"We Are Here": Jewish Narratives of Poland's March 1968 Events

Wera Lechtman - Pediatrician, Mragow

June 26, 1967 was my birthday - I was turning 29. 

Starting at 7 a.m. people were wishing me happy birthday.  Secretaries, nurses.  I was a doctor at the city hospital and also at a home for children near Mragow.  One of the nurses brought me a flower that was very unusual in Poland: oleander.  Someone else brought me a very beautiful tea service.  The whole staff was coming up to me and giving me gifts.  I called my husband; he was a doctor too.  “Bogusz,” I said, “I feel really dumb, we have to offer these people something, some coffee at least.”

My purse was empty, I didn’t have a penny to spare; in Mragow we made very bad money.  I called my friend and she lent me some.  I ran to the store and bought some strawberries, whipping cream, coffee; we made aer cognac.[1]  And I invited the whole staff of the children’s home over for a snack.  Not a single person came.

Two weeks later, there was a telephone call.  “May I speak to the doctor?”  Some bureaucrat from the PZPR[2] gets on the line and says:  “You held a celebration of the Israeli Army’s victory.  Do you understand what that means?  What’s more, you are persuading people to emigrate to Germany.”

Polish people really were extremely happy after the Israeli victory [in the Six Day War].  Even in Mragow.  Even though it was a provincial town and I used to think “what do these people know?” 

As far as Germany goes, I never persuaded anyone to go there.  People from “indigenous” groups[3] would come to me and say their neighbors were harassing them, calling them Germans.  After all, Mragow is in the Mazurian Lakes region.  There were a lot of “indigenous” people there; different, but Poles all the same.  Whenever it would come up at coffee or around the television in the children’s home, I would explain to people who these indigenous Mazurs were, that they spoke Polish even during the war, when there was a penalty for that.  That they shouldn’t be forced out of Poland, that moving out is a tragedy for them and if they do move, it is not because Germany is better.  I urged people to read a little bit about them, to find something out about them, and not dismiss them and try to make them leave.

“Madame Doctor, you have two sins on your conscience then,” he said, and added that I should not be surprised if they threw me out of my job.  I told him that I am never surprised by anything.  He paused for a moment, then said, “Well, maybe you would consider joining the Party?”  “Sir,” I told him, “you absolutely do not understand the situation you’re in, because you don’t know my history.  First, you make two accusations against me, and now you are talking about the Party.”  “Yes,” he said, “but you like to fight for justice.”

He was right.  I was very revolutionary and I always said something other than what the authorities wanted.  It must be because when I was in my mother’s stomach, she was making revolution. 

I told him, “My father fought for justice and he ended up in Auschwitz.  And my mother came back from France after the war because she dreamed of a good, socialist Poland, and they threw her in jail.  That’s why I am telling you honestly: I never belonged to any organization in my life and I never will belong to one.  Regardless of the situation”

He backed off, got off the phone.  But later, I don’t remember when exactly, he called my boss and told him he had to fire me from my job.

My boss did not agree.  He was the director of the hospital and the head of the children’s ward.  Technically I was only part time at the hospital - 3.5 hours there and 7 in the children’s home.  In practice, I was working 7 hours in the hospital and then I would go to the children’s home for as long as it took, sometimes until the morning.  The Director called me and we spoke in French, so no one would understand.  He had told the bureaucrat - “when I get another doctor like Dr. Lechtman, I’ll fire her right away.”  “I didn’t offer any resistance,” he said.  “When you find a doctor who wants to get paid for half-time and work full time, by all means….”

I didn’t preoccupy myself with the conversation with this functionary.  Opportunists, morons - I thought - don’t deserve to be treated seriously.  And so I kept working. 

My situation was very strange.   In Mragow, aside from one tailor, I was the only Jew.  So the poor things really didn’t have anyone to be prejudiced against.  The hospital in Mragow was well-run. My husband and I had worked there for a few years; he was a specialist in internal medicine and I was a specialist in pediatrics.  The organization of the health service was good back then; once a year I was allowed to travel to Warsaw for three months of specialized training.  We lived on the grounds of the children’s home.

My husband - it’s funny that I’m talking about him in these categories because I never think of him this way - was a Pole, not a Jew.  My daughter was four at the time, and I was pregnant with my son. 

So now it’s 1968.  I went to Warsaw for my three months of training.  And just then, my daughter got sick.  They took her to the children’s hospital in Bielany.  She almost lost her sight.  At that time - I don’t know if you remember - parents were only allowed to visit their children in the hospital three times per week, at 3 pm.  I got a pass saying I could visit her every day, on the condition that I also see some of the other children.  It was an obvious choice for me.  I took a taxi to the hospital every day - not because I was so well-off, but because it was March and the student protests were making it hard to get anywhere on the bus.

On March 19, I was in Mragow.  I watched Gomulka’s speech in the Congress Hall on television.  For me it was unbelievable.  Gomulka talking about Irena Lasota, who had read out the students’ resolutions at the University of Warsaw protest, and saying her mother’s name.  It wouldn’t be proper to simply call her a Jew, but he wanted the public to know who they were dealing with and who, according to him, was organizing these protests. 

Lasota-Hirszowicz, he said.

Not totally Jewish, but Jewish-sounding.

And then he got tripped up and said “the resolution was later read out by two other … Polish students …mmm…that is, Poles…”

I was in shock.  I told my husband: our children too could one day stop being called Ligeza and become Lechtmans.

I didn’t know the last names.  I didn’t go to Jewish camp, didn’t go to the Jewish Association, didn’t have many Jewish friends.  I knew a few intellectuals of Jewish heritage who didn’t consider themselves Jews, but Poles.  They never denied - God forbid - their Jewishness, but they simply felt themselves to be Poles. 

