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Chris continues...

My mother recalls going to Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw and running in past guards to the commander鈥檚 office where she pleaded for her father鈥檚 life, offering to trade places with him, telling the German that her father only escaped because her mother was sick with malaria and that she could not adequately care for her and make a living selling vegetables at markets. The German was touched by my moms heart and told her that she reminded him of his own daughter in Germany and that he would be proud to have her as a daughter. She was then allowed to visit him in the cellars of the Gestapo for three weeks where she recalls walking past the torture chambers with their various instruments of torture. She would bring him and others with him food.The Gestapo tried to get out of him who helped him escape from Germany to Warsaw and finally sent him to a place he could not escape from - Dachau concentration camp in Germany. He survived a year at Dachau only because he had a strong heart and body. Zdzislaw walked back from Germany at the end of the war with a wagon full of things for his family. My mother watched what was left of him die a few months after the war ended, before he could make it to scheduled convalescence in Switzerland.

My mom and her mother were offered a factory in East Germany as compensation for what the Germans did to her father. The declined knowing that Germans still regarded them as sub-humans. They [my mom and her mother] hated them also, well as wanting to stay in their home country.

Warsaw Ghetto

During WWII my mother lived two blocks from the Warsaw ghetto. She sometimes walked the street along the boundary of the ghetto wall that separated it from the rest of the city. The Germans were intentionally starving the Jewish inhabitants and preventing medical supplies from entering the ghetto as a method of killing those within its walls before the extermination camps were built and in full operation.

A lot of people were sick in the ghetto from typhus and other ailments compounded by malnutrition. Non Jewish Poles would walk along the walls and occasionally throw in food over the wall when the Germans were not looking at bunkers situated along the wall. When the Germans did see this happening they would gun down the people trying to help Jews. My mother has a very vivid memory of walking alongside the wall where there were small openings in the bottom of the walls for drainage. She would often hear machine-guns on the other side. From these openings the gutters of the adjacent streets would fill with - instead of water - blood. These openings were so small that a small emaciated child could squeeze through them.

One time she was walking near the ghetto when she saw a young Jewish boy squeeze through an opening and dart out to grab and start eating an apple core that had been thrown in blood filled gutter. At night Jews in the ghetto would send out their small children to forage for food and medicine in the neighbourhoods immediately adjacent the ghetto. The Germans had signposts out that anyone caught helping Jews would be executed. Many Poles helped them regardless. My mother got to know a young Jewish boy who would visit her home at night with any possessions worth anything outside of the ghetto. He used to be a neighbour before the Germans forced him into the ghetto. He always wore clothes with lots of pockets sewn on them. The children would trade these possessions for food and medicine for their families in the ghetto. They had little value in the ghetto where people were very sick and starving to death. My mother and hers would then trade them for more food and medicine. Each time the boy came at night he looked skinnier and skinnier. Eventually he stopped coming. My mother always assumed that he was eventually deported to a concentration camp, got sick and died, or was killed getting caught getting things for his family.

After the extermination camps were built, transport trains full of Jews would leave the ghetto. My mother and her friends would toss food and containers full of water into the open tops of cattle cars crammed full of people crying out for food and water. German guards riding on the tops of the trains would shoot to kill anyone trying to help the people heading to the camps. My mother got to know a German guard by sight that was an incredibly good shot with a rifle. She went to the train tracks one day with an acquaintance whose husband was missing and she was figuring he was heading to one of the camps. She insisted on trying to see her husband one last time and trying to get him some food and water. She thought he had been rounded up in one of the many roundups that occurred in Warsaw as reprisals for resistance actions in the city. My mother was with her when this woman stuck her head out from behind a tree and got shot by this German guard in the head. All she could do was watch her die as the train went by. Later on it turns out that the woman鈥檚 husband had died in a bombing of Warsaw by the British of one of the many munitions plants in the city that the Germans had set up to help with their war effort. All over the occupied lands non Germans were dying from the inaccurate allied bombings of the times.

Eventually word got around the Jewish ghetto that the people being 鈥渞elocated鈥� to the camps and the trains were being exterminated and the Warsaw ghetto rebelled against the Germans. The Jews of the ghetto refused to show up for more transport trains and took up arms with what little they could get their hands on. From where my mother lived near the ghetto she saw ghetto Jews jumping to their deaths sometimes on fire from multi-story buildings - preferring to die that way rather than burning to death from flamethrowers. The Germans raised the ghetto and that was the end of it.

