Feliks Nieznanowski
Warsaw
Poland
Interviewer: Joanna Fikus
Date of interview: November 2005
Mr. Feliks Nieznanowski is a retired officer. He comes from a poor family that lived in the Old Town in Warsaw. The home was moderately religious, yet all the high holidays were observed, Sabbath was celebrated, and, as a little boy named Fiszl, Mr. Nieznanowski used to go with his father to the synagogue. Mr. Nieznanowski remembers perfectly well the excitement of his bar mitzvah. He vividly recalls pre-war Jewish Warsaw where he often wandered with his friends. He went to a Jewish school at 34 Swietojerska Street that was under the official patronage of the Jewish Community of Warsaw (this is where the brushmaking shop was located where Marek Edelman fought during the ghetto uprising). Mr. Nieznanowski sang in the boy choir of the Great Synagogue at Tlomackie Street. He survived the war in the Soviet Union. We spoke in his apartment in downtown Warsaw. Mr. Nieznanowski has lived here for fifty-two years, and he remembers the time when the house was being built by German POWs.
My family history
Jewish poverty before the war
During the war
After the war
Life in communist Poland
Recent years
My father came from Wloszczowa [small town in central Poland, ca. 250 km south of Warsaw]. His name was Mychoel or Michal Nieznanowski. Poverty meant young people were eager to go to Warsaw. Father came to Warsaw as a young man and there he met my mother. I never met my paternal grandparents, I don’t even remember their names. Dad told me Grandfather was a merchant, took wares from the city to the country, was a traveling salesman. But I never visited Wloszczowa, never met them.
My grandparents’ children lived in Warsaw. You’d think it’s one city, a dozen streets, and yet we weren’t in touch [with my father’s siblings]. Where they lived, those were Jewish houses, streets like Sapiezynska, Franciszkanska; people had lived there for years, lived together, were born together, died together. We lived completely out of the way, though it was very close [on Podwale Street].
Most of my father’s relatives were poor people – shoemakers, hired laborers. I knew some of them. I knew an uncle, Benjumen, who was a coal provider. He carried baskets 50 kilograms heavy, had a special pole for that and used it to lug those baskets to the upper floors. He lived in Warsaw, at 16 Mila Street. A terrible drunkard. It was hard for me because my father often took me to Uncle’s. He worked hard and drank hard, and his kids were so skinny, uncared-for, such poverty. And my mother would never go there, it was beneath her dignity. There were such animosities at the time.
Another of my father’s brothers lived on Smocza. He had a shoemaker’s shop, I remember, in the basement. That was poverty. His name was Jankiel. I remember him – a young man, and there was a baby. Father often took me there.
There was one more uncle on Walowa Street. If you look at Muranowska, there was the Kercelak [pre-war Warsaw’s largest open-air market], which was for the Poles, and for the Jews there was the Walowka [open-air market at Muranowski Square in the Jewish quarter]. And he sold second-hand clothes there.
My father’s brothers were religious insofar that every Jew believed it was his duty to go to the synagogue to pray, that on a holiday, whether it was Sukkot or some other holiday, you had to participate in the service, but they weren’t Orthodox 1, like that they wore payes, dressed in black, prayed. They kept kosher as much as they could. It seems to me they were too poor to keep kosher all the time, but I can’t say that for sure. Officially, when we visited them, there was chulent, never any pork. On ordinary days you didn’t eat meat but bread, oatmeal, potatoes. Meat was eaten in Jewish homes only on Saturdays and on holidays. There could be goose lard, or you bought chicken giblets.
My mother was Hadasa Gutman from Przysucha [small town in central Poland, 30 km west of Radom]. There was a large family on my mother’s side, too: eleven children from Przysucha. They found themselves in Warsaw and their business was tanning, as that is what Jews did for a living in the Kielce region. I know that during World War I my mother’s brothers, the Gutmans, made leather belts and ammunition pouches for the military, for the Russian army, as well as horse harnesses. They made a lot of money that way.
I never met my [maternal] grandfather; he died when I was a child. He was a shoemaker in Przysucha. I even visited the workshop once when I went to Przysucha. Grandmother’s name was Rachele, or Ruchl. A petite woman, she wore a wig. Their children left Przysucha, came to Warsaw, and prospered quite well here. Hence there was the family disharmony – the Nieznanowskis were poor, and the Gutmans were richer. My mother’s eldest brother, Uncle Jojne Gutman, lived at 5 Gesia Street, I think he had as many as five rooms there. He was a really wealthy man. I remember the following episode – I came with my father and they didn’t let us into the rooms but received us in the kitchen, served a meal for us, the poor people, there. I always felt a sense of distance. There was no family idyll, as it is typical for Jews. My mother’s brothers were religious, observed the kashrut.
There was one more uncle, Dawid, a saddler. He had a saddler’s workshop, on 70 Dobra Street, corner of Tamka Street [in Warsaw]. When Grandmother Ruchl came from Przysucha to Warsaw, she stayed in Uncle Dawid’s apartment. A family gathering would then take place there, everyone came to visit Grandmother. I went there, too, and she’d lie in bed and treat us to figs and sweets. That’s it, I really don’t remember much. I didn’t even speak much Yiddish then. I learned to speak Yiddish fluently only when I was seven or eight. I spoke with Grandmother using a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. She spoke Polish. She died before the war, in the apartment at Dobra Street.
Uncle Samuel was a middleman, a business matchmaker, had no specific profession. There was also a younger brother, Benjumen, who, during the Great Depression 2, in the 1930s, immigrated to Belgium to work as a coal miner. He returned to Poland in 1938. He got married, they lived on Bugaj Street. A tragedy befell them when, during the air raids in [September] 1939, a shrapnel killed their baby virtually in their arms.
There was also Perla, my mother’s younger sister. She married a guy named Benjumen. He had a machine that weaved embroidered epaulets for the military I always admired it, the epaulettes were silver, golden. You could hear the machine clattering in the basement. They lived on Kupiecka Street, later known as Rabin Majzels Street, it was a pass-through house from Nalewki to Zamenhofa Street. The street is no longer there. [Following the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish quarter was razed to the ground by the Germans. The present street grid doesn’t correspond to the pre-war one]. My mother was close with her sister, she visited her often. They were close because of their similar social status. I also remember an aunt who lived in a small wooden house on Wolynska Street.
My father was born in Wloszczowa in 1886. My mother was six years younger than him, born 1892. Dad could read and write Russian. I don’t think he served in the Russian army. I remember no mention or photo to that effect. When he was growing up, they all saw there were no prospects of a better life there, so everyone was eager to move to Warsaw. In Warsaw, they hoped one would be helping the other, as befits a family. Poverty, misery was causing people to go to Warsaw those days. My mother worked in someone’s business, sold ice cream, cakes, in Warsaw, on Chmielna near Zelazna, it was called ‘Cakes and Ice-cream.’ It wasn’t a café, you bought and ate standing. I know from accounts that my father bought cakes there, and that’s how they met. I don’t know when precisely they married, but it was before 1909.
In 1909 my sister Pola was born. She went to the Jehudiya girls’ school [public gymnasium for Jewish girls at Dluga Street]. She was an excellent student. She fell in love with a boy from a very rich family. That family obviously forbade them to meet, and my sister tried to commit suicide. We had gas at home. She put that gas pipe into her mouth, swallowed a lot of it. She survived, but her brain had been irreversibly damaged. It was a family tragedy. She was put into the Jana Bozego hospital, at Sapiezynska Street, where the church stands [a mental institution]. I went there with my mother. The place was run by monks, at the back of the Jana Bozego church. There was a large room with beds, on those beds sat the patients. I remember they organized exhibitions of the patients’ works there – painting, wood sculpture.
Later, when there was no one to pay the bills for her, I come home one day – and she was back. She stayed with us. But there were no proper conditions at home to keep her. She wasn’t aggressive, rather catatonic. There was no contact with her at all, and we loved her very much. So after she had been brought back home, we made efforts and finally took her to Choroszcz. It is a small town near Bialystok [ca. 200 km south-east of Warsaw]. There was a mental facility there that took patients and placed them with wealthy peasants. They worked for them, and once a week the peasant was obliged to take the patient for an examination to the hospital.
My brother was born in 1911. His name was Josif, or Jozef. He completed a business school. He worked as a salesclerk at a Jewish textile store on Nalewki Street. And besides working there, he got increasingly involved in political activity, contracted the disease of communism. He joined the KZMP 3, the communist youth organization. He received several sentences before the war, and by 1939 had spent four years in prison. The uncles didn’t like that. It was that kind of family in which such things were unwelcome. They didn’t like the fact that he was a communist, was in jail, that we sent him food packages, fatback.
There was the so-called Swietojerski trial: a communist organization had been detected that had its headquarters at Swietojerska Street [hence the name]. My brother was a defendant in that trial. He received a six-year prison sentence. He was one of the leaders. When he was in prison, obviously we had frequent visits from the police, they came to search the apartment. I also remember we had visits from the MOPR 4, an international organization helping prisoners of conscience. They brought food packages and we sent those packages to the prison, it was allowed, the prosecutor would give us permission. I myself went to visit him with my mother once. There was a prison, a transfer facility, at Danilowiczowska Street. So before he was sent from Warsaw to Rawicz [major prison in western Poland, 40 km north of Wroclaw], I was actually allowed to see him with my mother.
I was the youngest, born in 1926. I lived my own life, the life of a boy, a teenager. Our family was tried severely by fate. Hence my childhood wasn’t like the other kids’. There was no emotional closeness, no everyday affection. My mother was an impulsive, go-ahead person, and my father was the one supposed to earn the daily bread, provide for the family, while my mother ran the house. There was the ill sister, there was the brother. Making ends meet was difficult. My father learned the craft of a gas worker. He worked for some time for the city gas works, but from the 1930s sackings of Jews began. Then he started working on his own.