And Gomulka in that same speech used the phrase: “two fatherlands.”  Choose which one you want.  That really hit home with me. My brother, Marcel, immediately decided to emigrate from Poland.  His friends convinced him to go to Sweden.  He didn’t know any languages, he was a nervous mess.

He went alone in September.   He had one address with him.  I left my kids with my husband in Mragow - my son was three months at that point - and went to Warsaw to say goodbye to him. We all went to Gdansk Station.  It was my mother, my father, the daughter of my mother’s friends from Austria with her fiancée who was studying in Poland.  And my brother’s friend, Lozinski, also named Marcel.  He went with my brother all the way to the border.

My mother said goodbye to Marcel, he got on the train and she fainted.  Ute, the Austrian girl, caught her quickly.  We didn’t wait for the train to leave, we just carried her to the car and went home.  My mother was devastated.  I had never seen her in that state before.  That night she was hysterical, she was broken, shouting “what have they done to me, what have they done?  Where is my son?”

I have to tell you something about her ….

That was a terrible night.  In the morning I called my husband and told him I had to stay with my mother for three days, I couldn’t leave her like that.  My mother got herself ready, and she went to work.  She was a librarian at the Committee for Household Economics.  She knew she had to carry on.  We made plans to meet for lunch.  I went to her work for lunch, and she said my husband had called, and said I should contact him immediately.  I called him back.  My son had a 40 degree fever.  I had to go back.  I told my mother, we can’t go out to lunch because I have to catch the next bus but we’ll go have a coffee and then I will send you back in a taxi.  Getting into the taxi, my mother said: “That’s right, they always leave me by myself.”  Terrible words: “They all leave me alone.”

My mother….

She got in the taxi and left.  I took the bus to Mragow and I said, “Bogusz, that’s it, I’m going to Israel, to my family, I’m not spending another day here.  Regardless of what my mother thinks, regardless of what you think.”

And Bogusz said “I told you this a long time ago.”  And it was true - after Gomulka’s speech, when I told him his children could become “Lechtmans.”  He asked me then, “So, are we going?”  But at the time it seemed strange to me, I didn’t want to leave.

This time I said: “Make up your mind for good.  Israel is not an easy country.  In Israel they don’t have warm feelings towards Poles, they hold a lot of things against you.  I don’t want you to go through what I am going through here.  That would be pointless.  I won’t hold it against you if you stay.  I would understand, it would be natural if you didn’t want to leave Poland.  And please, don’t say anything now.  Just tell me when you’ve decided.”

For two weeks we didn’t talk about it.  After two weeks he said that he had decided: we’re applying to emigrate.  At that time they still let mixed couples in [to Israel].  There was no problem.

We couldn’t submit our applications [to emigrate] together in Mragow.  In Mragow we were only registered on a temporary basis.[4]  My permanent registration was in Warsaw at my mother’s, and his was with his parents in Nowa Huta.  I resigned from my job; he didn’t - someone had to work and support the family.  I went to Warsaw and he went to Krakow. 

I told my mother: I’m taking the children and leaving.  Whether you come with or not is your decision, I’m not going to argue about it.  Everyone who knows me knows that when I make up my mind on something, there is no sense trying to change my mind. 

I went with my mother down to the police station.  We submitted our papers to go to Israel.  The officer asked my mother “Do you have your Party membership card with you?”  My mother said, “at the moment, yes.”  He said “Please don’t forget to hand that in today.”  And my mother said, “Sir, this is not my first trip to Israel.  The first time I went I was 16 years old, and do you know what difference I see?  The first time I went I had a letter of introduction from the Polish Young Communist League to the communist organization in Palestine so that they would give me a good reception.  And now - if you are taking my Party card, that’s exactly what it’s worth - worth giving back."  And she turned it in that day and immediately quit her job.

I have to tell you about her…give me a moment, turn off the tape recorder….

Okay, turn it back on.  It’s alright now. 

My mother’s family and my father’s family both went to Palestine in 1934.  My mother’s family was from Lodz, and my father’s family was from Vienna.  My parents met each other in the Communist Youth.  They had a language in common; my father spoke German and my mother spoke German as well as she did Polish.  In her home they often spoke German and she had studied for a year in Switzerland.

They fell in love.  My father was 19, my mother was 18.  They got arrested by the British[5] and thrown in prison.  The British were expelling anyone who belonged to the Communist Party from Palestine.  Those who had some other citizenship were sent back to the country they came from.  And those who had no citizenship could go where they wanted.  The British put them on a French ship.  My father had no citizenship, and my mother had Polish citizenship.  My mother’s mother, Grandmother Bialer, found out that my mother could avoid being deported to Poland if she got married.  So they got married and my mother gained the right to give up her Polish citizenship.  In 1937 they arrived in France and went to Paris.

At that time, the Spanish Civil War was going on.  My father volunteered.  He was, as my mother would tell us, a happy guy, full of enthusiasm, with an optimistic outlook on life.  And he very much wanted to fight for freedom and justice.  My mother too.  But my mother wasn’t allowed into the international brigades because she was pregnant.  With me.  So my father went through training in France and paid his own way to get to Spain.  He joined up with the Austrian-German brigade under Thalmann.  If I’m not mistaken there were a total of 26 men and three women who came to serve in Spain from Palestine. 

I was born in Paris. 

Thalmann’s brigade left Spain along with the Spanish [Republicans].  Many Spanish families were fleeing at that time with their children to southern France.  France agreed to take in the fighters and held them in camps.  My father ended up in a camp in the village of Gurs, 16 kilometers from Oloron.  My mother succeeded in getting a pass to go visit him.  I was almost a year old.  After that when friends of my father would ask whether I remembered him, I would say I don’t remember him, but I saw him.  I have a picture with him, taken in Gurs - my mother, my father and me.  My parents were together for one day and from that one day, my brother Marcel was born.  My mother was barely 21 and she had two little children. 

