Nate Hall

Memoir of the Dying Pole

Cold. Freezing cold. Every day I wake up and try to remember
warmth. Its hard; its been so long that the idea of not freezing seems
impossible. The only thing that fights the cold is the exhaustion. I dont
know how long Ive been in this godforsaken hell on Earth, but the day
I leave Norlisk will be the day I die. I will probably die in the mine; one
moment slaving away at rocks as I have been for years, the next
buried underneath them. The notion doesnt frighten me anymore. Ive
seen death; I know its ugly face. Ive seen it in the ashes of my city, in
the sarcophagus of Warsaw.
Im writing this memoir by moonlight in the Gulag. Ive been here
since the Red Army captured me back in October of 1944. While it may
be presumptuous to assume my own storys significance, I believe Ive
seen the worst of human nature, and that gives me purpose to detail it.
My story becomes history when put on paper, and while life has been
tempestuous, history will be glorified. Igor, a man who shares a name
with my grandfather, smuggled the pen and journal into the camp. I
promised him my assistance in completing his quota next week and he
used his connections to get them to me. Igor was a Russian, while I
was a Pole, yet here we were swinging the same pick axe, the same
numbers needing be fulfilled for quota. We were equals in our squalor,
despite being enemies in our cultures. I speak just enough Russian

2
from my years at the University to communicate with him, yet I will
never call him my friend.
The wind is driving through the sparse planks of our barracks
walls. Across the room a fight breaks out between two wide-framed
Russian men. The usually swears of a brawling Russian are replaced
with grunts and snarls, these men have become animals and selfpreservation has dictated an ultimatum for the survival of the fittest.
More yelling ensues as guards come into the putrid-smelling, dimly lit
room and begin beating the two men senseless. For good measure,
they beat the men around them, kicking prisoners who fall to the floor
in order to remind them of their sub-human status. I must hide my
papers before the guards steal them from me.
To be a Pole has meant many things over the course of my life.
The icy water of the Vistula still flows through my veins, while the
blood of my people still soaks the dirt. I was born in my familys home
on May 4, 1914. Every year my family and friends would celebrate the
day before my birthday, Constitution Day. To me, it seemed as though
memorializing a two-hundred year old piece of paper overshadowed
my existence, but my mother used to tell me that the Poles were
simply getting ready for the main event. Kazimierz mother would tell
me, The Constitution only lasted for a year, and youve lasted for five!
I pray to God that you last another five! She was a hardy woman:
stout and stern, always ready to brandish her large wooden spoon in

3
the event of her childrens disobedience. Wioletta was a devout
woman and while time has changed my religious thinking, she raised
me to be a good, Catholic boy. I grew up attending mass under the twin
spires of St. Florians Cathedral, impatiently fidgeting to the stories of
hellfire and divine retribution. Little did I know that God would unleash
his fury upon the Warsaw.
We lived on the Eastern bank of the Vistula River, in the
neighborhood known as Saska Kpa. I had an eventful childhood
growing up in Praga. While I was born during the Great War, I
remember very little of it besides the day Poland became free. My
father had held me on our front steps as we watched the demoralized,
Soviet occupiers finally leave the domain of us Poles. We despised
them and their miserable, chaotic homeland.
During my childhood, Id often race my brother Piotr across the
Poniatowski bridge, our sister Michalina waiting on the other side to
determine a winner. Piotr would always cheat in these races, pushing
me as we ran in an attempt to make me slip on the icy bridge. During
one such scuffle, Piotr fell and knocked out his front tooth. We tried to
hide Piotrs missing tooth from our parents, but my father quickly
caught on when the normally garrulous child suddenly had nothing to
say. Lucjan Lewandowski had always been an observant, charismatic
man. His attention to detail served him well in his work as a lawyer. In
1905, Lucjan had seen my mother reading Eugene Onegin, and

4
recalling his classical Russian schooling (as was mandated in Polish
schools by the tsar), recited a sappy, romantic Pushkin poem to win
over my mothers heart.
During the summer of 1920, Piotr and I were sprinting across the
bridge to get home. School had gotten out early that day and we were
excited to play outside now that the ice had finally melted. As we
neared the end of the bridge, we could see our father standing on the
steps outside our front door with a solemn, worried look across his
face. Piotr and I immediately began apologizing, assuming that we had
made a mistake and trying to save ourselves some of the punishment
heading our ways. Father waved our apologies aside and explained the
situation to us.
Boys, I know that sometimes you enjoy playing as soldiers and
fighting pretend wars. But real war is coming, and its not as fun as
youd like to think. We were immediately sobered and terrified. The
Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, led by the evil and terrible
Commander Tukhachevsky. Panic gripped the streets; stores reserves
were bought out, as Poles feared the oncoming siege and its
consequences on their daily lives. Rumors flew regarding the
disastrous defeats suffered by our Polish army and the inhumanity of
living inside the non-Christian Soviet Union. Piotr, Michalina and I were
forbidden from leaving the house and we sat waiting in the parlor for
the oncoming apocalypse to arrive. We were convinced that the

