Zofia Radzikowska, born in 1935

I Discovered a Jew in Me

KATARZYNA MELOCH: We ought to start with your “creation of the world”.

ZOFIA RADZIKOWSKA: My name is Zofia Radzikowska, I was born on November 4, 1935, in Krakow. I’ve lived in Krakow all my life, except for the Nazi occupation. My parents were no longer living in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. They lived in the very center of Krakow, at Krupnicza Street. My father had a furrier’s workshop at Grodzka Street, also in the city center. Our whole life was concentrated downtown. I found out that my grandfather still lived in Miodowa, in Kazimierz. My father didn’t. People moved “downtown” from Kazimierz. I remember that we had a rather nicely furnished apartment and a maid. My mother worked in a dental warehouse at Szewska Street.

You were asking about my first memories of the war… I was less than four years old when the war broke out. My father had to move all the furs he was working on to the apartment. Because one of the first German decrees in Krakow forbade Jews from running shops and businesses. They had to close them.

The second memory: a visit of a German officer who took over our apartment for the army. They turned it into a casino for the Wehrmacht. I only remember that… We had a couple of days to move out. I remember people taking furniture and other things out of our apartment.

I have this memory: I had a tricycle, it was very old. It had been bought second-hand, then it was retouched and had new thick tires put on. It was probably the latest in fashion then—a tricycle with thick tires. I didn’t get to ride this tricycle even once. It was taken out of the apartment along with everything else. It may sound silly today, but then, for a child, it was a tragedy… And we were left without a roof over our heads…

Did you move?

Not right away. We bounced from apartment to apartment, all full of people. In one of them, we stayed for a while with my grandfather and my youngest aunt, Idka.

Later, we were in other apartments; some had bedbugs, others fleas, terrible conditions; you had to sleep on the floor. These are flashes
—very unpleasant.

And later my mother rented an apartment in Borek Fałęcki. Today, it’s Podgórze, it’s part of Krakow, but back then, it was very rural. And there, my mother rented a place, simply saying that the Germans had kicked us out of the apartment, and my father had gone to war and didn’t come back. Which was mostly true, because the Germans did kick us out of our apartment. My mother somehow obtained a Kennkarte under the name of our pre-war maid, I remember exactly. I don’t know how, probably the Kennkarte was bought; I don’t know because I never learned the details… There was no ghetto yet, because it was at the beginning, in ‘41. When the Krakow ghetto was formed, we had been living in Borek for a long time—only the two of us.

Today, I admire my mother’s courage and intuition. How did she know not to go to the ghetto, because that would have been the end? How did she know? It was she who decided that we wouldn’t go the ghetto. It was she who decided that we had to hide and live as Poles. And she got the Kennkarte and she rented the apartment. I remember that my father visited us once, in secret, for a few hours, when the landlady wasn’t at home and then he disappeared. Father went to the ghetto, he couldn’t hide with us. A man was very easy to expose, not to mention that neither my mother nor I looked Jewish. And my father did! So, my father was in the ghetto.

At first, the ghetto wasn’t closed off yet. I remember the trip to the Krakow ghetto, we went to see my father—a terribly long way. Because we lived in Borek, behind the so-called Góra Borkowska, and we had to walk back to where Lwowska Street is today. It was an awfully long way from this place to our apartment beyond Góra Borkowska. We went there on foot. And that was the last time I saw my father. He was cheerful and said that everything would be fine and that he was healthy. My father worked, probably in workshops sewing something for the army—he was a furrier after all… He probably hoped that he’d be needed and that he’d survive. I don’t know how he died. I just—I don’t know. Because I never talked to my mother about it after the war. As if I didn’t care.

Zosia, you weren’t the only one. We, the survivors the “Children of the Holocaust” were afraid to think about the past. We pushed it down to the bottom of our unconsciousness.

You see, Kasia, after the war, I even went to a Hebrew school, which I’ll
talk about later. I knew I was Jewish, I’ve always known, and I’ve never had any problems with it. But I didn’t care about what happened at all. I knew that we survived (and how) and I never asked my mother how she knew what would happen to the Jews… I think she was just a woman with intuition… Today, no one is alive…

Incredible intuition, because it was impossible to know.

You had to somehow sense it, feel that the ghetto was a trap. She had a Kennkarte and she was working! Because her pre-war dentist friend gave her a job in Krakow. Before the war, she’d worked in a Jewish warehouse of dental goods. She knew many dentists, and it was a Pole, a dentist, her friend from before the war, who gave her the job, and she went to work in Krakow throughout the war. It was a way to survive, she earned money. But she risked it every day. Someone might have recognized her. And yet, she kept going to work from Borek and then also from Łęg to Kraków.