Then the war broke out.  The internment camps with the fighters [from the Spanish Civil War] were located on the territory of so-called “Free France” administered by the Vichy regime.[6]  Those prisoners who had citizenship were released, but those without citizenship were taken to other camps.  My father was taken to a camp in Vernet d’Ariege.   My mother arranged visas for all of us to go to Mexico.  At that time, Mexico was taking in many socialists and communists from Europe.  But my father got an order from the Party to stay in the camp, because he and others would be needed to fight in the French Resistance against the fascists.  So we didn’t leave.  And the Vichy regime decided to get rid of all the interned fighters and sent them to Auschwitz.  My father ended up in Auschwitz. 

Meanwhile we - my mother, me, and Marcel - wandered from place to place, fled, hid.  Limoges, St. Leonard de Mari, Nexon, Limoges again, Zurich.  From a young age I was never in one place for long. 

I don’t know where I’m from.  I never knew how to answer that question.

At the end of the war my mother finished a course for social workers and she started to work in the Unitarian Service Committee, a private American charity.  Have you heard of it?  They called them Unitarians.  The organization had a branch in Paris and Noel Field was the director of the main office in Geneva.  You know that name, right?  He organized a team of Polish doctors to help the refugees and former concentration camp prisoners.  Dr. Jozef Opalski was a member of the team, among others.  Initially my mother led the team, and later, when they moved into German territory, Dorothea Jones became the director - an American they sent from the USA.  Marcel and I stayed in a childrens’ home near Zurich, while my mother traveled with the team all over Europe, primarily in Germany, to the camps.  They cared for the former prisoners of the German camps. 

In 1946, the Polish government asked for their help to restart the pre-war miner’s hospital in Piekary Slaskie.  My mother went with them to Poland.  The hospital was empty, but the Americans sent equipment and they taught the locals to work in the hospital.  They brought in additional medical personnel, and the hospital started to function.  My mother worked there.  At this point there was somewhere to sleep and eat, and my mother brought us from Switzerland in the winter of 1947-48.  We started to go to Polish school.  To her chagrin, instead of studying Polish, I learned German.  This was Upper Silesia, and the Silesian kids spoke to each other in German.  Maybe not pure German, but the Silesian dialect, heavily Germanized. 

In 1949 the American organization was thrown out of Poland.  My mother lost her job.  She went to Warsaw and lived with Jacques Nowicki - my mother knew his wife from Paris, and they had worked together in the Unitarian Service Committee.  Jacques took us in. Then they threw him in jail.

I was 10 years old.  I still didn’t speak Polish well.  And I was very embarrassed by that.  There was a situation - funny from today’s perspective.  My mother sent me to the store.  I was very active, energetic.  I was supposed to buy bread, sausage, something else.  I went into the store and when I said what I wanted, everyone burst out laughing.  It really made an impact on me.  I didn’t want to speak any more in German or in Polish - only French.  It was my first language.

We went to school.  My mother got a job she liked - in the Ministry of Industry and Trade she oversaw childrens' homes.  The Secretary came to her and asked her to change her last name, because Lechtman didn’t sound good.  “In this Ministry,” he said, “there are too many people with strange last names, party members too.”  My mother declined.  “I’m very sorry, comrade,” she said, “but that is my husband’s last name, who was murdered in Auschwitz, and his wife does not have the right to change it.” 

After she got out of prison, the only thing she changed was her first name - to Antonina.  But to us she was still Tonia.  Tonia Lechtman. 

I didn’t change my name either when I got married, I stayed a Lechtman. 

My mother got an apartment.  We had our own place now.  One night we were visited by Anita Duracz.

Jakub Berman’s former secretary.[7] 

My mother met her in Switzerland.  She came into my room - I was already falling asleep - to give me a kiss goodnight.  I opened my eyes and saw this beautiful woman and I asked “Am I in heaven”?  Completely earnestly.  She was beautiful.  I fell in love with her. Honest, warm, intelligent.  She went to jail too.  But not for long.  Only two years. 

The school year ended and I went to a scouting camp by the sea.  Marcel stayed home with my mother.  And suddenly, at 5 in the morning in July 1949 the UB[8] came and my mother was arrested.  She was personally arrested by Colonel Swiatlo.[9]

Swiatlo woke up Halina Stankiewicz from two houses down so that she could take Marcel and our things.  She left her own infant at home, came running.  My mother was in shock.  Halina was in shock too.  But she did an extraordinary thing: she started packing things for us and, knowing that I was constantly reading, she packed me a few Polish books, and a lot of French books, which she knew I liked to read.  For Marcel, she packed a soccer ball - a real one.  He got it from Dorothea Jones, the director of the American charity where my mother had worked.  I don’t know how many kids in Poland at that time had a real leather ball. 

And my mother was declared the biggest American spy in Poland.

Was this the case of the Field brothers - Noel and Herman?

You know that case, right?  Noel disappeared, Herman disappeared, and so did Noel’s wife and their adopted daughter.  Noel was arrested in Prague and transferred to a prison in Budapest, and Herman, who had started looking for him, was imprisoned in Warsaw.  He did his time in the famous Department X in Miedzeszyn. 

My mother was locked up on Rakowiecka Street[10] and they made her out to be the lead organizer of U.S. spies in Poland.  And they told her right away that it was going to be the death penalty.

You know, to this day I don’t understand how someone could think of something that was simultaneously so stupid and disloyal.  My mother was a very open person, honest, sincere to everyone.  She was not even psychologically cut out to be a spy.  Why do that to her?  Why specifically did they choose her to set up a completely fictitious trial?

