26

Nate Hall

Memoir of the Dying Pole

Cold. Freezing cold. Every day I wake up and try to remember warmth. Its hard; its been so long that the idea of not freezing seems impossible. The only thing that fights the cold is the exhaustion. I dont know how long Ive been in this godforsaken hell on Earth, but the day I leave Norlisk will be the day I die. I will probably die in the mine; one moment slaving away at rocks as I have been for years, the next buried underneath them. The notion doesnt frighten me anymore. Ive seen death; I know its ugly face. Ive seen it in the ashes of my city, in the sarcophagus of Warsaw.Im writing this memoir by moonlight in the Gulag. Ive been here since the Red Army captured me back in October of 1944. While it may be presumptuous to assume my own storys significance, I believe Ive seen the worst of human nature, and that gives me purpose to detail it. My story becomes history when put on paper, and while life has been tempestuous, history will be glorified. Igor, a man who shares a name with my grandfather, smuggled the pen and journal into the camp. I promised him my assistance in completing his quota next week and he used his connections to get them to me. Igor was a Russian, while I was a Pole, yet here we were swinging the same pick axe, the same numbers needing be fulfilled for quota. We were equals in our squalor, despite being enemies in our cultures. I speak just enough Russian from my years at the University to communicate with him, yet I will never call him my friend.The wind is driving through the sparse planks of our barracks walls. Across the room a fight breaks out between two wide-framed Russian men. The usually swears of a brawling Russian are replaced with grunts and snarls, these men have become animals and self-preservation has dictated an ultimatum for the survival of the fittest. More yelling ensues as guards come into the putrid-smelling, dimly lit room and begin beating the two men senseless. For good measure, they beat the men around them, kicking prisoners who fall to the floor in order to remind them of their sub-human status. I must hide my papers before the guards steal them from me.To be a Pole has meant many things over the course of my life. The icy water of the Vistula still flows through my veins, while the blood of my people still soaks the dirt. I was born in my familys home on May 4, 1914. Every year my family and friends would celebrate the day before my birthday, Constitution Day. To me, it seemed as though memorializing a two-hundred year old piece of paper overshadowed my existence, but my mother used to tell me that the Poles were simply getting ready for the main event. Kazimierz mother would tell me, The Constitution only lasted for a year, and youve lasted for five! I pray to God that you last another five! She was a hardy woman: stout and stern, always ready to brandish her large wooden spoon in the event of her childrens disobedience. Wioletta was a devout woman and while time has changed my religious thinking, she raised me to be a good, Catholic boy. I grew up attending mass under the twin spires of St. Florians Cathedral, impatiently fidgeting to the stories of hellfire and divine retribution. Little did I know that God would unleash his fury upon the Warsaw.We lived on the Eastern bank of the Vistula River, in the neighborhood known as Saska Kpa. I had an eventful childhood growing up in Praga. While I was born during the Great War, I remember very little of it besides the day Poland became free. My father had held me on our front steps as we watched the demoralized, Soviet occupiers finally leave the domain of us Poles. We despised them and their miserable, chaotic homeland.During my childhood, Id often race my brother Piotr across the Poniatowski bridge, our sister Michalina waiting on the other side to determine a winner. Piotr would always cheat in these races, pushing me as we ran in an attempt to make me slip on the icy bridge. During one such scuffle, Piotr fell and knocked out his front tooth. We tried to hide Piotrs missing tooth from our parents, but my father quickly caught on when the normally garrulous child suddenly had nothing to say. Lucjan Lewandowski had always been an observant, charismatic man. His attention to detail served him well in his work as a lawyer. In 1905, Lucjan had seen my mother reading Eugene Onegin, and recalling his classical Russian schooling (as was mandated in Polish schools by the tsar), recited a sappy, romantic Pushkin poem to win over my mothers heart. During the summer of 1920, Piotr and I were sprinting across the bridge to get home. School had gotten out early that day and we were excited to play outside now that the ice had finally melted. As we neared the end of the bridge, we could see our father standing on the steps outside our front door with a solemn, worried look across his face. Piotr and I immediately began apologizing, assuming that we had made a mistake and trying to save ourselves some of the punishment heading our ways. Father waved our apologies aside and explained the situation to us. Boys, I know that sometimes you enjoy playing as soldiers and fighting pretend wars. But real war is coming, and its not as fun as youd like to think. We were immediately sobered and terrified. The Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, led by the evil and terrible Commander Tukhachevsky. Panic gripped the streets; stores reserves were bought out, as Poles feared the oncoming siege and its consequences on their daily lives. Rumors flew regarding the disastrous defeats suffered by our Polish army and the inhumanity of living inside the non-Christian Soviet Union. Piotr, Michalina and I were forbidden from leaving the house and we sat waiting in the parlor for the oncoming apocalypse to arrive. We were convinced that the boredom would kill us before the war got to Warsaw. It wasnt until August 12, 1920 that we began to hear the booms of artillery and crackles of gunfire. Mechanical thunder and lightning pounded Warsaw and we could do nothing but sit in our basement praying that the Red Army didnt find us. The Soviet offensive happened right down the street from our house, and from our basement hideaway we could hear bullets shattering windows, lodging themselves into the walls of our home. We knew nothing about what was happening outside, but were preparing for life under a new empire. Grandpa Igor had told us horrible stories about the brutality of life under the Russians during the 19th century and we feared the revival of such hostility. Gunfire ripped through the silence of the night and paranoia grasped each of my family members. After a week and a half of fighting, our food reserves were very low. We were surviving on very little, and my siblings and I began to shrivel in size. Little did we know of the Miracle at the Wisa[footnoteRef:1] taking place outside, and the glorious victory that would be achieved by Pisudski and Polish forces. The defending Polish troops had smashed the demonic Red Army, successfully defending Warsaw by way of a flanking maneuver and crushing the retreating Soviets in a series of battles[footnoteRef:2]. The celebrations were glorious as Pisudski was heralded as the savior of a Polish nation facing certain annihilation. I ate so much kielbasa during the festivities that I doubled my weight in a few days. [1: Thomas Fiddick, The Miracle of the Vistula, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 45, No. 4 (UChicago, 1973) p. 626-643.] [2: Fiddick, The Miracle of the Vistula, P. 626-643.]