5
boredom would kill us before the war got to Warsaw. It wasnt until
August 12, 1920 that we began to hear the booms of artillery and
crackles of gunfire. Mechanical thunder and lightning pounded Warsaw
and we could do nothing but sit in our basement praying that the Red
Army didnt find us. The Soviet offensive happened right down the
street from our house, and from our basement hideaway we could hear
bullets shattering windows, lodging themselves into the walls of our
home.
We knew nothing about what was happening outside, but were
preparing for life under a new empire. Grandpa Igor had told us
horrible stories about the brutality of life under the Russians during the
19th century and we feared the revival of such hostility. Gunfire ripped
through the silence of the night and paranoia grasped each of my
family members. After a week and a half of fighting, our food reserves
were very low. We were surviving on very little, and my siblings and I
began to shrivel in size. Little did we know of the Miracle at the
Wisa1 taking place outside, and the glorious victory that would be
achieved by Pisudski and Polish forces. The defending Polish troops
had smashed the demonic Red Army, successfully defending Warsaw
by way of a flanking maneuver and crushing the retreating Soviets in a
series of battles2. The celebrations were glorious as Pisudski was

1 Thomas Fiddick, The Miracle of the Vistula, The Journal of Modern

History, vol. 45, No. 4 (UChicago, 1973) p. 626-643.
2 Fiddick, The Miracle of the Vistula, P. 626-643.

6
heralded as the savior of a Polish nation facing certain annihilation. I
ate so much kielbasa during the festivities that I doubled my weight in
a few days.
Those were some of the most proud moments to be a Pole. Id
always known myself to be a Pole with the word representing the
image of my homeland. We were a resilient group of people, beset on
all sides by historic enemies such as the Russians and Germans. My
neighborhood, Praga, was not homogenous however. Many Jewish
families lived in the area and played important roles in the community.
One such family, the Rubensteins, were family friends and Id often
come home to my father and Mr. Rubenstein smoking their pipes and
discussing recent controversial legal cases. Although the Rubensteins
wore yarmulkes and ate on a strict kosher diet, their family was very
similar to ours in the way they acted towards each other. Mrs. And Mr.
Rubenstein often bickered, as did my parents. The Rubenstein Children,
Jakub and Abram would sometimes break into fistfights, as did Piotr
and I. In truth, the Rubensteins were as Polish as the Lewanowskis.
Jakub Rubenstein and I had been best friends since the day we
met. While we went to different schools and learned different things,
we had entirely similar interests. Both of us were Polonia Warsaw
fanatics, and wed often talk about the football matches after school,
reciting statistics that wed read in the papers and arguing over who
was the best player on the team. Wed listen to broadcasts of the

7
games on weekends, and every year on Jakubs birthday, Mr.
Rubinstein would take us to Konwiktorska Street, where the Black
Shirts, played to rabidly cheer for our favorite team. Fans around us
would often heckle Mr. Rubinstein for his Kippur, but it never seemed to
faze him. I think he had grown used to the jeers over the years.
Another favorite pastime of Jakub and Is was loitering in the
Brdno cemetery. When we were teenagers, wed wander the
tombstones looking for the most Jewish names that we could find.
Wed have deep conversations about life and religion, philosophizing
about what made us different if we acted so similarly?
Its tradition, Jakub would explain. Your dad and your dads
dad, and your dads dads dad all lived according to a resurrected
Communists cryptic metaphors, whereas my ancestors all wore funny
hats and sacrificed children! They were clearly other differences
between us. Although our families were close, we existed in different
communities. The Rubensteins went to Temple on Saturday, while
Lewandowskis attended mass on Sunday. Jakub spoke Polish, Yiddish,
and Hebrew, whereas I only spoke Polish and specks of Russian. If there
was one thing for sure, it was that I much preferred the Rubensteins
bagels to the Lewandowskis Chleb3.
In May 1926, Jakub and I were standing near a light post next to
the Vistula watching history in the making. The legend himself, Jzef