There was gas lighting in Warsaw before the war, with the kind of glowing mesh; there were gas stoves. In a lamp, there’s this glowing element, there are small holes supplying the gas, and if you light it, the mesh glows and produces light. Dad went from home to home and [asked], ‘Do you need any repairs, a new mesh?’ He also repaired gas stoves. A door-to-door salesman, you could say, he usually worked the Jewish homes. He had a bag, all kinds of tools in it, nuts and bolts, and he carried it with him. One day he’d bring something home, another one he’d bring nothing. Which means it was a really measly existence.
Before the Great Depression, I guess, my parents must have had some money because they paid for my sister’s and brother’s education. But then they became impoverished. I experienced the misery period, but when my sister and brother were studying, there had to be funds for that. There was a tradition in Jewish homes that first of all you had to educate your children. It needs to be said there were such ambitions but then there came impoverishment, stratification, Jewish families became numerous, with nothing to live on. I remember Jewish poverty very well – when you walked those streets [in the Jewish quarter], with no sewerage, everything flowing down the gutters. Crowds of children in the courtyards.
I myself seldom went to the Jewish quarter but in 1939 I found myself there because they were bombing the Old Town and we moved to Wolynska, that’s when I saw the extreme poverty. The girls went on the street as prostitutes, the boys as thieves. On Jewish streets, Zamenhofa, Nowolipki, Smocza, Krochmalna, there were diners, cheap eateries. You could come, eat for pennies. The girls were always cruising around those busy places. That was the underworld, the demimonde, shady Jewish misery. There was a song that went like, ‘It’s raining on Smocza Street, don’t buy cigarettes there because they’re wet with rain.’ I seldom went there, you never left your neighborhood in Warsaw those days. It wasn’t like today, that you board a streetcar and go. A streetcar cost 20 groszy! That was a lot of money.
We lived at 18 Podwale Street. Where the Kilinski monument stands today, that’s precisely where the 18 Podwale house stood. It was a Polish, Catholic neighborhood. There were also some Jews. There was a synagogue on Podwale, an Orthodox church, and a Catholic one, all on one street. Five of the tenants in our house were Jews – one had a shop selling coal, firewood, that sort of thing. Another had a dime store. They kept quarreling, and he pimped his daughters. One was a wheeler-dealer, a gigolo, the police kept canning him. In fact, there were few decent Jews there. Whereas on another street, Kapitulna, there lived a good friend of ours who was a glazier. A Jew with a long, white beard. But those were isolated cases. We had very good neighbors, friends, acquaintances among the Poles, the goyim.
A woman called Jadowska, for instance, cared for me because she didn’t have small children of her own. She’d always hug me, I was her boy. She’d really pamper me, she’d say to me, ‘Come, Felus [from Feliks], you’re such a poor little boy!’ She’d give me food, she was a close friend of my mother’s. Later she started bringing food to the ghetto wall, after my parents had been sent there, she learned about that. She made those soups and at an agreed hour they picked them up from her through a hole on Bonifraterska. We found her after the war, after I returned to Warsaw. She was an old lady, we wanted to take care of her, put her into a home, but she refused; she died in her apartment on Grzybowska. Her son was a policeman before the war, and, surprisingly, a friendly one, who always came to warn my brother: ‘Józiek,’ he’d say, ‘don’t sleep at home tonight, they’re coming for you!’ He stayed in England after the war, was afraid to go back to Poland.
I remember the house on Podwale Street – the entrance was from the gateway, up the stairs. Such apartments were usually originally designed for the janitor. You walked down a long windowless corridor, and then there was a single room. It could have had 16-20 square meters. All life went on in that single room and a dark kitchen. When I brought the bean sprout from school to grow it, it never grew. There was another wall a meter from the window and there was never any sun in the apartment. When later they told me I had the English disease [rickets], I explained it to myself that it was obviously the result of the conditions in which we had grown up. But my sister was buxom, normal. I wasn’t very tall, and my brother had the English disease [too]. There was a coal stove, water outside, an outhouse, and I remember, they bathed me in a washtub. There was gas lighting.
As my parents lived all that time in the Polish quarter, they spoke fluent Polish. They had no Jewish accent. At home they spoke Yiddish between themselves and Polish to me. But they weren’t people for whom the idea of being Jewish, of Yiddishkeit, was an important one. The kashrut wasn’t observed. True, I remember that on Saturday there was always fish and candles. My father’s religiousness was authentic, not fanatical. Sure, he observed all the rules, he participated in the service, but there was no fanaticism. On Sabbath he always went to the synagogue and took me with him. There was food and drinks, and then they debated. My father always participated in this. Some subject would be proposed and then they would analyze, discuss it from various angles. It always went according to that model: first the questions, then the answers to those questions. I sat and listened to all that. You didn’t talk about politics in the synagogue, like you did on a walk in the Krasinski Gardens, but about various issues of religious nature. What happens if your wife is unfaithful to you, what happens if your wife doesn’t observe the kashrut, that sort of thing. I understood perfectly well what they talked about, what I didn’t understand was why they discussed it in such detail. After all, those were often purely theoretical deliberations.
I know you did shopping at Swietojerska Street, there was a covered market there, where the Industrial Design Institute building stands today. We went there, my mother bought giblets, goose stomachs and other stuff. I often accompanied her there. The Swietojerska markets resembled the Koszyki ones [major brick covered market at Koszykowa Street in downtown Warsaw]. There was a vegetable section, there were stalls selling poultry, fish. There was also a ritual slaughterhouse, where they ritually slaughtered the chicken right on the spot. That was quite an experience – you brought a live chicken and the shochet, praying, slaughtered it. The market wasn’t only Jewish but also Polish, a mixed one. My mother didn’t buy vegetables there, for vegetables we went to Mariensztat [a district in Warsaw]. The poor peasants from around Warsaw came there, stood behind long tables and traded whatever they had – cottage cheese, dairy products, vegetables.
For winter you bought potatoes. Before my mother bought the potatoes for winter, she took one potato each from ten different peasants and boiled each of those to see whether they were tender enough. Then she returned and the peasant brought a sack or two of potatoes right to your home and didn’t charge anything extra for that. Mother kept them in the cellar, as she did cabbage. Buns or marmalade for everyday use you bought in the local grocery.
Easter holidays, Pesach. The bustle had already begun, the preparations were under way. Mother was sweeping dust from all the corners, a general clean-up. Guys went around with cauldrons with hot water for scalding dishes, and my mother used that. There was only a single set of dishes because of that scalding [koshering, the everyday set could be used for Pesach]. And then the long-awaited Seder evening came. I remember it to this day. Firstly, I learned the Haggadah and answered the four questions that my father asked of me. It has stuck in my mind that an extra place would be set at the table and the door would be left slightly ajar. I’d ask, ‘Why?’ Because if it’s left open, Messiah will come. That was fun for a kid. There was matzah, and I remember I’d make an exchange with the boys – they’d give me bread, I’d give them matzah. Felek, bring us some matzah! When our neighbors celebrated Easter, I visited them, too. Pesach was an opportunity for family meetings. If for weeks people didn’t have time, didn’t meet each other, everyone busy taking care of their business, for Pesach they always paid each other visits.
Another holiday – Chanukkah. That was a really big event for me, the lighting of the candles. Besides, the volunteers from the community council would come and bring us all kinds of gifts – sweets, tangerines, oranges, various kinds of cakes. There were packages and there were also fruit baskets. I guess they visited all the Jewish schools with those gifts. I remember how there was more and more candles. Dad lighted them. Later I learned to sing and I sang songs by those candles. Father and I would play various games, we’d dreydelekh, we’d play spinning top. On each side of the top there was a different letter.
At Chanukkah there was also the tree. I remember as if it were today – you brought an evergreen tree from somewhere and decorated it. That was fun! You placed the tree, hung apples, candy on it. I went to visit my friends, there was a tree there, they came to visit me – ‘Look, Felek has a tree, too!’ There was no knowledge of tradition in all that, I learned only later what Chanukkah was all about, what it meant. But in the beginning it was – these guys profess this, those guys profess that. For a Jew, for instance, to go to a church and see the cross, is a horrible thing – the cross! For us, that didn’t matter. I mean, there was no cross at home, you burned the candles. There were two candlesticks and my mother always placed them on white tablecloth. But there was nothing to emphasize that it was a Jewish home, like in some places where you saw all those paintings of old Jews on the walls, the kind of family portraits. There was nothing of the sort.
Then I remember Purim, the shows. That was a major experience, as even my mother helped me prepare some costumes, decorations, and there were Purim shows at school. There was an orphanage at Sapiezynska Street, and our school had it for its partner. We went with a musical show there, to that orphanage.
I remember Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Father would reserve seats in the synagogue for himself and my mother, and we’d participate in the service. Usually the seats weren’t numbered, but on feast days everyone had their seat and I participated in this. I remember as if it was today, it was 14 Dluga Street. At the corner of Kilinskiego and Dluga was the Rena movie theater, and on the other side the Mucha theater, and there stood the synagogue. It was a great experience for me – the singing, the shofar playing, the chest beating.
I didn’t really understand everything, but later, when I went to school, I understood that what really united all Jews was those two days. They are crucial. Because the other festivals, they are kind of remembrance stories, whereas here it was a direct experience. I didn’t understand where I had sinned, what my sins were, but I saw how strong an experience it was for others, the self-flagellation, extreme self-criticism. Father fasted on Yom Kippur, spent the whole day in synagogue. And when I was still a little boy, I remember Father would put a few cookies into his pocket, I’d stand in the synagogue, take out a cookie and eat it. It was a genuine fast for the whole day, there was no question of eating anything.
There were no sukkot in our courtyard. They wouldn’t put one in Podwale for sure because it wouldn’t have survived – the gamins threw stones, cats etc. We went to Wolynska Street, where Aunt lived, and to Kupiecka Street for that. A sukkah was built there, but we didn’t go there each day because it’s quite a long way from Kozla to Wolynska. But I remember we also went to other places for Sukkot. That was also an experience for me. I thought, ‘Why do they make those shelters with planks, with boards, and the roof is covered with branches and leaves?’ The sun shone through, and if it rained, the rain trickled on your head. Later I found out what it was all about. I remember, I was moved because the boys, the gamins threw stones, made fun of it. That wasn’t anti-Semitism as such but only a desire to deride, to gibe.
