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Jews in The Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, The Fate of His Family, and The Secret History of Poland in World War II Judy Rakowsky
Jews in The Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, The Fate of His Family, and The Secret History of Poland in World War II Judy Rakowsky
Jews in The Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, The Fate of His Family, and The Secret History of Poland in World War II Judy Rakowsky
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: Hena in Hiding
Part I
1. Lost and Found
2. The Old Country
3. Barnyards
4. Origins
5. Some Friends
6. Breakthrough
Part II
7. Jews in the Garden
8. Postwar Gift
9. Checking Boxes
10. Wielding the Baton
Part III
11. Strained Truth
12. Fake Partisans
13. Documented Evidence
14. No History Without Truth
15. Honored Guests
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
Back Cover
To the truth tellers who reveal the tales of lives discarded,
rescuing them and us from denial of a dark history.
“We all need peace. Memory, meanwhile, breeds unrest.”
Hena in Hiding
Heavy footfalls thudded on the road that rainy May night. Passing
miles of freshly plowed fields, men moved in menacing formation.
Eighteen months in hiding had honed Hena Rożeńka’s hearing,
alert to sounds of danger from Germans or anyone who would
betray her and her family. Perched on a hilltop in central Poland, it
was easier to notice approaching intruders. The farm hideout lay a
few kilometers and a world away from the house and shop where
she had spent her life nestled among so many relatives. But who
were these men out here shouldering long guns? Why were they
heading directly toward the farmhouse as if it was their target?
Hena’s apprehension grew with every footstep the gunmen took
toward the house. Her parents, her sisters, and her brother were
inside. This late in the war, with liberation expected any day, they
had dared to seek comfort and refuge from this raw spring soaker.
The dark forms encroached on the house. Fear and helplessness
gripped her gut. She could not warn her family without revealing
herself. She could only steal peeks from her hiding place. That night,
she may have had a thousand reasons for not joining them inside.
After all, at age sixteen, she had been with her family every moment
since September 1942. She longed to be on her own. The last time
she saw peers in school, she was eleven.
Her parents kept telling her how lucky they were. Pan (Mr.)
Radziszewski, a kind man and customer from their hardware store,
had rescued them before the roundup. Otherwise, they would have
been forced onto wagons and trains with the rest of the Jews of
Kazimierza Wielka.
Out here on this farm so far away from everything, that brutality
did not seem real, but their brave protector told them what had
happened. The Germans shipped nearly two hundred Jews off to
Bełżec, the nearest death camp. No one heard from any of them
again. A second roundup happened not long afterward. Throughout
the fall and winter of 1942, Pan Radziszewski brought back news
from town of Nazis scouring the countryside, murdering any Jews
they found and terrorizing townspeople with threats of punishing
whole villages if they dared harbor Jews. The Rożeńeks took in these
reports from their hideout, willing themselves invisible.
Since their arrival here, they had weathered two winters. Along
the way, the farmer’s teenage daughter went away, one of the many
Poles involuntarily deported for forced labor in Germany.1 But
recently her parents as well as Hena’s siblings were elated by word
Pan Radziszewski brought back from town: Red Army troops were
approaching. Their suffering wouldn’t last much longer.
Hope made her parents so much lighter. Some moonless nights,
they stole out of the cramped outbuildings and took in fresh air,
heavenly respite after interminable stillness crouching in the dirt.
They had even dared to dream of ordinary life back running their
shop, and that Hena might see her schoolmates again.
She strained for a furtive peek. Nothing about the approaching
gunmen indicated they were Russian troops, or Germans for that
matter. And why would they be taking up positions around this
farmhouse?
Dark forms now massed at the door. Muffled voices carried on
the cold, wet air.
Then came the sounds she would long remember. Metal on
metal, guns poised for action. Thunderous banging on the front door
ricocheted off nearby houses.
Men shouted in Polish. “Give up your Jews! We know you have
Jews. Hand them over!”