3 Maria Balinska, The Bagel, (Yale, 2008)

8
Pisudski stood opposite President Stanisaw Wojciechowski in what
could only be described as a standoff. A chilly wind was blowing off the
river, as the two Polish power players negotiated the fate of the newly
reborn countrys government4. There was tension in the air as Poland
stood on the precipice of conflict for the third time in my young life.
Warsaw collectively held its breath when Pisudski stormed away. It was
true that the Sejm had been a mess; power was constantly shifting as
Polish government struggled mightily to gain its bearings. Yet war
seemed so drastic for the majority of us Poles who had witnessed
devastation at the hands of foreign invaders. On the 11th, a state of
emergency was declared in Warsaw as a full Coup dtat took place. As
he had done six years before, my father ushered our family into the
basement. Just like when the Soviets had come, Pisudski had captured
the Praga neighborhood, and was preparing to cross the bridge right
down the street from my home. We were scared and confused. The
fighting of 1920 had lasted two weeks, who knew how long this battle
could take? Fighting began during the night across the river. We could
hear gunfire throughout the night from our basement shelter. Michalina
cried, her boyfriend had deserted his post in order to fight for
Pisudskis rebel army and she feared for his life. Her constant sobbing
made already strained nerves short-circuit, and my father silenced her
4 Joseph Rothschild, The Ideological, Political, and Economic
Background of Pilsudski's Coup D' Etat of 1926, Political Science
Quarterly, vol. 78, No. 2, (Academy of Political Science, 1963), pg. 224244

9
with the back of his hand. We would find out the next day that the
young man was dead.
Life was not much different after the coup. As the new prime
minister, Pisudskis Sanation government supposedly cleaned up the
Polish governments act. However, my father often remarked on the
tsarist tendencies of the new dictator5. During the early 1930s,
Lucjan had defended many communists in court who were being
prosecuted by the government for bogus claims. The responsibility of
defending these doomed communists weighed on my father,
I know I cannot win this case, he said one evening after having
spent all day in court defending the editor of a left-leaning
underground newspaper. I was in my last year of gymnasium, and had
read the writings of Marx and Engels by this point. Their arguments
made sense, yet I couldnt bring myself to believe them. My people
didnt hate the Russians because they were richer or poorer than us.
We hated the Russians because they were Russian, and they had
committed so many atrocities against our people over history.
Opposite my disbelief, Jakub had become a fervent ideologue for
the communist cause. He had been converted during his gymnasium
years. Id often find him with a copy of an underground communist
paper, distributed through illegal sources. It was hard to find
communist materials during these years, as the Sanation government
5 Antony Polonsky, Politics in independent Poland 1921-1939,
(Clarendon, 1972), 66.

10
had begun censoring the instability-stirring ideology6. Jakub believed in
revolution, he had seen inequality and he believed that unlike other
social systems, communism offered him a chance at normality, at
removing labels that had burdened his existence7.
On a chilly afternoon in the Fall of 1932, Jakub and I were seated
at a small caf near the Old Town market place. As typical of two law
students, we were enthusiastically debating politics. Our cups were
constantly filled with coffee as the waitress supplied the collegiate
drug of choice. Our argument centered on the root cause of the
famine in the Soviet Union that was decimating the Ukraine. We knew
very little about the specifics, but rumors had spread that millions were
dying in our neighbors to the East. Refugees had appeared from the
area, with bodies like stick figures, telling of the horrible atrocities
being committed by the Soviet officials throughout Ukraine. Millions of
agrarian farmers were starving to death while Stalins collectivization
policies required them to continue meeting absurd grain quotas. Those
who refused to comply were brutally repressed, often murdered or
exiled and never seen again8. It seemed clear that whatever the

6 Gawe Strzdaa, Censorship in the Peoples Republic of Poland,

<http://www.folklore.ee/pubte/eraamat/eestipoola/strzadala.pdf.>
7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, <
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communistmanifesto/ch01.htm>
8 Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi, Marta D. Olynyk and Andrij Wynnyckyj, The
Holodomor and Its Consequences in the Ukrainian Countryside,
Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1-4, <
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23611463>

