Joe Jezioranski

It was Friday and Father was due home soon. All fathers were due home soon. Some, however, were reporting for duty while others were already fighting at the front. Other fathers were deciding what to do next. My father came late. He was organizing protection for the company buildings and property. He also made sure that the company cars were delivered to the mobilizing depot and prepared a plan for possible emergency salary distribution.

There were three attacks on Warsaw that day. We listened to Hitler’s impassioned speech on German radio and on Polish radio and got the first taste of war propaganda. Polish radio was being continually interrupted to pronounce items like, “PE 46, AJ 27 general alert; DA 18, HO 72 full alert.” Apparently the country was divided into sectors and these announcements advised appropriate sectors of Poland about the oncoming air attack.

Saturday there was a big gathering of neighbors and friends at our house. Some friends arrived from Warsaw. In fact this was the last time we saw many of them. It was a sombre occasion. News were not good. News was broadcast much more often than in peacetime. I had a map of Germany and tried to define where the Polish forces were advancing.

There did not seem to be any such places. My brother suggested that we use the Polish map; I felt that this would be construed as a betrayal of Polish national feeling. My brother thought I was stupid.

Sunday the air attacks intensified. More planes were falling from the skies and I cheered the fighters on until my brother suggested that the majority of the falling planes were Polish. Later on he admitted that maybe there was something to cheer about, as most of the Polish planes were destroyed on the ground; the planes falling in flames were at least fighting. We did not go to church. I felt dejected.

Finally late in the day there really was something to cheer about. Both England and France declared war on Germany. Now Germany could be defeated soon. I felt very hurt when my father suggested that this war could take five years or more. It was encouraging that none of our neighbors seemed to agree with him, but I did not like the idea of my father being so wrong…

Monday was supposed to be the first day of school. The bus did not arrive. My father got a lift to work from Mr Nowak, who as a director of the Bank of Poland, kept his car and the bank’s car. I did not feel very good about it – was it not unpatriotic? All planes appeared to carry crosses on their wings now; I thought that Hitler was supposed to have the swastika as his symbol. Anyway, where were the Polish planes? Antiaircraft guns still boomed but much less often; on the other hand the air alarms appeared to be more frequent. Did we not destroy a part of the German Luftwaffe? At night we watched the glow of fires over Warsaw. The fires seemed much closer than five miles away. Father did not come home that day.

Father came next day in the afternoon. He had to walk from the last tram stop, about two miles. People were leaving. The Nowaks left on Tuesday in two cars. They asked my father to join them. He declined. Bystram left with his family, leaving his sister to guard the house.

After one more excursion to Warsaw, my mother insisted my father stay home; there was not much point in going to work. By the seventh of September, advance groups of the German army were operating south of Warsaw. During the lull between bombing, the roads were full of people moving east.

The weekend of the ninth and tenth was very sad. We listened to speeches by Mayor (of Warsaw) Starzynski imploring people to leave the city or assist in building the defenses. One was not sure whether he wanted them to stay or to leave, but at least he wanted them to do something. We wondered what had happened to the Polish government. There did not seem to be any coordinated command.

Monday my father stayed home at my mother’s insistence. Although most of the stores were closed, the bakery was open in the morning. We bought baskets of bread and distributed parts of loaves to tired and hungry travellers along the road. We saw isolated groups of Polish soldiers moving east. Going backwards? What happened to the front? Apparently it collapsed. We almost got hit when the low-flying planes began strafing the roads. Many wounded. The Post Office and railway storage shed were made over into hospitals, but there was no doctor at Mlociny. We tried to load the wounded onto horse-drawn carts and send them to Warsaw. Many of those that could not jump into the ditches got killed in the strafing. Mother insisted we stay home now.

Wednesday the thirteenth. During the night, a German tank moved through Mlociny, stopping on the dirt road in front of the house where my ex-teacher lived, apparently to repair a broken track. We, the kids, investigated the grooves made by the tank. The day was quiet. At night, one could see heavy artillery projectiles passing overhead appearing like low-flying falling stars.