The Security Bureau arrested all of the Polish communists who had contact with the Fields.

I came back from scout camp, the doors to the apartment were sealed up, and the neighbors said Marcel was at Halina’s.  I went and sure enough, he was there.  Some “Dabrowszczaks”[11] who knew my father from Spain, arranged it so that first we want to a sanitarium, and from the sanitarium to a children’s home in Bierutowicz, near Karpacz.

The woman from the Dabrowszczaks who took us there there gave me the paperwork but didn’t want to go in with us.  Obviously she was afraid that her name would be taken down on some kind of list.  She left us with our suitcases by the door.  I was 11, my brother was 9 1/2.  A middle aged lady opened the door and asked us who we were.  I answered: Marcel Lechtman, Wera Lechtman.  She said: I know how to read, I’m not asking you your names, but who you are.  I thought for a few moments about how to answer.  Because who were we really?  I didn’t know.  I still don’t know.  In the end, I told her: “We are children of communists.”  In response she added in an unsympathetic tone: “Judeo-Communists.”[12]

That was the first time in my life I had heard that term. And it didn’t bother me at all.  Maybe that’s strange, but I didn’t understand what it was about.  For me it was just a sort of nickname, one of many, later I would hear more, and I thought that it was just normal.  One person has this nickname, another person has something different.  Besides, I had something else on my mind.  I had become the main caretaker of my brother.  He was a small child, curly-haired, he had little brown eyes - he was a beautiful child, he made an impression on everyone, but he was totally different.  Quiet, withdrawn, shy.  And he was picked on all the time.  I always had to stick up for him.  At the children’s home in Bierutowice there was a large group of boys who had lived through the Warsaw Uprising, who hadn’t been to school in years.  It’s not that they were demoralized, but they were disoriented.  Without families, without basic material things.  And Marcel had a soccer ball.  Because of that soccer ball there were nonstop fights.  They constantly took the ball from him, beat him up.  And the other kids would come running to me: “Wera, Wera, they’re beating up Marcel.”  And Wera would come running and fight with the boys. Because of that ball everyone knew us.  And I was always bruised up. 

The children’s home in Bierutowice ended up being closed, there was some kind of scandal discovered.  They wanted to divide us up - send my brother to a children’s home, and me to Wroclaw, where they had a home for children in fifth grade and up.  I fought for us to stay together at the home in Wroclaw.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t for long.  They took Marcel in the end. They took him to a home in some village and when he finished sixth grade, when he was 13, they sent him to basic mining school.  Presumably as a reward for good grades in science, because he got all 5’s.  He was still small, curly-haired.  In mining school the kids taunted him for being a Jew.  And they drank vodka.  I’m not sure how it happened, some kind of miracle, but somehow he didn’t go completely bad.  And he learned various things, ways to defend himself.  Two were most important. First, he would say he wasn’t a Jew.  And he made up that his mother was dead.  Which was somewhat true.  For us, she was not alive.  After all, we didn’t know what had happened to her.  No one officially told us that she was under arrest, that she was charged with something, that she was in jail.

She was in jail for seven years.

No - five years and three months.

Who was in her cell?

The longest time was with Halina Zakrzewska.  Over two years.  The composition of the cell was always changing.  Halina was from the AK [Armia Krajowa or “Home Army”],[13] and before the war she studied Polish and theater in Lwow.  By profession she was a playwright but during the war she fought in the Home Army, she was a high-ranking intelligence officer.  Her husband too. Later there were others - Ewa Piwinska, Wanda Podgorska, Hedda Bartoszek.

Podgorska was Gomulka’s secretary.

She was a lawyer by profession and she was afraid that whatever she said, it would harm Gomulka. They used to say that she did her time for Gomulka, not Field.  Ewa Piwinska did her time for Gomulka too.  Wanda couldn’t tolerate the torture, she became mentally ill.  Hedda Bartoszek, who was Ewa’s sister-in-law, was also mentally ill.

Ewa Piwinska went through some terrible things in her life.  Majdanek, Ravensbruck.  After the war they sent her to a diplomatic post in Paris - she knew some French - and she had a daughter, Marta.  It was then, in 1945, that my mother met her.  That’s actually not a bad story.  As I mentioned, my mother worked for the Unitarian Service Committee.  She went to Paris on business and suddenly - can you imagine - she was arrested for staying illegally in France from 1937-1943.  They threw her in the same prison with Gestapo collaborators.  Someone told the Polish Embassy and Gienia Lozinska, along with Ewa Piwinska, got her released.  That’s when my mother got a Polish passport. 

Later, my mother returned to Poland, and Ewa was set to Rome.  She had a second daughter, Krysia.  They recalled her to Poland and on the way, they arrested her.  Krysia was a month old. First Ewa was in the legendary Miedzeszyn prison for three months, then she was transported to the prison on Rakowiecka Street.  When Ewa was brought to my mother’s cell, they both protested that they couldn’t share a cell.   Do you know why?  Because they knew each other!  Before the war there was a rule that you couldn’t put to people into a cell who knew each other.  But that was before the war.  On Rakowiecka Street they spent two years together.  Krysia, Ewa’s daughter, died.  In the 1960s, Anka Gecow showed me documentation of why she died.  It was terrible.  I don’t want to talk about it.

Anka Gecow was also imprisoned, but for a short time.  She was a doctor, she got her medical degree in Zurich.  Leon, her husband, died in prison.  He was the leader of the Polish Red Cross.  People said he couldn’t withstand the investigation, he fell into a depression, and died.  Maybe he killed himself?  They both fought in Spain in the Dabrowski Brigade and they knew Herman Field.  They were true friends to my mother.  Many of my mother’s friends were in prison at that time.

Szymon Jakubowicz, Jozef Held - communists from France.