Hena could not believe this was happening. How many times
had she imagined an attack by storm troopers pulling up in big black
cars in front of the house, soldiers fanning out across the farmyard
before anyone could run? Now those shuddering fantasies had
turned real.
A bleary Pan Radziszewski appeared. Light from within
silhouetted him cradling a small child. Gunmen stormed into his
house, shouting and beating the farmer with the butts of their rifles.
Pan Radziszewski clung to the child, protecting the baby instead of
shielding himself.
“We know you have Jews. Hand over your Jews. Where are
they?”
“What are you talking about?” Radziszewski protested. The child
screamed. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Who are
you?”
The gunmen stormed the house, breaking dishes, ransacking
everything. Their noisy assault and accusations reverberated across
the fields to surrounding farms. Hena heard no German, no Russian.
Only Polish.
The stately cherry tree outside the house, now freighted with
wet blossoms, had just shaken off winter doldrums. Knotty buds had
emerged, opening with clusters of pale petals that cheered the
wartime landscape. Hena may have huddled under it. Maybe the
attackers would not find her family, she consoled herself. Maybe they
would not look in the space behind the stove or in the attic, where
some Rożeńeks had hidden during other scares, like when a
neighbor’s daughter came by to play.
The house erupted with sounds of furniture tumbling and more
assaults on the farmer. After moments of quiet came exultant
shrieks. Her heart sank. The gunmen must have found their quarry.
Her beloved family.
“We got them!” someone shouted in triumph. The muffled
shouts from inside the house turned sharp and clear. She saw why.
Windows at the top of the house had been thrust open. Gunmen
inside yelled to others swarming below.
Next she saw the form of her sister Frania. Her teacher and
protector, Frania was five years older than Hena. She appeared in
the opening, her face twisted in terror. Her body lurched into view.
The gunmen laughed while shoving her out the window. Her slight
form floated for a moment. Bullets sprayed upward. She landed with
a sickening thump.
Acrid gun smoke drifted to Hena’s hiding place. The vicious
attackers laughed and shouted, egging each other on for the next,
her sister Frymet. How could she watch this again? The sounds and
images repeated. Her stomach knotted in horror at the sight of her
mother’s haggard face in the window. She must have been looking
down on her daughters lying crumpled below. Ita was in her fifties
and had calmed them over so many days and nights while they had
to sit still on damp earth. She moved awkwardly. The sadistic
attackers prodded and poked. Then came the push. Her screams
rang out amid the barrage of shots.
Hena could glimpse the ends of the barrels of the guns aimed
upwards murdering her family one by one. She struggled to believe
her mother and sisters—who only moments before huddled together
in fear—were already dead.
Her brother and father watched helplessly, restrained by other
assailants. Again came the sickening sounds. The forms of her
brother then father were pushed into a hail of bullets, their bodies
falling onto the others.
The gunmen whooped and hollered, triumphant in their
murderous cruelty, congratulating each other for killing the “Yids.”
The attackers made no attempt at secrecy. They staged the
executions brazenly, their shouts and gunfire reverberating through
the hamlet. No one in the village responded. No Germans. No Polish
police.
For hours after the massacre, Hena did not move. The gunmen
seemed to have gone. But she had heard them warn the farmer not
to take any belongings of the Jews. They would be back.
How soon?
Long after the shuffling boot steps had receded, she remained
frozen in place. She was alone in the world.
Where could she be safe? She could not ask Pan Radziszewski
for ideas. What if the gunmen found out she was alive and tortured
him?
The cherry tree turned into the burial site of her family. But the
location of the Rożeńeks’ remains would not stay secret. The tree
itself refused to conceal the crime.
Each spring, it blossomed as usual. The flowers gave way to
promising little stone fruits colored lime green. They cast a hopeful
look. But never would they turn the blushing orange-red of Poland’s
famed sour cherries. They withheld their promise as Poland’s pride
and never ripened. Instead they turned black and rotted, refusing to
allow villagers to forget what lay beneath.
