during the uprising. Since I had little money, I could sell them and use the money for necessities.
When asked repeatedly about my personal information, I admit that my maternal grandmother was Jewish, while my grandfather was Polish. Due to my origin, I have already been at the Gestapo in Warsaw several times, room 206. There it was explained to me that I was not recognized as a Jew and I was released.
All this is true and I cannot provide anything else on this matter.
signature: Szychowski Zbigniew
An excerpt from the autobiography entitled W skorodowanym zwierciadle pamięci, published in Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki no. 2/2005, Warszawa 2005.