There was no profound, traditional celebrating of the holidays, typical for small towns, for people who went to the cheder, the yeshivah. It was a middle-class, urban audience, not always educated, but open-minded. It identified with its Jewishness, but didn’t emphasize it with either looks, behavior, or accent. That’s why everyone later always wondered, ‘Your Polish somehow sounds so normal?’ It sounded so because I lived in that community. I only felt Jewish after I crossed Franciszkanska, Nalewki, Nowiniarska. But when I walked down Podwale, around the Old Town – no, that Jewishness wasn’t so laid out into the open.
Dad was apolitical. He’d always ask himself: ‘Is it good for Jews or is it bad for Jews?’ It wasn’t important for him whether it was these guys or those guys. He knew that if something wasn’t good for Jews, then no way. He never joined any political party, but he liked to speak out. Well, a national trait. He liked to discuss politics, and I kind of caught the bug from him. There was a path in the Krasinski Gardens where Jews gathered and deliberated over global politics. There were like twenty parties there and they argued. Something like Hyde Park, but more interesting to look at. And father took me there. I saw that every each one of them, whether he knew or he didn’t, one had read something, the other had heard something, another had just been released from prison and found out, and all those bits of wisdom cumulated in that pathway in the Krasinski Gardens. To this day when I’m walking there I remember it as if it was today. It leads from the Krasinski Palace, diagonally, on the left side, a drinking pump stands on it. It’s there.
My father read the Haint 5. He also read the Bund newspaper Folkszeitung 6. He politicized – on the global situation, the Bolsheviks’ role 7, America’s role. He didn’t think about leaving Poland. There was a Keren Kayemet 8 box at home. It was sealed. An official came, opened it, took the money out, and sealed it again. He wrote on a piece of paper how much money he took.
A cousin from my mother’s side came to us from Przysucha, I don’t remember his name. He was staying with us and said I was growing up like an antichrist [sic] – neither was I being raised like a Jew, nor did I know anything. I was running with the boys both to the synagogue and to the church. You went to the church because the priest could give you something, an apple or a cake. You know, just like kids who have nothing to do. You didn’t go to the mass but only to visit. And so they started turning me into a Jew by force. The cousin convinced my parents and gave them money to pay for a rabbi to come everyday and teach me – alef, bet, gimel, and so on [Editor’s note: most likely a melamed came, not a rabbi]. He gave me assignments. And if I failed to do the homework, he slapped me on the hands with a ruler or the pencil case. He was an authority figure.
My parents certainly didn’t pay for this, as they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. They gradually started turning me into a Jew. Fortunately, I was circumcised, that’s what was left of my Jewishness. I spoke Polish with my parents. I understood Yiddish but couldn’t speak it. I was familiar with it. I heard my father speak it in various situations, like during the Krasinski Gardens debates. You rubbed against it, whether you wanted it or not. But it wasn’t a language I spoke every day.
I went to school when I was seven. I went to elementary school, it was a school operated by the Jewish Community of Warsaw. My parents fixed it so that I found myself there. There were several such schools in Warsaw, run by the Jewish Community. I don’t know where the others were, though. It was supervised by the municipal school inspector, but also by the Jewish community. There were also other schools, private ones. I should have gone to a Polish elementary school at 1 Podwale Street. That was school number 1, it was my district. But they decided I’d go to a Jewish school. It wasn’t a coeducational school, there were only boys, I remember. The curriculum was the same as in a Polish school, but also Yiddish, later Hebrew, then we started studying Rashi 9, the Tannakh, and slowly, slowly, I was deepening my knowledge about things Jewish, becoming a Jew.
I remember that in the beginning they saw me off to Swietojerska Street, and later I walked myself, it was close. My mother escorted me when I was in the first and second grades, and later I had already grown into an urchin, a smart boy, so there was no need to escort me. School was free of charge. That was an advantage, that they didn’t have to pay for me. At school I never talked about my brother, that would have been inappropriate, such things were unwelcome. Neither about my sister. Home was taboo, a private matter. It was our family’s tragedy.
I remember neither the headmaster’s [nor my] home-room teacher’s name. There were seven grades. The school was in the third courtyard. There were three courtyards [at Swietojerska 34], and the school occupied an entire floor. The windows faced the junction of Walowa and Swietojerska. That’s where the brushmakers’ shops 10 stood during the war. They searched for the Ringelblum archive 11 there, but found nothing. The Chinese embassy stands there today.
The school was on the third floor. A typical class had twenty-odd to thirty students. It suddenly became terribly important to me, and I was impressed, because every student had to have a satin uniform and a white collar. You had to adapt and I was sort of uncouth, coarse, and suddenly I found myself inside that school rhythm of things. But I liked it. I was terribly determined to present myself favorably to the teachers. They didn’t have to drive me to study. I did my homework so eagerly. Gradually they came to like me, told the other kids, ‘Look at Felek, he doesn’t have the conditions you have, you live in luxury, and yet you refuse to study, follow his example!’ And because of that poverty, that misery, I started understanding things. All the students were Jewish, and they came from various backgrounds. I remember that every day we were given milk and a bun with marmalade. Every student got that. And the boys from the more well-off families brought sandwiches and shared with others. I was a good student so they’d invite me home to do homework together. There was always something to eat there, those were Jewish homes, well-off – something I never had at home.
The school wasn’t just about going through the basic curriculum. The curriculum was rather packed. Besides the usual subjects, there were also the Jewish courses to go through, and they were treated as seriously as the others. So there was quite a lot of tension, a lot of homework to do. And, I remember it very well, the teachers were rather ambitious and were determined not to leave anyone behind. There were all kinds of jokes, and yet we disciplined each other. At the music lesson, we liked to make fun – the teacher came, played the violin… You know, like kids.
But how much that school gave us besides the formal education – it broadened our horizons! We visited the Belvedere [Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, official residence of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski until his death in 1935], the Royal Castle, which we saw like five times, the Okecie airport – they took us to all the important places by bus, by streetcar. The whole class went under the teacher’s direction. It seems to me that school gave me much more than just the formal education, it introduced us to the world at large. They took us to the technical workshops, showed how young people studied there.
It was mine and my parents’ dream that upon completing elementary school I’d go to a vocational school to learn the trade of a metal worker, a turner, or something like that. That would have been the greatest distinction [achievement]. I must say the teachers had a dialogue with the pupils. There was no drill like, ‘You must obey and either you recognize my authority, or it’s goodbye.’ The atmosphere was friendly. I remember inspections from the Jewish Community and from the municipal board of education, because the school must have been financed by both. And they were always satisfied with what they saw.
The school educated Polish-Jewish patriots. Polish Jews. There were no divisions like that you are Hashomer Hatzair 12, and you are something else. We spoke Polish and Yiddish at school. But mostly Polish. The lessons were also in Polish – math, physics, geography. And if it was a Jewish subject, then you spoke Yiddish. It wasn’t a talmudic school, there was no memorizing. On Saturday and Sunday there was no school. They said it was a goy school, because there were no Chassids there, no Orthodox students.
There was a music teacher at school, Ajzensztadt 13. He was the father of Marysia Ajzensztadt, the nightingale of the Warsaw ghetto. A robust man, six feet tall, with a bit of a gut, he sported a small beard. Dignified. He wore a black hat, but otherwise dressed secularly. He was the conductor of the synagogue choir and was always on the lookout for talented boys, also from other schools. He probably also taught at other schools. I don’t know where he lived, that was too high society for me. He was nervous, he conducted passionately. Had assistants in the choir, but for synagogue service he conducted himself. He was respected, the second most important person after the chazzan.
It was a stroke of luck – your voice usually cracks at this age – that I was chosen to sing in the synagogue choir. I remember they bought me a uniform of sorts – either the community or the synagogue. It was a great honor that someone like me sings in the choir, where Kusewicki 14 sings, the famous one, and look, our Felek, our Fiszl, also sings in it! I remember vividly how they came to the synagogue by limousine, by car, by carriage, I said, ‘Damn, it’s Saturday, a holiday, and here they are in a car!’ Well, yes, but it was his chauffeur driving, not him. The great bankers, industrialists, each had his private seat in the synagogue, their uniformed coachmen.
That was a very outstanding episode in my life. But the most interesting thing was that when the production started of The Dibbuk 15, the movie according to An-ski 16, the Ajzensztadt choir was asked to perform in it. I saw the film once, couldn’t see myself, but I was there! I even remember what I sang there – Shir ha-shirim, the Song of Songs! In the synagogue, there was a gallery, the gods like in the church where the pipe organ is located. We stood there, you went up the stairs from the back. We only sang on Saturdays and the high holidays, not every day. The rehearsals took place at the back, where the ZIH 17 is located today. There was a press club 18 there, and the rehearsals took place in a room. I sang there for a year and a half perhaps, from 1937/1938 to 1939. That was in the final grade, and the whole thing raised my position, that honor, despite all those misfortunes.
There was also this geography and chemistry teacher, she lived on Panska Street, her name was Gienia [from Genowefa], I don’t remember her last name. She’d take me home and I’d help her review the younger grades’ notebooks. How great a distinction it was for me! She took me, a student, to her home, and I browsed through the notebooks and she gave the marks! She was making me proud. Whereas I never saw any interest from school in the students’ family situation. There was a situation once where some teacher took me by the ear and half-tore it. I remember, my mother came to school and made a great fuss about how it was possible, to half-tear a child’s ear?! But the whole thing settled down quickly.
There were always celebrations at school of the traditional holidays and anniversaries. There were celebrations on the 11th of November 19, on Marshal Pilsudski’s 20 birthday, all that you had in a normal school, plus Jewish holidays. Lag Ba’omer, excursions in the summer. We went for excursions to Wawer [summer resort near Warsaw], to the woods, to Otwock [summer resort near Warsaw]. A narrow-gauge train went there, and we’d go on that train to Otwock with a teacher who taught natural science. The natural science course included things such as practical topography, the art of recognizing trees, leaf collecting, and so on. I had, I remember, a very nice collection of leaves in a large album, the herbarium. Dried.