“Zhozef,” to us he was always “Zhozef.”  Oh, how we loved him.  Before he was arrested he wanted to marry my mother.  Dr. Szymek Lis, another friend of my mother's, was imprisoned too. 

Later, my mother decided that everything that happened during the Stalinism was a period of errors and excesses.[14]  It doesn’t matter.  None of them is alive anymore.

But I was very lucky.  In Wroclaw at the children’s home I met good, honest people.  It’s a unique story.  Thanks to the nuns there I was able to get in contact with my grandparents in Israel.  Thanks to a Swiss woman whose husband had also been arrested, I was able to find out what had happened to my mother.  One day I’ll tell you all that.

My mother was released in October 1954.  As “innocent.”  You see, after more than five years in prison it turned out that she was innocent.  That they were all innocent. 

You know how she looked?  Imagine what a woman looks like who hasn’t washed her hair properly in over five years.  Not to mention her teeth.  Just basic hygiene, clothing.  Can you imagine what her clothes looked like that she sat in from the time of her arrest?  They were in tatters.  Two prison guards took her to a department store on the Aleje Jerozolimskie[15] so she could pick out new ones. 

Our apartment was gone.  They took her to Halina, who we stayed with for a while after my mother’s arrest.  That was the only address they had and my mother didn’t want to give them any others.  They rang the doorbell with no notice and told her: “You’re taking her in.”  She was terrified.  My mother tried to reassure her:  “Dear, they told me I am innocent, you can take me in, I’m innocent.” 

After two weeks Halina asked my mother: “Wouldn’t you like to set things straight with your children?”  I already knew from one of the caretakers at the children’s home that Field had been released.  So I was not surprised when my mother called me in Wroclaw, at the children’s home.  I asked “When can you come here?”  And she said that she would call again.  Silence.  My mother didn’t call again for another three weeks.  I became depressed, I thought something had happened again.  After a few more days, she called again. 

She called my brother too.  The director of the home called him to the phone.  Marcel went to him and said: “I have no mother.”  And he put down the receiver.

In the winter, the security agency sent us all to a state-run hotel in Krynica.  By this time it was the beginning of 1955.  My mother came for me first, then for Marcel, and together we went to Krynica.  My mother looked … well…different.  We remembered her as a young, beautiful woman.  After all, she was only a little over thirty years old.  But what we saw was a very old woman, terribly hunched over.  My mother, who always walked straight as an arrow, was completely hunched over.  It was nothing to me, but her appearance scared my brother. 

I don’t know why the security agency sent us to Krynica - as a reward?  As compensation?  They told my mother that it was so that we could become close to each other again.  It was the worst possible idea.  Complete lack of understanding.  Going to the children’s home was not as big of a shock for me as staying in a luxury hotel.  We were kids who for the past several years had not used a knife or fork.  In the children’s home we ate only with spoons.  We didn’t have appropriate clothing.  And all around us were women from wealthy homes, elegant, made up.  They looked at us like freaks. 

I felt terrible.  I couldn’t stand it.  After a week I told my mother that I had a Latin exam and I had to return to the children’s home to brush up. 

No, my mother was not a stranger to me, but the situation was unnatural.  To this day, I don’t like hotels.  That’s the last thing you’ll ever talk me into.

I went back to Wroclaw.  My mother was supposed to return to Warsaw, and Marcel to his boarding school.  But he said he wasn’t going back.  My mother tried to convince him that he should, because after all she didn’t have an apartment, she was drifting from friend to friend.  “Listen,” she told him, “you left your notebooks at boarding school.”  “I don’t want them.”  “But you left your clothes and I have nothing for you.”  “No,” he said, “I’m not going back.”  And my mother took him with her on the train.  He rode to Warsaw straight from Krynica, with nothing. 

My mother finally got an apartment.  It was completely empty.  The furniture from our old apartment had been taken by the UB after my mother’s arrest and placed in the cellars of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, where it was either stolen or destroyed.  We found a table, a couple chairs. 

My mother had to get herself together somehow.  They tried to heal her psychologically, which was an absurd, failed experiment.  But it’s not important.  She also didn’t have any money, obviously. 

Herman Field got $50,000 in reparations from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. 

But he was an American.  Poles didn’t receive anything for the first few months after being released from jail.  Later, my mother started getting money here and there - an officer from the prison authority would come by and give her some money for her troubles, but she never knew how much and when. 

My mother returned to work in the Ministry of Industry and Trade.  Briefly.  At that same time, they opened the Committee for Home Economics.  They convinced her that she should join then as a librarian.  They surrounded her with sincerity.  The doctors said she could work half-time.  She worked hard there and they loved her.

Now we all lived together again.  Marcel and I returned to our old school.  The classmates accepted him very nicely.  But not the director.  My brother was never good at science.  And instead of helping him, instead of giving him some extra lessons, they left him alone.  He couldn’t make up the deficits.  Ewa Piwinska, a Polonist by education, tried to lift him up.  Nothing worked, and he dropped out of school.  Then he went for a class on technical drawing, and it turned out he was very good; he got a job helping engineers on their Master’s Degree projects, and then building construction projects.  It was good.