The electricity was cut off on the sixteenth.

Next day was the third Sunday of the war. The sun shone brightly in the sky. I went to see Marian in the morning and had just came back home. My mother was cleaning the house. One of our servants decided to go to Warsaw, where she had some family. In the kitchen a few stragglers were eating soup and bread. All at once the house shook with a nearby explosion. As I ran to the window in my room I saw a squadron of Polish cavalry being pursued by heavy artillery fire. The horses were in full gallop, for the most part escaping the slaughter. One or two bodies remained, along the road in front of Marian’s house. One horse was galloping without a rider, with his entrails hanging out. I could not forget the sight for a while. The war had come to Mlociny.

The dead soldiers were buried quickly. People were afraid that the artillery fire might come back. We waited for something to happen but the day and night were quiet. Another day passed. There were not even any stragglers moving to the east. Some men from the neighborhood came in asking for food and stayed the next night.

The night of the eighteenth reverberated with the sound of gunfire. Somewhere close by a battle was raging. We huddled together in the living room to flashes of explosions and small-calibre gunfire. I woke up in the morning to find Polish soldiers everywhere. There were horses in the lower garden, and soldiers along the fence were digging in. My mother and the cook were cooking huge amounts of soup, throwing in whatever was left of our vegetables in the basement. This went on through the whole day.

I made friends with the sergeant, who spent most of his time watering horses. He showed me some of the loot they had won from the Germans during the previous night. Most of it were Polish arms which the Germans had won previously from Polish troops. He offered me a bayonet of the Polish National Guard, which looked like a little sword. I hung it proudly on my belt and walked around with it the whole day.

Around five o’clock, the artillery fire started. The Polish officer in charge told us to stay home, preferably in the basement. My mother hated to stay downstairs and so we wandered into the kitchen. All our neighbors and the stragglers were gone, including our cook, who seemed to have mixed very closely with some of the soldiers. As we sat in the kitchen amid the constant noise of the battle, it grew dark slowly.

I fell asleep despite the constant noise, only waking up when our house and/or garden were being hit. Towards the morning the sounds of the battle receded.

I woke up late. It was completely quiet. Occasionally one could hear the distant sound of explosions, but compared with the previous night it was a quiet morning. There weren’t even any sounds of passing projectiles. I thought, “Where is everybody? What is happening?”

Something was poking into my side; it was the bayonet. The lower gate clanged. Somebody was walking into our garden. Must be the Polish soldiers, I thought. I ran into the dining room and saw my father walking out onto the terrace. German soldiers were standing there pointing a gun at him. As he spoke to them in German, they began to concentrate on questioning him. I was scared out of my wits. I had to get rid of the bayonet. I ran into the hall and deposited the bayonet under the table.

Having assured my father that he would be shot if any Polish soldiers were found in our house, two of the Germans made my mother walk in front of them throughout the house while the other two kept pointing their guns at my father. Our garage was on fire; apparently they had found a Polish soldier hiding there. My father was led away. My mother, my brother and I were told to sit down in the dining room.

The house was filling up with the soldiers. Nobody paid any attention to us. It was getting close to noon. I wanted to go to the bathroom. I asked my mother what should I do. She looked around and selected a man with some insignia on his sleeve. She asked him to let me go upstairs. He looked me over and decided to permit me to go upstairs.

When I came back the soldiers began to dig into any food that was left from the previous visitors to the house. One of them found a jar full of cherries fermenting with sugar. He was picking out the cherries with his knife and spitting the stones out on the floor. My mother was none too happy. She asked him whether he would like a plate to spit the stones into. He told her to keep her mouth shut when she was in the presence of the victors.

She asked him whether the victors were taught by their mothers to spit stones on the floor, and the soldier flew into a rage. He stepped forward holding his bayonet towards my mother’s chest. Fortunately the soldier with the insignia on his sleeve shouted at the other soldier. He told him not to behave like an idiot, then assailed my mother with a stream of abuse.

