Ewa Koper
The fellow of the David and Anna Dlugie Kliger Scholarship in 2016
The fellow of the David and Anna Dlugie Kliger Scholarship in 2016
I should like to begin by thanking Alan Metnick and Forum for Dialogue for giving me the opportunity to take this important journey. Everything I experienced, listened to and acquired is, to me, extremely valuable and amazing. Today I may refer to this trip as a educational and documentary journey. I have learned a lot about the modern Israel during this trip, and how the country was newly build with all its structures. To see Israel from the angle of the experience of its citizens is so different than reading only bare facts in books and pres articles. People I interviewed were mainly those who as children or teenagers emigrated to Palestine or later to Israel. Their experience, reflections and remarks are of great value to me. Stories connected to their fate during occupation and the difficult life after the war made me realize many things and shed light on different points of view. I landed in Israel on 12 November 2016. The next day after my arrival, I met with Nava Ruda who was born in 1935 in Lviv as Szeindel-Charlotte Kohn. During German occupation, she was send in the Lviv ghetto together with her parents and brother. She was saved by a Polish caregiver Julia Jurek who in the spring of 1943 helped her to escape the ghetto and took her to her family in Przemysl.
Father Grzegorz Pawłowski was someone I have always wanted to meet. He was born as Jacob Hersz Griner to a Jewish family in Zamość in 1931. During the liquidation of the ghetto in Zamość in the Fall of 1942, the Jews were forced to leave the town and were directed to Izbica. Among them was also a young boy with his mother and sister. From Izbica – the largest transit ghetto in the Lublin region – he managed to escape an execution. His family was shot at the Jewish cemetery. With the consent of the Chief Rabbi of Poland, the body of Father Pawłowski after his death will be buried at the cemetery in Izbica, near the mass grave where ashes of his family members lie. I often recall the story of Father Pawłowski during educational activities in Bełżec – Memorial and Museum, thus meeting him personally was very important to me. During the second day of my trip to Israel, I was able to learn about the activities of Heichal Jahadut Wolin Center in Tel-Aviv, which is commonly referred to as The House of Wołyń or Wołyń House. Visiting and learning about the work of this institution was a great discovery to me, as I was unaware that such place operating under the auspices of Yad Vashem exists. It seemed that Jews of Wołyń were not commemorated in a specific place particularly. Wołyń House was established on private initiative as a place of meeting for those coming from that area. Today, the center conducts educational and research projects. Nurit Fejge, the daughter of its founder, was my guide there. Something incredible happened to me on my way to Haifa. Before I left to Israel, I had prepared a list of people whom I wanted to meet while there. On the list I had also put the address of Lilia Thau, hoping to find the time and be able to find her apartment to talk to her about her experiences. While on my way there, it turned out that Lilia was traveling with me. Lilia Chuwis-Thau survived the German occupation in Lviv, Kopyczyńce and Czortków. She was just a teenager when she was left all alone as her mother died in Lviv and her grandmother and aunt were deported to the death camp in Bełżec. During the meeting with Lilia, I could also discover the story of survival of her husband’s parents, sister and aunt from a small town near Lviv. I received a copy of memories of her husband written just before his death. Mrs Thau wants to edit it and publish in the near future.
The story of survival of her husband’s family is very particular, because it was rare for five members of the same family coming from the same place to survive the war. While in Haifa, I also had a chance to meet and talk to Ignacy (Izio) Rothstein. Before the war, he lived with his parents at the market square in Stryj. In the beginning of the German occupation, his father was killed in the campaign against intelligentsia. Soon after, Izio and his mother were put in a ghetto. Thanks to the great effort of his mother, he was rescued from the action aiming at liquidating children. When the situation became so dramatic that it was no longer possible to stay in the ghetto, his mother sought help on the “Aryan side”. The help came from Mr Starko, who hid Izio, his mother and several other people in his basement. To secure the hiding place, its entrance was walled in. The food was delivered by Mr Starko through a chimney. They survived in these condition for 14 months. After having moved to Israel, Mr Izio has never returned to Poland nor to the town of his childhood which today is located in Ukraine. At the National Insurance Institute of Israel in Haifa, on a special request of Lucia Retman, I gave a lecture on the history of the death camp in Bełżec and how the Museum-Memorial in Bełżec operates today. While at the meeting, I met two people whose families come from Rymanów and Kraśnik. Lucia Retman comes from Leżańsk. During the war, on March 1942, she survived the first deportation from Żółkwia to Bełżec. She lived there with her aunt because her parents had died much earlier. Then, Lucia was hiding in Lubaczów, and after receiving Aryan documents as a Polish woman she was sent to the Third Reich as slave labor. The photo below shows Lucia Retman and Janina Heszcheles-Altman. This photo was taken during a dinner as it turned out both ladies live in the neighborhood. It was in Haifa that I personally met Janka Hescheles-Altman, with whom I had been in touch for several years. When Mrs Altman was an eleven years old girl in 1943, she wrote a moving poem about Bełżec. With the help of Żegota (The Polish Council to Aid Jews), she was saved from the camp at Janowska street in Lviv. Shortly after she wrote her memoires “Oczyma dwustoletniej dziewczyny” (Through The Eyes of A Twelve-Year-Old Girl), published for the first time in 1946.