11
Soviets were doing was not working based on the stories spread by the
Ukrainian refugees. Jakub disagreed at every point. According to him,
we in Poland had no documented proof that the Soviet Experiment was
the cause of the famine, but rather our culture biased us to believe
anti-Russian propaganda. Jakub argued that the famine was caused by
the tremendous droughts and poor harvests. Information that he had
acquired through underground sources told of quotas being met and a
great deal of industrial success. Stalin was supposedly leading them to
glory and his master plan would create a stronger Soviet Union. The
way Jakub spoke of Stalin was strange, as though star struck by the
magnificence of the Soviet Unions controversial dictator. As Jakub
began his usual glorifying rant of Stalins heroics, our waitress
suddenly interjected,
It was not Stalin who raided my home for grain and killed my
family. His henchmen did that for him. I was stunned. The ferocity and
repressed emotion from someone who had lived through Hell, who had
seen the deadliest famine in modern history, and yet she went coolly
pouring my coffee while glaring fiercely at Jakub until he finally offered
his condolences. She was beautiful; her blonde hair wrapped in a braid
down her back while her eyes were filled with dark wells of blue. I sat
there dumbfounded, struggling to form the proper words to respond to
such a dark confession. I will always owe the deepest debt to Jakub for
inviting her to sit and talk with us. Her shift ended 15 minutes later,

12
right as Jakub and I finished our argument on who would ask her on a
date first. I won citing an incident in which I had protected him during
an argument with multiple anti-Jewish student demonstrators.
Her name was Anita and she had been in Warsaw for less than a
month. She had fled from her native Ukraine by stowing away in a rail
car and protecting herself with a kitchen knife grabbed before Soviet
Party officials razed her home. She told me of her younger brother,
Nikolai, who was shot in a ditch when the officials had found grain
stored in his mattress. Anita and Nikolai had used to run races across
the length of a bridge, like Piotr and I had across the Vistula. Her Polish
was shaky, and she would stumble when trying to find translations for
her Ukrainian vocabulary, but we talked for hours regardless, finding
out details about each others lives, comparing childhoods in Poland
and the Ukraine. She had come from a farming village in Central
Ukraine, near Kiev and seen violence since a young age when the
Soviets created a civil war in Ukraine and installed their own puppet
government9. I told her about the terror of the Battle of Warsaw and
was surprised when she told me shed never heard of it. Her contempt
for Soviets was apparent.
They are rats, shchury, only focused on themselves. Murderers,
self-righteous murderers. The twisted satire has not been lost on me.
Decades after I met Anita I find myself in a Soviet labor camp, breaking
9 Kul'chyts'kyi et. al, The Holodomor and Its Consequences in the
Ukrainian Countryside

13
my back daily for this satanic empire of lies and police brutality. I often
find myself dreaming of Anita as my body begins to break down under
the absurd workload. I remember the perfect continuity we shared, two
souls captivated with one another, finding solace in the knowledge that
we had a second half to ourselves. Its hard to write about my wife
without succumbing to emotional devastation. Of everything that
existed in the world I used to know, my time with her occupies my
mind as I struggle with consciousness. The prospect of accompanying
her in death makes my mortality acceptable, but the spirit she
embodied means that Im damn sure going to fight until my last
breath.
The slats of the cot that I was using have broken, and I am now
relegated to sleeping on the dirt floor of the barracks. I dont
understand much of what the Russians say to each other, so my only
company comes from the rats that share my bed. I have still managed
to meet my quotas despite my deteriorating back, but I recognize that
my time is running out. There is much death around me; just yesterday
forty prisoners were killed in a cave-in. Today, we had just a little bit of
extra soup to go around for the living.
Anita and I were married in February, 1934. Our ceremony took
place in St. Johns Cathedral with my family, family friends, and school
colleagues in attendance. Piotr served as the best man, as my mother
had strictly forbidden Jakub from the position despite my request. I was

14
glad to see that the Rubensteins were in attendance. Jakub had told
me day before that this would be the first time anyone in his ancestry
had been to a Christian wedding.
Im still waiting to be the first of my family to attend a Jewish
one, I had told him half-jokingly. Despite the humorous nature of our
observations, there was a taste of significance to this witnessing of
each others customs. Jakub, despite not practicing Judaism himself,
still identified as Jewish with the caveat that he was a Pole first10.
After the wedding, my family threw the best party of my life.
Polka music echoed throughout the old abode on the Vistula, as a local
band played popular tunes for the celebrating Poles. Beer and vodka
were flowing as we celebrated what would be the happiest time of our
lives. I was living in a dream, being propelled along by an incredible
and beautiful euphoria of eternal companionship and a new hope for
our future. For the first time life felt peaceful. The month before,
Pisudski had saved Poland yet again by signing the German-Polish
Non-Aggression Pact, easing the ever-present paranoia of Nazi
invasion. Later that year, Poland would sign a similar agreement with
the Soviet Union. We had no idea how devious our neighboring
monsters deceits would be.
Things began to quickly deteriorate in second half of the 1930s.
Our great leader Jzef Pisudski, hero of Warsaw, had passed away in
10 Chone Shmeruk, Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish
Culture, 309

