Long Journey Home: A Young Girl's Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust Read online

  Long Journey Home

  A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust

  © 2013 Lucy Lipiner. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Usher Publishing

  c/o CMI

  13518 L. Street

  Omaha, NE 68137

  ISBN: 978-1-936840-70-0 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-936840-71-7 (Mobi)

  ISBN: 978-1-936840-72-4 (epub)

  LCCN data on file with the publisher

  Printed in the USA

  Rev. date: December 2013

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  For my parents, Abraham and Roza, thank you for teaching me to embrace and celebrate life.

  For Edward, my husband and my best friend. For my dear children, Rena and Steven.

  Courtesy of U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum

  Introduction

  My old home in Sucha Beskidzka, Poland, is perhaps four thousand miles from my home in New York City. For me, it is an emotional distance that I feel apprehensive about; it is another world, another century.

  My mother lost her entire family in the Holocaust. For her, it was a wound that never healed. Yet she rarely spoke of her sisters and brothers. But sometimes, I would hear her whisper, “If only I had a picture. I can’t remember what they looked like.”

  So, in 2004, I went back to Sucha, my old home. I have no idea what I thought I’d find. The purpose of going back was not to reclaim any of her properties. As the only survivor, she was next of kin to all her siblings. No, I did not go back to make any claims on her behalf.

  I went back to search for family photographs. My mother was still alive in 2004.

  If I could find some family photographs, that would be better than anything, the best gift I could ever give her, I thought.

  I even offered the driver a generous reward if he would also make an effort in searching for the photos. “Oh yes,” he said, “I will find your pictures.” Of course, he didn’t.

  What was I thinking? After more than sixty years, would her photos be there waiting to be claimed? I still marvel at my own thinking. Was it a little irrational, or did I experience a moment of foolish optimism?

  I arrived one lovely day in the middle of summer. I lacked the courage to ring the bell. I felt uneasy, almost hoping that no one would be home. The driver came to my rescue. He rang the bell, and someone answered the door. The driver explained that someone who was born in the house wished to see it again.

  The woman who opened the door was very gracious and invited me in. The old, serpentine staircase was still there. I began climbing the stairs my grandparents did so long ago, more than one hundred years. Slowly, I entered the house where I had lived the first six years of my life. The layout of the rooms was still the same. The double-paneled windows, which opened inward, were still as I remembered. Everything else was different, a little shabby and tired looking—no trace of us anywhere.

  The seventy-six-year-old Maria, her arms outstretched, walked over, and we embraced. Then she just stood there looking at me. She filled in some of the missing pieces. She said she had been our neighbor before the war, and she remembered two little girls Frydzia and Lusia running around. She had been thirteen years old when World War II broke out, and she remembered that our home had been plundered almost immediately after we had left. “There was a trail of your things spilled on the sidewalks,” she said.

  Still looking at me, Maria said, “I have something that belongs to you.” She walked over to a low cupboard and retrieved an old, yellowed envelope with my maiden name Mandelbaum written in a cursive script on top of it. Maria reached inside the envelope and withdrew an old photograph. “These are your parents. Here, it belongs to you.”

  I couldn’t speak. I was crying. It was an old sepia photograph, dated 1927. I knew immediately it was my parents—two handsome, young people, very formal looking and wearing elegant clothes. I gathered it was my parents’ engagement photograph because they were married the following year in March 1928.

  Maria said she kept the photograph all these sixty-plus years because she believed someone would be coming for it someday. I was grateful to Maria for keeping the photograph. There was nothing else of ours.

  Clutching the photograph, I walked over to the window. More than sixty years had melted away. For one moment, I lost all sense of time and space; there was no “now,” no present time. I was a sixyear-old once more. What I saw was exactly as I remembered—the market square, the rolling hills, and the beautiful Beskidy Mountains beyond. My childhood memories remained unspoiled.

  I did not sense Maria’s presence near me. She stood waiting for us to embrace again. I don’t know what made me look for the mezuzah. Of course, it wasn’t there. This time, without kissing the mezuzah, I said good-bye to my old home, knowing in my heart that I would not be coming back.

  “He Who Saves One Life Saves the World Entire.”

  Talmud, Sanhedrin:37a

  1

  The Last Summer

  The summer of 1939 turned out to be the last summer of my childhood. I had been looking forward to school. I used to look out onto the street from the wrought-iron balcony off our kitchen, my very own playground and observation post, from which I could see all kinds of activities in the streets— including the children marching off to school. I couldn’t wait for school to start. On my fingers, I counted the remaining days of summer. Every day, I peeked inside my closet to touch my brand-new school uniform: navy-blue jumper with huge, white pearl buttons running down the front; white, long-sleeved shirt, starched crisp; white stockings; and blue lace-up shoes.

  There was much to do that summer. My father’s older sister, Tante Lotte, and her three daughters, my cousins Renee, Cecille, and Fredeke, arrived from Antwerp, Belgium. They all spoke French, Flemish, and German. We spoke Polish, Yiddish, and some German, as did everyone in Sucha. But we were able to communicate right from the start, and soon enough, our Belgian cousins had learned to speak Polish.