Those were some of the most proud moments to be a Pole. Id always known myself to be a Pole with the word representing the image of my homeland. We were a resilient group of people, beset on all sides by historic enemies such as the Russians and Germans. My neighborhood, Praga, was not homogenous however. Many Jewish families lived in the area and played important roles in the community. One such family, the Rubensteins, were family friends and Id often come home to my father and Mr. Rubenstein smoking their pipes and discussing recent controversial legal cases. Although the Rubensteins wore yarmulkes and ate on a strict kosher diet, their family was very similar to ours in the way they acted towards each other. Mrs. And Mr. Rubenstein often bickered, as did my parents. The Rubenstein Children, Jakub and Abram would sometimes break into fistfights, as did Piotr and I. In truth, the Rubensteins were as Polish as the Lewanowskis. Jakub Rubenstein and I had been best friends since the day we met. While we went to different schools and learned different things, we had entirely similar interests. Both of us were Polonia Warsaw fanatics, and wed often talk about the football matches after school, reciting statistics that wed read in the papers and arguing over who was the best player on the team. Wed listen to broadcasts of the games on weekends, and every year on Jakubs birthday, Mr. Rubinstein would take us to Konwiktorska Street, where the Black Shirts, played to rabidly cheer for our favorite team. Fans around us would often heckle Mr. Rubinstein for his Kippur, but it never seemed to faze him. I think he had grown used to the jeers over the years.Another favorite pastime of Jakub and Is was loitering in the Brdno cemetery. When we were teenagers, wed wander the tombstones looking for the most Jewish names that we could find. Wed have deep conversations about life and religion, philosophizing about what made us different if we acted so similarly? Its tradition, Jakub would explain. Your dad and your dads dad, and your dads dads dad all lived according to a resurrected Communists cryptic metaphors, whereas my ancestors all wore funny hats and sacrificed children! They were clearly other differences between us. Although our families were close, we existed in different communities. The Rubensteins went to Temple on Saturday, while Lewandowskis attended mass on Sunday. Jakub spoke Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, whereas I only spoke Polish and specks of Russian. If there was one thing for sure, it was that I much preferred the Rubensteins bagels to the Lewandowskis Chleb[footnoteRef:3]. [3: Maria Balinska, The Bagel, (Yale, 2008)]