15
1935. I was working as a patent lawyer in rdmiecie, reading papers
all day and dealing with lengthy, legal jargon. We had moved into an
apartment in the Mokotw district of Warsaw, close to the caf where
Anita and I had met. We were doing fairly well for ourselves and life
was going along routinely. We would often stroll down Marszakowska
Street, relaxing in what was our scenic hometown. On weekends, wed
often picnic in azienki Park, feeding the ducks when they came to the
edge of the pond. Anita had become active in local feminist circles. She
would often attend speeches from prominent activists such as Irena
Krzywick and Tadeusz eleski11. The ideas and concepts encountered
during these meetings inspired Anita. We had many conversations
discussing what gender equality would entail, if it was possible, and
how we could better achieve it. I supported Anita and the feminist
cause she championed, but I saw the endeavor as futile. Men had
always controlled the levers of power, and while it may be possible for
individual women to empower themselves and gain power, the system
seemed too powerfully predisposed to be overcome patriarchy had
been the standard in my household, as well as the Rubensteins.
Whereas hundreds of possible categories existed in the realm of
nationality and religion, gender seemed too defined and preordained to
be changed. My father had run my household, as had my fathers

11 Nameeta Mathur, The New Sportswoman: Nationalism, Feminism

And Womens Physical Culture in Interwar Poland, The Polish Review,
Vol. XLVIII, No.4, (Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, 2003)

16
father, and so on. However, Anita and I were equal in our partnership.
Our marriage wasnt about control or property; we both valued each
other as people, friends, and lovers. In that, we broke from the
tradition of our ancestries.
Warsaw had been changing since we moved into our apartment
in Mokotw. The old mayor, and new President Stefan Starzyski had
invested huge sums into large-scale transportation projects. Streets
were widened and paved, and trees and flowers were planted along
these new roads. Construction began on a subway system and
according to Anita; general opinion in the coffee shop was that Poland
was becoming one of the worlds premier metropolises. The cold,
quaint town of my childhood was quickly becoming a modern city of
the new world. Then the world ended.
Diplomatic tension between Poland and Nazi Germany had
heated to fear-inducing levels in the late 1930s. The neighboring
Czechoslovaks had been betrayed by Western Europe in late 1938, as
the infamous Munich Agreement saw Germany annex the economically
and industrially advanced Sudetenland. Our country had no true allies
besides the French who appeared weak in their commitment, and
Romania who seemed weak in their ability. Hitlers regime had
demanded preposterous concessions from our government, including
ceding the city of Danzig and a highway between East Prussia and
Germany proper. Things appeared out of control as Germany swiftly

17
conquered our Czechoslovak neighbors in early 1939. Anita heard
rumors of war flying all day in the caf, as newspapers described the
quickly spiraling situation in sensationalized headlines. It felt as though
we were waiting for the day when German planes would begin
bombing the city. The familiar zeitgeist of pessimism began to
reemerge among my academic contemporaries.
It was a late afternoon in September of 1939. Anita, Jakub and I
were huddled around the small stove in our apartment and Jakub was
visibly frazzled. Worry lines creased his forehead, a trend that used to
happen before final exams now had more dire circumstance. News had
just broken that the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression
pact. The details were foggy, but discomfort crept into the soul of
every Pole. The mutual deterrence of the Soviets and Nazis had
provided an uneasy comfort in the increasingly tumultuous, global
political stage, as we believed Germany would not risk the enormous
consequences of a war with the Soviets. The Nazis had been vocal
about their dislike for Jews, and Jakub knew this. He was drinking faster
than I could pour.
This is the end my friend the distraught, Jewish academic
prophesized, Everything we have, everything that is Poland has a
diminishing timeframe. Were running out of time. I disingenuously
reassured my drunken friend that everything would be fine. The British
and French had threatened Germany with war in the case of an

18
invasion of Poland, but we knew they would be no competition for the
German industrial juggernaut that loomed menacingly over Poland.
Jakub was preparing to leave the country for the East. Rumors had
circulated among the Jewish community regarding the inhumanity with
which Nazis regarded Jews. German Jews had lost most of their civil
rights in a series of legislative actions by the politically dominant Nazi
party, while Hitlers virulently anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf
called for the removal of Jews from Aryan culture12. Jakub was
understandably in a state of panic,
My family is here. I am a Pole! How can I leave the place that
defines who I am? He was sobbing now; precognitive fear mixed with
vodka had turned my best friend inside out. I promised him that if
worst came to worst he could stay with Anita and I in our apartment
until the dust settled and things returned to normalcy.
Normalcy would never return. Our poor Poland was annihilated
during the early part of September 1939. The dread and panic
reminded me of the previous war against the Soviets nearly twenty
years earlier. The demonic screams of Air raid sirens blared as
Luftwafte bombers leveled entire buildings. The overwhelming sense of
despair and inevitability strangled Warsaw as news of defeat after
defeat suffered by the Polish Army came over the radio. Many of our
neighbors fled their homes in search of safety in the country. Families
12 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy, <
http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf>

