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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.
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.
Period
Location
Warsaw
Poland
Interview
Feliks Nieznanowski