Over time, the tree drew notice in the village and beyond. For
miles around, people heard of the cherry tree. Murdered Jews, the
Rożeńeks from Kazimierza, were buried under it. Was it cursed?
Word trickled out in whispers that someone escaped the fate of
her family. It was Hena, the youngest daughter. Only she could walk
away.
PART I
The eightieth birthday party of Benjamin Rakowsky, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1913.
Ben celebrates with his younger brother, Joe, father of Sam (Rakowski) Ron, who stayed
behind and survived the Holocaust. Judy attends this celebration as a seven-year-old.
1
Poppy sat at the head of a long table at Lost Creek Country Club,
beaming at his family, who were all turned out in shimmery dresses
and sharp suits for his eightieth birthday celebration. Ben Rakowsky,
my beloved grandfather, had married Jennie Stokfish in Warsaw
before anyone knew even one world war. From his family of eight
children hailing from a village near Kraków, only three had survived
and made it to this country. On this night, Poppy’s pale blue eyes
shone between his wide cheekbones and heavy brow, indelible
family features repeated on the squarish faces of his siblings and
progeny around the table, including his only son, my father, Rudy.
Poppy’s path to that birthday celebration started on another
continent when his country did not even exist. Ben left home in his
twenties, encouraged by his mother to avoid the draft. Poland had
been carved up by Russia, Austria, and Germany. Jewish parents
willed sons to emigrate rather than forfeit their lives to the Russian
army. Family lore has it that he was involved in a plot against Czar
Nicholas II, an added incentive to leave the country in times of
pogroms against Jews and prewar turbulence. Ben evaded the czar’s
clutches by leaving the country with a group of Polish Jews
sponsored for immigration to the United States. Landing in
Galveston, Texas, on September 11, 1913, the ship Breslau’s
manifest recorded his arrival. At twenty-seven years old, he left
behind his wife, Jennie, and baby daughter, Helen, in Warsaw. Filling
swamps in Texas, malaria befell Ben’s group of immigrants. Their
sponsor put them on a train to the Mayo Clinic. Ben, we were always
told, was the only one healthy enough to walk off that train. After
treatment, Benjamin Rakowsky, whose surname now ended in a y
thanks to the stroke of an immigration official’s pen, headed east
from Minnesota, stopping in a small town in northwest Ohio that
once enjoyed an oil boom before Texas struck a much larger vein.
Ben was earning money by measuring college students for tailored
suits, and living in Lima, Ohio. Here he would settle. Why Lima,
Ohio? He was so impressed by the warm reception: a bank president
held the door open for him, a poor Polish immigrant.
Six years and a world war later, Jennie and Helen joined him in
Lima. They left a place that once again had reclaimed its identity as
Poland. No one else in their extended families followed.
After Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939,
Poppy sent letters that drew no response from his family in Europe.
Finally, in 1946, a telegram arrived. It was from his “unknown
nephew,” Samuel Rakowski, a son of his younger brother, Józef. Sam
had helped the Red Cross locate Poppy using a clue he remembered
from old letters to his grandmother: the return address included the
word buckeye, part of the name of the company Ben started in Ohio,
known as the Buckeye State.
“From our family survived your sister Lily with her son, nineteen
years old, and your brother Józef, who is my father, and my mother
survived. The rest of the family, I am sorry to say that they are all
destroyed by y’mak shmo—his name should be blotted out—Hitler.”
Ben sponsored the survivors for visas to America. Only then did
he learn that American liberators of Mauthausen had found his once-
brawny brother lying on a pile of corpses, barely alive at eighty-eight
pounds. Joe’s son Yisrael, Sam’s brother, had perished in the same
camp two months shy of liberation. Joe’s wife, Sophie, had survived
three concentration camps and a death march from Gross-Rosen
with her sister Minna.