It might have developed into further unpleasant discussion, but for the officer who came and told us to be ready to move out in half an hour. My mother asked whether we could take something with us and he said yes – whatever we could carry, as we might be walking a long way. The officer took the soldiers away.

My mother helped us to pack a few things into a personal bag each. We used our school bags. She took things that fitted into a shoulder-strap bag, then filled a suitcase with some food. Then the officer was back urging us to move out. A column of women and children was forming along the main street. We wondered whether all the men were taken to the same place that we were going. As we joined the throng of people we saw the bodies of four men on the hill below the Stamirowskis’ house. My father was not among them. One of the bodies was that of my former schoolteacher, another was a straggler who had stayed in our house two nights before.

We speculated as to the cause of these men’s being shot. My brother suggested that they might have been double agents. By this time we had heard many stories of German agents disrupting Polish lines of communication and doing other acts of sabotage.

The march to the west was a nightmare. Throughout the countryside one could see the results of the battle. Mutilated bodies of Polish soldiers and horses were all along the ten miles of our march. Trees damaged by the artillery fire were pointing their broken stumps towards the sky in accusing sorrow. Broken vehicles interfered with our progress. Not many people cried – the shock was too great. Our escort of two soldiers marched us into a village called Kepa Dolna and let us stay there. The villagers took five families to a house. They were very generous.

Some people slept in the barn. We were privileged to sleep in the house, six of us to a bed (we shared it with the Romanowskis). I don’t know what made us so privileged unless it was my mother’s money. My father called my mother a socialist in white gloves. She always stood up for common people’s rights, unless she had to sit next to somebody who was not properly washed and dressed. Apparently in her younger days she had been a very active socialist. She even knew some people who formed the socialist wing of the pro-government that was later formed in Lublin. I loved my mother very much.

I loved her so much I even agreed to wash behind my ears in the ice-cold water from the well situated in the middle of the yard of the little farm where we were housed. I stayed close to her all the time we stayed on that little farm. Of course I could not forget the sight of the road filled with the dead bodies nor the broken trees. But most of all I could not forget the mutilated bodies of horses. Some people took advantage of all the horse meat available and cooked it for supper.

My brother and Tom Romanowski bought a pig, which we had our meals of for a few days. They also procured a horse and wagon from somewhere. They came with the news that Poland was now at war with Russia as well. The farmer advised them to stay close to the village, as Kepa Gorna (the next village) was a village of German settlers who had already made their presence felt. The Kepa Dolna leaders were all taken away and imprisoned; nobody would see them ever again. I stayed close to my mother.

My dreams were full of violence and gore. I was sure my father was dead now. I was sure all my friends were dead now. I played with the farmer’s dog, keeping my eye on my mother’s movements.

We left for home in the wagon that my brother and Tom procured after we heard that Warsaw had fallen. The road was cleared now. All the men from the village worked most days burying the dead and clearing the debris. I don’t remember much of the journey home, except that I tried not to look at the places where I remembered the signs of the battle.

When we came home we found the house deserted. The German army had moved into Warsaw and temporarily we were left alone. We brought some food with us and found the flour my mother had bought in the last days before the war. My mother was setting up the housekeeping in the kitchen when a new group of soldiers came in and requisitioned our house. We were permitted to stay in one room upstairs. No sign of my father.

The place was full of soldiers now, who seemed to spend most of their time learning to goose-step on the meadow between our house and the farms of Rentelaer and Lomnicki. They looked silly and menacing at the same time. Groups of four soldiers were marching shoulder to shoulder, turning around in a single line and returning to their previous position, then turning around on command. There were so many of them that the voices of sergeants (or Feldwebels, whatever) sounded like a chorus. Usually cows were using this meadow and I hoped that the goose-stepping Germans were having a lot of trouble with cows’ manure.

I was getting resigned now to the bleak life ahead. I still could not look at the road where we observed the bloody battlefield, but I started moving around the countryside and meeting some of my old playmates. Anything to get away from the goose-stepping mob. But I could not get away from the fact that my father was still missing and the place was full of “victors.”