To play truant we went to the Krasinski Gardens. 34 Swietojerska Street was opposite the park, so we often fled from school to the park. We played, gradually started talking with the girls. Krasiniak [Krasinski Gardens] was a community of the Jewish youth. You know how young people are – we liked to make excursions to the Krasinski Gardens, it was the closest place. There were no sanctions for truancy. We went there for the day’s last lesson, or if a teacher had called in sick. I had many friends – Heniek, for instance, lived at 14 Nowiniarska Street, near the Forum movie theatre. Heniek’s was a wealthy home – nice furniture, the table always set, cookies, sweets on the table. It was a different home than mine. I also had girl friends – I remember Rozia from the Old Town, her father had a siphon bottle-filling business.
I was nine or ten years old when I became interested in Hashomer Hatzair, but my family didn’t like it, because they didn’t like me coming home late. Why Hashomer Hatzair? Because it offered a lot of fun. There were various sections – for the adolescents, for schoolchildren. But no politicking. The purpose was to shape people. I knew a few girls who were members, they persuaded me to go. Those were girls I knew from the Krasinski Gardens. There were age groups, I was in the youngest one. They hinted it was about educating the future elites, that there’d be a Jewish state. We knew about it from history.
There were instructors. First some casual-style lecturing, then we’d play. It was like scouting. Excursions were organized, things that young people find impressive. For instance, swimming lessons. There were covered swimming pools on the Vistula with wooden floors, designed so that the water gradually got deeper and deeper. Those were commercial, private-owned swimming pools – Polish, Jewish. Cafes with tables on jetties, water in between. They took us there, and I learned to swim. The Vistula itself was dangerous, unregulated. That was under the auspices of Maccabi 21.
My family poverty didn’t prevent me from becoming more and more deeply involved. Even if any membership fees were charged [by Hashomer Hatzair], they were minimal. I wouldn’t have had the money to pay. Instructors came, elder people, already trained. It was them who took us to the kibbutzim in Grochow [part of right-bank Warsaw], showed us: ‘Look, those are the people who’ll be building the state!’ There were kibbutzim in the Goclaw area, on Grochowska Street. We went there to meet young people preparing for aliyah to Israel [then Palestine]. I remember as if it was today. They had milking cows there, cultivated the land, grew vegetables. There were houses, dormitories, in which young people lived – not only from Warsaw, I guess, but from all kinds of places. They lived in military barracks-like conditions. The land must have been leased, and they cultivated it. They sold the produce and that’s how they earned their living. The main idea was for them to learn, to prepare Jews for working as farmers. They had instructors and they were being trained to become conscious farmers. I remember, when we came, they laid various kinds of fruit out on tables – their produce. It was their pride, that they had grown it all themselves.
Jewish football teams – Maccabi, Ha-Poel 22 – often played on the Polonia [leading Warsaw sports club] stadium at Konwiktorska Street, either against themselves or against Polish teams. Polish and Jewish fans would always fight. You actually went there with the thought that there’d be a fight. We were the aggressive ones. We’d force our way to the field through a hole in the fence, and one time I got through and suddenly a policeman hit me with a club on the back! I came home, my back was all black. Mother applied compresses, moaned, ‘And why did you go there, why do you go there at all?’
We played war, we played tipcat. It’s a game – you have a piece of wood, pointed at the ends. You hold a long stick, like a bat. You throw the piece of wood and strike it with the bat, and it flies. There are goals, and the closer it gets to the goal, the better. There are two teams, it’s a bit like cricket. On Broni Square, where there was later a bus depot and a circus called the Barrel of Fun, we played rag-ball football. Such were our games. Earlier, I had a stove lid on a rod and ran with it, rolling the lid in front of me. In winter time, we made ourselves a sled with the other boys – two planks nailed down together, and when you went sledding head on down the slope at Mostowa Street, you got right to the Vistula bank! My dream was to have a bike. I never had one. There were velodromes [cycling tracks] in Jewish courtyards before the war. I saw kids ice-skating, but roller skates – that I never saw during my childhood.
I played with both Jewish and Polish kids. There was no division on Podwale. Problems would only arise if a stranger entered our turf. The neighborhoods had a strong sense of territorialism. But it wasn’t like, ‘Look, a Jew, let’s give him a beating!’ He was a friend, a homeboy. Parents didn’t react either that, ‘Oh, this Felek is a Jew but goes to the church for fun.’
There was an Orthodox church on Podwale. I lived 18 Podwale, and opposite, at 17 Podwale, near the palace, stood that church. I liked to go there because they sang nicely. At the corner of Podwale and Kapitulna streets was a restaurant, officers, merry, arrived with girls in hackneys.
I went to the movies, there was a cinema on Dluga Street, it cost 25 groszy. You raised the funds by selling bottles you collected in the gateways – and you went to the movies. You often sneaked in for free if the usher wasn’t looking. And when you were inside, you could sit there for hours because the movies played one after another. I loved to watch them, film fascinated me. I remember I was watching a movie called ‘In the Year 2000’ [USA, 1912, directed by Alice Guy], and there people fly like angels. And I thought, ‘God, will I ever live to see the year 2000?’ And when it came, I remembered that moment – I dreamed about it and I’ve lived to see it! They fly! Helicopters, they fly into space, and for me it was something unimaginable! There was Tarzan [‘Tarzan and His Mate,’ USA, 1934, directed by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway].
There were ship cruises to Mlociny [Warsaw suburb, popular Sunday picnic destination before the war]. It often happened we sneaked in on board and got as far as Mlociny, and from there, by the streetcar number 15, from Bielany, back to town. I was a terrible urchin! That’s how I lived. I had no sense of fear, of being afraid of anything. I felt my blood boiling when the Germans entered and I saw what they were doing, how they were catching the Jew, cutting his beard off with scissors, how the Jew jumped from the Kierbedzia bridge into the Vistula.
When Pilsudski died [in 1935], I saw him six times [on the catafalque in the St. John Cathedral in the Old Town] before a queue had accumulated, as it was close to home. Before Poland found out, I was already making the turn, as you went around the catafalque there. All kinds of events, if something was happening on Pilsudskiego Square, I was immediately there, say, a military band marching. I knew all the Legion 23 songs in Polish. There were also Yiddish songs they sang on the street, and I’d catch hold of them, too. Or the so-called courtyard artists came, they also sang in Yiddish. But they seldom came to us because it wasn’t a Jewish neighborhood.
The Vistula was a navigable river, all kinds of goods were rafted down the river on barges, from Cracow, through Warsaw, to Gdansk. In the fall, they brought apples and other farming produce from the south of Poland. Those barges would moor to the shore, Jews would come to trade, and you could buy apples, grain cheaply. The barges were called ‘galars.’ Life teemed on Powisle, Rymarska, Mariensztat, it was the poor neighborhood inhabited by Jews. The Vistula was nearby, you went to pick chestnuts to the Citadel [large military facility just north of Old Town/New Town, built by the Russians as symbol of their rule following the failed January Uprising of 1863], that was my neighborhood. I remember how the guards once caught me picking the chestnuts. Entry was forbidden, it was a military area. And we went there in a large bunch, all homeboys from the Old Town. We got a good whipping and then you had to broom the place. They gave us brushes, brooms. How did you get in here?!
We, the Old Town kids, also had our own garden plots. Mrs. Moscicka, the First Lady, allotted some land at Bugaj Street near the Vistula, and every child got a plot two meters by one. You seeded flowers there, bluebottles, that sort of thing. I remember, she’d come with a servant, he carried a basket with candy, all kinds of sweets. Handed it out to the children, you kissed her on the hand, the moment has stuck in my mind. She was accompanied by no bodyguards, as would be typical these days, she came just like that, it was just a short stroll to go down from the Castle to Bugaj. Or, I remember, they placed in the Old Town – a Christmas tree! How great fun! That was my childhood.
I never went anywhere with my parents, except to visit some relatives. Nor did we ever go out of town. There was no money. I once went with my brother to Przysucha, that must have been before 1935. There I saw a Jewish town – the market square, the small houses, a shtetl. And a church. Then Grandmother took us to the priest, we were allowed to go to the orchard, pick some fruit. But later that was a highly anti-Semitic area, the worst pogroms took place there 24. But before the war it was very, very poor.
I remember Grandmother’s house. There was a sewer besides, a gutter, it smelled. And low, two-story wooden huts. She lived in one like that. I also remember there was a bakery nearby and you could smell the aroma of freshly baked bread and buns. Grandfather’s shoemaking workshop was there. All the Gutmans [Mr. Nieznanowski’s distaff-side relatives] came from Przysucha. She lived there, but the workshop was no longer there. They all knew each other. When Grandma walked with me down the street, she was proud she had a grandson like that, from Warsaw. She dressed the traditional way. Everyone greeted her, ‘Hello, how are you,’ very polite.
What has also stuck in my mind is that there was that bench, and on it sat people. So I ask, ‘Who are those people, why do they sit on this bench?’ Because, they tell me, they have been punished, have been sentenced for various petty offences to sit on this bench for three hours a day, and for everyone to know they’ve done something bad. It was a form of punishment. To this day I remember that bench on the market square in Przysucha. It was for petty offences – someone has stolen an egg, someone else has snatched a pale from the fence. It was surely the town council that dealt out the sentences. A dunce’s bench of sorts. [Editor’s note: there remains to this day in the wall of the Przysucha synagogue a ‘marten,’ i.e. a metal hoop on a chain into which an offender was clenched for a period of time by order of the kahal court as object of ridicule. The bench, in turn, was a popular punishment for petty offences in rural Poland. Perhaps Mr. Nieznanowski combined the two facts. The existence of a ‘dunce’s bench’ in Przysucha has not been confirmed.]
Grandmother had to speak to me Yiddish then. But she knew Polish, too. Those were mixed communities, and Jews in those towns knew Polish. They had an accent but spoke Polish. Grandmother, though religious, was a cultivated person. She never alienated herself, never backbit her neighbors. The relations were different. The antagonisms were later artificially fuelled, especially through envy, that Jews have it better, that they sponge on us, and, worst of all, that they have murdered Christ. That was poisoning thoughts and minds. Everything is alright, they are okay, but they are the Christ murderers.
