Country of Ash: A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939–1945 by Edward Reicher

Author:Edward Reicher [Reicher, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, history, Europe, Eastern, Jewish, Holocaust
ISBN: 9781934137598
Google: 3auhDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2013-03-29T23:21:40.903983+00:00

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The train conductor Antoni Kaczynski lived with his wife Veronika and fifteen-year-old daughter, Irka, in a small house in a working-class neighborhood. There was a larger house across the street, but otherwise we had no neighbors, which was very lucky. The house consisted of a single room divided by a curtain into two unequal parts. The front part was the kitchen, where we ate and spent the day, and where the Kaczynskis slept. Pola and I slept behind the partition, and Elzunia slept with Irka. Mr. and Mrs. Kaczynski slept in a double bed, and Elzunia shared a single bed with Irka. For the Kaczynskis’ family, friends and neighbors, it was understood that Pola and Elzunia were refugees from the area around Lublin, from where, in fact, large numbers of people had indeed been pushed toward Warsaw.

Pola was introduced as the wife of a Polish officer imprisoned in a German camp. I, on the other hand, did not exist officially at all. If anyone came in, I would hide behind the curtain or slip under the bed. For greater security, Kaczynski and I constructed a hideout, because I preferred them. Behind the curtain we cut out a few floorboards to make a hole about two feet square. The house had no cellar, so we dug away the earth beneath the floor and carried it out in a pail during the night into the nearby fields. We nailed together the boards we had cut out to make a lid for the hideout, just as we had done on Muranowska Street, and covered it with an old rug. It was an ideal hiding place, but after a while it became wearisome.

As it turned out, the Kaczynskis had a lot of visitors: Antoni’s coworkers, friends, neighbors. It was wartime, and people dropped in on one another and exchanged all kinds of news. Besides, Irka had numerous admirers. She was a fresh young thing; a real little morsel. I was forbidden to appear, for the Kaczynskis claimed there was something Semitic about my features. In any case, it was a time when every stranger was suspected of being a Jew. It was easy to find something Semitic in a face—a turn of the nose, protruding ears, or a slightly thicker lower lip. Sometimes I would have to dive under the floorboards twenty or thirty times a day. I would come out filthy and matted with lumps of clay. I had to brush myself clean and wash many times a day, and there was no running water in the house.

Veronika, Kaczynski’s wife, wasn’t happy to have us, and took every opportunity to show it. There was no toilet in the house; instead there was a shed out back, country style. I was not allowed to use that stinking outhouse. Despite these unusual conditions, we were relatively safe there. Our rent was seventy zlotys a day, the amount the lawyer Olek Rozenholc had arranged for us to pay. It wasn’t expensive, but neither was it cheap.

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