My War Years

More happened in my life during the World War II years, 1939 to 1945, when I was between 9 and 15 years old than during the following thirty years. I feel it an obligation to my family and friends to tell this story in some detail.

These recollections should also serve as a memory to my less fortunate family members and friends who did not survive those years. Everything in this story is based on memory; therefore, I will be able to provide only approximate dates of various happenings bound by the dates of such historical events as the start of World War II, the Warsaw ghetto and later Polish uprising, Russian liberation, etc.

The Jewish population in Poland consisted of several million people concentrated in the cities. There were two very distinct Jewish groups: the older generation working in trades and commerce, mostly orthodox and using Yiddish as their main language, and the younger generation, which against much resistance on the part of the Polish population was moving into liberal professions such as medicine, law and writing. My grandparents belonged to the first group; my parents to the second. The ascent was not easy. There always was strong and often violent antisemitism in Catholic Poland. Universities had only small quotas for Jews. Frequently, Jewish students were beaten by their Catholic colleagues and could not attend classes. Because attendance at the university was usually not required, they studied at home without attending lectures and then took exams at the end of the school year. Even though many Jews succeeded in obtaining a college education, most jobs in government, banking and many industries were closed to them. The lack of such opportunities probably accounted for the many Jewish lawyers and doctors.

Most of the educated Jewish population was assimilated and frequently ignored the Jewish tradition. I do not remember ever having gone to a synagogue before the War. My exposure to the Jewish tradition consisted of visiting grandparents for Seder once a year. On the other hand my father refused a high municipal government position which would have required him to become a Catholic.

My father, Zygmunt Lewartowicz, was a man of many talents. A lawyer by profession and a practicing attorney, he was also a freelance writer for various magazines, an electronics buff, a raconteur, a bridge player, an enthusiastic solver of mathematical puzzles, a magician and a hypnotist. I remember going with him frequently to the local flea market to pick up some electronic parts. Frequently, he would accept electronic gadgets or parts from his clients instead of a fee. He spent hours soldering and working on various projects, such as a burglar alarm, or in developing his patent for a fountain pen. We owned one of the first radio sets in Poland with a license number in the low hundreds. My father always had some kind of a press pass which would admit us free to exhibitions and performances. With few exceptions he always had excellent judgment. One of the few instances in which his judgment was incorrect was his low esteem of the slide rule. He claimed that to learn how to use it was not worth the trouble. However, his quick and good thinking steered us through the War. He studied law and literature in Grenoble, France to avoid the antisemitic Warsaw University. My mother, Zofia, born Riterband, led a quiet, sheltered existence till the War forced her to show her energy, abilities and will to survive. She met my father returning from a vacation trip. The train was packed full with standing room only. In the old Polish tradition she slipped a few zlotys to the conductor and she got an empty seat. A few minutes later my father, using the same approach, landed in the same compartment, and this is how they met. Her background was in art and music. Her father, my grandfather, was a self-made man, builder and contractor, who loved and admired music and law. My grandmother played several instruments and used to sing many operatic arias. Their two sons Stasiek and Roman, both studied law and music. Stasiek played concerts with the Lodzer Philharmonic as a child, wanted to become a judge, but because of restrictions became an attorney. Roman, however, after obtaining a law degree decided to pursue a musical career as composer and pianist. My mother studied music at the Warsaw Conservatory.

I was born in the textile-industrial city of Łódź on April 27, 1930, the only son of upper-middle income parents. I attended a private elementary school as was the custom for all middle income families. I remember that when our class passed a group of public school children our teacher referred to them as the poor kids. We lived in a 6-room apartment in Lodz. Till the age of 8 I had a governess taking care of me. We also had a kitchen maid who lived in a small cubicle between the kitchen and the living room. After I turned 8 my father's secretary would take care of me on a part-time basis. I hated most of my governesses, whose only purpose in life was to feed me all kinds of detestable foods, mostly hot cereals. When one of the girls was quitting she told me that I would not have to eat the terrible stuff any more when she was gone. When a new maid arrived with a bowl of the same cereal I hid under the table until we could arrange a truce with no cereal. The Great Depression of the 30's did not affect us in any way. Life was normal as far as I was concerned.

In the summer of 1939 our family went on a 2-month vacation to Druskieniki, a resort town on the border with Latvia. My mother made the overnight train trip by herself while my father and I stopped for a few days on the way in the small town of Lubartow to visit my father's father and his family. In the evening we took a stroll with my father through the town. When we asked a stranger for directions, he answered adding sir attorney. In a small town I suppose everyone knew everything about a visitor... The town was previously called Lewartow, which is the origin of our family name. Our family owned a soft drink factory and a few boys including me had a soda speed-drinking contest. The owner's son won, the two runner-ups including me threw up. Before departure my grandfather blessed me in Hebrew. This was the first time I met him in many years and I never saw him again. All Jews in Lubartów were rounded up by the arriving Germans and shot in the city square.

Though war was only weeks away nobody believed that it would come. My father was thinking of taking us to the Worlds Fair in New York to escape from a possible war but he did not pursue that idea. We were under the illusion that Germany was too weak to attack the Polish military might. Stories were circulated about German tanks made out of plywood which were getting damaged in collisions with taxi cabs. The unofficial military statements were to the effect that we would not need French or English help if the war were to start. We would make it to Berlin by ourselves and our Allies should not interfere. Our vacation ended in late August and we came back to Lodz a few days before the war started. Our baggage never made it back; it disappeared on the way. We saw it last sitting on the loading platform in Druskieniki and were told that it will be put on the next train.