Near the end of October, two soldiers came into our room (the rest of the house was occupied by the Germans) and took my brother away. My mother was frantic. Her entreaties to the original two were of no avail. She decided to ask Mrs Edward Weigle to help her to obtain my brother’s release.

I was very depressed at the thought of pleading with the “victor” but accompanied my mother anyway. Was it curiosity, protective feeling, fear of losing her – I really don’t know. Anyway we walked that mile in sorrowful silence. We found Mrs Weigle entertaining a large group of senior officers in a very boisterous atmosphere. She invited my mother to her study and listened to her sympathetically. She went out to talk to her compatriots and soon came back with a piece of paper and instructions that led us to the Warsaw highway and a large group of boys (most of the men were still away) working at clearing the war debris from the road. My mother got my brother back home.

Obviously the whole escapade was rather unnecessary, since all the boys came home eventually. But it did impress me – my mother’s concern, Mrs Weigle’s sympathy. As it turned out, she was soon to stop fraternizing with her own compatriots and marry a Polish industrialist, while her brother-in-law, whose family had been settled in Poland now for many generations, became a Volksdeutsch [25] to save his factory from being taken over by the German government.

We found out later that all these preparations were being made for the victory parade, attended by Hitler, which took place in early November in Warsaw. A week after this “momentous” (for the victors, anyway) event, we were sitting in the evening by candlelight, confined to our room, when my father walked in. He looked haggard and tired but was otherwise unhurt. He remarked afterwards that he remembered with tenderness the moment we all rushed to embrace him, Mother and my brother from his front and I from his back for the lack of room. He felt tender and guilty about my second-rate position while I felt rather stupid, but I loved him anyway. Somehow the world was getting back together again.

25. Volksdeutsch was a person who claimed and was accepted as a descendant of a German family. Other persons acceptable to the German Reich were Reichsdeutsch, German citizens; and Eingedeutsch, persons who signed an intention to become German citizens if allowed to do so.

Father decided to go to his work after staying at home for a couple of days. At first he would return home every few days, but it proved difficult. There was no transportation yet and he had to walk all of 9 miles. My mother suggested that he make up his inner office into a bed-sitting room, and he stayed in his office then for much longer periods of time. When he came home, he would be a source of news for us.

Tom Romanowski retained the horse and wagon in which we all had come home from our exile. At first the horse had the time of his life, as he was kept in the garden where he nibbled on all the greenery. Later on, Tom had to procure fodder for him. He made some excursion with my brother and established a bit of a black market, bringing food and fodder from nearby villages. Many farmers soon provided lively competition in that trade.

It was getting colder now; at night there was frost. In order to get wood for the stove in our room, I had to walk through the kitchen to the woodpile at the side of the house and to the coal stored in the basement. German soldiers were cooking food for themselves in the kitchen and, one day, they told me to get lost. I would not give up until they chased me out shouting abuse, while I answered back. My mother told me to stay in our room and not to show myself. Still, with the lack of wood, it was getting very cold in the room.

A couple of days later, the German officer who commanded the troops brought a peace offering: a plate of sandwiches. He started out by admiring my mother’s ability to talk German, and went on admiring our library and the picture my father got as a gift from the German owners of the company he managed. He also told her that he was in Poland during the first world war. Though he deplored our situation, he asked us not to use the dry wood nor our coal, putting the blame on the high spirits of his SS soldiers. We could, however, buy wood outside and create another pile if we liked at the front of the house, where we would not be likely to interfere with the “victors.” So the bottom line was that I lost the war again. What upset me the most, was my mother claiming that the officer was not as bad as the soldiers; I could not stand the “victors.” After all, using our house, our fuel, our books was a form of robbery.

All Poles remember the day that their feeling about the victorious Germans turned from a dejected feeling of submission and despair to active opposition and hate. For most, the day (Oct 27, 1939) when the Germans killed 140 innocent people at Wawer near Warsaw was that day. As most people know, on that day two German soldiers engaged in a brawl and one knifed the other. Subsequently the Germans pulled out the people out of the nearby houses and shot them in full view of the rest of the population, who were made to watch the performance.