We lived in Borek throughout the war. In Borek, I was even baptized. There were friends who became my godparents. The priest was told that I was an illegitimate child, my father’s name was unknown. He took it at face value, believed it or not, whatever. He baptized me, I had godparents. I remember them asking if we realized how much they were risking. I guess my mom did. I said yes, but a child doesn’t fully understand what this means…

I knew I could never speak, never admit the truth. And because I was a Polish Catholic… In any case, I had a birth certificate, because I had to go to school. I had a birth certificate for a false date of birth, which was later than mine. Anyway, in the midst of war, I had to go back to school.

I hadn’t gone back when we were staying in Borek, because we had to get out of there, the good times were over—because it was basically an idyll. While I did stay home alone for hours on end, I learned to tell stories to myself. Still, it was an idyllic time compared to what people experienced then, which I only found out later.

A blue policeman started blackmailing us. After the war, it turned out that he was following another Jewish family who were hiding in Swoszowice. We got to know the people he was looking for. I don’t know how he stumbled on us. He would come and say that he knew that we were Jewish and that he had to take us to the Gestapo. Of course, he came in civilian clothes. My mother gave him what we had taken from the house, she gave him everything… There are these details that stuck with me. When I was a little girl, I had a sunbathing romper (it used to be called a romper). He even took that.

And when he came round the second time, he said that his wife cried and she wouldn’t take the romper, such a bleeding heart… But he didn’t bring it back, he did not. He came twice, and twice he said that he had to take us to the Gestapo. I was saying the evening prayer, I don’t know what my mother told him. Of course, she wouldn’t say. And after the second visit, there was practically nothing else to give him, and my mother decided that we had to flee. And somehow she managed to move us to another village. To the so-called Łęg, today it’s a part of Nowa Huta. Today, it’s all urban but back then, it was a remote village on the Vistula River. I don’t know how she did it, she may have bribed some official who recorded residence so as not to enter us in any registration book. How did she manage to do that? I don’t know. She wanted to make sure that this policeman couldn’t find us…

So, as she told me, somehow she managed to arrange it so that we weren’t registered anywhere. How on earth—I don’t know. Because we lived at a specific address, we must have had food stamps, I had to go to school. I don’t know how she did it. But she rented an apartment from some landlady, had a Kennkarte, went to work so she could pay the rent. We lived in Łęg, and I went to the first grade there.

Of course, I got on with Polish children as a Catholic. I knew what I needed to know, because I learned it, I was taught it quickly. I don’t even know when or how I learned to read so I read the prayer books. I could read before I went to school. In religious education, I was the best student. But then I found out that all Jewish girls were like that…

So true!

The teacher told me to read books to my classmates so that they would be quiet when she had to step out for a while. Well, in short, that’s how we survived. When I was in the second grade, liberation came. It found us in the village, near Czyżyny. Some German airfield was bombed there, but then it turned out that these were dummy anti-aircraft guns, not the real thing. I remember our landlord organized a celebratory binge, we were invited. At some point, a Russian soldier also stopped by for a drink of water.

And we immediately (in February) moved to Krakow. Of course, we couldn’t return to our apartment. Right after the war, the Polish Writers’ Association settled there, at 22 Krupnicza. This was our pre-war address: 22 Krupnicza Street. But my mother found a different apartment, at Pomorska Street. The Germans had left it, we got allocated. And Mom and I came back—both of us. Obviously, my mother was looking for my father. She searched for him through the Red Cross, cried at night; other people were coming back. There was no trace. It was later established that my father didn’t die during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto or in the Płaszów camp. Those who worked were not “liquidated” right away. He was taken to Auschwitz and died there. There was no trace of him after Auschwitz.

My mother later got remarried to a man who returned as a soldier of the Polish army. She married a Jew from Lvov who had been deported by the Russians. He lost his family—his wife and two daughters in Lvov, and he survived. He was in the Red Army, and then in the First (Polish) Army. In Krakow, he demobilized and got married, he adopted me, I took his last name.

My mother enrolled me in the Tarbut School. There was a Hebrew school in Krakow—it was the fifth and sixth grade, I attended a Polish school until the fourth grade. I came to the Tarbut School as a complete gentile. I didn’t know anything about Jewishness. I had been going to church. I took everything that I learned seriously—the Catholic religion, too. But I went to the Tarbut and I became an atheist very quickly, just like that, overnight.