In May 1926, Jakub and I were standing near a light post next to the Vistula watching history in the making. The legend himself, Jzef Pisudski stood opposite President Stanisaw Wojciechowski in what could only be described as a standoff. A chilly wind was blowing off the river, as the two Polish power players negotiated the fate of the newly reborn countrys government[footnoteRef:4]. There was tension in the air as Poland stood on the precipice of conflict for the third time in my young life. Warsaw collectively held its breath when Pisudski stormed away. It was true that the Sejm had been a mess; power was constantly shifting as Polish government struggled mightily to gain its bearings. Yet war seemed so drastic for the majority of us Poles who had witnessed devastation at the hands of foreign invaders. On the 11th, a state of emergency was declared in Warsaw as a full Coup dtat took place. As he had done six years before, my father ushered our family into the basement. Just like when the Soviets had come, Pisudski had captured the Praga neighborhood, and was preparing to cross the bridge right down the street from my home. We were scared and confused. The fighting of 1920 had lasted two weeks, who knew how long this battle could take? Fighting began during the night across the river. We could hear gunfire throughout the night from our basement shelter. Michalina cried, her boyfriend had deserted his post in order to fight for Pisudskis rebel army and she feared for his life. Her constant sobbing made already strained nerves short-circuit, and my father silenced her with the back of his hand. We would find out the next day that the young man was dead. [4: Joseph Rothschild, The Ideological, Political, and Economic Background of Pilsudski's Coup D' Etat of 1926, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 78, No. 2, (Academy of Political Science, 1963), pg. 224-244]

Life was not much different after the coup. As the new prime minister, Pisudskis Sanation government supposedly cleaned up the Polish governments act. However, my father often remarked on the tsarist tendencies of the new dictator[footnoteRef:5]. During the early 1930s, Lucjan had defended many communists in court who were being prosecuted by the government for bogus claims. The responsibility of defending these doomed communists weighed on my father, [5: Antony Polonsky, Politics in independent Poland 1921-1939, (Clarendon, 1972), 66.]

I know I cannot win this case, he said one evening after having spent all day in court defending the editor of a left-leaning underground newspaper. I was in my last year of gymnasium, and had read the writings of Marx and Engels by this point. Their arguments made sense, yet I couldnt bring myself to believe them. My people didnt hate the Russians because they were richer or poorer than us. We hated the Russians because they were Russian, and they had committed so many atrocities against our people over history. Opposite my disbelief, Jakub had become a fervent ideologue for the communist cause. He had been converted during his gymnasium years. Id often find him with a copy of an underground communist paper, distributed through illegal sources. It was hard to find communist materials during these years, as the Sanation government had begun censoring the instability-stirring ideology[footnoteRef:6]. Jakub believed in revolution, he had seen inequality and he believed that unlike other social systems, communism offered him a chance at normality, at removing labels that had burdened his existence[footnoteRef:7]. [6: Gawe Strzdaa, Censorship in the Peoples Republic of Poland, ] [7: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm>]

On a chilly afternoon in the Fall of 1932, Jakub and I were seated at a small caf near the Old Town market place. As typical of two law students, we were enthusiastically debating politics. Our cups were constantly filled with coffee as the waitress supplied the collegiate drug of choice. Our argument centered on the root cause of the famine in the Soviet Union that was decimating the Ukraine. We knew very little about the specifics, but rumors had spread that millions were dying in our neighbors to the East. Refugees had appeared from the area, with bodies like stick figures, telling of the horrible atrocities being committed by the Soviet officials throughout Ukraine. Millions of agrarian farmers were starving to death while Stalins collectivization policies required them to continue meeting absurd grain quotas. Those who refused to comply were brutally repressed, often murdered or exiled and never seen again[footnoteRef:8]. It seemed clear that whatever the Soviets were doing was not working based on the stories spread by the Ukrainian refugees. Jakub disagreed at every point. According to him, we in Poland had no documented proof that the Soviet Experiment was the cause of the famine, but rather our culture biased us to believe anti-Russian propaganda. Jakub argued that the famine was caused by the tremendous droughts and poor harvests. Information that he had acquired through underground sources told of quotas being met and a great deal of industrial success. Stalin was supposedly leading them to glory and his master plan would create a stronger Soviet Union. The way Jakub spoke of Stalin was strange, as though star struck by the magnificence of the Soviet Unions controversial dictator. As Jakub began his usual glorifying rant of Stalins heroics, our waitress suddenly interjected, [8: Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi, Marta D. Olynyk and Andrij Wynnyckyj, The Holodomor and Its Consequences in the Ukrainian Countryside, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1-4, < http://www.jstor.org/stable/23611463>]