For me the cutting of the top of our silver fir in front of the house was the act that turned the tide. In order to decorate the officer’s table for Christmas, the soldiers decided to cut the tree, which had been planted by my father and which we had watched grow throughout our nine golden years of peace. They did not cut the whole tree, only the top of it, thus leaving the deformed stump to remind us of their uncaring abuse.

The German command organized the clearing of dead bodies, the removal of debris and the movement of troops, as well as new marking of the roads, very early. They also supplied their army with everything it needed. Taking away anything that was locally available was a good supplement to the transportation required to feed, dress, house and amuse the army. Nobody paid any attention to the needs of the local population.

After Christmas I was surprised when my father came with Alina (my sister) and her husband. They brought gifts for my birthday. I was quite impressed. Unfortunately later on that year all Polish soldiers who came home had to first register and later on were taken as prisoners to Germany.

This created another priority and one that was organized slowly. Some ex-soldiers wanted to join the Polish Forces in France and thus travelled surreptitiously into Hungary or Roumania which were still neutral. Most of them got interned in those countries after crossing the border. Others found a way west; this was called the underground train. One of our neighbors, Mr Stamirowski, disappeared that way.

Proclamations were posted, which prohibited ownership of guns, radios, motorized vehicles, communication businesses and agencies, etc, all under a penalty of death. As we soon found out, this was not an idle threat. All commercial undertakings needed to be approved by the local government, whatever that was. Still, one had to live, so little attention was paid to the proclamations.

Farmers had nowhere to deliver their produce. Of course originally it was assumed that it needed to be available for disposal by the army, but which Polish farmer cared about the needs of the German army? People had nowhere to buy produce. Thus a lively black market soon developed. New proclamations soon prohibited transportation of food and advised the population to wait for food distribution, which turned out to be sporadic at best. Still, shopkeepers applied for authorization to be official food distribution points. Once such a permit was obtained, the black market through the distribution points flourished. Even German soldiers seemed to take advantage of this arrangement.

Soon there were less of them. In January all front-line soldiers moved out without much notice. The war was moving elsewhere. Instead, small detachments of police and party officials began to appear.

The most essential business for the occupational authorities was the organization of the police, whereby in each detachment of the old Polish police there soon existed both official groups of the criminal and secret German police. In addition troops were organized from the German settlers in Poland. Those were called security police and turned out to be the most cruel and dangerous.

All officials, people of note, sports figures, were arrested. These were originally replaced by the German military and later by the so-called general government composed mainly of German settlers and some imported German “talent.” We did not have to wonder for long what would happen to the arrested people. Trains began to move through Mlociny early in the new year to take the prisoners to Palmiry, where they were all shot. After all, concentration camps could not be built in such a short time. The “lucky” ones who survived the first onslaught were given priority to go to Auschwitz. Jews were ordered to carry yellow bands at first, later changed to official white bands with the star of David.

Still it was very hard to convince the Jews that we knew, that their lives were in a grave danger. The rabbi continued to sing his prayers even with all the German army around him until one day he was taken away by the Gestapo (secret police).

Winter came in with a vengeance. So one of the first industries created was glazing. Many of our friends became overnight specialists in fitting out windows with plywood. Glass, if available, was very expensive. The second industry was wood delivery. First the broken-down trees were cut, then all trees were subject to becoming fuel supply. Nobody cared about forest destruction – first things first.

As most of our fuel supply was used up by the “victors,” we had to buy wet wood. All ceilings in the house soon were showing signs of moisture. I remember travelling to school on my skis. The roads were covered with beaten snow and most of the vehicles were horse driven and carrying wood to Warsaw. I tried to hang on to one that was passing by. Usually the driver would aim at hitting me with his whip but often one could escape his attention. Coming home it often was so cold that I felt like lying down and going to sleep. It was not until I lived in Canada that I encountered such freezing and windy weather. The winter of 1939 destroyed most of our fruit trees and my father’s roses. It is probably just as well that he had to stay now in his office due to the lack of transportation.