 The Tarbut—in Hebrew: culture. Here, the name of the Jewish school.

I didn’t like going to church, but I did because I thought if I missed mass, it would be a mortal sin. In the summer, I’d feel light-headed in the church, in winter, my feet would be freezing on the floor. I hated going to confession. I didn’t like anything about what I was doing. I thought I had to. When I went to the Tarbut, I was told to come to school on Sunday because we had Saturdays off. We went to school on Sunday and had the Chumash… And I decided there was no God.

Chumash—the Pentateuch of Moses, the Torah. Here—reading the Torah.

And I was relieved that I didn’t have to go to church anymore. There were children at the school who had been studying there for a year, because the school had started a year earlier. I went to fourth grade. Of course, I couldn’t speak the Yiddish language. Obviously, my parents knew Yiddish, and I remembered that before the war, they spoke Yiddish when they wanted the child not to understand. Back then, this drove me crazy, I yelled at them to speak “like humans” or “normal”. But fortunately, my mother spoke Polish well and I was learning to speak only a pure Polish at home, without any foreign accent. It also helped us a lot.

Education in Polish was also very important. In the new school, the children already knew a little bit of Hebrew. There were entire groups who had come from orphanages from the Soviet Union or had lived in a Jewish orphanage. They knew Hebrew songs. I knew nothing but I liked it a lot! I learned very quickly and fell in love with Hebrew. In fifth grade, I only got a passing mark in Hebrew at the end of the year, in sixth grade, I got a B. It was difficult. There were no textbooks, teachers wrote on the blackboard. There was one textbook, you had to borrow it, then we got some readers.

There was more material in sixth grade. But I learned. I really took to the Hebrew language. Later, we learned Hebrew songs… I liked it all so much. I joined the Shomers. I was so happy. We celebrated Jewish holidays because it was a Zionist school, not a religious one. Religion was a subject like any other. The holidays were patriotic in nature. It was a turning point (I went there in the years ‘47-‘49), people fought for Israel, then Israel was created. I absorbed the Zionist message. What sank into me back then is still there. After two years, my school was closed.

Hashomer Hatzair—a Zionist youth movement, abbreviated to Shomer.

Didn’t you and your mom think about leaving?

I did—of course. I was prepared to leave. I was going to go to a Hachshara. I forced my parents to sign a consent form. When my school closed, my father applied for a passport. They kicked him out of the Party, which he didn’t really regret. We were denied passports. It was 1950—everything was slamming shut.

Hakhshara—an agricultural center.

How many of your friends had a similar episode? How many parents decided to leave, and were then fired from work and refused a passport at the same time?

My father wasn’t fired, he worked for CPN but then he resigned. He was a plumber, started his own business. He thought it’d be better this way. My mother tried to run a dental warehouse after the war, but she quickly gave up. They started to oppress her, started to destroy the “private initiative”. After the Tarbut closed, all the children went to the TPD school.

CPN—Centrala Produktów Naftowych—a former Polish company that stored, transported and sold oil products.
TPD—Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci—Association of the Friends of Children.

Where there was no religion…
Where there was no religion! We went with the whole group, and we were fine in the seventh grade, and then we all went together to High School No. 8. You almost forgot about the Tarbut. My friends—some left Poland, others went as usual to live normally here.
In ‘56, when it was possible to leave again, my aunt and uncle left (she and my uncle, her fiancé at the time, had been deported from Lvov in the Soviet times). They survived in Kazakhstan. Heniek, my cousin, was born there. He was two years old when they came to Poland in ‘46. They left for Israel in ‘56. I didn’t want to leave any more.

Because it was October…

I was so involved in what was happening in Poland, a revolution was here, why would I leave for Israel? My Jewishness had been dormant for many years. Because: my parents still went to the TSKŻ, mostly to dance parties there, that was their circle. My younger brother was also part of the TSKŻ, he went to Jewish camps.

TSKŻ—Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów—the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.

But he was born after the war?

Yes, in 1959, from the second father. I was in between my parents and my brother—I didn’t go to the TSKŻ, my school was taken away. It was a terrible experience for me, because I loved this school, this environment, this Shomer. I was out for a few years and then in ‘89… But that’s a completely different story.

I’d like to go back to those war stories… Because I survived with my mother, and after the war, I didn’t understand what she really had done. It seemed obvious to me that I was with my mother, that my mother was raising her child. Because I knew that parents work to support their children and I studied well, this was expected of me.