It was not Stalin who raided my home for grain and killed my family. His henchmen did that for him. I was stunned. The ferocity and repressed emotion from someone who had lived through Hell, who had seen the deadliest famine in modern history, and yet she went coolly pouring my coffee while glaring fiercely at Jakub until he finally offered his condolences. She was beautiful; her blonde hair wrapped in a braid down her back while her eyes were filled with dark wells of blue. I sat there dumbfounded, struggling to form the proper words to respond to such a dark confession. I will always owe the deepest debt to Jakub for inviting her to sit and talk with us. Her shift ended 15 minutes later, right as Jakub and I finished our argument on who would ask her on a date first. I won citing an incident in which I had protected him during an argument with multiple anti-Jewish student demonstrators. Her name was Anita and she had been in Warsaw for less than a month. She had fled from her native Ukraine by stowing away in a rail car and protecting herself with a kitchen knife grabbed before Soviet Party officials razed her home. She told me of her younger brother, Nikolai, who was shot in a ditch when the officials had found grain stored in his mattress. Anita and Nikolai had used to run races across the length of a bridge, like Piotr and I had across the Vistula. Her Polish was shaky, and she would stumble when trying to find translations for her Ukrainian vocabulary, but we talked for hours regardless, finding out details about each others lives, comparing childhoods in Poland and the Ukraine. She had come from a farming village in Central Ukraine, near Kiev and seen violence since a young age when the Soviets created a civil war in Ukraine and installed their own puppet government[footnoteRef:9]. I told her about the terror of the Battle of Warsaw and was surprised when she told me shed never heard of it. Her contempt for Soviets was apparent. [9: Kul'chyts'kyi et. al, The Holodomor and Its Consequences in the Ukrainian Countryside]

They are rats, shchury, only focused on themselves. Murderers, self-righteous murderers. The twisted satire has not been lost on me. Decades after I met Anita I find myself in a Soviet labor camp, breaking my back daily for this satanic empire of lies and police brutality. I often find myself dreaming of Anita as my body begins to break down under the absurd workload. I remember the perfect continuity we shared, two souls captivated with one another, finding solace in the knowledge that we had a second half to ourselves. Its hard to write about my wife without succumbing to emotional devastation. Of everything that existed in the world I used to know, my time with her occupies my mind as I struggle with consciousness. The prospect of accompanying her in death makes my mortality acceptable, but the spirit she embodied means that Im damn sure going to fight until my last breath.The slats of the cot that I was using have broken, and I am now relegated to sleeping on the dirt floor of the barracks. I dont understand much of what the Russians say to each other, so my only company comes from the rats that share my bed. I have still managed to meet my quotas despite my deteriorating back, but I recognize that my time is running out. There is much death around me; just yesterday forty prisoners were killed in a cave-in. Today, we had just a little bit of extra soup to go around for the living.Anita and I were married in February, 1934. Our ceremony took place in St. Johns Cathedral with my family, family friends, and school colleagues in attendance. Piotr served as the best man, as my mother had strictly forbidden Jakub from the position despite my request. I was glad to see that the Rubensteins were in attendance. Jakub had told me day before that this would be the first time anyone in his ancestry had been to a Christian wedding.Im still waiting to be the first of my family to attend a Jewish one, I had told him half-jokingly. Despite the humorous nature of our observations, there was a taste of significance to this witnessing of each others customs. Jakub, despite not practicing Judaism himself, still identified as Jewish with the caveat that he was a Pole first[footnoteRef:10]. [10: Chone Shmeruk, Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture, 309]