We knew that stores were being demolished, but not in our area 25. That Jewish stores were being attacked, that there had been a pogrom in Przytyk – that we knew, that was being talked about. I was already a smart-aleck, I remember, I said, ‘But on Miodowa they didn’t touch a single Jewish store!’ And on Miodowa Street was one fur store after another. The most expensive fur stores. The police always stood there, nothing could happen. But a poor shop, a nickel-and-dime, a shoemaker, that they’d attack, throw stones. Only we didn’t really feel it because we had no business of our own, and among the residents such things didn’t happen. I’d actually say there was no barrier at all.
In 1937 we moved to 11 Kozla Street, which was close to Franciszkanska Street, and that was the ghetto border. There everything was pulling me more and more deeply into Jewishness, I had it close to school. My parents had decided to move because the Podwale place was too expensive. They couldn’t afford it. They searched, searched, and found the Kozla place. The house, its old part, has survived. I go there often. They found one room, no kitchen, on the first floor. A kitchen was set up behind a curtain, and there only lived the three of us in that room, as my brother was in jail, my sister in Choroszcz, in the hospital. When my brother wasn’t in jail, he lived with us, he didn't start a family.
As I approached the age of 13 [in 1939], preparations started for my bar mitzvah. I remember, they wrote me the – it’s called the drush, a speech, I was supposed to deliver it. The ceremony took place in the synagogue on Nalewki, I guess it was 24 Nalewki Street. It was a large synagogue. Our synagogue was at 24 or 28 Podwale Street, but my bar mitzvah took place at the Nalewki one. They gave me the tefilin, everything. You had to prepare a drush, a speech. A rabbi came, sent by someone, I guess, to prepare me. He gave me the theses, and I was supposed to write an essay about them. A 20-minute speech. He suggested corrections. It was like writing an essay at school. A major experience, and the worst thing was that I was supposed to make the speech in public. I had performed in school bands, in front of children, but to be in the synagogue, in front of an audience of a hundred or more, to stand on the bimah where they’ll be reading the Torah and then I am to deliver a speech – that was inconceivable!
I long tried to persuade my father that I’d make the speech ten times at home, but not there! Until the last moment. But they just kept explaining to me ‘Look, it will be the greatest honor of all!’ And so I had the drush. Such great satisfaction! So many paeans, praises! It wasn’t the kind of bar mitzvah you’re likely to see today, 200-300 people, gifts and all, no! It was a purely religious, ideological ceremony to indicate that a boy has grown up enough to be a man. Something in this spirit.
I delivered the drush in Hebrew, very clearly, with proper articulation. I felt very important then, as if I was the chazzan. I felt like one! When they also read Torah fragments to me, it was… And the second part, the merriest one – though we were poor – but when I returned home, the table was all set and all uncles had gathered, both from my mother’s and my father’s sides, with wives, kids. I don’t know, perhaps 15 people, that was a lot those days. I repeated the drush, I had it written on a piece of paper, kept it as a holy relic at home. Did Mom prepare a party! There was lokshen with yoych [noodles with chicken soup], then fish, and then the sweets. It was an event of great rank and great importance, they were saying everywhere, ‘Oh, this Fiszl, this Felek will grow up to be a goen [Yiddish for ‘genius’].’ The uncles had acquired another Jew! It hadn’t been clear what he would grow up to be, and look, he has grown up to be a Jew! Already an educated one, Hebrew-speaking.
Before the war I attended perhaps two funerals. It must have been some relatives. I remember us walking to the cemetery at Gesia. Members of my family were buried at Gesia, at the Praga one it was mostly Jews from Praga, poor ones, and our cemetery was there 26. Whose funeral was it? I can’t recall. I only remember everything was clad in black. I remember the crying, there were special weepers that you hired for such occasions. Later, in the cemetery, I asked questions, and they told me – that you bury the person in a shroud, that there is an ablution, the washing of the body, the ritual, but I didn’t see that directly. It never happened in the family, close. I asked why do you place them facing the east. I had such thoughts. But those are only episodes in my mind. I remember that, after some relative had died and we were in their home, everyone sat with their shoes off. You sat [shivah] for seven days. But when you are 10-11 years old, you pay little attention to such things. What has stuck in my mind instead are the merry things, the pleasant memories.
On 1st September 1939 27, when the Germans started bombing Warsaw, my first thought was, ‘Hey, I’m not going to school today!’ I should have been starting seventh grade. I walked there two days later, one of the wings had been bombed, and there was no school anymore. I never turned up at Swietojerska again. We lost touch also with the rest of the family, except for spending some time on Wolynska at my maternal aunt’s, I don’t remember her name, she lived in a wooden house. Wolynska was all wooden houses. Two-story wooden houses.
When the war broke out, my brother was in jail, in Kalisz [town ca. 200 km south-west of Warsaw]. They already knew air raids had started, and the guards fled, leaving all documents laid out in the open on the central courtyard. The criminal prisoners started forcing the bars open. When they broke out in one place, they started freeing each other. And they freed themselves. The first thing they did was to pour gasoline on those documents and set them on fire, lest the Germans find them. And the flight from Kalisz began. We didn’t knew what was happening to Josif. Three days after the Germans marched into Warsaw – which was around 30th September [the Germans indeed marched into Warsaw on 30th September, 1939, and on 1st October a military parade was held on the city’s central square, the Pilsudskiego Square] – there was a night curfew, suddenly there’s knocking on the window! We open the door – my brother walks in! Unshaven, scrawny, hands in bandages. As if he had been resurrected from the dead.
We found out they had been negotiating their way towards Warsaw during the whole of September but as long as the Germans stood around the city, they couldn’t enter. On their way, the fugitives split into groups. The criminals did well, and the political ones – everyone pulled in their own direction. There were many Ukrainians, Belarusians, and many Jews – from Lodz, from Warsaw. One day they were surrounded, was it the Poles who had denounced them? They hid in a cabbage field. The Germans picked them out, started interrogating them. Handcuffed them. But they escaped again, it was the front, they weren’t guarded closely. He worked his way, in those handcuffs, to some village, to a blacksmith, who unchained the handcuffs. But they had left bruises on his wrists, hence the bandages. It seemed the danger was over.
After the Germans entered, I traded a little – sold flowers, Germans newspapers, worked as a paperboy. In February 1940 they started catching people to send to Germany to forced labor. The ghetto hadn’t been set up yet, it was organized only in the fall 28. But already you had to wear the badge [cf. Armband 29]. My brother was walking down the street, they caught him. Those caught on the street worked in the Sejm [parliament], loading documents onto trucks for transport to Berlin. A German came up and says, ‘You ‘Jude’ [German for Jew]! You were there, in that and that place [the Kalisz prison]!’ And my brother says, ‘Why, I’ve never been there!’ He told him to roll up his sleeves. My brother had no ID, nothing. Only some piece of paper. The German tells him, ‘I know where you live! Tomorrow at 11am you are to report at Aleja Szucha [Gestapo HQ].’ And he let him go.
And so the decision was made – we must flee immediately! There was no time to look back. We knew people were fleeing east 30, through Malkinia [town some 100 km north-east of Warsaw, between 1939 and 1941 the German-Russian border passed through there]. We discussed it and my parents decided to stay. ‘No, we were born here and here we’ll stay, it’d be a pity to forgo this old wardrobe, some old rag, we’re not going! But you go, save yourselves!’
And so in the evening, after the curfew, we set off, to save ourselves. We ran from Kozla Street, down the stairs to Koscielna, and there was Bugaj Street, the fishermen. We got to one of those fishermen and for two zlotys he took us to the other side of the river. He dropped us off near the zoo. It was dark. We waited there until 6am, in some bushes, the same kind of ones that are there today. At 6am we went towards the Wilenski train station. Country women in head scarves came to Warsaw with milk, they had those 20-liter cans, two cans each. They delivered the milk to their customers across Warsaw in the night and returned on the morning train. And we got through to the stock car among those women. They were returning home, and we rode among them.
There were checkpoints on the way, but somehow we managed to hide ourselves among them. Eventually we got to Malkinia, and my brother says, ‘Everyone’s getting off that side, and the Germans are yelling to be getting off the other side, so let’s follow the others.’ And we followed the women. We walked through the fields, and suddenly, ‘Halt!’ [German for ‘Stop!’] They started searching, ‘Jude, Jude,’ fished out a dozen persons from among those ladies and told them to go in that direction. Us too. The women went their way, to their villages, their homes, and us they drove in another direction.
We walked perhaps a kilometer and we came upon a crowd of people, a huge crowd! Thousands of people sitting in the neutral zone. On the one side the Russians, in those tall hats of theirs, and on the other the Germans. If you entered the neutral zone, it was neither this way nor that, nor any other. There were several dozen thousand people there. It was cold, freezing, people were dying. Some delegation went to Moscow, they let them pass. There came orders from Stalin to let the Jews pass to Bialystok [city 120 km north-east of Warsaw, in Russian-seized territories between 1939 and 1941]. There were mostly Jews there and some Poles, communists, but not many. Those were refugees from all those places that the Germans had captured.
At first, no one thought about fleeing to Russia, nor did we believe in what the German Jews were telling us about the suffering they had gone through there. A great crowd of people had gathered. Then we managed to get by train to Czyzew [small town 25 km north-east of Malkinia on the rail route to Bialystok]. That’s how we got through. There was no way of going back to the German side. Later people established transfer routes and paid to return, to bring their parents, friends with them. We didn’t want to go back. Our friends, my brother’s friends, went back to get their parents and visited ours to collect them, too. Our parents didn’t want to go. There is this Yiddish saying, ‘What happens to everyone will also happen to the bride.’ They didn’t want to, weren’t aware what would happen to them.
And thus a new epic journey east started for us. I was 14, had had my bar mitzvah, my brother was 15 years older than me. We were in Bialystok. My brother went to Choroszcz, to our sister [Pola], and learned all patients had been taken away and there was no trace of them. The Russians decided all those patients had to be liquidated [Editor’s note: There are no records of the Red Army murdering mentally ill patients. Perhaps it was a one-time action by an isolated unit]. We thus learned our sister was dead, something our parents knew nothing about.