19
carried very little luggage, using one of natures ultimate defense
mechanisms: running. Hitlers forces were quickly positioned outside of
Warsaw, the barrels of artillery aimed at the heart of our country. The
Nazis already occupied my childhood home, Praga, and I knew nothing
about the fate of my family. I would later learn that many of my old
friends had been killed in the Nazi invasion. My brother, Piotr, had been
enlisted in the infantry and I knew his survival chances were slim to
none. I prayed to a god I didnt entirely believe in to protect my family,
to spare my brother from the fate I knew he had already suffered. I
never heard from my brother again.
During the last day of Polands existence, I was startled by a
knock on my door. Jakub was standing there covered in rubble and
bleeding profusely from his forehead. I pulled him inside and got him
clean clothes, while Anita filled a basin with water for him to wash with.
Jakub was babbling nonsensically, his words slurred and incoherent. It
was apparent that he had suffered a head injury, but I had no means to
diagnose its severity. Anita set up temporary bed inside our bathtub, as
the apartment itself was filled with broken glass. Anita and I put Jakub
in the makeshift bunk, and then lay in our own bed for hours, unable to
sleep due to the overwhelming uncertainty of tomorrow, and definitive
destruction of today.
When we woke in the morning, we found Jakub curled up in a ball
on the ground rocking back and forth. He seemed bewildered, unable

20
to comprehend the devastation he had seen13. Anita prepared three
bowls of oatmeal, putting the last of the pantrys butter in Jakubs dish.
The food helped settle our nerves and calmed Jakub down enough that
he could finally speak. He had escaped the East bank of the Vistula on
a hunch that Nazi forces were quickly approaching. I asked him about
my family and what had happened to his head. He knew nothing
regarding the well being of my family, or his own, but we both knew
that their prospects were dismal. He had been hit in the forehead by a
piece of brick following an aerial bombardment near Old Town. He
described his journey as a light-headed trip through destruction, fire,
rubble and all
The next few months would be the strangest of my life. The
Germans had set up a puppet government in Warsaw known as the
General Government, and with it came blond-haired, blue-eyed devils
speaking a language I couldnt comprehend. The occupying Nazi troops
treated us Poles as subhuman, mocking and threatening us whenever
we were in the street. The city had been badly beaten by the invasion,
and the streets were lined with bodies and wreckage. I had never
imagined carnage on such a scale to be possible, yet the invasion was
just the beginning of the Nazi horrors. Warsaw was lawless, no courts

13 Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second

World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, (Jerusalem,
1976)

21
existed and German occupiers committed more crimes than they
prevented14.
Anita and I lived in fear and darkness, food was difficult to find
and required bartering away goods such as clothes and jewelry.
Gunshots rang out at all hours, as if to remind us that the war
continued. We knew very little about the events in the war at large,
and the information we did have came largely through rumors from
those remaining in Warsaw. Anger was rising up inside me; I felt pure
hatred for these Nazi animals that had caused unlimited, needless
suffering. At some point in the next year, the Germans used forced
labor to begin building large walls around a planned Jewish Ghetto.
They marked Jews across the city with stars, and herded them into the
confines of the Ghetto. Poles were forbidden from hiding Jews, while
Nazi occupiers encouraged crimes to be committed against them15.
My family had survived the initial onslaught of the war, and
managed to hide the Rubenstein family in their home. My father had
engineered a secret room by covering the dugout basement shelter
with wooden boards and dirt. After the Nazis had sentenced all Jews to
the Ghetto, the Polish-Nazi police force known as the Blue police began
14 Jan Karski, The Situation of the Jews in the Territories Annexed by
the Third Reich, An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and
Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-In-Exile,
February 1940, ed. David Engel, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1
(Indiana, 1983), p. 1-16
15 Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second
World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski, (Jerusalem,
1976), 128.

