Undying Will: A Family’s Story of Survival in War Torn Europe

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Warrior Way

Copyright © 2019 Harvy Berman

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0468-1

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Dedicated to the memory of my parents, Nathan and Mira Berman, who did everything they could to leave the horrors of the Holocaust behind them.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1. Autobiography of a Survivor, Joseph Berman, Part I

2. Alter Pinchus Passes Away

3. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part II

4. The Age of Jewish Enlightenment

5. Game Day

6. The First Soccer Match vs. Team Mazzovia

7. Coach Bela

8. Preparation, Anticipation, and Communication

9. A Wedding and a Sad Turn of Events

10. The Final Rematch

11. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part III

12. The Proposal

13. The Family Business

14. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part IV

15. The Destruction of Kaluszyn, Mendel Berman, Part I

16. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part V

17. The Destruction of Kaluszyn, Part II

18. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part VI

19. The Destruction of Kaluszyn, Part III

20. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part VII

21. Martyrdom, Resistance, and Destruction

22. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part VIII

23. Kaluszyn Partisans

24. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part IX

25. Autobiography of a Survivor, Part X

Epilogue

About the Author

Appendix

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Acknowledgments

When my hopes of making a career playing football ended in 1974 due to back surgery, I decided to go into the family leather business. Nine o’clock breakfast, eleven o’clock schnapps, and twelve o’clock lunch were spent with uncles and cousins gathered around a large conference table. The business of the factory was discussed in a mix of English and Yiddish. Inevitably, the conversations would switch over to tales of my relatives’ lives in Poland before and during the war. One day, my uncles were talking in Yiddish about my father’s first wife. Unbeknownst to them, I had overheard their conversation and I realized I had just overheard a family secret. I wondered how much more of this time I was unaware. I began to take notes and ask questions. My notes sat for years while I helped run the family business, completed college, married, and raised a family. In 1992, when the family business was sold, I decided to pursue a lifelong dream in the martial arts. After meeting grandmaster Helio Gracie in 1997, I could not get over how much he reminded me of my own father, who had passed away the previous year. It was at this time that I decided to dedicate the next part of my life in the study and teaching of Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

In 2016, I received a call from an old family friend, Mark Upfall, whose father came from the same city in Poland as my father. He told me the story of Joe Gellman, another descendant of my family’s city. Upon visiting his ancestor’s gravesite in Kaluszyn, a barren field was all that greeted Joe, with no designation of what was once there. Joe and his friend, Ed Goldberg, began the long and arduous task of reclaiming the cemetery and creating a monument to honor the generations of Jews whose final resting space was desecrated by the Nazis, as well as the mass grave used to liquidate thousands of the town’s Jews. I discovered that the land had been purchased and the monument, created by Israeli artist Ken Goldman, was being erected. In two months, there was going to be a dedication of which I was invited to attend.

Many thoughts crossed my mind as I recalled my father’s words that he would never set foot in Poland again. My thoughts shifted to my grandparents, of whom I had never even seen a picture. I thought reciting Kaddish at the burial site of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and half-brother would be a way to honor my parents and family. My wife, Jody, and I arrived in Warsaw and united with a few descendants of Kaluszyn. The next morning we drove to Kaluszyn to memorialize those long-forgotten souls. After the memorial and dedication service, we went on in search of my family’s factory. Upon arriving, I was saddened to discover that the structure burned to the ground just two years prior. However, to my great surprise, we were able to locate the homes of my grandfather, Alter Pinchus, and Uncle Mendel. Walking in the footsteps of my family inspired me to get back to work and document my family story for my grandchildren and future generations. I took out my old notebook and realized I would need help in telling the story I had envisioned all these years. I was fortunate to come into contact with an old football friend, Brian Patterson, who always impressed me with his abilities as a multifaceted artist. We worked together for almost a year, and with Brian’s help we were able to bring to paper that which I had only envisioned in my mind. I would like to express my gratitude to Sarah and David Waldshein—David for his translations from Yiddish to English of the Kaluszyn safer1, and Sarah for her keen memory, recalling the many stories her mother, Ethel, had shared with her over the years. My Uncles Mendel and Joseph Berman for their firsthand account of our family story. One can only imagine the difficulty of putting into words and reliving the horrors they experienced. To my extended family, though I initially hoped to tell the stories of our entire family, I found the story of my father and old Sam’s involvement in creating a soccer team in a small Jewish Shtetl to most resonate with me. To my wife, Jody, thank you for believing in me and supporting each endeavor and pursuit. To my daughters, Jaime and Aly, thank you for all your efforts, support, and encouragement throughout this process. Finally, to my grandchildren, Gianna, Vince, and Cece, this book is for you. Not so much to relive the horrors of the Holocaust, but to learn about the history, which is your heritage. Your ancestors’ strength of character and fight for survival has been a great inspiration to me. My hope is that these stories of resilience and perseverance act as a reminder to you when faced with adversity.