September 1, 1939, the first day of the war started with sirens announcing the German planes. We spent the first hours in a cellar. A few bombs fell at a distance and rumors started circulating about a poisonous gas attack. Though we had no gas masks we had gauze pads soaked in salicylic acid. Breathing through them was supposed to protect us from poisonous gases. Fortunately the rumors proved to be false. We left our shelter scared but relieved. What we did not realize was that the Luftwaffe on this day destroyed the majority of Polish aircraft on the ground. The next few days were filled with rumors and contradicting news stories. My father learned that Lodz would be temporarily aban-doned to the Germans and we decided to flee to Warsaw. What should have been a 2-1/2 hour train trip took us nearly 2 days. We left Lodz in the middle of the night on a crowded train, probably the last one leaving the city. After a few hours we rolled into a station and were told to change trains. I was so sleepy that after getting off the train I just curled up in the middle of the concrete platform and went back to sleep. After some wait we ended up on a freight train with about 50 people sitting on the floor of each box car. The train started its slow progress towards Warsaw. As the morning came the German planes attacked. We heard the howling of diving Stuka bombers and the train stopped suddenly. Bombs and machine gun bullets started coming towards us. I was lying on the floor with my parents on top of me to protect me from bullets. The planes made several passes, destroyed the locomotive and shot our freight car full of bullets. There was a row of bullet holes above our heads. I don't know how many people on the train were hurt. When the planes temporarily left we ran into the nearby forest. I only remember the peace and beauty of the Polish countryside in the fall contrasting with the horrors of a few minutes earlier. We walked a few miles till we came to a small town. We stayed for a few hours in a farmer's house, experiencing another air attack. During the attack we were lying on the floor on a hot summer day covered with big down comforters to protect us from bomb fragments. I doubt that the comforters would have helped us much, they just made us sweat. In the evening we went in a horse-drawn carriage to a suburban train station to go to Warsaw. The carriage stopped a few times when we heard German planes approaching, but they left us alone this time.

We arrived in Warsaw around September 8 and stayed in our friends' apartment. We had an inner room with no windows, which probably spared us a later injury. The next two weeks were spent listening to the radio bringing more and more grim news. The polish government went into exile, Russia decided to annex the eastern part of Poland and all the defenses were crumbling. Warsaw was now surrounded by German tanks; the rest of the country with the exception of a few outposts was abandoned. The last week of September was the worst. The dive bombers kept coming several times a day interspersed with artillery rounds. It was around 10 a.m. when bombs hit the inside court of our apartment building. Glass was flying, dust made the day into a night, people were screaming, it was a nightmare. Out of eleven people in our apartment my parents and I were the only ones not injured. My mother was planning to wash her hair that morning but decided to do it instead in the afternoon. When we looked later at the bathroom where she was going to wash her hair, it was a shambles of broken glass. We walked slowly down the stairs with people bleeding from glass cuts on their faces, screaming and complaining. A makeshift first aid station finally restored some measure of peace. We found a spot on the ground floor next to the elevator where we spent the night. There was a fire raging on the top floor and we were afraid that the counter balance weight in the elevator shaft would come crashing down. We made it through the night with artillery rounds striking all around us. Every few minutes the explosions would come closer and closer and then pass us. Rumors were circulating that the English and French were coming to rescue us. There was hardly any food except for meat from a dead horse lying on the street so to break the monotony my father was composing the most elaborate dinners with 10 courses which we would supposedly order when the war was over. On the next day Warsaw capitulated and the 5-year German occupation started.

The Germans after taking over Warsaw ordered that all non-permanent, residents leave the city. In early October we managed to get a ride in the rear of a truck back to Lodz. Our apartment in Lodz was taken over by a group of German officers and, therefore, we moved into my mother's parents' apartment. The officers were very polite and told my mother that she can take with her anything she wishes. However, when she took a few minor items, they sent our maid the next day to take them back. They kept everything including our maid but they agreed to release my dog Miki. My grandfather could not stand dogs and we had to return Miki to the German officers. Two days later the dog reappeared, to my great relief, having found his way through a busy city. My grandfather agreed now that the dog could stay. Unfortunately a few days later the dog was stolen. This was my first heartbreak of the war.

Groups of German soldiers and officers kept searching through Jewish apartments robbing jewelry and other valuables. One such gang came to my grandparents' apartment. When they opened the closets they were so impressed with their neatness and various German proverbs embroidered on the narrow curtains covering the contents of each shelf (my grandmother was an avid lover of German culture and spent some time in Berlin every few years), that they left without stealing anything. When my father tried to pull down one of the curtains to show them that we were not hiding anything one of the Germans yelled: Nicht zerreissen (Do not tear it) and stopped my father. As Jews we now had to wear yellow stars and arm bands. I remember walking with my mother on the street when a German soldier approached us and warned us not to go in a certain direction. We found out later that he tried to protect us from danger knowing that a synagogue was being burned on that street and Jews were being beaten. This and other similar incidents showed us that there were many Germans who did not agree with their country's official policy. Later that day we watched the flames from our balcony and for the first time I saw my grandfather crying.

It was becoming clear that Łódź with its 10% native German population would soon become a part of the German Reich. The statue of Kościuszko, the Polish-American national hero was lying, illuminated at night, in the middle of the former Freedom Square, with its face in the gutter. Though the Germans were normally using Jews for demolition crews this time they used Poles to destroy the statue. The Germans also started arresting and executing doctors and lawyers. We decided that it was time to go back to Warsaw. Before we left my father arranged with a friendly Russian Orthodox priest to get us a set of phony birth certificates attesting to our non-Jewish background. The only problem left was that of transportation. A tenant in the apartment building of which my father was a part-owner came to claim a disputed payment from a previous year. When my father pointed to a court ruling in his favor the German tenant showed his Nazi party card. After a ˝ hour discussion the tenant not only agreed due to my father's persuasion to halve the disputed amount which we then paid him but he also agreed to drive us to Warsaw and to carry all our jewelry and valuables. He kept his word and we were back again in Warsaw.

My grandparents did not want to leave Łódź telling us that they will be the last ones to go. They were forced to leave their apartment on 15-minutes' notice only a few weeks later and soon thereafter they were deported in a 3-day train trip without food and water to a ghetto in New Sandoz from where they deported in 1942 to an extermination camp. A letter sent by my uncle from Switzerland to them in September, 1942 was returned to him with annotation Empfanger ausgesiedelt, wohin unbekannt (recipient resettled, location unknown).