A whole lot of people had gathered in Bialystok. There was no work, so people started trading, wheeling-dealing. The Russians said, ‘There are many spies here, many enemies of the Soviet Union, we need to get rid of them, it’s the border area, it’s dangerous.’ And they announced – people willing to go back to Germany should report there and there. And people bought that. Many signed up for return to Germany. Then the Russians said, street so and so, numbers from so to so, report with luggage at train station. They crammed them into freight cars tight like herrings in a barrel, sealed the cars, posted sentries, and off they went!
I later talked to those people, because we didn’t go. We didn’t sign up for leaving, but very many people wanted to go back. They said, ‘We want nothing to do with all this communism, we have enough.’ And so they set them up. They packed them all, sealed like herrings in a barrel, and they’re riding. It’s no more than 150-200 km to Warsaw. And they’re riding, riding, riding… Until they found themselves in Archangelsk [city in northern Russia on the White Sea, major labor camp location since 1922], or in Murmansk [city in northern Russia on the Barents Sea]. There they took them to a forest, and said, ‘You wanted to go to the Germans? Fascists! Now you’ve got your shovels here, your crowbars and pickaxes, you’ll learn about life and work.’
People of leftist views, on the other hand, like my brother, said, ‘It’s the Soviet Union, the only salvation, we’ve got to save ourselves.’ And they boarded the freight cars, but not under escort, under guard. We rode for four weeks. We knew we were going into the Russian interior, to work, but as volunteers. On our way we stopped at several cities and there were the so called ‘delousing stations’ because lice were eating us away. Those are the kind of steam baths where they take your clothes away for boiling. They killed the lice to prevent typhus. Everyone stripped down completely, gave the clothes away for boiling, and took a bath. We went several times through such quarantine. After such bathing the lice actually came back to life, growing even faster than before, as they had what they liked – heat. And with such luggage, through the delousing stations, we got to the Ural, to Magnitogorsk [city in eastern Russia, in the Ural region, major industrial center, symbol of Stalinist industrialization].
In Magnitogorsk, they welcomed the newcomers, they didn’t say ‘from Poland,’ but ‘from Belarus,’ who ‘want to be building the Magnitogorsk industrial complex with us.’ Some people survived that way. But some didn’t like it, so they went back [to the General Government]. They actually decided to flee while in Magnitogorsk – and some made it. You could fix everything in Russia if you had the money, because it was completely corrupt. The authorities were corrupt, the police were corrupt. They went back to the ghetto! And they started writing letters. Until 1941, the postal service functioned normally. We sent two packages to our parents, to the 11 Kozla Street address. We got a confirmation they had received the packages, but we didn’t know what was happening to them. From the people who got back there we knew a ghetto had been set up. But whether or not our parents were still there, that we didn’t know.
I don’t know whether it was out of naivety of something else, but people wrote letters to [Soviet] president Kalinin asking for families to be allowed to reunite. Kalinin 31 sent a reply, saying that the letters had been forwarded to Berlin and talks were under way on a potential reuniting program. That was before the outbreak of the German-Russian war, before June 1941 32. The two countries kept normal diplomatic relations. When the war broke out – it was the end. Germany became an enemy, a treacherous invasion, and we were making tanks, weapons etc. to defend the country against the Germans.
I completed a carpentry course in Magnitogorsk. Then I was assigned to a brigade that built coke-chemical furnaces. Before the war, the Russians didn’t have the technology of building such furnaces, and had to employ Belgian, Dutch, American specialists to build them. Special luxurious developments were built to house them. They were paid in gold. Those were the experts in building coke-chemical furnaces. During the war, when they started heating up one of such furnaces, it collapsed. And without coke you can’t make tanks. It meant a great sabotage had occurred. All those foreign experts had gone home, they were foreign citizens, the Russians couldn’t stop them. And so they set up special brigades for building those furnaces, and I was assigned to one of those. We knew how to lay those bricks, because those are the chamotte bricks, maximum tolerance is 1-2 millimeters, there can be no deviation, and there you cook coke. We learned to build those furnaces. We were at first like students, and those who had worked under those foreign experts were our masters. We became craftsmen. An enterprise was set up to build coke-chemical plants. So after the Magnitogorsk project had been completed, they sent us to Novosibirsk [city in Siberia, port on the Ob River]. The production cycle was six months.
My brother, in turn, became a construction worker. There’s this concrete construction, you insert metal rods and pour concrete over it. He worked with reinforced concrete. We were in touch, but I worked in a completely different place. You worked 14-16 hours a day, no one asked you. There was work to be done and that’s it. War. I lost touch with my brother in Magnitogorsk because I was sent to Chelabinsk [city in the Ural, major industrial center]. From Chelabinsk to Novosibirsk, from Novosibirsk to Sverdlovsk [city in eastern Russia, former Yekaterinburg]. When they started liberating Ukraine [1944], and in Donetsk [industrial city in eastern Ukraine] there were such furnaces, they told us, ‘Now your brigade will go to Ukraine.’ And they sent us, two or three engineers and our group, about 30 people, from Siberia to Ukraine. That was 1944. As soon as the Russians captured Donetsk, the Donbass region [Donets Basin or Donbass, industrial region in eastern Ukraine, major cities Donetsk and Luhansk], they sent us there.
There we found bombed out ruins, it was the turn of 1944 and 1945. A whole lot of German POWs had been gathered there, later also the kulaks 33 and others from the socialist countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, to tear down those ruins, and on that rubble we started building those coking furnaces. We were again in the spotlight there, because within half a year they started smelting iron in the Donbass again. It was ore, but without coke, so it’s nothing. I was in touch a bit with my brother, he was in the Ural.
I got so Russianized in that work brigade – as I had been Polonized in the past, de-Judaized, so I became Russianized here. I could no longer speak Polish, because I hadn’t been doing so, and I didn’t speak much Yiddish either. Then I found out that the Union of Polish Patriots [ZPP] 34 had been set up and was signing people up for return to Poland. I met one more boy like myself, a victim, his name was Furman, from Pinsk [town in eastern Poland, presently in Belarus]. Interestingly, he was a Jew, and his father had been a sailor in the Pinsk Fleet. We were together in Ukraine. We were in Dnieprodherzhinsk then [industrial city in Ukraine], that’s a dozen kilometers from Dniepropetrovsk [industrial city in south-central Ukraine]. And one day he says, ‘You know, let’s go to Dniepropetrovsk, we’ll find that ZPP office.’ And so we’ve found it, are turning up, talking in Russian. They ask us, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I’m from Warsaw, and he’s from Pinsk,’ I say, ‘Okay, but how do we know it? Do you have any documents?’ I only had a school ID. And what does your friend have? And he had nothing. So I say, ‘He’s been with me all the time, since the beginning of the war.’ No, he has to present some document. And so that school ID saved me, and him they didn’t let go and he had to stay in the Soviet Union. No one gave you the benefit of the doubt there.
When I registered there, I told them I had a brother in Magnitogorsk, and that I knew he had been registered with the ZPP there. They checked that, and found out he was no longer in Magnitogorsk but in Moscow. He had been brought to Moscow alongside a group of Jews who were to prepare for repatriation to Poland 35. Because there was a problem – what to do with the Jews who were in Russia and when they return to Poland, where would they go? They had no families, no houses, nothing. So a group was set up in Moscow to prepare ‘aliyah’ from the Soviet Union to Poland. My brother and others had been brought there. He later found himself in the Lublin government 36, under the protection of Modzelewski [Zygmunt Modzelewski (1900-1954): communist politician, during WWII in the Soviet Union, 1947-1951 foreign minister of communist Poland].
The Lublin government sent him to Lower Silesia [region in south-western Poland], as a delegate for receiving the repatriates there. Before the war, he had served time together with Ochab, so he had good credentials. [Edward Ochab (1906-1989): communist politician, during WWII in the Soviet Union, first secretary of the communist party between March and October 1956, head of state 1964-1968, member of parliament. Withdrew from politics in the aftermath of the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign.] When I was in Ukraine and read somewhere that Warsaw had been liberated in January, I thought, ‘Why not?’, scribbled a few words on a piece of paper, and sent that to Warsaw, to 11 Kozla Street, my parents’ address. A reply came, ‘House burned down, addressee absent.’ Meantime, my brother got in touch with me to let me know he was in Lublin [city in south-eastern Poland, ca. 200 km south-east of Warsaw], and that he’d be in touch.
I returned to Poland in one of the [repatriation] transports, it was February 1946, arriving in a place called Rychbach, Reichenbach in German, Dzierzoniów in Polish [town in south-western Poland, 50 km south of Wroclaw, on former German territory. The main gathering point for Jews being repatriated from the Soviet Union to Poland after WWII]. I didn’t go to Warsaw because to whom would I have been supposed to go there? My parents died in the Warsaw ghetto. No one survived of the whole Warsaw family. They were probably sent to Treblinka 37. My brother told me once there had been over thirty people in the family. Of those thirty-something, virtually only me and my brother have survived.
After the war I met my mother’s brother, Awrum, and his children, who had survived in Russia. In 1920, a group of Polish Jews, communists, wanted to cross the border illegally to the Soviet Union. On the border they caught them as spies, enemies. It didn’t matter they were communists. They were sent to the Siberia. Awrum did time before the war in a prison in Kharkov [city in eastern Ukraine], he took me [and showed to me] in which cell they kept him and fed him with herring. They lived in Kharkov. The elders are already dead, and their children have gone to America, Israel. If I was in touch with them at all, it’s less so now, because with children it’s a different story altogether.
My mother’s cousin, Stella, I don’t remember her last name, worked before the war as assistant teacher at the Korczak 38 orphanage. I don’t know how she survived. She settled in America. It is from her that I have my mother’s only pre-war photo. We got in touch, she came here. She knew my mother, she remembers me as a small moppet. She died recently.