After the wedding, my family threw the best party of my life. Polka music echoed throughout the old abode on the Vistula, as a local band played popular tunes for the celebrating Poles. Beer and vodka were flowing as we celebrated what would be the happiest time of our lives. I was living in a dream, being propelled along by an incredible and beautiful euphoria of eternal companionship and a new hope for our future. For the first time life felt peaceful. The month before, Pisudski had saved Poland yet again by signing the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact, easing the ever-present paranoia of Nazi invasion. Later that year, Poland would sign a similar agreement with the Soviet Union. We had no idea how devious our neighboring monsters deceits would be.Things began to quickly deteriorate in second half of the 1930s. Our great leader Jzef Pisudski, hero of Warsaw, had passed away in 1935. I was working as a patent lawyer in rdmiecie, reading papers all day and dealing with lengthy, legal jargon. We had moved into an apartment in the Mokotw district of Warsaw, close to the caf where Anita and I had met. We were doing fairly well for ourselves and life was going along routinely. We would often stroll down Marszakowska Street, relaxing in what was our scenic hometown. On weekends, wed often picnic in azienki Park, feeding the ducks when they came to the edge of the pond. Anita had become active in local feminist circles. She would often attend speeches from prominent activists such as Irena Krzywick and Tadeusz eleski[footnoteRef:11]. The ideas and concepts encountered during these meetings inspired Anita. We had many conversations discussing what gender equality would entail, if it was possible, and how we could better achieve it. I supported Anita and the feminist cause she championed, but I saw the endeavor as futile. Men had always controlled the levers of power, and while it may be possible for individual women to empower themselves and gain power, the system seemed too powerfully predisposed to be overcome patriarchy had been the standard in my household, as well as the Rubensteins. Whereas hundreds of possible categories existed in the realm of nationality and religion, gender seemed too defined and preordained to be changed. My father had run my household, as had my fathers father, and so on. However, Anita and I were equal in our partnership. Our marriage wasnt about control or property; we both valued each other as people, friends, and lovers. In that, we broke from the tradition of our ancestries. [11: Nameeta Mathur, The New Sportswoman: Nationalism, Feminism And Womens Physical Culture in Interwar Poland, The Polish Review, Vol. XLVIII, No.4, (Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, 2003)]

Warsaw had been changing since we moved into our apartment in Mokotw. The old mayor, and new President Stefan Starzyski had invested huge sums into large-scale transportation projects. Streets were widened and paved, and trees and flowers were planted along these new roads. Construction began on a subway system and according to Anita; general opinion in the coffee shop was that Poland was becoming one of the worlds premier metropolises. The cold, quaint town of my childhood was quickly becoming a modern city of the new world. Then the world ended.Diplomatic tension between Poland and Nazi Germany had heated to fear-inducing levels in the late 1930s. The neighboring Czechoslovaks had been betrayed by Western Europe in late 1938, as the infamous Munich Agreement saw Germany annex the economically and industrially advanced Sudetenland. Our country had no true allies besides the French who appeared weak in their commitment, and Romania who seemed weak in their ability. Hitlers regime had demanded preposterous concessions from our government, including ceding the city of Danzig and a highway between East Prussia and Germany proper. Things appeared out of control as Germany swiftly conquered our Czechoslovak neighbors in early 1939. Anita heard rumors of war flying all day in the caf, as newspapers described the quickly spiraling situation in sensationalized headlines. It felt as though we were waiting for the day when German planes would begin bombing the city. The familiar zeitgeist of pessimism began to reemerge among my academic contemporaries. It was a late afternoon in September of 1939. Anita, Jakub and I were huddled around the small stove in our apartment and Jakub was visibly frazzled. Worry lines creased his forehead, a trend that used to happen before final exams now had more dire circumstance. News had just broken that the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact. The details were foggy, but discomfort crept into the soul of every Pole. The mutual deterrence of the Soviets and Nazis had provided an uneasy comfort in the increasingly tumultuous, global political stage, as we believed Germany would not risk the enormous consequences of a war with the Soviets. The Nazis had been vocal about their dislike for Jews, and Jakub knew this. He was drinking faster than I could pour.This is the end my friend the distraught, Jewish academic prophesized, Everything we have, everything that is Poland has a diminishing timeframe. Were running out of time. I disingenuously reassured my drunken friend that everything would be fine. The British and French had threatened Germany with war in the case of an invasion of Poland, but we knew they would be no competition for the German industrial juggernaut that loomed menacingly over Poland. Jakub was preparing to leave the country for the East. Rumors had circulated among the Jewish community regarding the inhumanity with which Nazis regarded Jews. German Jews had lost most of their civil rights in a series of legislative actions by the politically dominant Nazi party, while Hitlers virulently anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf called for the removal of Jews from Aryan culture[footnoteRef:12]. Jakub was understandably in a state of panic, [12: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy, < http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf>]