In 1956 there was the “thaw” and former prisoners from Auschwitz started to return to Poland.  Hermann Langbein, leader of the International Auschwitz Committee, came as well - he was a friend of my father going back to his school days.  He wanted to find us.  A few of them went to Premier Cyrankiewicz.[16]  Cyrankiewicz was also an Auschwitz survivor.  “What’s going on with Tonia?” they asked right away.  They thought that he knew, that he was aware of the facts.  Cyrankiewicz was one of my father’s closest friends in Auschwitz.  Because when my father first got sent by transport to Auschwitz, he first got sent to dig coal, but those men who dug coal on their knees wore out quickly without nutrition.  So my father quickly found himself on the list for the gas.  Hermann Langbein, who was in charge of the sick room, found him on the list of people to be gassed.  He pulled him out and convinced the S.S. doctor to send him to the treatment ward.  They started treating him and my father came up with the idea that he needed to learn Polish.  He was an optimist, and he knew that if this all turned out alright, then my mother would want to return to Poland.  My mother was, after all, a Pole and she missed Poland.  My Father knew that she never wanted to leave Poland and that it was her family who forced her to go to Palestine in the first place.  Cyrankiewicz, then, was the one who taught my father Polish in the camp.  But it didn’t work.  My father was killed in a death march.  There are different versions of the story.  We know he was alive as late as January 18, 1945.

Cyrankiewicz knew nothing about us.  They were surprised by this.  For them it seemed obvious that he must have spent all this time looking after Tonia and her children.  “And,” they asked him “did Tonia go after her arrest to be with her parents and in-laws in Israel?”  Cyrankiewicz said “No, but she’ll go.”  And Mr. Langbein called my mother and asked when she wanted to leave for Israel because Premier Cyrankiewicz was ready to give passports and tickets for the whole family.  My mother was in shock.

One again I was away at some camp.  My mother was always pushing me to these different camps, she didn’t know what to do with me during vacations.  She called the head of the camp and told them that I must immediately return to Warsaw to get my passport.  I was 18 by that point. 

The next day, the director of Cyrankiewicz’s office called my mother and told her that the Premier had just learned that I was 18, and therefore certainly must have passed my high school exams, and in light of that did I need any help getting into any universities.  My mother responded that no, thank you, my daughter already passed her exams and was accepted to the Academy of Medicine.

We received our passports and suddenly my mother told my brother: You come with me next time, but this time, it will just be Wera.  I was surprised, I didn’t know why.   But I didn’t ask her.  I was the type of rebel that never asks questions. 

We flew to Israel via Vienna.  At the time in Vienna there were celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.  We were immediately surrounded by friends of my father.  We were shocked that he had so many.  They invited us to official parades and when we left after four days, they gave us presents. 

On the plane to Tel Aviv my mother spent the whole time instructing me: remember, remember, your grandmother is from a bourgeois family, don’t ask her for a teaspoon, just go and get it.  Remember to look at who is eating what, and if someone is missing something, get up and offer it to them.  My mother was trying to raise me on that flight, transmit all the information that she didn’t pass along all those prior years. 

The airport in Tel Aviv was tiny and both families were standing on the balcony.  My God, there were so many of them!  All of a sudden I saw what a large family I had.  My mother’s brother and sister, their spouses, my grandparents on my mother’s side and father’s side, aunts, sisters of my father.  And they were all standing on the balcony to greet us. 

My grandmother leaped up to give me a teaspoon, my grandfather hopped around me just to talk to me.  It was a very happy visit.  I had a family.  Do you know what that means, to have a family?  It’s the beginning and end of everything.

In Israel at the same time as us was Anita Duracz with her husband, Jurek.  They sat on the balcony with my mother and discussed the matters of this world.

That it would be perfect from now on?

That the worst was over.  And would not come back.  Anita was similar to my mother in terms of her thinking.  That’s how it was - what can I say?

I went with my mother to a kibbutz outside of Nazareth, where our cousins lived.  My mother had a gall bladder attack.  This was her third attack.  The first one she had in jail.  It struck me how that must have felt in jail.  She was running around  out of pain.  The room at the kibbutz was quite a bit bigger than the cell.  She was running around in a very regular rectangular pattern.  She gritted her teeth and she ran.  An ambulance came and took her to a hospital in Tel Aviv. 

In the end I found out why my mother left Marcel in Warsaw.  As we were getting closer to the time of our return to Poland, everyone started to persuade us that we should stay in Israel.  And then she would say, calmly, with a face that I knew which meant there could be no further discussion, that we couldn’t stay because Marcel was waiting for us in Warsaw.  She foresaw the situation and was afraid that Marcel and I together would force her to stay in Israel.  But for the life of her she didn’t want to live outside of Poland.

But in Poland . . .

I know, I know…

. . . there was nothing good waiting for her. 

Let’s take a break.  Turn off the tape recorder….

My mother…my mother viewed herself as Polish.  She was tied to Poland primordially.  It was the one country in which she wanted to live.  She knew Polish literature, history, like few others.  Actually her favorite poet was Gotthold Lessing, the 18th-Century German poet, but she could recite whole verses of Polish poetry from memory.  She learned many poems in prison.  For four years in prison they had no books, magazines.  So they taught each other whatever they remembered from school.  They learned from each other.

But you could have stayed [in Israel].

No, no - without my mother I wouldn’t have stayed.  I wouldn’t do that to her.  Never.

We returned to Poland.  October [‘56] [17]was starting.  It was incredible.  I went to the Dean of my school because when we left for Israel, I had asked for a leave of absence and they gave me two months.  The Dean said it was good that I had come back, and asked if I would be able to make up the material I had missed.  I told him I would try and, having passed my high school exams under worse circumstances, I would figure it out this time too.  Because if I didn’t, I understood that they would throw me out of school.

Then there was a student meeting in a classroom at the Warsaw Polytechnic.  I had just met this classmate, a friend, very sincere, tall, handsome, a student at the Polytechnic, and I went with him.  And with a friend of his.  We were standing on a balcony.

There was a crowd of students.  And suddenly I heard some anti-Semitic slurs.  And how!  It was about Jaworska, who was the head of the Union of Polish Youth.[18] 

I told you that before, I never felt personally affected when I would hear something anti-Semitic.  It’s there, too bad, it doesn’t affect me, not my problem.