Mrs Janina Altman organized for me a visit to Ghetto Fighters’ House (Beit Lohamei Ha-Ghetaot) and a meeting with its Director Anat Livne, as well as the Head of the Archive, Anat Bratman-Elhalel. It meant a lot to me to be able to visit the temporal exhibition devoted to the camp at Janowska street, which mainly presents the drawings made by one of the former prisoners. It was equally important to me to visit the Archives. I could, among other things, see an original notebook, in which Janina Hescheles-Altman was describing her experiences in 1943. During my stay in Haifa, I also met Mrs Maria Shmuel whose parents were deported from Wieliczka to Bełżec in August 1942. She was hiding in Warsaw, and participated in the Warsaw Rising in 1944. I have been in touch with Mrs Maria via email and phone since 2008, unfortunately her health does not allow her to visit Poland. She is such an interesting person and one can learn a lot from her. After Haifa, I went to Ramt-Gan where I met with Lilla Haber, the Head of The Krakow Jews Landmanshaft. During our meeting we came up with an idea to commemorate the Jews deported from Krakow to Bełżec. “Aktion Reinhardt” has its 75th anniversary in 2017. I have already talked to Mrs Marta Śmietana from the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow, and soon we will prepare the program of a joint commemoration. On the next day in Rehavot, I met with Marta Goren, born in 1935 in Czortków. Marta survived the war in Warsaw thanks to real ID card of a girl of the same age from the Czortków area. She attended a school run by nuns and until today she keeps in her house a book with religious songs, her school certificate and she wears a medallion with the Holy Mary of Częstochowa on her neck. The story of Wira (Wiktoria) Lewentol is the one that has not yet been written down. Only a couple of months ago she sat with her sons and grandchildren to disclose to them her wartime fate. My last meeting was with Mrs Lea Paz born in 1930. In September 1942, Lea, convinced by her mother, jumped from a train heading to Bełżec.
After wandering for several days, she reached her home where she joined her grandfather and uncle. A false birth certificate was obtained for her and thanks to the help of a Polish family, she survived the war. After losing her mother who was deported to the camp in Bełżec, Wira was hiding in Lviv, Otwock and Krakow. She encountered many people on her way to survival. A birth certificate was bought for her for a lot of many. She keeps it until today. I will present her story next year in a publication for the conference Lviv. City – Community – Culture: Residents of Lviv Around The World, published by the Pedagogical University in Krakow. Mrs Milek Wachtel and his sister Rózia Grajower come from Suchodnica near Borysław. Their mother, Mina Wachtel, died in 1941 in Urycz, located nearby. She was visiting her father on the day when a pogrom took place. She helped several people to escape but did not use this opportunity for herself. She only asked that her words be transmitted: “My father needs me even more now than my children”. Milek together with his father survived in bunkers near the mountainous Barosławia. The sister worked in German administration, but when the situation deteriorated, she joined her father and brother. From a family of eighty members, only seven survived. Meeting with Miri Gershoni in Kiryat was a special moment during my stay in Israel. Her parents came from Czorków. Her father had left to Palestine before the war, and her mother survived the Holocaust in the district of Galicia. In her research, Miri Gershoni explores the history of Czortków and its residents. She holds a collection of dozens of recordings collected both within the Jewish community of Czortków as well as from other town residents. Her collection also includes many original documents, letter and also false documents that helped her to survive on the “Aryan side”. She is now working on an incredible map which will allow next generations to easily find places connected to the history of their families in Czortków.
A particular, funny moment occurred during our meeting, as we had to “break into” a shelf. It turned out the key to the shelf where photo albums are kept, was lost. After several tries we managed to open the closed door. One of the albums included photos made by Lea’s uncle in Palestine in the 30. of the XX century. He had always dreamed of moving to the historic lands of Israel. Unfortunate, he died just before the Red Army entered the Stryj region. The day before my departure, I went to Jerusalem where I could witness a Bar Mitzvah celebration by the Western Wall. Because I work as an educator, I often describe this Jewish coming of age ritual in theory. This time I could participate in it and document it with photos which I will definitely use during my next workshops.
The David and Anna Dlugie Kliger Scholarship is to be used towards personal development and individual work for Polish/Jewish relations.
Project co-financed by The David and Anna Dlugie Kliger Scholarship Fund.