  They brought many presents, but best of all was a pair of roller skates. Neither Frydzia nor I had ever owned a pair of roller skates; in fact, I don’t think I had ever seen such skates before. Frydzia insisted that, as the oldest, she should take charge of the skates. I was devastated and wept inconsolably. So my parents came up with a fair decision: they divided the pair of skates between us. Frydzia was not happy, but I was delighted. Riding around town on one skate was pure joy. There were no automobiles in Sucha, so there was no danger of accidents.

  I remember that summer of 1939 as always sunny and warm. It never rained. There was never a cloud in the sky. Was it really so? Maybe it only seems that way to me now—the bright summer days before the storm that would upend all our lives.

  I remember many cousins between the ages of four and fourteen. The older ones felt much too adult to participate in our games, but it seemed we younger kids spent every minute playing. The entire town belonged to us; we could play anywhere and everywhere. We hiked. We jumped rope in the streets; the winner was the one who could keep it up the longest. We picked flowers that grew in the fields of grain on the outskirts of town. We were so busy playing that we often forgot lunch till the housekeeper came looking for us with a
picnic basket.

  One time, I recall running home with a handful of cornflowers. I ran straight to my father’s store and into his arms.

  I screamed with joy, “Look, Papa, look!”

  With a big smile on his face, he picked me up, held me in his arms, and said, “Yes, yes, these flowers are beautiful like you and blue like your eyes.”

  As summer came to an end, Tante Lotte and our cousins prepared to return to Belgium. They left Poland on August 30, 1939, two days before the war started.

  Tante Lotte; my cousins Renee, Cecille, and Fredeke; their father (my aunt’s husband, Meyer); and the rest of the Jewish population of Antwerp suffered the most grievous persecution from the moment Hitler’s troops entered their city in May 1940.

  My aunt and my cousins would survive the war, making their way to Switzerland and safety—but not Uncle Meyer. He stayed behind in Belgium with his own father, a deeply religious man who refused to shave his beard. With the long beard, he was too obviously Jewish to be smuggled out of Belgium.

  Soon enough, Meyer and his father were picked up by the Gestapo on the streets of Antwerp. They were deported east to Poland, along with thousands of other Jewish people. Uncle Meyer and his old father were killed in Auschwitz, one of the most infamous extermination camps.

  2

  Market Square

  My hometown of Sucha (presently Sucha Beskidzka) sits in a picturesque valley of the Tatra Mountains, the highest range of the Carpathian Mountains at the junction of two rivers, Skawa and Stryszawka, Skawa being the longer of the two. In my parents’ generation, Sucha was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it belonged to an independent Poland when I was born. And on September 3, 1939, it became part of the German Third Reich. Before that time, however, it was home to a community of some 780 Jews—150 families, including mine.

  I can still picture the old house as it stood at the edge of the market square. From the windows two flights above—for there was nothing taller than that in my town—the landscape was pleasing.

  In winter, when heavy snow covered everything, you could look out on serene white streets, white rooftops, and white mountain peaks that remained undisturbed and beautiful all winter long.

  Gone was the harsh sound of wheels against the cobblestones. Instead, the bells on the horse-drawn sleighs made a rhythmic ringing sound, and riding in one of those sleighs, covered snugly in heavy blankets, was pure delight. Most of all, I remember sleighing down gentle hills in the evenings under the bright light of the moon and stars with Mama and Papa, Frydzia and me between them. That was probably the best of all winter experiences.

  Once the snow melted, the meadows were brilliant with flowers, and the foothills of the Tatra Mountains could be seen clearly in the distance. But sometimes, in the hazy morning light, the meadowlands and the gentle hills beyond seemed surreal in the misty setting.

  On the opposite side of town, the river flowed gently, but in some places farther downstream, the rushing waters washed over small rocks and boulders and then swiftly merged with deeper water.

  During warm summer days, the acacia trees provided welcome shade and serene beauty to the sunny side of our house. But most beautiful of all were the majestic chestnut trees with blossoms shaped like grapes and large, deep green leaves spread out flat, glistening in the bright sunlight.

  At the edge of our town was a historical landmark—Maly Wawel, a beautiful castle that dated back to the 1500s. It had been built by an Italian goldsmith named Gaspare Castiglione for his beautiful Polish bride, Jadwiga. When I was little, the castle belonged to Count Tarnowski, a Polish nobleman.

  The Tarnowski children were about my age, and I was so envious when they rode into town in a small buggy pulled by two ponies. Just as they looked for excitement in town, we looked for excitement around their castle, but we were never permitted to enter the grounds. On our hikes, all we could do was look through the elaborate wrought-iron fences to the vast lands beyond the castle—beautiful flower gardens, fruit orchards, and workers tending the fields of grain.

  I remember well the house where I was born, and I remember many things that made me happy as a young child before the war. Our house of solid brick and stucco was built to last. Even as a child, I knew that the house was very old, more than one hundred years old.

