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Chris continues...

Courier and Lookout

As my mother was a small girl during the war she was used to transport small arms, pamphlets and notes for the underground. The Germans walking the streets did not pay much attention to small children. She was taught to swing her bag of goods (most of the time not knowing the exact contents were) in a nonchalant way skipping down the streets. Other times she and her friends acted as lookouts for the underground in the street as they played, signalling the presence of Germans.

Family Cat

A day my mother has told me about several times, was when she was staying with relatives during the occupation. Germans came banging on the door to the home with their rifle butts. They were looking for younger men. Either some Germans were killed in an attack by the Polish underground in the city and the Germans needed people to execute as a reprisal, or they needed more able bodied men for slave labour sometimes as far as away as Germany.

One of the people at home that day was a younger male cousin of my mum’s who would normally hide in hole dug out under a heavy work bench that was then moved over the opening in the ground.

This day the Germans came too quickly and he had to hide behind a dresser with a cavity in its rear. The Germans were let in the house and they commenced looking for men. The cousin happened to have a cat in the house that liked him and would follow him around the house. As the Germans were searching the cat jumped on the dresser from a couch and started to nose around behind the cabinet meowing away at the cousin behind. The Germans were starting to take notice of the cat so my mother hurriedly snatched the cat and took it to the ground where she attempted to entertain it and maintain its attention, as it was again meowing away staring away at the cousin’s feet which it could see from by the cabinet’s legs. The Germans laughed as my mother toyed with the cat and left the house without finding the hiding cousin who was white as a sheet after coming out of hiding.

Possessions

After the outbreak of the war my mum and her mother returned to a house on the outskirts of Warsaw from the city when it was safe to. They had left this house because my mum’s father knew the front for the fight for the capital would include the area around the house. The city had been occupied and Poland had surrendered to the Germans. As my mum approached her home, she noticed the neighbourhood kids that she had often played with wearing her clothes. The neighbours’ houses had been bombed out and they lost all of their possessions when this had happened. My mum’s house survived the fight for the capital but had been looted by the neighbours. My mum told me her mother could not even get back one dress for a change of clothes from her former neighbours. The only thing that was salvaged in the home was bread dried in the oven and overlooked by the looters prior to my mum leaving her house as emergency provisions for the trek to the city. So were the fortunes of war when it became everyone for them self.

Wartime Trade

During the occupation my mum knew a woman whose husband was being held by the Germans at a prison as a political prisoner. The prisoners would communicate with people on the outside by rolling up bread putting it on the windows with water and making words on the windows to their cells. This woman found out this way that her husband had found out that an execution date had been set for him. The woman was determined to save her husband. Everyone thought that things were hopeless for him. She was able to obtain some high proof, high quality Polish vodka and trade it with German guards for her husband. He survived the war because of a couple of bottles of good liquor.

Value of a Name

During the occupation there was a period of time when my mums mother worked in a café frequented by Germans. There were times that she would work late and not make it back before police curfew hours. She would have to try to make it home avoiding German patrols.

One night she found herself being chased by Germans who caught up with her and demanded to inspect her bags. She explained that she had food for her child but a German insisted on sifting through her bags with his hands. The underground would sometimes move arms and leaflets around the city in the bags of civilians. The German soldier put his hand into bag and found it in the middle of a jelly roll. He angrily withdrew his hand and went for his pistol swearing at my grandmother until the other German with him told him to stop because my grandmother had a German name - Frank. Her life was saved by her still having her first husband’s last name. A horse drawn carriage was then called for her to finish her trip home - frightened, but alive.

After my grandfather had returned back from Dachau concentration camp in Germany, my mother desperately wanted him to formally wed her mother so that her mother could have the same name as her father. Kids at school often asked her why her name was different than her mothers and she felt almost illegitimate. It turns out that her father was previously married to a Russian woman in Eastern Poland who had died. Because no death certificate was obtained he could not remarry. My mother as a child actually went to the authorities and was able to get the death certificate to the amazement of her father.

Her father was on his deathbed after his ordeal in the concentration camp. One of last things he did while alive was change from his pyjamas for the priest to carry out the ceremony to marry my grandmother. He died a few days later with my mother at his side. He knew he was dying and asked my mum not to go to school that day and sure enough he passed away but his name was finally passed to his wife, and his child now came from a normal marriage which meant a lot to my mother.

While away from home

My grandfather lived only a few months following the conclusion of the WWII in Europe. He was a walking skeleton and extremely physically abused, but he survived a couple of years in a Nazi concentration camp.

One day mother came to the door and found a strange woman there. She was asking for him, explaining that she was in the camp with him and he had helped her and her daughter getting food and in doing so helped them to survive the war. My mother, who was 15 at the time, chased her away swinging a broom at her telling her she would wrap it around her head if she returned. The woman left telling my mum that she was a little devil. And so ended something started while away from home and the wife.

At the end of the war much time was spent waiting for people to return from places far away as in Germany. Most of the time people did not even know if family members were still alive as with people in the concentration camps or what awaited people as they returned home. WWII spanned over 5 years a lot of things happened in that time.

My mother did not know that her father was alive until he arrived at her doorstep at the end of the war.

Foraging for food

Food was very scarce during the war. Everyone lost weight. Everything was rationed. My mother and hers often ate raw potatoes, beets and onions because they were so hungry at that point. The farmers guarded their fields often with dogs and manned shacks.

During the beginning of the war, the Germans were bombing Warsaw and strafing columns of refugees and soldiers on the roads or anywhere else they were caught in the open. It was during these air raids that the children of the civilians under siege would take advantage of the air raids and go out into the fields and dig for vegetables for food before all of the all clear sirens sounded and the farmers and their dogs reappeared. My mother was caught in an open field foraging for food with other children when German planes appeared and started to strafe the children caught in the open with machine gun fire. My mother remembers seeing the faces of the pilots in their goggles. Her dad had instructed her not to try to run but to hit the deck when caught in this situation, so she shouted out to the other children to drop down flat on the ground. After the planes had left she got up and noticed that a lot of other children were not doing the same having been hit with machine gun fire.

People did what they had to do to eat and stay alive. My mother often felt guilty about stealing from the farmers and felt compelled to confess to this to a priest in church who told her it was all right considering the circumstances and to return to the fields for more should the need arise. The farmers harvested their crops in such a way that they often left vegetables behind unharvested from which people were able to get at least a little food if they took some risks and looked hard enough.

A somewhat funny story related to the food problem involved the family cat. Again food was scarce and everyone my mother knew, including herself, was losing weight and going around hungry. In the meantime the family cat was strangely enough gaining weight and getting fat. It was found out later that the cat was raiding a pen of pigeons from a neighbour on a regular basis. The pigeon owner swore to get even with whatever was stealing his pigeons but could not later bring himself to hurt the cat when the mystery was solved. It was just another necessity imposed by war. Even the animals did what they had to do for food.

My mother owned a rooster as a pet. One day it too disappeared. She found its head thrown in the garbage of a neighbour. Someone apparently stole and killed it for food.

My mother loves horses but often ate horse meat when they were killed by strafing planes. One got food from wherever possible and most often lost any inhibitions about the matter.

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