Virtually no one’s left of my generation. There was Janka Wiernik, daughter of Jojne Gutman, my eldest uncle. She was a communist in France before the war. She went there in search of work. She was active in the communist movement in a coal mine in Belgium and she met Gierek there [Edward Gierek (1913-2001): communist politician, before WWII worked in Belgium as coal miner, 1970-1980 first secretary of the Polish communist party]. I called her. ‘Who’s this?’ I go, ‘Do you know anything about Nieznanowski from Podwale?’ ‘And who are you?’ ‘I’m his son, Felek!’ We got in touch. She’s dead now.
On our way back to Poland, in Przemysl [town in south-eastern Poland, ca. 350 km of Warsaw], we were being shot at by the Ukrainian gangs [official propaganda in Poland referred to armed Ukrainians active in the contestable territories in the post-WWII period as ‘Ukrainian gangs’], on our way from Ukraine. We arrived in Rychbach, I looked around: it was full of Jews, hustle and bustle like before the war on Nalewki! And I’m standing there with my wooden suitcase, dressed in the Soviet-style quilted work jacket. ‘Hey, who are you with? Wie alt bist du? [German for ‘How old are you?’] Where you from?’ I started to tell him. ‘Wait, you won’t be walking on foot! Sit on my bike, and I’ll walk and carry your suitcase. Where do you want to go?’ ‘To Daszynskiego Street,’ I said, ‘my brother works there.’ ‘Daszynskiego?’ ‘It’s where the Jewish Committee 39 is located.’
I went there, and there was a huge crowd in front of it, people had arrived in town and are waiting for lodgings, for food, because they had emerged within nothing from the train. I couldn’t push through. Eventually I got through to the secretary, her name was Siedlecka, and I say to her, in Russian, I remember, ‘Mrs. Siedlecka, my name is Nieznanowski.’ She says, ‘Oh, Nieznanowski, you must be his brother?’ And my brother entered the room. We burst into tears. We hadn’t seen each other since 1941. He says, ‘Take these keys, there’s an apartment, go there, I can’t leave the office right now. You’ll find some clothes there, get dressed.’
I entered the apartment, looked around – and there were swastikas, all kinds of German clothes. I opened the drawer – there’s a gun. But, most importantly, there was a bathroom! A coal-fired stove. I fired under that stove, took a bath, dressed into those shorts, the lederhosen, and turned into something of a German boy. I went to the train station, and there stands the car in which I arrived. I say, ‘What are you waiting here for, come on, let’s go!’ ‘No, we’re supposed to go to Klodzko [town in south-western Poland, 80 km south of Wroclaw, on former German territory].’ So I said to them, ‘We’re not going to Klodzko, this is where we'll stay!’ And they got off. The whole chevra [group], I have them in the photos here 40.
And so another Jewish epic story began, in Dzierzoniów this time. I was there in 1946-1947. I found myself in the center of things. There were so many kibbutzim, various ones, of various hues! And I had come as a leftist, from the Soviet Union. So I ask them, ‘Which organization am I supposed to join?’ ‘The ZWM!’ they tell me. Alright, let it be the ZWM 41. And the Jews were quarreling about who was to be in charge of distributing the things that are arriving, because through Gdansk there were arriving loads of stuff from the Joint 42: bales of fabrics, machines, products, food, all for the Jewish survivors. Really great amounts of stuff. And, typically for the Jews, they started quarreling who was to be in charge of all that. And each party wanted to be important. Finally, a decision was made – I have no family, I’m young, I will be the storeman. Because half of all that stuff had already found its way to the market. They were already dealing, doing gesheft, business. And so shipments were arriving – there’s matzah, there’s canned fish, there’s kosher food. Loads and loads of stuff. You made lists and in the cooperatives, the factories, there were distributing the stuff according to those lists. But there were always some smooth operators who tried to get the stuff that wasn’t theirs.
And someone told me, ‘There’s one man you can trust, and his name is Szpryngier. He is a German who saved the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery here, he was here throughout the war. He’s the only man you can trust. Okay, Szpryngier or no Szpryngier, I had to deal with all kinds of people in the Ural. I introduced myself. I gathered all the Jewry – for in the meantime I had become an anti-Semite – and told them so, ‘All the keys that you have, put them on the table! I brought locksmiths, all the locks have been replaced, and only me and Szpryngier have keys to them now, no one else is allowed to enter the storerooms.’
And then it started! ‘What, he wants to introduce his rule here!?’ They started tossing around, shouting. Started accusing my brother that he discriminates in favor of the Zionists. That, though he’s a communist, he still shows favor to the kibbutzniks. A brawl started. It was the time of the so called rightwing-nationalist deviation. [Editor’s note: At a congress in December 1948, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the communist Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) merged to form a communist-dominated Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). That became possible only because PPS members opposing the merger (or in fact absorption by the communists) had been accused of a ‘rightwing-nationalist deviation’ and ousted. An estimated one in four PPS members were marginalized or expelled from the party.] I was powerless. With such a crowd of people I had no power to control all that. I asked some of the younger ones to the side and tell them, ‘Listen, I don’t want you to be policemen, but please, keep a watchful eye. If you see someone selling chocolate on the market – where does he have it from? Or canned food?’ Everyone knew it was a tactic to frighten. And they grumble, ‘Look, such a young lad and such a zealot.’ And bargaining began, like today – who is to have control over all that aid? Let’s do a rotating presidency, first the Poalei Zion 43, then the Bund 44, then the religious organization. Ideology was mainly just a cover. I knew the kibbutzim needed to provide for the people, they had taken them under their roof, had to feed them, nourish them. It wasn’t important for me whether someone was from this or that kibbutz – what was important was that they have enough food to feed their people. A major tussle started and then I said, ‘Enough! I can no longer stand it here.’
In 1947 I was drafted into the army. I said, okay, if I’ve been drafted, then I’m going. What, to the army? Are you crazy? A delegation came from Wroclaw, the party secretary, Grudzien. He says, ‘Felek, are you crazy, you, going into the army? One phone call and you don’t have to go.’ And I tell him, ‘But I want to go! I don’t want to be here any longer.’ And so I bid farewell to all that and joined the army. I started with the barracks, from the lowest rank, from washing the johns. My brother they did in, too. As a supporter of Zionism, he was eliminated from Dzierzoniów. Since then I knew I wanted nothing to do with those people. In the army I started as a private, moving gradually up in active service. I went to a cadet school in Lodz. This impressed me, I’ve got to admit it – a working-class boy, from Warsaw, a Jew, and suddenly he becomes someone and is respected! But there were the ghetto commemorations, they came to Warsaw, we met, I kept in touch with them. Most immigrated to Israel, to other countries, and I was stuck in the military.
In 1952 I married Henryka. There’s two years’ age difference between us. She isn’t Jewish. We met in Warsaw through a common friend. We just grew intimate. She didn’t have parents, only the father, her mother died when she was a child, in 1937. During the war her father was taken prisoner, then found himself in a camp. She and her younger sister were living with relatives. My brother and whole family welcomed her really warmly, she saw a completely different atmosphere. Her family are simple people, but it wasn’t a problem for them, they respected my brother. The problem of anti-Semitism didn’t exist. What was under the surface, I don’t want to know, though I’m not that stupid not to realize.
I’ve been living in this house, 82B Koszykowa Street, for 52 years now. I watched it being built. I had a studio flat, only the bed, there was no passage. If you wanted to pass, the other person had to lie on the bed. So narrow. But when we were expecting our first child, I went to my commanding officer, and I say to him, ‘Comrade, we’ll have a child, there’s no room for three in that apartment. Please do something.’ He immediately summoned an architect, a major, and says, ‘This officer has been allotted an apartment, when is it supposed to be ready?’ And he says, ‘We could finish the renovation, but there are no stairs, we have no materials.’ ‘You’ll get materials, everything, do it in two weeks.’
When I moved in, the stairs still weren’t there, we climbed up the construction gangways, and German POWs were hurrying to finish the renovation. Then the second child came, a year and half had passed. I lived in the same staircase, only up a floor. I got one room, I wasn’t due for more. There was some general, a bachelor, someone was interested in him getting the apartment, but they could only give him one room. And so we moved into that apartment, whose renovation had still not been completed by then. Our daughter Ewa was born in 1953, and a son, Witek, followed in 1954.
My brother had a wife, a Jewess, and three kids. His wife’s name was Guta Rozenfeld, the kids – Michal, Hadasa, and Rachela. They lived in Zoliborz [district in northern left-bank Warsaw]. In 1954 – they could no longer stand it, because that daughter, Rachela – she’s dead now – was a typical Jewess, dark-skinned, pretty eyes. They harassed her in school. She hit herself on the head, had to be treated psychiatrically. So they said, ‘Enough! We can no longer stand it here!’ A decision was made to leave Poland. My brother came to me and says, ‘What do we do? Only the two of us have been left.’ I say, ‘I’m in the army, I’ll go and tell them to dismiss me.’ They still pretended to be nice then. They said, ‘So what that your brother is leaving? But you have a wife, the army needs you, we won’t dismiss you. It doesn’t matter that your brother is leaving.’ I say, ‘What do you mean it doesn’t matter? I know the rule is if you have anyone abroad, you yourself will never be permitted to leave.’ ‘No, nothing of the sort!’ My brother said, ‘Well, you have your family, you’ll do as you like, but we’re leaving.’ And thus we parted. In Israel my brother worked in the Carit kibbutz. His daughter, Rachela, went to the swimming pool once, wanted to take a swim, they didn’t notice, she drowned. Hadasa works as a teacher.
In 1954 my wife was working for the military. She was set up – they didn’t know to get rid of me, the easiest way was through her. She ran the classified registry, one day they called her, said the baby had high fever in the nursery, she had to come and take it home. She went to her boss, handed over the keys, and returned only two weeks later, after the baby had gotten better. In the meantime, a top-secret document had gone missing – the dislocation of underground airfields in Poland. She had registered it and now it was gone. So they started interrogating her, an investigation was launched. I was in the academy in Poznan at the time, and she was crying, telling me, listen, so and so. I thought this way and that way, but those days it was difficult to extricate yourself from something like that. They still did it the soft way, because they trusted me, after all, so they just fired her from the job. She was left jobless.