Joe and Sophie came to stay with Poppy and Grandma in Lima,
but my grandmother struggled with welcoming these immigrants,
despite all they had endured. A prickly, thin-skinned woman,
Grandma cringed at the reception Joe got around their adopted
hometown, where after decades of trying to fit in, they finally felt
accepted. But people kept mistaking her brother-in-law for her
husband. All over again, she felt the sting of being a greenhorn and
a Jew in a small white Christian town. Grandma hardly concealed her
feelings, offering the newcomers instructions in table manners and
begrudging them a second slice of toast.
By the time of the birthday celebration, those tensions had long
since disappeared. Joe and Sophie had moved away from Lima soon
after immigrating. Joe created a successful home-building business
in Canton, Ohio. The two couples had grown close. In fact, at the
party, Ben was still tan from their annual vacation in Miami.
For seven-year-old me, none of this background would mean
anything for decades. The party loomed in my memory in flashed
impressions—the itchiness of my dress and the pinch of my black
patent leather shoes.
That night, I almost didn’t recognize Grandma with her flaming
apricot hair sprayed into an elegant cloud. She clutched a mink stole
over a champagne-colored dress. She chatted with visiting relatives
in Yiddish, their cone of secrecy. They sounded just like her even
when they spoke English: th sounded like t (ting for thing) and w’s
were v’s (vat for what). And every sentence rose an octave at the
end, always sounding like a question. But my eyes were on Poppy,
whose smile flashed like sunshine. I tried to catch his eye, those
blazing ocean blues he had passed down only to me, not to any of
his three children or the other six grandchildren. He smiled in my
direction, which I took as an invitation to wriggle off my seat and
sneak under the tray of a waitress who was shouting at the old-
country relatives as if their accents made them deaf.
At Poppy’s side, I waited. I expected him to pull me onto his
ample lap as he usually did on our weekly visits, when anything I did
or said made him laugh in belly-jiggling delight. But that night he left
me standing there under his protective arm, riveted by his brother,
Joe.
They seemed caught up in memories a world away.
Until I was in fifth grade, I didn’t think much about where Poppy and
Grandma came from. The teacher said that people in America came
from all over the world. We made up a wonderful melting pot with
everyone casting off those former identities to pursue the American
dream as one. She asked that we volunteer our families’ countries of
origin. The class shrugged. Few of the white multigeneration
American kids had a clue. A boy named Smith might be English, the
teacher suggested. He did not know.
I piped up, “I am of Polish-Jewish descent.” The teacher found
that interesting, and I shared the little I knew about my immigrant
grandparents. I repeated the reference in the carpool after school.
The mom at the wheel spun. She accused me of fibbing: “Everyone
knows all Polish people are Catholic.” I was dumbstruck. Why would
I lie about that?
I had a vague sense of why we had few relatives on Dad’s side.
We knew Hitler killed many Jews, including our relatives. The ending
had an American spin. Poppy was smart to leave Europe before the
war and found freedom in the United States. No one mentioned the
life our family left behind, who was lost, or how.
3.
"Heu fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum" olivat ne sanat, joihin
hänen sielunkaihonsa sisältyi ja joita hän alati mietti. Niin, pois täytyi
hänen päästä täältä, pois loistavasta hovikaupungista paikkaan,
jossa Jumala on opettajana, elähyttäjänä ja ilahuttajana aamusta
iltaan ja illasta aamuun.
"Girolamo, poikani, eikö äitisi voi lohduttaa sinua, minä kuulen että
kärsit tuskaa, soittosihan kaikuu melkein kuin jäähyväissäveleet!"
*****
Hautarakennus.