Suddenly, it became my problem.  It was scary.  People started looking around to see who was who.  I felt threatened.  Not so much physically, more emotionally.  Down below they started beating someone.

And that was the first time I heard someone say that it was time to give the Eagle back its…

Crown?[19]

Yes, yes.  And awful shouts of: “Jews to Palestine!”

It was terrible.  My friends were more concerned than we were at first.  We were both still laughing, it hadn’t hit home yet.  They formed a circle around us - my friend and four other guys I didn’t know before this - and they got us off the balcony, walked us outside.  They invited us for coffee.  Later we became good friends.

[After March '68] all of a sudden everything came back to me after 13 years.  I wanted to be in Israel.  Nowhere else.  And can you imagine - I had all the paperwork filled out and you know surprise fate had in store for me?  They wouldn’t let us leave.  There was a directive that mixed couples were not allowed to leave Poland.  Let them stay.  Terrible situation.  Bogusz was in Mragow, I was with the children in Warsaw, without a job.  What’s more, I had brought the housekeeper with me from Mragow because I was sure that in a month, two months at the most, we would be leaving and I had to pack everything, take care of the formalities.

Packing was a nightmare.  We had to make a catalog of shirts, bras, underwear.  List all of our books, and those that were published before 1945 had to be legitimized, meaning we had to get a permit to remove them.  I was running all over.  I had some silver, which my grandmother to our misfortune had brought me from Israel as a present a few years earlier.  She came one time - Grandfather Bialer was no longer alive, and I made her visit Poland.  And besides silver she give an extra gift - a little vase, French, from the Gallego factory, which specialized in recreating antiques.  My grandfather collected them, and each of his children got some piece of Gallego.  We didn’t get permission to take it.  My mother gave it to the National Museum in Warsaw on the condition that it be displayed as a gift of the Bialer family.  I don’t know what happened to it.  Today it’s worth its weight in gold, they don’t make them any more.

And so we didn’t leave.  We appealed every three months.  I went from office to office and I yelled - at the Ministry of Internal Affairs too - that I demanded my passport, that they had no right to deny me. 

My son needed medical care.  He was born without an ulnar bone in his arm.  Something had to be done and the doctors in Poland had no ideas.  They said that the best thing to do would be to get medical advice from abroad.  My daughter needed to be seen too.  Margaret Locher - who I call my Swiss mother - came to Poland and brought me an invitation for examination and treatment for my children at the University of Zurich.  I had my passport denied again.

I looked for work.  I couldn’t get any.  I went to the health service and I was not polite, I was aggressive.  I said that I was looking for temporary work because I was waiting to leave for Israel and I had nothing to live on.  For my husband too - because is it normal that the children are here, and he is off in Mragow?  The woman [at the health service] was unusually kind.  “Of course, naturally, I’ll find something, for your husband too.”  “His permanent place of residence is in Krakow,” I warned her.  “It’s no problem, I’ll see what I can do.”

And she did.  I got a job at the Boduen children’s home.

Someone suggested that instead of a permanent passport, I should apply for a tourist passport to Switzerland for my children’s medical treatment.  I got a summons to appear at the Mostowski Palace.[20]  For eight hours they scrutinized me.

You know what they asked about?  My Jewish contacts.  Funny.  And what they were saying in Jewish circles about various events in Poland.  At that time, early 1971, the wool workers in Lodz were on strike.  They were fighting for an end to the price increases announced under Gomulka.  First Premier Jaroszewicz declared that the price increase would be maintained, and then overnight it was overturned.  That morning at eight in the morning I came to the Mostowski Palace.  They asked what the Jewish community thought about it.  I had to laugh - we had been watching The Forsyte Saga on television, it’s my favorite book.

“What community are you asking about,” I asked.  They said, “Well, the Jewish [Social-Cultural] Association.”  I told them “I have been there once in my life, in 1957, when I brought some friends who were visiting from Israel there because they were supposed to spend the night.”  “And your student stipend - where did you get it then, if not the Jewish Association?”  I told them: “From the Premier.  I was one of a few and I got it because I deserved it.  My father died in Auschwitz and my mother spent five years in jail even though she was innocent.  And that was the stipend I lived off of.”

After two days, I got a tourist passport to Switzerland for my children’s medical treatment.  I don’t know what it was that caused them to let me go.  Because they weren’t stupid and they knew that I was leaving and never coming back.  I left my husband and mother, took my children, and left Poland. 

You know who met me at the station in Vienna?  This was another major experience for me.  Almost the entire Central Committee of the Austrian Communist Party.  Friends of my father.  The world really is incredibly complicated.  To understand it you have to learn all the nuances.  I told them, my father’s friends, that I was traveling to Switzerland temporarily because my plan was to emigrate permanently to Israel.  They didn’t like that at all but they had to swallow that bitter pill.  The greatest enemies of Communism were always the Zionists, and to them, Israel was Zionist.  Many of my mother’s friends from western Communist parties did not want to forgive her either for emigrating to Israel.

In Switzerland I waited four months for my mother and my husband.  Dr. Opalski, an old friend from the Unitarian Service Committee, drove my mother to the border - you see, those were friendships for life. 

My husband stayed in Poland. Only at the very end of her life did my mother tell me what happened.  They called Bogusz in to the Security Service[21] and ordered him to sign a declaration that he would not make any further applications to leave Poland.  He signed the form and only then did they allow my mother to emigrate.  He didn’t get a passport for four years, until we divorced.  The rest is unimportant.

It is important.

Well, maybe one thing.  In 1991 I planned a trip to France.  My mother was in worse and worse condition.  I invited my brother and the three of us took a trip through Paris and all the places where we had been. 