My family is here. I am a Pole! How can I leave the place that defines who I am? He was sobbing now; precognitive fear mixed with vodka had turned my best friend inside out. I promised him that if worst came to worst he could stay with Anita and I in our apartment until the dust settled and things returned to normalcy.Normalcy would never return. Our poor Poland was annihilated during the early part of September 1939. The dread and panic reminded me of the previous war against the Soviets nearly twenty years earlier. The demonic screams of Air raid sirens blared as Luftwafte bombers leveled entire buildings. The overwhelming sense of despair and inevitability strangled Warsaw as news of defeat after defeat suffered by the Polish Army came over the radio. Many of our neighbors fled their homes in search of safety in the country. Families carried very little luggage, using one of natures ultimate defense mechanisms: running. Hitlers forces were quickly positioned outside of Warsaw, the barrels of artillery aimed at the heart of our country. The Nazis already occupied my childhood home, Praga, and I knew nothing about the fate of my family. I would later learn that many of my old friends had been killed in the Nazi invasion. My brother, Piotr, had been enlisted in the infantry and I knew his survival chances were slim to none. I prayed to a god I didnt entirely believe in to protect my family, to spare my brother from the fate I knew he had already suffered. I never heard from my brother again.During the last day of Polands existence, I was startled by a knock on my door. Jakub was standing there covered in rubble and bleeding profusely from his forehead. I pulled him inside and got him clean clothes, while Anita filled a basin with water for him to wash with. Jakub was babbling nonsensically, his words slurred and incoherent. It was apparent that he had suffered a head injury, but I had no means to diagnose its severity. Anita set up temporary bed inside our bathtub, as the apartment itself was filled with broken glass. Anita and I put Jakub in the makeshift bunk, and then lay in our own bed for hours, unable to sleep due to the overwhelming uncertainty of tomorrow, and definitive destruction of today. When we woke in the morning, we found Jakub curled up in a ball on the ground rocking back and forth. He seemed bewildered, unable to comprehend the devastation he had seen[footnoteRef:13]. Anita prepared three bowls of oatmeal, putting the last of the pantrys butter in Jakubs dish. The food helped settle our nerves and calmed Jakub down enough that he could finally speak. He had escaped the East bank of the Vistula on a hunch that Nazi forces were quickly approaching. I asked him about my family and what had happened to his head. He knew nothing regarding the well being of my family, or his own, but we both knew that their prospects were dismal. He had been hit in the forehead by a piece of brick following an aerial bombardment near Old Town. He described his journey as a light-headed trip through destruction, fire, rubble and all [13: Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, (Jerusalem, 1976)]

The next few months would be the strangest of my life. The Germans had set up a puppet government in Warsaw known as the General Government, and with it came blond-haired, blue-eyed devils speaking a language I couldnt comprehend. The occupying Nazi troops treated us Poles as subhuman, mocking and threatening us whenever we were in the street. The city had been badly beaten by the invasion, and the streets were lined with bodies and wreckage. I had never imagined carnage on such a scale to be possible, yet the invasion was just the beginning of the Nazi horrors. Warsaw was lawless, no courts existed and German occupiers committed more crimes than they prevented[footnoteRef:14]. [14: Jan Karski, The Situation of the Jews in the Territories Annexed by the Third Reich, An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-In-Exile, February 1940, ed. David Engel, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Indiana, 1983), p. 1-16]

Anita and I lived in fear and darkness, food was difficult to find and required bartering away goods such as clothes and jewelry. Gunshots rang out at all hours, as if to remind us that the war continued. We knew very little about the events in the war at large, and the information we did have came largely through rumors from those remaining in Warsaw. Anger was rising up inside me; I felt pure hatred for these Nazi animals that had caused unlimited, needless suffering. At some point in the next year, the Germans used forced labor to begin building large walls around a planned Jewish Ghetto. They marked Jews across the city with stars, and herded them into the confines of the Ghetto. Poles were forbidden from hiding Jews, while Nazi occupiers encouraged crimes to be committed against them[footnoteRef:15]. [15: Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, (Jerusalem, 1976), 128.]

My family had survived the initial onslaught of the war, and managed to hide the Rubenstein family in their home. My father had engineered a secret room by covering the dugout basement shelter with wooden boards and dirt. After the Nazis had sentenced all Jews to the Ghetto, the Polish-Nazi police force known as the Blue police began searching homes for Jews[footnoteRef:16]. It was at this point that Jakub left us. He realized that we didnt have enough provisions for ourselves, and that his residency put us in direct danger of Nazi retaliation. The day Jakub left told us that he would keep in touch, walking out the door with nothing but the clothes on his back. The familiar feeling of uncertainty crept over me as I realized that could very well be the last I saw of my lifelong best friend. [16: Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, 134.]