  Our ancestral home, center, overlooking the market square, Sucha, Poland, 1910

  Our home, Sucha, 2004

  It had not changed much since those days, although the acacia trees are gone, replaced by a kiosk selling newspapers, cold drinks, and picture postcards of the town. Some of the cobblestone streets had been replaced as well, paved over for the automobiles that have replaced the horse-drawn carriages and sleighs of my childhood.

  I loved the house where I was born. I even loved the old, serpentine wooden stairs, worn from advanced age and hollowed out in the middle of each step by people in my family who climbed and descended those stairs long before I was born.

  I heard many interesting stories about my ancestors, who were born and died in the house of my childhood. They left an imprint on our lives. Sometimes, I was allowed to handle family heirlooms but only if I promised to be very careful: little silver spoons, old glass or porcelain dishes, tiny Passover wine glasses with edges decorated in gold—all handed down from my grandparents and my great-grandparents. I never knew most of my grandparents or great-grandparents; they died before I was born.

  I did know my maternal grandfather, Anshel-Usher Urbach. I remember a big, beautiful house that belonged to him and his wife, my maternal grandmother, Sara Ribner Urbach.

  The house was modern, with indoor plumbing—unusual in the days before the war. It stood in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter in the old part of Krakow. Sucha, my town, was only fifty miles south of Krakow. My grandmother Sara died before I was born. Anshel-Usher was my only remaining grandparent when I was a young child. I might have seen him no more than twice in my entire childhood. But I do remember him holding me in his arms, tickling my face with his long white beard, and my arms tightly wrapped around his neck.

  I remember very clearly the day my grandfather died. It was a beautiful summer day. I was five years old. I had spent the afternoon with my big sister and several friends, wading in the shallow waters of the Skawa River in our town. I remember eating blueberries and sweet cream that Frydzia and I brought from home in a large, tightly closed thermos. And I remember all of us playing a game of tossing flat little stones into the river, when our housekeeper came running.

  “Come quickly,” she said to Frydzia and me. “Your grandfather died, and your parents are getting ready to go to Krakow for the funeral.”

  I was so young and didn’t understand the finality of death. Going to a big city, to a funeral, it all seemed so exciting. I wanted to go. Of course, Frydzia and I had stayed home. Funerals were not meant for young children—not in my family.

  When I was a young child, I knew very little about my grandfather Anshel-Usher. Later, I learned that he was a very unusual man; he was a self-made man. People in my family loved to brag about, even to exaggerate, his great wealth. I also heard some sad stories told about my grandfather. Apparently, his widowed mother, my great-grandmother Miriam Urbach, had remarried. She had many children from her previous marriage, my grandfather Anshel-Usher being the oldest. But her new husband was unwilling to keep my grandfather under his roof, and at the age of ten, he was cast out of their home.

  Anshel-Usher was apprenticed to a cobbler in exchange for food and lodging. He worked long hours, his only schooling being the cheder, the Jewish school for boys. He grew up very quickly and, early in his youth, became an entrepreneur doing a variety of jobs. He carried buckets of water from the well in the center of town to the wealthier residents. He shoveled coal into people’s cellars and stoves. Life was hard for my grandfather as a young boy. But the hardships that many children endured were not unusual back in 1880, when Dickensian tales were real-life stories in many parts of Europe. In spite of—or perh
aps because of—the hardships Anshel-Usher endured, he grew up to become a strong individual.

  He built a large and successful business importing liquors from many parts of Europe. He built his beautiful house in Krakow. He gave much to charities, as prescribed by Jewish law. He gave to his family. They didn’t lack for anything except, as my mother remembered, the one thing everyone in the family wanted most—a little love and some attention that Anshel-Usher was unable to give. Those emotions were foreign to him. He was a distant man, well spoken yet of very few words. He was always cautious—I suspect because of his very unhappy childhood.

  At the beginning of World War I, he moved his entire family—my grandmother Sara, my mother, and her four siblings—to Budapest, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anshel-Usher believed the family would be safer there, and he was right; the Polish people suffered grievously during the war, deprived of the most basic requirements for living, while my grandparents survived that war in relative security.

  When Anshel-Usher and the family returned to the newly independent nation of Poland in 1918—when the fighting was over—they and other Jewish families of Jaworzno were greeted by a people seething with resentment over what they had suffered and ready to take out their anger on the Jews.

  My mother’s entire family was, at one point, almost slaughtered in a pogrom. My mother, Roza, the second youngest, was fourteen at the time. She remembered that the murderous mob ran amok, killing Jewish people and destroying property while the authorities turned a blind eye to what was happening. My mother’s family, accompanied by a huge dog and a shotgun, barricaded themselves in a barn behind massive doors. Uncle Isaac, eighteen years old, was in charge of the shotgun.

  As the mob was in the process of breaking down the doors, Uncle Isaac began shooting into the air, thereby upsetting the dog. The dog, crazed and barking, bit Tante Hava’s leg. She was the youngest child, about twelve years old. The shooting, the barking, and the child’s crying continued. Fortunately, the violent mob began to retreat, but not without consequences.