After arriving in Warsaw we moved into a room in an apartment of our family Finkel. From now till the end of the war we never occupied more than the standard space allotment in Warsaw, one room to a family. The Finkels' apartment like other Jewish apartments was often raided by gangs of German soldiers, who robbed the occupants. We were protected by our Russian-Orthodox papers and a lighted icon on the wall (this was still the time of Russian-German friendship). A group of German soldiers once entered our room with a big German Sheppard dog. I patted the dog, my father said Wir sind Russen (we are Russians) and the soldiers saluted and left. Another time I was visiting with my father some friends whose apartment has just been raided. The Germans who were not impressed with our papers took all the money from my father's wallet and started threatening to kill him. My father then gave a passionate speech in German asking them to spare his life. The soldiers not only let us go but even returned half of the money to my father.

In mid-1940 the Germans started building a high masonry wall with barbed wire and glass splinters on top around the part of Warsaw where we lived. As we suspected that this construction was in preparation for setting up special ghetto quarters for the Jews, we decided to move. My uncle, Stasiek, with his wife and son, who was 5 years younger than I, occupied another room in the Finkels' apartment. They decided to stay - I never saw them again. My other uncle, Roman, left Poland on a sightseeing trip just before the war started and was now safe in Switzerland. We moved out of the walled-in area to a new room in another section of town. My father started working for the Polish Methodist Church. He would find people willing to lend money to the church against a written promise for reimbursement after the war in US dollars. My father was getting a considerable commission on these transactions so that we never had any money problems. The church was headed by the American bishop Gaither P. Warfield who returned to the USA in 1940. His successor was bishop Konstanty Najder, a man of high ideals and also a good feeling for practical problems.

After my father's death bishop Najder also helped us financially. I was earning some money as well by installing removable black paper curtains required by the blackout regulations. I figured out how to make them by watching a salesmen's demonstration. I purchased with my earnings large quantities of safety matches which were stored under our beds. Soon the matches, like everything else, became scarce and my match supplies multiplied in price quickly.

Life was getting more and more difficult. Under the pretext that Jews were carriers of typhoid fever all Jews were ordered to move behind the ghetto walls. A Jew outside ghetto was subject to the death penalty. We were always afraid to be recognized; when I went somewhere with my parents I would walk a hundred steps in front or in back. We assumed that three Jewish faces together were more suspicious than just two. Non-Jews were also in constant danger. People were often picked off the street and taken to Germany to do slave labor or they were executed a few days later as reprisal for the Polish underground activities. On many street corners where these executions took place there were fresh flowers changed every day by the local population. When my parents visited friends and would come home later than usual I was always terrified that they would be recognized and arrested. I tried not to worry my parents with my problems. For example, I was once involved in an accident and did not tell them about it for a whole year. I was running to catch a trolley car when I was hit by a German-driven car. I blacked out for a few seconds and woke up sitting on the pavement dazed but unhurt. People who saw it told me that I made a 20 foot jump through the air; they could not understand how I escaped injuries. I had only 2 dozen black and blue marks all over my body with a multicolored one where the car hit me. One of my shoes flew about 50 feet. The German driver just looked at his car bumper and drove away, the bumper had only a small dent so he did not complain. When my mother saw a few days later some of my black and blue marks, I explained that I had a fight with a schoolmate.

When German-Russian relations started deteriorating, we decided to change our faith from Russian-Orthodox to Methodist (still without getting baptized). In addition we developed a new background reinforced with fake birth certificates from areas of Poland where all the records had been destroyed.

These papers showed that we had some Jewish blood (to satisfy the authorities if somebody should denounce us as Jews). But we selected the proportion of Jewish blood so low that we would be considered Arians in terms of the German laws. We still kept our original name Lewartowicz except that my mother erased her parents' Jewish names Abram and Golda from her identity card and replaced them with Adam and Gustava. A new problem arose: Polish youths, being quite intolerant towards non-Catholics, started persecuting me in school. A teacher who was also a Methodist finally rescued me by giving a lecture about religious tolerance; to stress the point she hit one of my oppressors on the head with a book. Germans were now conquering all of Europe with very little resistance, but we did not believe for a single moment that they could win the war. There was never even in the darkest moments any doubt in our minds that the war would end with a German defeat. Old prophecies of Nostradamus were dug out and with proper interpretation were always pointing to Allied victory. The Germans then issued their own interpretation of the prophecies showing their future victory. Both sides were always correct in their interpretations of the past events; this was not always true for future happenings. We also used to sit around the table with lights dimmed and hands locked in a circle listening to a ghost knocking on the table (every participant could actually do the knocking). We then translated the knocks into letters and lo and behold here was another prediction of Allied victory.

Our official school curriculum was very limited. All foreign languages including German and Latin were forbidden. The Germans claimed that they could always issue orders in Polish and that slaves do not need the language of the masters. History and geography were also on the forbidden list of subjects. All places of higher education were closed. The only schools open for the Polish population were elementary schools with six grades and trade school with seven grades. Most teachers, however, chose to risk their lives and to resist. As an example, a friend of ours was conducting final high school exams when the Gestapo burst in. He and all the students were taken to a concentration camp. Many of my teachers also ended in concentration camps from which they never returned. Many approaches were used to circumvent the official rules. We were taught the forbidden subjects in private apartments or in hidden classrooms. Once I had a Latin class in a classroom to which the only access was through a locked door in another classroom. German inspectors came to visit the adjacent class which was studying a permissible subject and did not realize that our class was next to it. The 25 students in our class did not make the slightest noise during the 15-minute inspection and the Germans left without discovering us. Students who were planning to pursue their education beyond the elementary school level were officially retained in the last grade because of poor performance. This way they could keep the important student status and still continue with the regular high school education. My family and I never took school too seriously anyway. On many nice days my friends and I aimed straight for the local park rather than for the school building. A friend of mine, Jacek Filipek, son of an insurance executive, used to pass me his father's expensive books on a string through the window. We were then selling the books to the local antique dealer to pay for our ice creams and other recreation. We would always remove the first page saying
- To our dear vice president Filipek etc. before disposing of the book. My mother did not like to wake me up in the morning and quite frequently I would miss the first class. Once I even arrived at school when all the other students were already going home because of early dismissal. I still managed to stay at or near the top of my class and did not lose a single school year. In the last year of the war when school attendance became impossible, my school teacher would assign work for me which I did on my own. One of my teachers used to teach us patriotic songs. He did not realize that two of his students were German children born in Poland. Fortunately the two boys decided to keep this knowledge to themselves and did not denounce the teacher to their parents.