With all the destruction, the homeless presented a social problem. Some well-meaning citizens organized a relief organization. A transportation agency of the relief organization was housed in my father’s office building. It was somewhat dangerous to become known as an organizer, as most of the people with initiative were likely to be shot. Somehow in the first year the Germans permitted some organizations to exist; they still had hope of finding a Polish Quisling. The relief organization tried first of all to assist in the billeting of the homeless.

And so most of the houses from which people emigrated in the first days of war became occupied by the people whose houses were destroyed by bombs. I was amused, when during my stay in Australia ten years later, one of those people tried to convince me, that if only the communists got out from Poland, common people would welcome the emigrés with flowers and kisses. I rather thought that it would be very difficult to return to one’s own home.

The relief organization also provided some clothing and food. In Poland, as in most poor countries, stealing of such materiel by the officials was a very serious problem. Most neighborhood people trusted my mother and she became the secretary of the relief organization. Now she was so busy I seldom saw her at home. She found time, however, to plant potatoes and beans in our garden which helped us survive that year.

She found that she had to watch everything that was donated for the homeless and refugees, as things disappeared fast. She used to tell us some horror stories about the poverty of some of the people she was trying to help. For instance one of the families, with eight children, had only one pair of pants. All ten people were alternating in using them in order to get some fresh air. The rest of them tried to cover themselves with two donated blankets on a donated bed. The mother had priority for the pants as she used to earn food money through prostitution.

My mother fought very hard with other officials to obtain beds and blankets, as the God-fearing officials did not want to help to legitimate prostitution in our midst, especially as the major customers were German. In the process of trying to help others, my mother contracted dysentery. Now we were the recipients of charity. Two women, both of whom used to be our servants, came to cook and help with the care of my mother.

The school year was supposed to have started at the beginning of the Polish-German war. Many school principals were arrested. Those who were not and teachers in general began to organize schools. The occupation authorities permitted only primary education. Soon up to eight grades of primary schools were operating. Permission for eighth grade was soon revoked.

My brother was supposed to go to 4th level of Polish high school, which was equivalent to 10th grade in the US. Mrs Wilkanowicz, who had a son of my brother’s age, arranged for secret lessons to be given to the two boys and others. Originally they could only get a math teacher who lived in Mlociny to give them lectures in math, physics, chemistry; and Mrs Wilkanowicz gave them lectures in Polish. Later some itinerant university professor gave them lectures in Latin and Greek while a neighbor taught them English. I participated in the last, but was soon left behind and had to be taught separately.

Mrs Wilkanowicz had a young daughter whose husband was a prisoner of war in Germany, and for some reason my brother seemed to baby-sit for her very often, which was curious since there were very few places where she could go; or he would go to play with young Wilkanowicz when young Wilkanowicz seemed to be away. I asked my mother why he was going so often to the Wilkanowiczes and would never take me with him. My mother laughed and said, “Blood is thicker than water.”

I wanted to know what she meant. She promised to explain providing that I leave my brother alone. She kept her promise, and I did temporarily. Anyway my mother soon convinced him to stay with my father in Warsaw. At Mlociny there were a limited number of people he could continue studies with.

During my mother’s sickness and long convalescence I often stayed overnight with my friend Marian and began to feel a certain attachment to his family. Mr Gliwa was a veterinary surgeon and was mostly away from home attending to animals. Some unkind people claimed that he preferred animals to his wife – she was not what one could term a beauty.

The household also included a servant, who came from the same district as Mr Gliwa and was a permanent part of the family, and Mrs Gliwa’s brother, who used to be the director of the Polish Bank in Gdansk and seemed to have got out from Gdansk during the war – quite a feat. It was almost sure that he would have been shot if he did not escape from Gdansk, as most of the old Polish officials ended up in Palmiry or a concentration camp. I liked listening to his stories about the two societies living side by side in the Free City before the war. I remember his story about the Town Council that ruled the Free City. Curiously enough there were seven Polish delegates, all bearing German-sounding names, and seven German delegates, all bearing Polish-sounding names.