It was then, being unemployed for the first time, that she signed up for an ORT course 45, a purse- and bag-making course. There she met Jews. At the time Jews were coming to Poland, repatriates [from the Soviet Union, being released as part of the thawing following Stalin’s death], it was 1954, and with those people she participated in the course. Later they went to work. There was the Odrodzenie cooperative, the Optima cooperative, and there she worked in the bookkeeping department. I used to tell her, ‘You’re now more Jewish than I am!’
In 1967 I was told to report at the human resources department, and they asked me, ‘So how’s your brother in Israel doing?’ ‘You’re asking me how he’s doing? Legia, the football team, have just returned from Israel, you ask them how my brother is doing. They’ll give you a detailed account, and I know nothing.’ It really wasn’t simple to be in touch those days.
Two years later, when the anti-Semitic campaign 46 had started in earnest, they tell me to report and say, ‘Listen, we have to dismiss you.’ I say, ‘Now? Well, okay, dismiss me. I wanted to do it a long time ago.’ The other officers were asking, why Nieznanowski is being dismissed. I was popular with the cadre. They say, ‘What, you don’t know? His brother is a high-ranking police officer in Tel Aviv! And you’re asking why he is being dismissed?’ It was only then I learned. I said, ‘How is that possible? He’s had rickets, he’s my height, how can he be in the army?’ But it didn’t matter, it’s enough that they’d said it. It was just sending a clear signal they wanted to get rid of me. But they had no pretext, so they had to invent.
Later they took care of me, they summoned me, and ask, ‘How long have you been a major?’ ’Eight years.’ ‘Eight years? And no promotion?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m of the wrong descent, that’s why I’ve had no promotion.’ ‘Well, that’s a scandal! We’re offering you a higher position. You can immediately go to Bartoszyce, in the Mazury area [lake district in north-eastern Poland].’ I say, ‘To Bartoszyce? A very interesting proposition, but I can’t decide [myself], I have a wife, children, a home.’ ‘But you’re the head of the family, the decision is yours to make!’ I say, ‘No, I can’t decide without my loved ones.’ ‘Alright, report tomorrow at 10am what you’ve decided.’
I already knew how they were fixing others. ‘So, have you made up your mind?’ ‘Yes, I have, and I have decided not to go and not to accept this proposition.’ ‘And why?’ ‘My kids are about to complete elementary school, they won’t be able to continue their education there. I know what kind of town Bartoszyce is.’ ‘Are you refusing to obey an order?’ I say, ‘This is not an order. I’m simply rejecting the proposition. If you offer me something here, in Warsaw, then okay.’ Several dozen people were thus gotten rid of. Everything under pretext, and at Jaruzelski’s 47 knowledge, because he was the defense minister at the time.
By 1968, when all that had hit us [the anti-Semitic campaign], I saw that spirit starting to circle around me. We were thinking more and more about leaving. My wife was very much in favor, because we saw – this one leaving, that one leaving, you went to the Dworzec Gdanski train station, bid farewell. I then said – if I am to go, then only to Israel, where I had a brother, there was family. I was full of ideology, I was thinking, there’s no place in the world that’s free of anti-Semitism. I knew it was in America, it was everywhere. On the other hand, there was the question of my wife going to Israel, of our children, as it wasn’t clear whether they were Jews or not. It wasn’t very clear at the time whether a goy woman would be welcomed in Israel, or the kids, whether my son would adopt the religion. There were many unanswered questions, though today they tell me it wasn’t that bad. I don’t know, perhaps I was wrong, in any case, that tilted the balance against going. Both my wife and my kids have held it against me to this day.
I got a weak kick in the ass, most people were getting a strong one, they started working on you, dissecting you, and in most cases it was turning out you were a spy. I avoided all that, but I knew what was going on behind the scenes. I knew who’d be summoned and who wouldn’t, and I didn’t decide to emigrate, though they were trying hard to persuade me to do it, to Sweden. Very many of my friends left then – they were going to Sweden, to Denmark, my neighbors. And we stayed.
I was twice in Israel, in the 1990s. Once at my brother’s initiative, who had died but left a wish to that effect and brought me and my wife to Israel. He had died sometime earlier, in 1987. I visited his grave, it was in the Sarid kibbutz, situated in the north of Israel. The second time I went with a group on a social exchange program organized by the Jewish community here, to familiarize myself with the country. I contacted all those friends of mine and was received very heartily everywhere, and they started coming here. Poland has become something like a base. When in Poland, Jews go to places like Ciechocinek or Krynica Morska.
I can read Yiddish to this day. Before the war, I spoke it fluently. Later, in Russia, I got complete amnesia, I couldn’t even speak Polish after returning from there. I spoke Russian and a bit of Ukrainian. But when I returned to the chevra, to the Jewish community, the knowledge of Yiddish came back to me. My Hebrew is only so-so. I studied in an ashkenazi school. In Israel today they speak Sephardi everywhere, but when I was in Israel for a couple of days, I quickly started to catch on, if I spent some time there, it would return to me. [Editor’s note: the interviewee is referring to the more oriental Hebrew of today’s Israel with regards to pronunciation and vocabulary.]
In 1990, Mostowicz 48 asked me, ‘What do you do now?’ ‘Nothing,’ I told him, ‘I’ve retired again.’ And I got involved in things Jewish. Old people started coming, I started reading, and the Yiddish language was revived in me. But when I went to Israel, I could only speak Yiddish with the religious ones, no one speaks Yiddish there. I’ve noticed it among young people – they study it at school, but it’s a dead language, I believe. You can still buy a newspaper in Yiddish, but few people speak the language, hardly anyone can read it. There are a few old men who can, with whom I can talk, but that’s about it. That’s the fate of languages, they die.
I worked for the community for many years, but no longer. There’s the social assistance committee, supported, among other things, by the Joint. Then for the Jewish Veterans’ Association 49, Mostowicz had brought me there. Right now I’m gradually pulling out. I work for the Jewish Historical Institute and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, I’m the chairman of the auditing committee. So I’m still active, but these days I no longer want to involve myself too deeply. I also had to back out because of my wife’s disease, because her Parkinson is developing, assuming various forms. In fact, whom am I supposed to live for? How much life do I have left?
My son, Witek, is in Sweden. He had been going there to earn money by picking berries, went again in 1980, and never returned. He worked at the psychiatric hospital in Uppsala. He started as a paramedic, but the doctors appreciated him and he was promoted, ran the psychiatric outpatient clinic. Last year he got promoted again and is the manager of the municipal department of psychiatry in Uppsala. So he ceased being a doctor and became an office worker. He attended English courses at the British Institute, where he was taught by his future wife. She obviously taught him to become her husband, and so they got married. His wife’s name is Valerie, she’s English. I went there, the wedding was in grand style. They traveled the world for ten years, and after ten years [they got married]. Then came the children. They have two daughters, Chana and Rebecca. Chana is 15, and Rebecca is eight years old. Unfortunately, they don’t speak Polish.
My son started questioning me, ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘the girls are supposed to write school essays about their roots, their descent, draw their genealogical tree. Start writing.’ So when they asked me to record [for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation], I gave the whole tape to my son. He translated it into English or Swedish, and now they’re proud of their grandfather who lives in Poland.
There is no problem in his family whether he’s Jewish or not. I was in England, to visit his parents-in-law, I was received by an Anglican priest. Everyone knows my parents were in the ghetto. The notion of anti-Semitism doesn’t exist there at all, and we got really close with his wife, too. My son, in turn, has been more and more interested in his Jewishness. How so? Well, he’s connected to Warsaw there through the Internet, reads the Polish press, and he’s really absorbed with all those things. So I started sending him books, magazines.
My daughter, Ewa, lives in Poland. She went to school to Czternastka, then to Queen Jadwiga’s on Wawelska [names of high schools in Warsaw]. She has a degree in agriculture. Then she got married, her husband works for a foreign company, he’s got a degree in archaeology. They have one son, Bartek. A handsome boy, tall, 185 centimeters. He was born in 1988. He’s studying inland construction at the Warsaw University of Technology. Ewa’s husband is a Catholic, a boy from Ochota [district in left-bank Warsaw], he isn’t dim, though his mother hardly ever leaves the church, but that isn’t a problem. Since she’s been to Israel, I’m an older brother in faith, I’m virtually as good as holy. The relationship is really okay. I meet my daughter, my son-in-law on an everyday basis, and with her parents-in-law we also get together from time to time.
I have this rule that I never advertise loudly that I’m a Jew, Felek Nieznanowski, but wherever something needs to be done, I never shun it. For instance, I worked for some time on a volunteer basis for the Polish-German Reconciliation foundation where I was in charge of Jewish affairs. I worked there with all kinds of people – from the AK 50, the NSZ 51… Surprisingly, I’ve kept in touch with those people since then. They’re from my generation. They like to see me, I like to see them. They used to be fierce fighters, broke up prisons after the war, served time in jail, and so on, today they’re just elderly gentlemen. They look critically at everything, come from a completely different background than myself, but they like me and they keep calling me. One of them, a doctor, tells me, ‘Felek, I come from an endek family, you know, there were endeks in Poznan 52. My father was an arms contractor for the Polish army before the war and I was brought up in the endek spirit. But the occupation period changed all that.’ I tell him, ‘Listen, I don’t want to be the good Jew!’ But God forbid! I am open.
I’m often in the Old Town, I like the place and if I have a foreign visitor, they have to take a photo where my house stood. I show to them the Kilinski monument, because that’s where the house stood. Before the war, the Kilinski monument stood on the Krasinski Square, near Nowiniarska, where the Warsaw Uprising Heroes monument stands today. It disappeared under occupation, and after the war was moved from the Krasinski Square to its present location.
I recently talked to Krajewski [Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish activist in Poland] and others and I say, ‘Listen, you’re younger than me, you could be my child. I look skeptically at things, though not completely hopelessly, but I’m no utopist. My only luck is that I’m already 80 years old. I only feel pity for the younger generation and their children. There’s no place for them [Jews] in this country. This could serve as my credo.