First we went to Oloron, the area in the south of France where my mother moved after the war broke out, to be closer to my father, and there had been terrible hunger.  Then to a farm near Montauban, not far from Vernet d’Ariege, because my father had been sent to a camp in Vernet.  It was terrible there too.  And then we went to Limoges.  Half a century earlier my mother had brought us to a children’s home that was started by Hanna Grunwald, a German psychologist, while she went to look for work.  She got sick and when she came to visit us, Hanna Grunwald hired her to work for her.  On the condition that she wouldn’t meet with us. 

Then the Vichy Government ordered that all Jews in Vichy-controlled territories had to be settled in particular places.  Hanna Grunwald had to give the children back to their parents; only French children could stay.  We were joined by a little four year old girl, Nanni, who had no one.  My mother took care of her and now she had three children.  We moved to St. Leonard de Mari.  We got evicted from the garage of the Limousin family.  A French police officer came to take us to a temporary camp in Nexon.  That was where they gathered all the Jews from Vichy territory.  Everyone from that camp was sent by freight cars to Auschwitz.  My mother did not know what Auschwitz was.  I think most people didn’t.  The woman whose garage we were living in proposed that my mother leave her children there, said she would gladly take care of us, and that my mother should go to the transport on her own.  The police officer told my mother: “Under these conditions people don’t separate from their children.  Are you sure you have no husband with you?”  My mother told him “I don’t, but we are going to the camp, and my husband is in the camp.”  And he said “It’s not that simple.”  Nanni, my faux-sister, stayed with the woman, because she was not listed in my mother’s documents, and we went with the policeman to the camp in Nexon.  We were in Nexon for two days.  Everyone was packed in the transports for Auschwitz, but we were saved by a French police officer.  It was probably the policeman from St. Leonard who asked him to do it.  He took us from the barracks, put us in his Jeep and brought us to the station.  Once again we rode to Limoges.  We hid in the children’s home. And then with the help of some good people we started our journey toward the border with Switzerland.  My mother wanted to hide us somewhere; she asked a priest to help her.  She promised to pay him.  But her gave her good advice:  go to the border, but not by yourself.  If the Swiss catch an adult, they return them to France, but they let children through.  He helped her get through to Switzerland.  I’ll tell you how sometime.  Because it was not simple.  We ended up in a refugee camp.  The children were really suffering; many children died in the camp from disease and poor conditions.  Margaret Locher, a Swiss woman, an exceptional woman, bought a house and with the help of the Swiss Croix Rouge she opened a children’s home bear Zurich and took in about 10 children from the camp.  Including me and Marcel.  She also smuggled Nanni over the border from France.  We were all finally living in good conditions.  We stayed in that home for almost four years.    

My mother was deeply affected by this.  Our mother, I should say.  Marcel is always mad at me that I say “my” mother.

So [when we returned] our mother looked at these places as though she was seeing them for the first time.  She discovered that these towns and villages were very beautiful.  Because earlier she hadn’t even noticed.  She only remembered that she was abused, that it was dangerous, that she was sick, lost, and unsure of what was to come.  I wanted to show her at the end of her life, that was had been in some special places.  She died a few years later.

And that’s it.     

[1]      Alcoholic beverage made on the basis of mixing grain alcohol with egg yolks that have been blended with ultrafine sugar. 

[2]      Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (“Polish Unified Workers’ Party”) - official name of the Communist Party in Poland.

[3]      In certain areas of Poland, such as the Mazurian Lakes region, there are/were small populations of people who considered them ethnically distinct descendants of earlier Germanic tribes.  These populations were viewed with suspicion particularly after the war for their “German” ancestry.

[4]      In communist Poland, each citizen was required to be “registered” to a permanent address that could be changed only with official approval.

[5]      Pre-war Palestine was under British Mandatory rule.

[6]      The Vichy regime was a nominally independent Nazi client state that governed portions of southern France that were not directly occupied by the Nazis.

[7]      A member of the post-war Polish Politburo, considered an ardent Stalinst.  Among other responsibilities he controlled the Security Police, a state organ of repression, and led the persecution of former underground army members. 

[8]      Urzad Bezpieczenstwa or “Security Bureau” - internal security police that functioned during the Stalinist era (1944-56) in Poland.

[9]      Vice-Director of the UB.

[10]    Location of the internal security service headquarters.

[11]    Name of a battalion of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

[12]    Zydokomuna (a conflation of the words Jewish and Communism) appears frequently in post-war Polish anti-Semitism, representing the concept that Jews imposed Communism on Poland and/or controlled the Communist government.

[13]    Armia Krajowa, the Polish underground army that fought against the German occupation from 1939-1945.  Former AK members were subject to repression by the Communist authorities who viewed them as a threat to Communist authority.

[14]    Euphemistic expression commonly used by post-Stalinist communist authorities to distance themselves from the brutality of the Stalinist era in Poland.

[15]    One of the main thoroughfares of central Warsaw.

[16]    Premier of the Polish People’s Republic from 1947-52 and 1954-70.

[17]    The so-called “October Thaw” in 1956 was a short-lived period following Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” admitting and condemning Stalinist excesses.  The speech was viewed as a potential sign of liberalization in the totalitarian Eastern Bloc regimes.  There was a short period of increased press and academic freedom in Poland followed by a stiffening of government control. 

[18]    Helena Jaworska (b. 1922) was a Communist Party parliamentarian and head of the Union of Polish Youth, a party organ for young members modeled on the Soviet Komsomol. 

[19]    Prior to the communist era, the Polish coat of arms and flag featured an eagle with a crown.  The Polish People’s Republic removed the crown from the image of the eagle.  Restoring the crown to the eagle was a symbolic rejection of communism. 

[20]    Headquarters of the Warsaw Citizen’s Militia (MO), equivalent to the city police.

[21]    Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa or “Security Service” was the successor to the Stalinist UB and functioned as an internal police and intelligence agency.