1 After the destruction of the Jewish towns, survivors and descendants of the towns created a book, a safer, of each town, as a form of remembrance.

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It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one most adaptable to change.

—Charles Darwin

Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.

—Carlos Castaneda

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

—Albert Einstein

Yiddish Map of Europe, 1939. Note location of Kaluszyn.

City Streets of Kaluszyn, 1938

New Jewish cemetery, founded between XIX-XX

Zwolinski’s forge

Roman Catholic cemetery

Power Plant built in 1927 r.

Well at Trzcianka Street

Ms Wisniewska and Brzozowska’s restaurant

City Council

Detka’s forge

Berman and Guzik’s tannery

Vicarage

Roman Catholic church built between 1890-1897

Primary school

Well at Kilinski Square (east side)

Police station

Commune office and the secretary Franciszek Frąckiewicz’s house

Old Jewish cemetery

Jan Sieradzinski’s tannery

No Data

Voluntary Fire Brigade Building

Post Office

Czerwiński Teofil Karol’s forge

Natalia Rudzińska’s restaurant (with jukebox)

Orphanage (location unsure)

Knife Manufacture; in 30’ cinema Uciecha; part of first and the second floor inhabited by Jews

Mikvah, built around 1825 r.

Property of Stefan Kozlowski—chairman of Voluntary Fire Brigade; grocery store; most beautiful garden in town

Old mansion, partially inhabited by rabby Beniamin Michelson

Public well (108 m. of depth)

Karolina Roguska’s restaurant

Stanislaw Nowak’s restaurant

Well at the Stasiaka Street

Station of the narrow-gauge rail Kałuszyn—Mrozy

Grzegorz Kuc’s forge

Tallith manufacture

Magistrate’s court

Jewish hansom cab station (shuttling between Mrozy railway station and Kałuszyn)

No Data

M. Kisielnicki’s restaurant

Teahouse

M. Kisielnicki’s petrol making facility

I. Goldberg’s petrol making facility

Two-story mill

Jewish forge (there were at least 3 of them)

Franciszek Klukowski’s forge

Synagogue, destroyed by Germans in 1942, rabbi Shapiro’s office, Jewish community house

No Data

Krzywoblocki’s forge

Wooden house, veterinary office

No Data

Slaughterhouse

Nest’s brewery

Great Synagogue of Kaluszyn, Destroyed 1939.

Kaluszyn early 1930s

Team Premium Soccer Club, Kaluszyn, 1930

Nathan Berman, second row, far left

Sam Berman (son of Motel), top row, third from left

Shia Berman (son of Yonkel), top left

Yosef Figenbaum, actual coach, top right

Additional teammates, unidentifiable. Yona Yedwab, Kochinik, Jacob Syzma, Jacob Susman, Meyer Yangerzinski, Gadila Provila

Berman Factory, Kaluszyn, 1937

Sam Berman, far left

Nathan Berman, far right

Chaim Gutarsky, second from left

Nathan Berman, Warsaw, 1938

Nachema and Nathan Berman, Kaluszyn, 1938

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Foreword

Although an estimated 80 percent of American Jews are of Polish descent, many in the postwar generation and those born later know little about their families’ connection to their ancestral home.

The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation, Kindle Edition

Before the war, there were approximately 3.5 million Jews in Poland. After the war, there were somewhere between 50,000 and 120,000 survivors.

Most American Jews are directly connected to those survivors. It is amazing, however, how time impacts awareness and perception. The farther we are from the horrors of the Holocaust, the less it seems to factor in our lives.

And indeed, part of the triumph over such a horror is being able to move on and enjoy life. The survivors you will meet here embody that attitude and embraced life without being held captive by the terrible memories.

But it is important to remember and to understand how these Polish Jews managed to survive the Holocaust and arrive in the United States. Their stories tell of astonishing and heart-stopping experiences. Tattered black and white photographs and film clips don’t tell the full story.

Fortunately, several survivors recorded their thoughts—stories of escape, survival, enduring love, starvation, mayhem, compassion, and murder with powerful firsthand accounts.