22
searching homes for Jews16. It was at this point that Jakub left us. He
realized that we didnt have enough provisions for ourselves, and that
his residency put us in direct danger of Nazi retaliation. The day Jakub
left told us that he would keep in touch, walking out the door with
nothing but the clothes on his back. The familiar feeling of uncertainty
crept over me as I realized that could very well be the last I saw of my
lifelong best friend.
In 1942, a neighboring Polish family denounced my father for
hiding Jews. The Rubensteins had been living in the basement for
nearly two years, and the fear of discovery had lingered permanently.
After the denunciation, Blue police combed through the household,
finding the hiding place when Abram Rubenstein coughed from dust in
the air. The Rubensteins were sent to the ghetto, while my father,
mother, and sister were summarily executed on the spot. Ive never
felt agony like the day when I showed up to the door of my old home,
and no one answered. A neighbor called me over and explained what
he had witnessed. He had been part of the Polish police investigating
our house, and expressed his deepest regrets claiming that he had to
do it. I believed that he regretted his actions, however I couldnt bring
myself to believe that it had actually happened.
I felt empty inside. If it werent for the loving support of Anita I
wouldnt have been able to psychologically make it through the early
16 Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War,
134.

23
years of the war. I felt the pain of loss that she had felt since the
Ukrainian famine all those years ago. Anita and I depended on each
other, never leaving the others presence if necessary. We didnt talk
about what had happened or what would happen for that matter. We
simply wept.
In an early morning of January 1943, I had another surprise
knock at my front door. There stood a man with a large mustache and
heavy trench coat. As soon as I opened the door he briskly stepped
inside. As I demanded an explanation, I realized that the surprise
visitor was Jakub. This time I was the one in shock. We embraced each
other and wept over the loss of our families, and our childhoods.
We talked for hours regarding what had happened during the
war. Jakub had joined the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), and
spoke excitedly of his attempts to undermine the German occupiers.
His stories were gruesome, but the passion he held for the cause of the
Polish patriots was intense. After leaving my apartment during the
early chaos of the war, Jakub had been recruited into Polands
underground resistance force by an old colleague from school. Jakubs
decisive thinking and passionate speaking combined with numerous
successful ventures into, and out of the Jewish Ghetto had earned him
the respect of his peers. His objective had been to deliver food to the
Jews who were embargoed from basic human necessities. He told me
of the horrendous situation inside the ghetto,

24
Women and children were dying on the street of starvation.
There were reports of roundups in which entire residencies would be
taken out of the ghetto and never seen again. They were living day to
day. In fact, to call it living would be an exaggeration. Surviving is more
accurate.17 Jakubs family had been exported during one of the round
ups he had described. Rumor inside the ghetto had it that they had
been sent to the Treblinka death camp, a place where no Jews ever
returned18.
I know they cant have survived, yet I keep trying to convince
myself otherwise, Jakub admitted. I knew how he felt, yet the pain
that I had been harboring for years since my own familys execution
had blunted all sense of grief. Loss had become institutionalized,
suffering was expected. Evil had prevailed in the remains of Poland.
When Jakub asked for my assistance in an upcoming mission into
the Ghetto I accepted the proposition. We were to smuggle a shipment
containing 3 pistols. I wanted to help these people who had been part
of my city growing up. I wanted to fight the force of pure evil embodied
by the Nazi menace. My only hesitation was Anita. How could I
unnecessarily risk my own life when it would mean the devastation of
hers? Anita was working a new job as a nurse in the makeshift clinic
down the street. When she came home, she burst into tears at the

17 Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, 5.

18 Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War,
114.

25
sight of Jakub. When she finally calmed down, I explained the arms
running job that Jakub had asked of me and she immediately
responded,
Do it, help those who are defenseless to fight back. I knew
Anita sympathized with the Jewish plight. She too had seen her people
brutally oppressed by the forces of evil. Jakub and I departed late that
night for a secret hideout located near the Stadium on Konwiktorska
street, where years ago Jakub and I had watched our favorite football
team play. The area was in ruins, and our journey was masked by
shadows. We were forced to quickly find shelter twice when we saw
police patrols roaming the streets. The hideout was in an abandoned
subway station near the ghetto walls. Inside, about ten men and
women were sitting around a table discussing their course of action
inside the city of Warsaw. I was introduced to the resistance members,
and briefed on the mission ahead of me.
Jakob and I were to sneak into the ghetto by impersonating
members of the Blue police. We were given traditional Polish police
uniforms and a series of forged documents proving our new identities.
The pistols we were smuggling would be underneath our jackets, as
though they were part of the police attire. Once inside the ghetto, we
were tasked with rendezvousing with Home Army officers stationed in
the basement of a Jewish bakery. Jakub and I both knew the enormous
risk of this operation, yet his face was calm. He had done this before