I didn’t think about it, and because I could read, I read newspapers, I believed everything they wrote; I wanted to be involved because socialism came with the Red Army, which liberated us, after all, us Jews, at least those who didn’t live in the East. Because in the East, it was completely different. But it really liberated us, and no matter what happened later, it freed us from the Nazi occupation, from the Holocaust, and we had the right to live again. And I was very involved in all of this. I read the newspapers, I wanted to be progressive. I thought that since my mother was at home, she didn’t do much… A distance grew between us. I wanted to live in a different world, there was no more understanding between us. Later, at the TPD school, I was in the ZMP.

ZMP—Związek Młodzieży Polskiej—the Union of Polish Youth.

I never really considered that my mother was simply a heroine, that she had courage, intuition, that she took risks every day.

She went out and could have met that nasty policeman.

You know what—she told me after the war that she had met him once—he was in uniform and turned his head. He was in uniform with a number, and that was the last year of the war. She told me that it seemed like he didn’t want to notice her, that he must have been scared. Because he was already thinking what would happen next, it was one year before the war ended. I suppose so… Because we were living in Łęg, it was ‘44, I think. I remember, there was a German newspaper published for Poles. I read there about the Warsaw Uprising, some monstrous propaganda article, it must have been ‘44.

And she bumped into him on the street and said that he wouldn’t recognize her (he was in a uniform then, he had a service number). I think he was already afraid. After all, she could have said that he came to blackmail us, that he was taking things from us…

Of course…

My mom somehow found out after the war what his name was and she was even going to look for him, but later, I don’t know if she didn’t have the opportunity or energy, she let him off the hook, what would she do to him? I always stress that some people helped us, that without this help I can’t imagine surviving. If it hadn’t been for these documents, if my mother hadn’t gotten a job, if it hadn’t been for those people who helped with the baptism and the fact that I had a birth certificate, if I hadn’t had an authentic name… The birth certificate was issued to an authentic name, so they couldn’t have caught us red-handed. It was impossible to survive without help! But with my mother, I never appreciated what she did in her lifetime. Not even after her death. Only a year later, when I joined the circle of the Children of the Holocaust and when everyone started talking about it. Because my whole life, I’d lived looking ahead, I never wanted to think about the past. I believed that the past is in the past! At the Tarbut, it wasn’t discussed at all either. We were prepared for an uprising, even to be HeHalutzs, to work in a kibbutz to build Israel. To be someone completely different. In the last grade, one hour of Yiddish a week was introduced, but everyone treated it that way… Because there was another Jewish school and there was a very hostile relationship between our schools, we considered the others worse, because they wanted to speak Yiddish, and we wanted to go to Israel… And we considered ourselves completely different. We never thought about the past or talked about it. Nobody asked anyone about their experiences.

HeHalutz—a Jewish settler, a pioneer in Israel.

But in the first years in Israel, it was also not to be talked about…
I read a lot about it, nobody even wanted to hear it.

And the resentment…

And the resentment: “They went like lambs to the slaughter—what else is there to say?”

And when Halina Birenbaum, she was a bit older than us, wanted to tell the stories because this is her mission, and the response she got both in Israel and Poland was: “We know, we know. But let us tell you how we drained the swamps.”

At school, we were also prepared to drain the swamps, not to recall the terrible experiences of the occupation. You didn’t talk about it, didn’t think about it, didn’t know too much… It’s not enough, I still don’t know how my grandfather and my youngest aunt, Idka, died. Because my mother never wanted to talk about it, but she knew. She knew. When I was in Israel, Aunt Lola made some kind of allusion. And I don’t know who killed my grandfather, did he die in action or in a pogrom? Did he die in Tarnów or Korczyn, because not in Krakow. Because they were with Aunt Idka somewhere outside Krakow. So they died fairly quickly at the beginning of the war, certainly no later than in ‘41, not in the Krakow ghetto. The circumstances of these deaths are unclear. I have one memory with my grandfather. When we lived in a shared apartment, I used to sit on his lap. My mom told me that my grandfather thought of my name. And my name is real. I’ve had five last names. I found it all on the internet. I kind of knew it from my mother’s stories …

I have a friend who is very good at internet searches and she told me that Krakow Jews in Tel Aviv had set up a website (www.szoroshim. org), where you can find everything about the Krakow Jews. And she went to the site and found information about my parents, about name changes, about my aunt. It turned out that when they came to Krakow after the war, she and Uncle hadn’t been married yet, they came with a child and got married in Poland. I found out where and when my father was born, what my grandfather’s name was, because I didn’t even know that. And I was able to look for my family history, follow what was recorded in black and white in documents. I had it printed and sent it to Israel to my cousin. His name is Hejman, and there was some information about the Hejmans. My brother has a copy.