We are focusing on the stories told by the Berman family. Two members had their memories written down. Many others outside the family did the same, and we draw from those accounts on occasion, as well.

Our most important takeaway from these stories is not a catalogue of the atrocities, but it is an attempt to understand the strength and courage it took to never surrender—no matter what they faced or how long they had to endure it.

Kaluszyn, Poland 1915–1945

Two autobiographical works, in the authentic voices of the authors, provide the vast majority of material that follows, with occasional notes to fill in additional perspective and quotes from the stories of others. The Berman autobiography authors, two of twelve siblings, are:

Mendel Berman wrote The Destruction of Kaluszyn, translated from the original Yiddish by David Waldshan (1995). He is the nephew by marriage of the author. In his words, it is approximately 90 percent word for word and approximately 10 percent rephrased sentences due to some idiomatic Yiddish expressions. Mendel’s work is included in the larger Memorial Book of Kaluszyn, first published in 1961 in Tel Aviv. Select additional quotes by other authors featured in that work are included herein on occasion and noted in the footnotes.

Joseph Berman wrote an Autobiography of a Survivor. This diary is longer and more comprehensive, and so provides most of the narrative contained herein. Joseph continued his remembrances beyond the Holocaust years and into the times when the family emigrated to new worlds.

The chapters recounting their Holocaust experiences (1939–1945) tell amazing stories: How five of the Bermans, after jumping off the death train headed to Treblinka, held together for nearly three years in the rugged countryside of Kaluszyn narrowly escaping certain death at every turn, desperately trying to keep the family alive and intact. (Two more in this group also escaped the Nazis, but later succumbed to disease.)

Kaluszyn was a small shtetl or town. Some 80 percent of its residents were Jews. As those five Bermans returned to Kaluszyn once the Nazis had been routed, they found that there were only a total of about ten Jews left in the ruined town, out of more than 8,000 before the war.

Shortly after the war, they were rejoined by six more family members who escaped the fate at Treblinka and survived in Russia, with their own harrowing survival stories including banishments to Siberia.

After the war, another journey would then begin that led to the United States.

This was a large family. Sometimes, there are more than a few members bearing the same first name. It can get confusing to track. A family tree is included in the pictorial section to clarify who is who.

Additional chapters interspersed throughout the book recount the experiences of the Berman family prior to the outbreak of the German invasion of Poland in 1939. These stories come from your author’s recollection of family discussions over the past forty years.

We wanted to look at this particular time because this was a period of relative peace and prosperity following and just prior to especially violent and traumatic periods of Polish history. A bubble in time—a few years after the German invasion of World War I and the subsequent Soviet invasion that lasted until March 1921. And it was some thirteen years prior to the start of World War II and the Nazi horrors.

It was in this time frame that young Nathan Berman, seventeen, was, in fact, appointed head of the family business after the death of the patriarch, Alter Pinchus Berman. Nathan was a fun-loving youth, known to enjoy cigarettes and vodka. He was not strictly orthodox, much like his beloved father, Alter.

Nathan and several relatives and friends did indeed play on a soccer team in the town. Team Premium is believed to be the first organized team to ever come from a predominantly Jewish shtetl (town).

The soccer stories also feature a Polish Catholic boy named Stanislaw Boruc. Boruc played a crucial role in the family’s survival during the Holocaust. However, his involvement in the soccer team is plausible fiction.

For their efforts in sheltering the Bermans and others during the Holocaust, Boruc and his wife, Teofila, were awarded by the Institute Yad Vashem in Jerusalem with the title Righteous Among Nations.

Since it is a known fact that Stanislaw Boruc and Nathan Berman’s fathers were indeed good friends in real life, we took the leap to imagine the two sons may have played a sport together. So, it’s not such a huge leap.

It is also worth noting that the coach of the team, Bela Sebesteyn, was actually a Jewish soccer star who played for Hungary in the Olympics. There were perhaps a couple dozen Jewish soccer players of note in the entire world in this era. When inventing a coach for the team, we decided to honor Bela’s name and his real-world accomplishments.

We tell these stories as best we can based on historical facts about Kaluszyn, the rapidly evolving Jewish culture of those times, some cherished family anecdotes, and some fanciful imaginings when it comes to the soccer games.

The stories are intended to try and help us understand the mental outlook on life and spiritual strength that must have developed in those who never quit fighting to survive the Nazi horrors—regardless of the