Oli kerran mies, jolla oli tytär, joka oli hänen elämänsä ainoa ja
suuri ilo, sitten kun hänen vaimonsa oli kuollut. Pieni tyttö kasvoi isän
väsymättömän huolenpidon alaisena. Hänen ajatuksensa liikkuivat
aina hänessä ja hänen kasvatuksessaan. Hän tahtoi antaa hänelle
kaikki, mitä ihminen voi antaa. Hän luki ja opiskeli ja koetti vähitellen
vuodattaa pienokaisen heräävään maailmaan kaiken hyvän tunteen
mitä hän opinnoillensa kautta oli voinut löytää. Hän tulisi,
suuremmaksi tultuaan, saamaan opetusta etevimmiltä kyvyiltä
useammilla aloilla, hänen tunteensa kehitettäisi niin hienoksi ja
jaloksi, kun ylipäänsä voi olla mahdollista. Hänen sydämensä tulisi
olla hänellä johtona läpi elämän, sydämensä kehittyneellä
etevämmyydellä vaikuttaisi hän kanssaihmisiinsä ja tulemalla hyvien
ja ylevämielisten lasten äidiksi, vaikuttaisi hän ihmissuvun
jalostamiseksi.
Mutta se, joka ei armahda edes pieniä lapsia, vaan iskee sokeasti
iskunsa, lähestyi tyttöä ja asetti hänet kuolinvuoteen valkealle
hurstille. Siinä makasi hän, suloisena vielä kuolemassakin, nyt oli
hän tullut todelliseksi Jumalan enkeliksi. Kalpeana, köyhänä ja
lohduttomana istui tuo rikas mies tyttärensä paarien ääressä. Kuollut
oli hän jonka eteen hän oli elänyt, kuollut oli hän, josta piti tulla
nainen, jommoisia vaan harvat, ja äiti, jonka ei vertaista ja jonka piti
vaikuttaa ihmiskunnan jalostamiseksi, aate, jonka hän oli rakentanut
mittaamattomassa rakkaudessaan pienokaiseen, oli rauennut.
"Ei, lakkokassoihin!
Silloin nosti mies kätensä kansanjoukon yli ja huusi niin kovin kuin
voi:
Näitä sanoja lausuttaissa oli rikas mies, joka oli kuullut kansan
jupinan, tullut ulos portaille. Silloin ojensi vanhus kätensä häntä kohti
ja jatkoi:
"Katso, tämä kansa on tullut kiittämään sinua suuren aatteesi
tähden, rakentaa hautarakennus tyttäresi haudalle, tämä kansa
kunnioittaa aatettasi, se tuntee, ettei se ehkä oikein käsitä sitä vielä,
että se ihanuuden ja täydellisyyden kaipuu, joka rakennuksessasi
ilmenee, kerran on tuleva sille esikuvaksi, kehoitukseksi ja onneksi,
se tuntee saavuttaneensa mielenylennystä, käydessään katsomassa
sitä, se oppii siitä pyrkimään kohti ihanuutta, kohti jaloutta, kohti
korkeinta tämä kansa kiittää sinua!"
Savenvalaja Willberg'iläiset.
Asia oli sellainen, että Sefa rouva, samalla kun hän oli
tuimaluontoinen, oli myöskin luonnostaan taipuvainen naiselliseen
turhamaisuuteen. Hän oli aina pitänyt koreista viheriäisistä
silkkihuiveista ja suurista karkaasseilla pyntätyistä myssyistä, joita
kamelikurjen höyhenet ja loistavat nauharuusut koristivat. Tämän
turhamaisuuden oli hän nyt, kun kaikki tuo uudenaikaisuus tuli
rautatierakennuksen mukana, vyöryen yli kaupungin, ulotuttanut
myöskin heidän omistamaansa taloon. Sefa rouva rupesi
arvelemaan, että ne kotitekoiset kattotiilet, joiden alla tornipääskyset
niin mielellään pesivät, näyttivät liian yksinkertaisilta ja että niiden
sijaan pitäisi pantaman levykatto, jonka voisi maalata
"ekonomivärillä," ja että tuon ijankaikkisen punamaalin voisi peittää
kunnollisella "rakennusvärillä," josta nyt kaikki kaupungissa puhuvat.
Stefanus meni vielä eteenpäin, hän tahtoi näyttää, että hänellä oli
totuus mielessä.
"Mene vaan, mene vaan, Stefanus!"
Eräs jumalanpalvelus.