Black Earth(131)

The Pole who owned the land was a stranger to them. When he heard their sobbing, he took the two women to his farm in Trzes?aniec. Afterwards he took in eight more Jews. Would he have taken in any Jews at all if not for that chance encounter with two tearful women who had found their way to his property and were at his mercy? To be sure, most people in his situation did not behave nearly so honorably, and many behaved much worse. And yet without the decision of Cypa and Rywa to control the timing of their own deaths, the landowner would never have met them, and perhaps would never have undertaken to rescue Jews at all. His efforts were all the more difficult in 1943, when the UPA began to ethnically cleanse Poles from Volhynia. And yet nine of the ten Jews he sheltered on his farm survived.

There were indeed people, although precious few of them, who felt compelled by the simple need for help. Irena Lypszyc survived thanks to one such person. She was a Warsaw Jew who fled to the eastern regions of Poland to escape the German invasion of September 1939, only to find herself unexpectedly under Soviet power. Such refugees were initially helped by local Jewish communities, insofar as that was possible, but were helpless when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Almost all of the local Jews were then killed, and the proportion of already displaced Jews who died must have been close to a hundred percent. After all, they had no prewar connections with the place where they found themselves, and no knowledge of the terrain.

Like most such people, Irena Lypszyc did not know much about her new surroundings. She was in Wysock, in Polesia, when the German invasion came. When the Jews of the town were rounded up for execution in September 1942, she ran into the swamps with her husband. It does not seem that she had ever previously spent much time out of doors. The two of them lived on berries and mushrooms for a few days before deciding to risk making contact with the outside world. Irena decided that she would stand on the first road she found, hail the first person she saw, and ask for help.

The man approaching her had a double-barreled shotgun on his shoulder and agreed to her request without batting an eye. As she came to understand, he was a natural rebel, living from smuggling and moonshine far away from any center of power, opposing whichever political system claimed authority over him. In interwar Poland he had hidden communists; when the Soviets invaded he had sheltered Poles from deportation by the NKVD; and now that the Germans had come he was helping Jews. He did not really seem to see a difference between one sort of rescue and another.

Irena told his story but did not betray his name.

—

Other rescuers, with more orderly minds and more conventional ways of being in the world, exhibited a mysterious steadfastness, a silently understood need to remake a corner of the world, to transform the overwhelming difficulty of the task into a kind of normalcy, where the labor and its presentation become something like the preoccupation of an entire personality. A private choreography of warmth and safety defied the exterior social world of cold and doom.

Rena Krainik found herself by chance in the village of Kopaniny, in eastern Galicia, not far from the city of Stanis?awów. Wearing rags, she knocked on the door of complete strangers, meaning to ask for shelter for a few hours and expecting to be turned away. Instead, the Zamorski family, a homemaker and a retired Polish army officer, took her in and treated her as one of their own for the rest of the war. As Rena remembered, “They didn’t ask me any questions, they didn’t demand any documents, they didn’t scrutinize my face to see whether I was Jewish. Mrs. Zamorska shared with me her very modest wardrobe, and the whole family shared with me every bit of food from the miserable portions allotted to the Poles.” Rena understood the risks that her hosts were taking and appreciated their virtue. “I was penniless, naked, and barefoot. The sacrifice was all the greater in a locality such as Kopaniny, where every new arrival attracted attention.”

In the city of Stanis?awów itself, where almost all of the Jews were murdered, Janina Ciszewska took in eleven for most of the war. In a house downtown she owned two apartments that were connected by an interior door. She hid the Jews in the second apartment, the one that did not open onto the hallway. At first she took in four people on behalf of a friend. When the Jews’ money ran out, she took a job with the German civilian administration, in the office that provided for the social welfare of ethnic Germans. Janina spoke German and, at the Jews’ request, registered herself as an ethnic German. She stole clothes and shoes from her employers (some of which had likely been taken from the bodies of murdered Jews), took them to the countryside, sold them at markets, and used the money to feed her growing group of wards. She made light of all the difficulties. She was, as one of the Jews she rescued wrote after the war, a “brave, warm woman.” She kept on a bright, beaming face, so that the Jews, as she said, would believe that she “could do anything.”