Any form of cheating the Germans was considered fair play. This applied in particular to payments for various services. Cold winter and the lack of coal (major heating fuel in Poland) forced us to use electric heaters. To avoid exceeding the maximum permissible use of electricity (beyond which power would be cut off) we used various tricks. We tried to tip the electric meter or to attach big magnets to slow it down. Somebody even supposedly invented a gadget which would turn the meter back. This invention, however, was never shown to me and I doubt that it existed. Heaters were often connected to the ground and the hot conductor in an outlet. This approach could be quite dangerous. In one of the apartment houses where we lived one could not touch the stair railing without risking an electric shock. We also had a big aversion against paying trolley fares. One either carried an expired monthly pass, flashing it quickly to the conductor, or one carried an old ticket in the lapel hole. A more dangerous way to escape the fare payment was to hang outside the trolley car or to jump off when the conductor was approaching. Jumping off and onto the trolley cars was one of our favorite sports. After witnessing many accidents in which people were run over I decided to jump off or on only from the last door of the last car. Still, once I got hurt jumping off between stops. I slipped on the wet pavement, fell flat on my back and could hardly breathe for 10 minutes.

The following jokes reflect the mood of the population in those days: On a crowded trolley car a uniformed German soldier steps by mistake on the foot of a Polish passenger. The Pole slaps the German on his face. Another passenger comes over and slaps the German from the other side. Both men are arrested and brought to the Gestapo headquarters. The first passenger explains that he could not contain himself because of the sudden pain in his foot and therefore he acted irrationally. When the second passenger is asked why he did it, he answers:

I thought that the War was over!

A group of Poles is watching a Red Cross train with wounded German soldiers coming back from the Russian front. A boy approaches trying to sell a newspaper calling loudly:

- Buy the Courier, buy the Courier!.
One of the Poles tries to quiet the boy down. Other people in the group start objecting:
- The boy has to make a living, why don't you leave him alone?
- But I can't hear the groans coming from the train, answers the first Pole.

Living as we did outside the ghetto left us with two choices: to hide or not to hide. Some Jews would find a friendly Polish family and would stay hidden for years without ever leaving their apartment. In many cases when they decided to take even one stroll on the street they would be discovered and executed. Their faces full of fear would give them away immediately. My father decided to take the risks of the second choice. We were not hidden and were leading a fairly normal life during the first few years of the war. The big danger was to be recognized by some unfriendly Pole who would know us from Łódź. The city was full of Polish blackmailers who would keep taking all the money and valuables from Jews they discovered and after bleeding them dry in a few months they would call the Gestapo for the final solution. The only way out was to move as soon as a blackmailer would show up. Finding a new apartment, however, was very difficult as Polish apartment owners did not want to risk their lives for harboring a Jew. We had a few close calls with blackmailers and changed apartments a few times in 1941. Finally somebody must have denounced us, as a group of Gestapo men arrived in our apartment. My parents were not at home. The officers looked at me, left a summons for my father to appear at Gestapo headquarters the next day and surprisingly left! When my parents came home their first thought was to flee. But where can we find a new apartment and new identity papers in one day? We were afraid that we would be caught and that our flight would only prove our guilt. On the other hand to go voluntarily to the Gestapo headquarters, the renowned site of death and torture, was like entering a lion's den. People were not leaving that place alive very often. My father decided to take the chance and to go to the Gestapo accompanied by bishop Najder, the current head of the Methodist church in Poland who offered his assistance. The idea worked! After a one hour interrogation during which one of the Gestapo men referred to me as a typischer Judischer Bengel (a typical Jewish brat) they accepted all our phony identity papers and let my father go. We now had a few months of peace until the next blackmailer showed up. We paid him off and in early 1942 we moved to a new apartment in a faraway section of Warsaw.

In the meantime a new danger started. The Russian planes were now arriving every few nights and were bombing Warsaw. The purpose of these attacks was supposedly to destroy the German communication facilities. The Russian planes would first drop flares on para-chutes which would make the night bright enough to read a news-paper and then they would drop bombs with hardly any precision. The bombs did not damage any German facilities but they killed and wounded instead many Polish civilians. In one such attack several bombs fell around our apartment building destroying the building across the street and the adjacent one. We never went to cellar shelters out of fear of being buried alive.This time we were sitting huddled in the hall of our apartment when the bombs fell. I only remember that suddenly all the doors to the hall opened pushed by the air pressure. I tried to scream but could not make a sound. One of the occupants of our apartment who was always drunk fell out of bed and went back to sleep on the floor. The next day we were digging through the ruins of the adjacent buildings looking for survivors. Suddenly a dog jumped from under a broken piano scared but unhurt. His master was not that lucky. After a number of air attacks I developed a conditioned reflex of a sort. As soon as the sirens started howling my knees would start trembling and my teeth would chatter.

Our second encounter with the Gestapo was much more serious than the first one. Several Gestapo men came one afternoon in the fall of 1942 to our new apartment, hit my mother till she gave them our remaining jewelry which they divided among themselves, sealed our room and drove the three of us to a prison at Daniłowiczowska Street. This was a medium security prison under Polish administration for both criminal and political prisoners. We spent the night together in a temporary cell on the ground floor with a few chairs on which to sit. We did not know what the future would bring: would we be shot the next day or would we make it through this time too? During the night the Russian planes were raiding Warsaw again. We hoped that a bomb would hit the prison so that we could escape but we weren't that lucky. Prisoners in the adjacent cell not knowing what crimes we had committed supplied us with free advice: Do not admit anything. Next day we became separated. I went to a cell with some juvenile delinquents; my mother was in a women's cell and my father was put together with men. When my companions asked me what I was accused of I told them that I was accused of being Jewish, which is not true, I added. Walking past a cell I recognized our old friend, Mr. Piątkowski. He was a staff officer in the Polish army and he figured out that the safest place for him to escape death in concentration camp was to hide in a Polish jail. He spent several years there and survived the war safely. During our stay in prison he was very helpful, knowing all the ins and outs. I looked out the window from my cell and saw my mother walking in the court with other prisoners. I had a few candies and threw her one. She picked it up on the ground, but the prison matron saw it and barred her from further walks. We spent a couple of days in jail and then the incredible thing happened: my mother and I were being released with my father supposedly to follow in a few days. My father told us that during a Gestapo interrogation he found out that whoever denounced us (we never found out who it was), figured out that two accusations are stronger than one. He therefore accused us of being Jews and of making forbidden dollar transactions. Fortunately in the Gestapo bureaucratic hassle the first accusation was temporarily lost and my father could explain that the dollar transactions made for the Methodist church were not forbidden, as no actual dollars were changing hands. One of the items of evidence which the Gestapo found in our room was a contract between my father and me promising me a 2% commission on my father's earnings if I behaved well, took care of my duties, carried out the garbage, etc. This formal looking document when explained by my father amused the Germans and they decided to release my mother and me immediately and to keep my father for just a few more days to wrap up a few odds and ends in the dollar dealing transactions. At one point my father succeeded in confusing his interrogators to such a degree that they had to ask him:

My mother and I went back to our apartment, we opened the seals, found many things stolen by the German search crew and sat down with a sigh of relief at having freedom again. But somehow the Germans would not release my father. Days went by and we just kept talking to and paying off various lawyers who would promise to get him out of jail, but to no avail. We went to visit my father, kept sending food packages, were talking to him on the phone and even started to plan an escape. Everything in this jail had a price which had to be paid to the greedy prison officials. A phone call was a few zlotys, a package was more and so on. About a week after our release a phone rang in the evening in our apartment with a relayed message from my father that we should leave immediately. There was only one hour left to the police curfew. People found on the street after police curfew were either arrested or shot on sight. We grabbed one shopping bag each and left the apartment quickly in order not to generate any suspicions among the neighbors. As we found out later the Gestapo in a subsequent interrogation of my father realized their mistake in releasing us and wanted to correct it. The day after we left the apartment they came to look for us but we were already gone. When they could not find us they transferred my father to the German administered dreaded Warsaw top security prison at Pawiak. We lost all contact with him and did not know whether he was dead or alive. Fortunately towards the end of 1942 Germans declared an amnesty for Jews hiding outside the Warsaw ghetto. Whoever would turn himself in would be taken to the ghetto without further punishment. The reason for this amnesty was that the Germans were planning to destroy the ghetto and its inhabitants in the near future anyway. As a result of this short-lived amnesty my father was released after a few weeks at Pawiak to the ghetto rather than being shot outright.

My father stayed with my uncle Stasiek and his family in the ghetto. Our aim now was to let him escape to join us. There was still telephone communication between the ghetto and the outside so we could do the planning. There were Jewish work gangs being led to work daily outside the ghetto and the guards could easily be bribed. In fact there was a fixed schedule of a few hundred zlotys per escapee. In the meantime we established a new forged identity for all of us with a new name Lewandowski. Our current religion was Roman-Catholic like the majority of the Polish population. We rented a room in an apartment of a widow who knew we were Jewish. For this knowledge she was charging us five times the usual room rent. The Christmas holidays were approaching which further lowered the vigilance of our various enemies. On December 22, 1942 our plan succeeded and we managed to get my father out of the ghetto into our new apartment. He was very tired and exhausted and soon went to sleep without telling us much about his recent experiences. During the night he started having stomach pains which got progressively worse. We called a few doctor friends but they were afraid to come. We did not officially live at this address. Finally the next day we called an ambulance. Though I did not realize how serious the situation was my father must have known it. He kept asking me to take care of my mother in the future. A few hours later during a transfusion he died in the hospital from a perforated stomach ulcer. He received Catholic rites from a priest to fit our new identity. We assume that his mistreatment in prison and in the ghetto contributed to his death as he never had any stomach troubles before that time. When my father died I was away from the hospital looking for blood donors and my mother did not tell me about his death for the next two days.

From the time of my father's death until the end of the war, for over two years, our biggest problem was to outrun the blackmailers and to find a new shelter for the night. Our landlady who first took the quintuple rent payment asked us to leave immediately after my father's death. She considered it too dangerous for her to let us stay and did not want to risk her life. We had a few close friends attending the funeral. When my mother mentioned to them that we had no place to stay for the night they all offered some excuses and left us quickly after the funeral. We managed finally to find some other friends with whom we could stay for a few nights. Somehow each time when all possibilities seemed to have been exhausted we always found a new place to spend the night. I often walked on the street looking at the lighted apartment windows. The only thing I was jealous of was that all those people had a place to stay and we never knew where to spend the night.

In the beginning of 1943 there were several hundred thousand Jews left in the Warsaw ghetto. Though the living conditions were terrible they were still alive. Germans opened a number of factories in the ghetto making uniforms and other necessities for the German army. My uncle Stasiek worked in one of these factories and hoped that this would be his ticket to survival. More and more people were now deported from the ghetto to concentration camps and gas chambers leaving, however, those employed in the factories. Escape from the ghetto now became practically impossible. The whole area was surrounded and guarded by the Ukrainian Vlasow troops in German uniforms who were even more cruel than the German SS troops. One can ask why did not more people escape from the ghetto while it could still be done? The answer is that it required tremendous courage and determination to leave friends and often family behind to start a new life full of constant dangers. The ratio of survival outside the ghetto with its unfriendly Polish population was not much better (a few percent at most) than the ratio of people who somehow survived the concentration camps. The number of people deported daily from the ghetto was now increasing. We kept in touch with our family in the ghetto via short calls from public phone booths always in fear that the call would be traced back to us. One day my mother called and was told matter-of-fact that her brother Stasiek was deported that day. We never found out where he and his family were murdered.

In April of 1943 the ghetto survivors put up a last ditch effort to resist. The Warsaw ghetto uprising started. The Germans brought their most modern weapons, artillery, flame throwers, dive bombers and tanks to quell a rebellion of a few hundred men and women equipped with hand guns and home made hand grenades. After a few weeks the Germans crushed the uprising, killed all the survivors they could find and leveled all buildings in the ghetto. What was left was one giant field of rubble. A few people, including one of our friends, Mrs. Lieberman, survived hidden for 1-1/2 years in a ghetto cellar with enough food to carry her until the end of the war. The Polish population during this period showed hardly any support or compassion for the ghetto fighters, considering the fight just a big spectacle. From outside the ghetto we could see the slaughter taking place but could not say a word or shed a tear in the open for fear of being recognized.