Collaborators

When the war broke out there were Polish policeman who chose to work with the Germans. Most were policeman before the war who continued to work in their field after the war started. My mother was told by a Polish policeman (after he made sure that Germans there were not looking) where to find the office of the head of the Gestapo at Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw when she went looking there for her father after his arrest. The policeman had a relationship with a relative and was known to the family. He was later seen by my mother and grandmother after liberation by the Russians and communist Polish army forces and tried to make believe that he never worked with the Gestapo in the city. My grandmother reassured him that they meant him no harm and would not divulge his activities during the war which included the arrest of fellow countrymen for political reason or for being in the resistance. After being confronted with this he never the less fled the city to family outside the city limits.

Most collaborators were severely dealt with. Any women that had relationships with the occupying Germans were shaved bald by the resistance. Everyone knew who had anything to do with the Germans and waited anxiously for liberation to reap vengeance. Another policeman who worked with the Germans met his fate at liberation in a strange way. The Russians that entered Warsaw at liberation had a deep seated hatred for the Germans. Many war crimes were committed - especially on Soviet soil - and the Russians wanted revenge. A Russian soldier told my mother that he would slit the throat of any German he would meet on his way to Berlin. Despite my mother鈥檚 young age he vowed to return and wed her at wars end.

Going back to the policeman, his house was appropriated by Russian troops as were many in the city, at liberation time. The Russians did not know he collaborated with the Germans until he got drunk with them. Russian troops always had supplies of vodka and would fight under the influence (being issued vodka just before battle). The policeman got loose with his tongue under the influence and gave away his activities with Germans during the war. My mother saw him the next day with a wire tied around his partially severed neck being dragged behind a jeep.

There were some who made the occupation under the Germans more tolerable by bartering or working with them. This was the case of a Pole who was a foreman at a German run factory employing forced labour from the Warsaw ghetto as well as non Jewish Poles from the city. My grandmother worked at his factory where she saw him being callous and abusive towards Jews working there. Many Poles worked at German run plants. They had no choice. One time she brought some food for a Jewish worker who wanted to barter with her with some possessions from the ghetto. My grandmother did not want the possessions knowing that many Jews were starving to death in the ghetto, but the worker insisted on bartering. The foreman saw the trade take place and ran over and hit the Jewish worker in the face and took the food from him. He later told my grandmother that if he survived the war that this Pole would be the first he would come after with a noose. The Jew apparently perished at wars' end as he did not return to Warsaw. As for the foreman, fellow Poles saw him trying to loot leather from the factory at liberation time and chased him down cutting a hole in his bag of goods spilling the contents behind him. They shouted at him that it was bad enough he worked for the Germans and tormented fellow Poles but now stealing from the factory made him disgusting to bear. The Germans had brought many Cossacks and Mongols into Warsaw to wantonly kill Poles (especially after the Warsaw uprising) from the ranks of recruited Russian PoWs and collaborators. They were less civilized than the Germans and were recruited by the Germans to do their dirty work. The Germans always made sure to give plenty of alcohol to ease their work. They were a constant menace on the streets. My mother was told that the Polish foreman ran into a Mongol soldier on the city streets on horseback that indiscriminately lanced and killed him. He was just one of many who perished being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

My mother had several close calls with death but those are different stories.

World War II spanned six years.

In that time my mother had many memorable experiences.

Life During the Occupation

Life in Warsaw during the war oddly enough involved spending many hours indoors as the Germans occupying the city were very careful to suppress resistance movements during the war. My mother was a child during the war and would often find herself playing in the blocks near her home when German trucks with loudspeaker systems would come through the city blaring that curfew time was going into effect and to clear the streets. Curfew time sometimes came as early as 1:00 pm in the afternoon. As the occupation lasted 5 years this meant much time spent indoors. The time seemed to vary a lot depending on whether or not the Polish resistance movement in the city had taken any actions against the Germans in recent times.

She once found herself a little too far removed from home and did not make it back to the house before a watchman locked a gate to her building. She scaled a fence in her dress and found herself hung up on the spiked top of a fence. The next thing she knew was being pulled off of the fence by German soldiers. They laughed at her calling her a harmless small child - 鈥渒inder鈥� in German. They had the watchman let her back into the house.

During the curfew time people had to keep quiet in the houses or Germans would fire their rifles in the air outside the homes as warning shots. The sounds of formations of German soldiers goose-stepping outside the home could often be heard along with Germans singing marching songs. The Germans seemed to like to move their military convoys at night also. At night every crack in every window had to be covered in thick tarpaper to hide any light from getting outside and getting to British bombers that would visit at night going for arms plants. Again Germans patrolled the streets looking for the slightest light leaving any house or building.

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