In 1942, a neighboring Polish family denounced my father for hiding Jews. The Rubensteins had been living in the basement for nearly two years, and the fear of discovery had lingered permanently. After the denunciation, Blue police combed through the household, finding the hiding place when Abram Rubenstein coughed from dust in the air. The Rubensteins were sent to the ghetto, while my father, mother, and sister were summarily executed on the spot. Ive never felt agony like the day when I showed up to the door of my old home, and no one answered. A neighbor called me over and explained what he had witnessed. He had been part of the Polish police investigating our house, and expressed his deepest regrets claiming that he had to do it. I believed that he regretted his actions, however I couldnt bring myself to believe that it had actually happened.I felt empty inside. If it werent for the loving support of Anita I wouldnt have been able to psychologically make it through the early years of the war. I felt the pain of loss that she had felt since the Ukrainian famine all those years ago. Anita and I depended on each other, never leaving the others presence if necessary. We didnt talk about what had happened or what would happen for that matter. We simply wept.In an early morning of January 1943, I had another surprise knock at my front door. There stood a man with a large mustache and heavy trench coat. As soon as I opened the door he briskly stepped inside. As I demanded an explanation, I realized that the surprise visitor was Jakub. This time I was the one in shock. We embraced each other and wept over the loss of our families, and our childhoods. We talked for hours regarding what had happened during the war. Jakub had joined the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), and spoke excitedly of his attempts to undermine the German occupiers. His stories were gruesome, but the passion he held for the cause of the Polish patriots was intense. After leaving my apartment during the early chaos of the war, Jakub had been recruited into Polands underground resistance force by an old colleague from school. Jakubs decisive thinking and passionate speaking combined with numerous successful ventures into, and out of the Jewish Ghetto had earned him the respect of his peers. His objective had been to deliver food to the Jews who were embargoed from basic human necessities. He told me of the horrendous situation inside the ghetto, Women and children were dying on the street of starvation. There were reports of roundups in which entire residencies would be taken out of the ghetto and never seen again. They were living day to day. In fact, to call it living would be an exaggeration. Surviving is more accurate.[footnoteRef:17] Jakubs family had been exported during one of the round ups he had described. Rumor inside the ghetto had it that they had been sent to the Treblinka death camp, a place where no Jews ever returned[footnoteRef:18]. [17: Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, 5.] [18: Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, 114.]

I know they cant have survived, yet I keep trying to convince myself otherwise, Jakub admitted. I knew how he felt, yet the pain that I had been harboring for years since my own familys execution had blunted all sense of grief. Loss had become institutionalized, suffering was expected. Evil had prevailed in the remains of Poland.When Jakub asked for my assistance in an upcoming mission into the Ghetto I accepted the proposition. We were to smuggle a shipment containing 3 pistols. I wanted to help these people who had been part of my city growing up. I wanted to fight the force of pure evil embodied by the Nazi menace. My only hesitation was Anita. How could I unnecessarily risk my own life when it would mean the devastation of hers? Anita was working a new job as a nurse in the makeshift clinic down the street. When she came home, she burst into tears at the sight of Jakub. When she finally calmed down, I explained the arms running job that Jakub had asked of me and she immediately responded,Do it, help those who are defenseless to fight back. I knew Anita sympathized with the Jewish plight. She too had seen her people brutally oppressed by the forces of evil. Jakub and I departed late that night for a secret hideout located near the Stadium on Konwiktorska street, where years ago Jakub and I had watched our favorite football team play. The area was in ruins, and our journey was masked by shadows. We were forced to quickly find shelter twice when we saw police patrols roaming the streets. The hideout was in an abandoned subway station near the ghetto walls. Inside, about ten men and women were sitting around a table discussing their course of action inside the city of Warsaw. I was introduced to the resistance members, and briefed on the mission ahead of me. Jakob and I were to sneak into the ghetto by impersonating members of the Blue police. We were given traditional Polish police uniforms and a series of forged documents proving our new identities. The pistols we were smuggling would be underneath our jackets, as though they were part of the police attire. Once inside the ghetto, we were tasked with rendezvousing with Home Army officers stationed in the basement of a Jewish bakery. Jakub and I both knew the enormous risk of this operation, yet his face was calm. He had done this before and his previous successes had built confidence in his ability to traverse the Ghetto wall. The next day, Jakub and I headed towards the Ghetto gate on Zelazna street. After being stopped by the guards and displaying our forged identifications, the gate was opened and I witnessed a new level of horror. The entire area smelled of rotting flesh and fire. The sidewalks that I had used to walk with my wife were littered with dead bodies. Those who were not dead were not far from it, and the groans of the starving echoed across the haunted streets. No amount of description could accurately portray the suffering of the Jews of Poland, cordoned off into their own cultural hell. I was surprised that many of the Ghetto guards were Jews, wearing the signifying star armbands. These men had perpetrated the suffering of their own people, like cannibals taking advantage of their slightly elevated status over the common Jewish suffering. I witnessed a Jewish police officer mercilessly beat a small, bone-thin Jewish boy for no apparent reason.When we reached the bakery headquarters of the resistance fighters, we were greeted by a young man named Mordechai Anielewicz. Mordechai appeared to be the de-facto leader of the ZOB, despite being younger than myself[footnoteRef:19]. He led us to the basement where we laid the pistols on a table. He told us that with these three guns, the organization had acquired thirty firearms, not nearly enough to fight toe-to-toe with the German military[footnoteRef:20]. Anielewicz thanked us for our efforts, before showing us a backdoor to leave the bakery inconspicuously. [19: Michael Berenbaum, Mordecai Anielewicz, Encyclopedia Britanica, < http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/25460/Mordecai-Anielewicz>] [20: Mark Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising, (Interpress Publishers), 55.]