It was much easier for my mother to survive alone outside the ghetto than for the two of us together. In particular, a boy could always be checked as only Jewish boys were circumcised. Therefore, it was to our great relief that we found a boys' boarding school which would accept me. The school was run by Catholic monks next to their monastery at a Warsaw suburb of Bielany. My mother also got a part-time piano teaching job in the school and she would come once or twice a week to teach piano and to visit me. I was now deeply involved in the Catholic religious education. As did the other boys, I had to learn to help celebrate the Latin mass. I knew all the Latin responses to the cues coming from the priest celebrating the mass. I was also regularly taking communion, attending at least one religious service a day and taking the biweekly confession. If I could not think of any sins committed during the last confession period, I would always invent a few new sins to satisfy the priest.

We were frequently going bathing to a nearby unsupervised beach at the Vistula river accompanied by a non-swimming monk. A month before my arrival at the school one boy drowned. The same thing happened now again. Our class consisting of 20-25 boys went on a swimming outing. Suddenly one of our boys started calling for help. We made a human chain to reach him; I was one of the links of that chain. Before we could reach the boy the current started pulling us in and the chain fell apart. Now instead of one there were ten drowning boys. I tried to fight the strong current with no success. I was swallowing water and went under a couple of times. An old story flashed through my mind that one comes up only three times before drowning. I was coming up for the third time and was so weak that I knew this was my last time. Only then I saw a man swimming towards me. He grabbed me and pulled me to the shore. Fortunately there were a few swimmers at the beach who rescued all but one of the boys. A few days later during the services the priest was comparing the death of that boy with the death of a Polish general killed a week earlier in an airplane accident in England. He never mentioned the fact that our only supervision on that outing was a non-swimming priest dressed in a long soutane whose only contribution was his screams for help. My stay in the boarding school lasted a few months. Then I was recognized by one of the boys as a Jew and denounced to the priests. They asked my mother to take me back immediately.

The last part of 1943 and the first part of 1944 brought a series of defeats to the German army. We now had at least hope that the end of the war was coming closer. Our life, however, did not get any easier. The sequence of events was always the same. We would find a new place to stay, blackmailers would find us a few weeks later, we would pay them off and start looking for a new apartment. We were fortunately always a few steps ahead of the Gestapo. I remember many peculiar places in which we were living. In one apartment there were so many bed bugs that to escape them I either slept on top of a table or on 3 chairs tied together. In another place the landlord deduced that we were Jewish by observing that my mother was washing her hands after leaving the bathroom. One never knew what would give us away! Another place where we stayed for a couple of months was the house of a Polish count full of pictures of his ancestors, antique furniture and porcelain. My mother was supposed to cook for him and his son and to run the household. The count had very peculiar notions about spending money. For example he would never pay utility bills before the electricity and gas were turned off. He would buy 1/4lbs. ground horse meat and ask my mother to make ten hamburgers out of it. He used to buy milk by the glass. His teenage son was involved in street gangs. Once when he and I were strolling on a busy street another boy from a rival gang approached us quickly and ran away. I did not realize that the count's son was hit twice with a knife. His heavy coat fortunately prevented a serious injury. The boy,suspecting that we were Jewish, also threatened my mother frequently with blackmailers. One day coming home I realized that the two men coming with me through the front door of the apartment were either secret police or blackmailers looking for us. I entered the apartment with them and ran quickly out through the back door. I then stationed myself in the entrance way of a house across the street to warn my mother who had gone shopping. Unfortunately, I missed her and she had to pay the blackmailers off. As a consequence we had to find a new place to stay. There were frequently chance encounters, like two ships crossing at night never to meet again. Once we met on the street our two cousins Leszczyński whom we had not seen for years. We could not help each other, so we quickly exchanged the news of our families, kissed and went in different directions.

We frequently visited our friends Piątkowski, the Jewish wife and half-Jewish daughter of the man we met in jail. I did some electrical repair for them and they insisted on paying for it. I did not want to accept money from them so I purchased a postal money order to pay them back. I signed it Kazimierz Repairman and mailed it to them. What I did not realize was that Kazimierz Repairman was the code name for one of the Polish resistance leaders. My friends therefore thought that the money order was some kind of signal for them, but could not figure out what it meant. During several years of the war I kept a daily diary which I left with the Piatkowski family for safe keeping. Mrs. Piątkowski read some of it and realized that she and her family would be doomed if the Germans ever found it. She could not get in touch with me, panicked and burned it. If I could have this diary now I could describe our life during those years in much more detail.

A new source of hope suddenly appeared on the horizon. My uncle Roman sent us from Switzerland papers attesting that we were citizens of Honduras. These papers were purchased from a crooked Honduran consul in Switzerland. A number of Jews hiding outside the ghetto received similar papers. We thought that our troubles were now over and that we would be evacuated as foreign citizens. Before registering with the Germans we discussed it with a doctor who was also an old family friend. He suspected a trap, strongly advised us against using the papers and hid them in his flower garden. This advice saved our lives. Several hundred people who survived until now registered with the Germans after receiving Honduran identity papers, were put up in a fancy hotel from which one day they were all taken to an extermination camp.

In the summer of 1944 we found a new place to stay. The apartment belonged to a family consisting of a widow, two adult sons and a daughter. They were born in an area of Poland which was annexed' by Germany and they were officially classified as ethnic Germans. One of the sons was forced to join the German army and was coming home on furlough every few weeks. The other son was a member of the Polish underground and the daughter had an SS-man boyfriend. The son in the German army claimed never to have shot at his attackers and was on good terms with his brother from the Polish underground. Both brothers were planning to hang their sister from the first tree when the war was over. This crazy family knew that we were Jewish but did not mind us living in their apartment. The only problem was that they would not let me leave the apartment for the next few months, not even to go to school. They were afraid that neighbors would recognize us and would call the police. My mother then got from one of my teachers school material which I studied at home. She also bought me a chromatic Hohner harmonica which kept me occupied for long hours.