26
and his previous successes had built confidence in his ability to
traverse the Ghetto wall.
The next day, Jakub and I headed towards the Ghetto gate on
Zelazna street. After being stopped by the guards and displaying our
forged identifications, the gate was opened and I witnessed a new level
of horror. The entire area smelled of rotting flesh and fire. The
sidewalks that I had used to walk with my wife were littered with dead
bodies. Those who were not dead were not far from it, and the groans
of the starving echoed across the haunted streets. No amount of
description could accurately portray the suffering of the Jews of Poland,
cordoned off into their own cultural hell. I was surprised that many of
the Ghetto guards were Jews, wearing the signifying star armbands.
These men had perpetrated the suffering of their own people, like
cannibals taking advantage of their slightly elevated status over the
common Jewish suffering. I witnessed a Jewish police officer mercilessly
beat a small, bone-thin Jewish boy for no apparent reason.
When we reached the bakery headquarters of the resistance
fighters, we were greeted by a young man named Mordechai
Anielewicz. Mordechai appeared to be the de-facto leader of the ZOB,
despite being younger than myself19. He led us to the basement where
we laid the pistols on a table. He told us that with these three guns, the

19 Michael Berenbaum, Mordecai Anielewicz, Encyclopedia Britanica,

< http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/25460/MordecaiAnielewicz>

27
organization had acquired thirty firearms, not nearly enough to fight
toe-to-toe with the German military20. Anielewicz thanked us for our
efforts, before showing us a backdoor to leave the bakery
inconspicuously.
Jakub and I were about to leave the ghetto through the same
gate we had entered when we were stopped by one of the Jewish
guards. The man had lived near Jakub in Praga, and recognized the
face of his long-time neighbor. Jakub and I looked at each other as we
realized the enormous implication of what was to come next. We began
sprinting, running as fast as we could to turn the corner thirty feet from
the gate. As my back was turned, I heard the fire of a machine pistol
but kept running as I had back in my childhood. I rounded the corner,
and looked for a place to hide. On the side of the street, the ruins of a
bombed out apartment complex offered my best chance at escaping
the pursuing guards. I hid behind a large pile of rubble, burying the
police uniform underneath broken bricks. After waiting five minutes, it
appeared I had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto with my life. Then it hit me
that I had not seen Jakub escape the gate, and that his body was likely
laying around the corner riddled with bullets. The now overly familiar
feeling of loss once again crept into my mind and mixed with the fear
of being caught by those who had found us out. I hastily walked back

20 Mark Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th
Anniversary of the Uprising, (Interpress Publishers), 55.

28
towards my apartment, tears welling in my eyes from a combination of
dust and heartbreak.
Two years later, Nazis would destroy the Ghetto. The guns that
Jakob and I had provided proved helpful for Jewish resistance fighters,
who were initially able to hold off the Germans deportation attempts
for much longer than could have been expected from a group so
heavily under-equipped. Months after the initial Ghetto uprising, I saw
smoke billowing from the region. Nazis had entered the ghetto and
burned it to the ground, taking the lives of the brave resistance
fighters, as well as tens of thousands of other Jews21. Anita and I had
no idea at the time that the Soviets were just outside the city ready to
defeat the Nazis.
The Soviets liberated Poland in 1945. The liberation felt fake,
as outsider Russian communists ran our country and freedom never
entered the equation. The removal of the Nazis was a great victory for
the people of Poland, but in the process our country had been
ravished, and our nationalist resistance fighters destroyed. I was
arrested in January of 1946 for my collaboration with the Jewish
resistance force. I was painted as an anti-communist, Zionist activist,
despite the fact that communism had played no role in my assistance
towards the Jewish people of the Ghetto. I spent months inside a prison
and was interrogated often. After all the atrocities of war that I had

21 Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, 75.

29
witnessed I had thought that things could not possibly have gotten
worse. Yet the months of torture spent in a Soviet jail proved me
wrong. I was forced to admit to a series of crimes that I had not
committed, and sentenced to exile in Siberia. I have been here in
Siberia for many years, and I expect that I will die here too. I witnessed
my beautiful countrys obliteration by the evil tides of racism and
hatred. To this day, I dont know what has happened of Anita. She was
the last speck of goodness in the spiraling tragedy that was my life in
Warsaw.
I know that my time is coming soon. I am giving this memoir to a
friend of mine who has been working with me in the mines for a few
months now. His sentence is supposed to end in five years, and I have
made him promise to get my story out. This journal will tell the world of
the horrors of Poland and the abominable nature of Nazis and Soviets.
Even now as I write this I can sense the coldness drain the life out of
my body.

30

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31

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