The persecution of the Jews was imminent, but in the meantime the occupational authorities needed to identify who was a Jew. Under penalty of death one had to identify to the fourth generation or a particular portion of his blood, if there was a Jewish forefather. I wondered: what happens if a pure Aryan receives Jewish blood? My teacher who had a long nose was made to take off his pants to prove that he was not a Jew and I would not pass such an inspection – my foreskin was cut off for medical reasons – so there you are. Lucky for me that the Germans did not decide to make everybody walk without pants on (under penalty of death, of course).

In any case, the noose on the Jews began to tighten. A ghetto was formed in Warsaw and the Jews from the surrounding area were resettled into the ghetto. Warsaw had before the war a large Jewish population (about 300.000) most of them, especially orthodox Jews, preferring to live close to the main temple. I can no longer remember where it was, but the area where Jews lived was in the north-west part of the city, bounded by the old city, the north leg of the railway line, Wola, and the city center. By the time all the Jews from the area were moved to the Warsaw ghetto, there were well over a million and a half people living there.

In 1940 they lived in relative peace, and despite warning from us and other well-meaning Polish people, most of them would not think of trying to escape anywhere. One of the Jews that we personally told about the threat apparent after the news of treatment of the Jews in Germany, which was well publicized before the war, was our shoemaker. He claimed to have no money to go into hiding. So he became another one of my mother’s charity projects. Everybody had to have new shoes! She even obtained leather from Weigles, who, except for Mrs Edward W, were now Volksdeutsche. I was really ashamed of her dealings with them. All this to no avail. The little shoemaker, his wife and five children all ended up in the Warsaw ghetto.

In 1940 there were still tram cars with a yellow stripe, which the Jews could use to move around a limited district (in fact two districts, since the ghetto was split originally). They even operated some businesses. Of course people who dealt with them could expect harassment from the Sonderdienst – special service of the security police – but this was all in the day’s work.

Within a few months, an official arrived from Münchener Rückversicherungs Gesellschaft [26] and suggested to my father that he reports his “Aryan connection” – basically become a Volksdeutsch. The owners of WTU had a lot of respect for my father and wanted him to be the Treuhänder for the company. All large businesses in General Gouvernement (GG – a part of Poland that was not totally annexed into Germany, das Reich) had to have a Treuhänder who was responsible to the GG for the operation of the business. Father declined the “honor” saying that his “Aryan connection” was too slight to deserve it. Still the owner tried very hard to avoid giving him an external Treuhänder. Very late in 1940, the Germans from Latvia were returned to the “Vaterland” and one of Münchener Rück Latvian associates (Mr Magnus) became the Treuhänder and a minister of the GG, a very powerful dude indeed.

26. Münchener Rück, as it is often called in short, is the largest German reinsurance company, and today probably the largest financial company in West Germany.

Well, 1940 somehow drew to a close, and what a disastrous year that was. Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, all fell under the shadow of the swastika. I swore never to place little flags on my maps, never to play with toy soldiers, never to play police and robbers. Anyway I was practically grown up, almost thirteen.

Something was going on at the Bielany airport. New roads were being built, and more planes arrived every minute. One day, two officers walked in and looked at all the rooms in our house. Before they left, they gave us 24 hours to leave the house. My mother, weakened by her sickness, resigned herself to packing a suitcase and leaving. Not I. I walked all the way to my father’s office, about four hours in all and told him about our plight.

He called a dispatcher in the relief organization and obtained two horse-driven platforms and eight men. We arrived at our house at 7:30 am. One platform loaded, left before noon. We were almost ready to leave with the second one when the two officers came back. Was it all for nothing? I was so happy when they only demanded that two tables be left, and allowed us to take the rest of our possessions. We moved into a part of Dr Brodowski’s large apartment and the next phase of my life began.