The German soldier son used to leave his Mouser rifle in the apartment and I learned to assemble and disassemble it. I would load it with a pencil and shoot flies with it. The recoil of the trigger spring was sufficient to push the pencil out. I also found where he was hiding bullets and played with them as well. One day my mother and I were alone in the apartment, the windows were wide open and I was sitting on the bed playing with the rifle. I must have forgotten that I loaded it with a real bullet, squeezed the trigger and a shot rang out. As my mother told me later my face turned as white as a sheet. The room was covered with dust from the hole in the ceiling. We were both terrified because our apartment was located across the former ghetto and there were still prisoners with German guards leveling some buildings. Did they hear the shot and would they come to get us? There was a wedding reception in the adjacent apartment. When they heard the shot they all ran out of the house. Our upstairs neighbor whose apartment must have been traversed by the bullet was quiet. After a minute of panic we decided that it was too dangerous for us to leave the apartment. We were now more afraid of the neighbors than of the Germans. We waited for 15 minutes and nothing happened. We were safe again!

In the summer of 1944 the British and American troops invaded France and Russian troops were advancing on Warsaw from the east. The end of the German Reich was clearly in sight. I could not stand any more being under the equivalent of house arrest and on August 1 I decided to visit our friends Piatkowski at the other end of town. My mother stayed home. On the way back home my trolley car suddenly stopped and shots started ringing out all around us. The Warsaw uprising organized by the Polish Underground Army started at 5 pm. I could not get home any more as the part of town where we lived was completely cut off from the center section of Warsaw where I was now stranded. For over two months I did not know what happened to my mother. I just had a recurrent dream several times each night of running through the German lines to reach my mother. After a day of living with strangers I found one of my school classmates who invited me to stay in his apartment. His house was less than 1/2 mile away from a German occupied area and every few hours the Germans would fire a mortar round towards us. The mortar shells which they were using produced thousands of very small fragments which could make a victim into a sieve. As we walked into the apartment we heard a mortar shell exploding on the street. My friend ran out. There were about 10 people injured including my friend's father and another classmate of ours. His father's wounds were only superficial; however, our female classmate standing next to him was severely injured and died the next day. We both helped to dig a grave for her in the courtyard. During the few days which I spent with my friend I did a lot of fire fighting. There were fires everywhere, started by incendiary bombs dropped by the hundreds from German planes. We were forming water bucket fire brigades, quite often having to duck bullets while carrying water pails. In a few days the Germans started attacking with tanks along our street in the middle of the night. We ran to the cellar while our house was hit and caught fire. All we could do was to escape through another cellar door to the next house. I had left close to my bed all my remaining valuables such as a very unique notebook on which I had worked for years and my harmonica. The apartment was now on fire and I had no way to recover them. A few days later with many other homeless teenagers I joined a boy scout troop. We were performing many auxiliary services for the Polish Underground army. We were carrying mail, fighting fires, building barricades, providing courier services between army units and manning observation posts. We did not do any actual fighting simply because there were not enough weapons for us. Every day was full of dangers. While most of the civilian population was hiding in cellars we were in the streets dodging bombs and bullets. Once I was crossing a wide courtyard when I saw a plane diving at me blasting its cannons. I dropped flat on the ground. When I got up I found several shallow craters within 10-15 feet of me.

Food supplies were very scarce. The only items in reasonable supply were unground wheat grain, sugar and vodka. I used to fill my pockets with granulated sugar, 1-2 pounds per day, and eat a handful every time I was feeling hungry. It was amazing how good it tasted. We would grind the wheat grain in coffee grinders and fry it with a little candle wax. A drop of vodka would then improve the taste. Once I succeeded in shooting down a pigeon with an air rifle. It made a great dinner but the pigeons became very cautious and I never succeeded in shooting one again.

One of the most unpleasant things during the uprising besides bullets were lice. There was no way to avoid them with hardly any water available for washing and the beasts were causing constant itching.

The Russians advanced to the opposite side of the Vistula river, we could see their tanks, but they would not cross the river to help us. The reason was that the uprising was organized by the Polish underground forces connected with the Polish government in exile in London. The Russians on the other hand were promoting their own puppet government consisting of Communists. This impasse caused the complete destruction of the city and the death of 100,000 inhabitants, or 10% of the population, during the two months of the uprising. From an observation post I often watched the Russian weapon drops for us. They were throwing small boxes with ammunition from low flying planes without parachutes. Not only was half of the ammunition damaged when it hit the ground but it would only fit Russian rifles which we did not have. The British-American help was not much better. Stalin would not let American planes refuel and they had to make a non-stop round trip all the way from Sicily. One day a flotilla of 4-engine Flying Fortresses appeared high in the sky. We were elated when they started dropping supplies by parachute. Unfortunately, hardly any of these fell into our hands. The strong wind blew most of the parachutes to the German side. The situation was becoming desperate: there was neither food nor ammunition, the Russians stopped their advance and the Germans were determined to crush us using the most modern weapons. On October 2, 1944 to stop the bloodshed of civilian population the remaining Polish positions capitulated. Our boy scout troop was dissolved, we were given a few hundred zlotys and a few pounds of sugar each and were told to mix with the civilian population. This should save us from concentration camps to which all Polish combatants and their helpers were going to be taken.

All the civilian survivors were ordered to leave the city. I left Warsaw with another classmate of mine, Jacek Filipek. We walked for a few miles to a railroad station with an endless stream of people past armed German guards stationed every few hundred feet. As we were walking past one of the guards he said loudly to himself in German: This fellow looks like a Jew. I nearly froze but kept walking by slowly. Would he shoot at me from behind? My friend asked me what the guard had said. I answered him that I did not understand. Somehow the guard did not pursue his loud thoughts and left me alone. We were loaded in open box cars and the train started moving. There were guards stationed on the train and they were shooting people trying to jump off the train. From my earlier experience with the guard and not knowing where we were going, I figured out that I would have to escape and told this to my friend. As he was not Jewish, he did not have as much to risk as I, and decided not to dolt. Our train stopped after about 1/2 hour and we were led out on a long station platform in a small town of Pruszkow. The train left and the whole column of people prompted by the guards started walking slowly towards some unknown destination. I saw local towns people watching us from across the tracks. Freedom was only 100 it. away. I let people go by and was watching the guard next to me, waiting for a break. My chance came when the guard hung the rifle on his shoulder and lighted a cigarette. At the same time I saw a train approaching from the opposite direction. I ran as fast as I could across the tracks just ahead of the oncoming train. Another guard shot at me but missed. The train stopped his line of vision and I was free again.

