Black Earth(127)

At that point the host family decided to steal everything from their Jewish tenants and then denounce them to the police. The decision probably arose not so much from anger as from calculation. When the sisters told Zdzis?aw that Alicja was Jewish, they were, in effect, denouncing their mother as someone who was illegally sheltering Jews and themselves as conspirators. In a moment of human jealousy they had endangered the lives of their mother and of themselves. The only way to ensure their own safety, to know that Zdzis?aw would not denounce them, was to be rid of the Jews. Alicja was safe: Her fiancé was as good as his word and found her a new shelter in the outskirts of Warsaw. Alicja’s two cousins were shot the next day. Alicja and Zdzis?aw did indeed marry after the war. They had a daughter and were later divorced.

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A wife might save a husband, or a husband a wife. Sofia Eyzenshteyn was a midwife in Kyiv, in Soviet Ukraine, known for her “golden hands.” In September 1941, the Germans shot most of the Jews who had remained in the city at Babyi Iar. Sofia’s husband, who was not Jewish, dug a shelter for her in the back of a courtyard. He disguised her as a homeless person and led her there. Then, continuing what must have been a family routine, he walked the dog and spoke to it. When he approached the hiding place, he addressed the flow of speech to his wife. He brought her food and water. She found the hiding unbearable and asked him to poison her. This he did not do. She survived.

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Love for children could also bring about rescue.

Katarzyna Wolkotrup was a Polish grandmother. She lived in Baranowicze with her children and their families: She had a married daughter, a married son, and an unmarried son. Her daughter and son-in-law had a baby, Katarzyna’s first and only grandchild. Her three children were on friendly terms with a Jewish couple, Micha? and Chana, who had a baby of the same age. Micha? and Chana hid in the basement of the house with their little daughter. The baby would cry, and Grandma Katarzyna, at Chana’s request, would take the baby out for air. This was much safer than Micha? or Chana appearing outside and indeed almost without risk: The baby was a girl and so not circumcised, and anyone watching would likely see nothing more than a grandmother with her own grandchild. There was no more typical sight in Poland, where the grandmothers raise the children.

One day when Katarzyna was out with Micha? and Chana’s baby, she heard loud noises back at the house and was afraid to return. When she finally did she found everyone dead: not only Micha? and Chana, but also her own three children, her son-in-law, her daughter-in-law, and her baby grandchild. They had been denounced by a neighbor, who probably got the house as a reward. At the age of fifty-four, now without any of her family and without the future she had expected, Katarzyna left Baranowicze for good. She kept the little girl as her own, raising her, as the Jews who interviewed her after the war noted, to be “healthy and lovely.”

Nannies also raise children, and love them. In Warsaw, Maria Przybylska had worked for the Lewin family as the nanny of little Regina, raising her for the first years of her life. From the Warsaw ghetto, Regina’s father made contact with Maria. After he was deported to Treblinka and murdered, his wife and daughter left the ghetto for the Aryan side and found Maria. Regina’s nanny took them both in, her former ward and her former employer, and found them both shelter. Regina could more easily pass as Polish, presumably at least in part because she had been raised by a Polish nanny. She lived with some of Maria’s Polish friends, to whom she was introduced as Maria’s niece. Regina’s mother, on the other hand, was recognizably Jewish in her speech and appearance. It was agreed that Regina’s mother would stay with a male friend of Maria.

Maria was now working for a German family, from whom she stole food and coal for Regina and her mother. Maria’s friend gave Regina’s mother his own bed and slept on the floor. A cook in a restaurant, he stole meat for the woman under his care, taking none for himself. Regina, writing from Sweden in 1946 as a seventeen-year-old, had this to say about the woman and man who saved her and her mother: “I owe to those people everything, that today I can see the sun and look at people, that I exist and enjoy life and freedom. I don’t know if anyone from my own family would have made such a sacrifice and cared for us, the way that they cared for us and loved us.”

Men sometimes took in children, because their wives asked them to or because they wanted to themselves. Sergiusz Seweryn adopted a three-year-old orphan girl who was known in his village, near Bia?ystok, to be one of two Jewish survivors. He loyally raised her until his wife left him, taking the child. Stanis?aw Jeromiński, also from the Bia?ystok region, took in the one-year-old daughter of a Jewish acquaintance. After the war he did not want to part with the girl: “He regards her as his daughter and says that he risked his head for her”—which, in fact, he had.