And is your brother in Poland?

My brother lives in Krakow, he started a family, has had a very happy marriage. He has two grandchildren. I’m very happy. I will keep saying it. First of all, I was simply lucky to have been with my mother. After the war, my brother was born. I have his family. I got married and had a son. I have my own family: a son and two granddaughters. I am a happy person.

I imagine your family was well-off before the war…

We certainly did well. My father—a furrier with a workshop in the city center, my mother also worked. There was a nicely furnished apartment and a maid. We had this Józia, from whom we later took our last name.

You take part in the Lauder camps, you are involved in the social life of the Association of the Children of the Holocaust; you are an enthusiast of the revival of Jewish traditions in Poland. And what has your path been to the renewal of your own Jewishness?

Lauder camps—Recreation camps for young people organized by the Lauder Foundation.

First, there was the Tarbut, it was so natural, effortless. For a long time
after that, my Jewishness lay dormant. Of course, I was in solidarity with Israel all the time, and that was that. In ‘88, suddenly, my aunt came from Israel with my uncle, another uncle of mine… When I saw her, the whole past came back to me, stood before my eyes. She reminded me of my mother and Aunt Lola…

When did your mother pass away?

In ‘61, very young, she was forty-nine. My mother had awfully high blood pressure. If I went through a lot, imagine what she’d been through! She had a stroke and died a month later. When my mother died, Adaś, my brother, was young. It was just us and Father…

The other father…

The other one. He’s dead too. My aunt and uncle invited me to Israel. After the political changes in Poland, I went to Israel and they told me about the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland. That there are international conventions of saved children and I could go to one of those. For me, it was unbelievable. Meanwhile, I was trying to brush up my Hebrew. After two years of the Tarbut, I spoke fluent Hebrew; except that I always made spelling mistakes. Later, I forgot…

When I knew I was going to Israel, I asked them to send me some phrasebooks and a Hebrew-English dictionary. In Israel, I started reading signboards, I slowly learned individual words. It was September ‘89, right after Mazowiecki became the Prime Minister. I saw on Israeli television when he fainted. I was terribly upset. I’d been in “Solidarity” the whole time; I’d printed the underground newspaper.

But they never caught you…

Only once, for forty-eight hours. They caught me with the flyers when I was going on May 3 to Mass for my homeland at the Wawel Cathedral.
In Israel, I liked everything, I was delighted. But I wanted to come back. After all, I won this war with communism—right? And there was so much going on in Poland without me! I came back and started looking for the Association of the Children of the Holocaust. I started asking around. I also attended the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society meetings because I was already drawn to Jews. But I didn’t have an access point because I didn’t want to return to traditional Jewishness. There was the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society. I thought it was a path for me, the more so because Jerzy Turowicz was a member, and so was Deputy Zdrada, my friend from “Solidarity”—such great people. We had our meetings. I met Henio Halkowski there and he told me, “If you’re looking for Children of the Holocaust, you should know that they will be at the camp in Zaborów.

I got to Zaborów a day later than the others, because I was working then, something came up. But I was there. And it was a shock to me, as if I was back at the Tarbut. A Hebrew lesson here, some singing there, only Jews around. And Michael Schudrich. This was when I met Michael and Rabbi Liber. We celebrated “Tu BiShvat” with Rabbi Liber. And the community singing. That was amazing! I was back in Krakow and I was dazed. It wasn’t even a week! And I couldn’t come back to reality, I didn’t want to come back to reality. Zaborów—that was the only camp where the entire board of the Association of the Children of the Holocaust was present, including Zosia Zaks, Marysia Leszczyńska, and Bietka Ficowska. I met so many wonderful people.

Tu BiShvat—the New Year of the Trees, a minor holiday in the Jewish religious calendar.

I remember getting together with two of my friends in Krakow and they said: “What happened to you, did you fall in love?”— I did, but not with a man. I started telling them… They were delighted. Oh God, it’s great that you are going back to your roots! It was only then that I joined the TSKŻ. It used to be a regime organization, but after ’89, it became different, independent. I decided: I must be with the Jews.

Interview with Katarzyna Meloch, Śródborów, 2006