After my escape in Pruszkow I decided to find our old friend bishop Najder. I saw him and his wife in Warsaw during the uprising, carried some messages for them and received an address outside Warsaw where they would try to go. I also had an agreement with my mother that should we ever get separated we would try to establish contact through the bishop. I left Pruszków, walked for a few miles along a country road, hitched a ride on a farmer's horse-pulled carriage and finally arrived still on the day of my escape at the bishop's address. He was not there but I was told that he and his wife were alive and well and that they moved to the small town of Milanówek 10 miles away. I found then a place to spend the night with a few other refugees, and the next day took a suburban trolley car to Milanówek. I was riding on the car's bumper on the outside being afraid to run into any Germans traveling inside the car. Finally I made my way to Milanówek and found the bishop and his wife. When they saw me they started crying from joy and told me that my mother was inside the house. The reunion with my mother took place a few seconds later.

My mother had her own incredible story to tell. On the second day of the uprising a couple of Polish underground officers showed up in our house looking for a woman hiding with a teenage boy. My mother assumed that they were looking for us but did not trust them any more than the Germans. I was not there and they did not recognize my mother. As soon as they left she fled the house planning to find me. After a while she started walking through a no man's land between the Polish and the German positions. When she saw German soldiers shooting at her from a distance she fell on the ground as I always advised her to do in such a situation. After a few minutes of quiet she got up and all hell broke loose. Though she did not realize it at the time a bullet traversed her upper leg fortunately without hitting any bones or major blood vessels. Also a hand grenade was thrown at her covering her hands and one breast with dozens of metal splinters. Now she fell for real and was lying more or less conscious for about four hours in a house entrance. When night arrived she managed to move herself to another house where there were people still living. She received some primitive first aid there. She remembers that a Polish militia man came in when she had her bandages changed, and he fainted on the spot. A few days later Germans took over the house, threw the inhabitants out and burned it. My mother then managed to get to a hospital where a doctor removed most of metal splinters from her body (some of them she still has today ) and fixed her leg and breast with a few stitches. In a few days the Germans evacuated the hospital, shooting all those who could not walk. My mother was put on a train taking care of a group of children and was let out in Milanówek. By chance she found out that bishop Najder was in the same town. He told her that I was alive when the uprising ended, but did not know what happened to me since. A few minutes later I walked in.

We stayed in Milanówek for the remainder of the German occupation. We could now hear the Russian guns only 20 miles away and see their planes circling overhead, but the Germans were carrying on as usual. Every few days Germans searched the town looking for Warsaw refugees and other people without proper identification, such as us. The house where we lived belonged to an engineer named Uggla. It had a small crawl space which could only be entered through a hidden hole in the cellar. We spent several hours there every few days when the town was being searched. We played cards with a couple of teenage girls who were also hiding there, while we could hear German boots over our heads. To make a living my mother and I started selling headache remedies, a very popular item in those days. My mother was undercutting my prices and I was told by one of the customers that my sister had lower prices than I did. This statement gave my mother a big morale boost.

The civilian population was forced to work several hours each week digging wide ditches to stop the Russian tanks. I enjoyed this work feeling much safer than in a house and knowing that the ditches would never stop a tank. We were even paid for this work in money and in vodka rations. In the meantime the house-to-house searches were getting progressively worse and more frequent and we were afraid that we would be discovered. Also there were rumors circulating that the Germans would try to deport or kill the civilian population before their withdrawal. Therefore, we started planning to cross the German-Russian front and to escape to the Russians. We had the whole route planned and were ready to go in a few days. Fortunately, the Russian offensive started in the third week of January 1945 in time to prevent us from following our hair-brained scheme. I doubt that we would have succeeded in crossing the front lines without being shot by either the Germans or the Russians.

The Russian tanks avoided the anti-tank ditches criss-crossing the fields by simply driving along the major highways without encountering much German resistance. There was one night of sporadic shooting and artillery fire, and suddenly the Germans were gone and Russian tanks were rolling along the highway. One of the tank crews, probably out of boredom, was breaking the base of every other telephone pole, but who cared. It was hard to comprehend that more than five years of our suffering were over.

Before returning to Łódź I wanted to go back to Warsaw to see what was left of it. With many other people I made the 20 mile walk from Milanówek in a day, and saw the city destroyed. After our departure in October of 1944 German demolition crews burned and destroyed most of the remaining buildings. The main street Marszałkowska was covered with rubble 1-2 stories high along most of its length. Buildings were still collapsing. After walking along a street I noticed a big sign pointing in the direction from which I came: Do not enter, mine field. I went to various places where we lived to look for papers and souvenirs which I had hidden under floorboards or in the walls before leaving. But they were either stolen or the houses were completely destroyed. I did not find anything. I spent the night in an abandoned cellar and walked the next day back to Milanówek. We were now heading back for Łódź, our home town. We covered the distance of less than 100 miles in two days, hitchhiking on military trucks. Most of the Russian drivers were drunk and drove accordingly. We did not have much choice. On one stretch of the road my mother was sitting inside the truck. As there was no more space inside I was sitting on top of the truck holding on for dear life with both arms to 5-inch artillery shells in order not to fall off. On another stretch of the road the Russian driver insisted on immediate payment with vodka or he would throw us out. One of the passengers had a few zlotys in the new currency and we could convince the driver to accept it instead. A few hours later we were back in Łódź in my grandfather's apartment. The German family who lived there left in a big hurry, leaving behind their false teeth, glasses and family papers. All the keys including those to our safe were lying neatly on the table. In the safe was a certificate for a military decoration signed by Hitler. I was now standing with my mother on the same balcony on which our whole family had stood a little over five years earlier looking at flames coming from the Łódź synagogue. The war was over for us, and we were the only survivors.