Jakub and I were about to leave the ghetto through the same gate we had entered when we were stopped by one of the Jewish guards. The man had lived near Jakub in Praga, and recognized the face of his long-time neighbor. Jakub and I looked at each other as we realized the enormous implication of what was to come next. We began sprinting, running as fast as we could to turn the corner thirty feet from the gate. As my back was turned, I heard the fire of a machine pistol but kept running as I had back in my childhood. I rounded the corner, and looked for a place to hide. On the side of the street, the ruins of a bombed out apartment complex offered my best chance at escaping the pursuing guards. I hid behind a large pile of rubble, burying the police uniform underneath broken bricks. After waiting five minutes, it appeared I had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto with my life. Then it hit me that I had not seen Jakub escape the gate, and that his body was likely laying around the corner riddled with bullets. The now overly familiar feeling of loss once again crept into my mind and mixed with the fear of being caught by those who had found us out. I hastily walked back towards my apartment, tears welling in my eyes from a combination of dust and heartbreak. Two years later, Nazis would destroy the Ghetto. The guns that Jakob and I had provided proved helpful for Jewish resistance fighters, who were initially able to hold off the Germans deportation attempts for much longer than could have been expected from a group so heavily under-equipped. Months after the initial Ghetto uprising, I saw smoke billowing from the region. Nazis had entered the ghetto and burned it to the ground, taking the lives of the brave resistance fighters, as well as tens of thousands of other Jews[footnoteRef:21]. Anita and I had no idea at the time that the Soviets were just outside the city ready to defeat the Nazis. [21: Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, 75.]

The Soviets liberated Poland in 1945. The liberation felt fake, as outsider Russian communists ran our country and freedom never entered the equation. The removal of the Nazis was a great victory for the people of Poland, but in the process our country had been ravished, and our nationalist resistance fighters destroyed. I was arrested in January of 1946 for my collaboration with the Jewish resistance force. I was painted as an anti-communist, Zionist activist, despite the fact that communism had played no role in my assistance towards the Jewish people of the Ghetto. I spent months inside a prison and was interrogated often. After all the atrocities of war that I had witnessed I had thought that things could not possibly have gotten worse. Yet the months of torture spent in a Soviet jail proved me wrong. I was forced to admit to a series of crimes that I had not committed, and sentenced to exile in Siberia. I have been here in Siberia for many years, and I expect that I will die here too. I witnessed my beautiful countrys obliteration by the evil tides of racism and hatred. To this day, I dont know what has happened of Anita. She was the last speck of goodness in the spiraling tragedy that was my life in Warsaw. I know that my time is coming soon. I am giving this memoir to a friend of mine who has been working with me in the mines for a few months now. His sentence is supposed to end in five years, and I have made him promise to get my story out. This journal will tell the world of the horrors of Poland and the abominable nature of Nazis and Soviets. Even now as I write this I can sense the coldness drain the life out of my body.

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