A Mother Who Survived World War II Returns to Poland

Can we ever recapture the past?

Probably not, but last summer I got the chance to at least take a glimpse into my mother’s past--as a young woman in World War II Poland--with my mother as my guide.

In the process, the image of her cozy, domestic life as housewife and homemaker faded, and the image of another life emerged--of furtive black-market trading and frantic midnight truck rides with lives hanging on the outcome; a life as a “criminal” and a slave, spent scratching for bare survival every day for six years amid the chaos of the war.

I’ve always been aware of this other side of my mother’s life, but being there--physically, where it all took place--pounds the message home in a way mere memorabilia or memory never could.

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This is one of a continuing series on Memorable Vacations that appears from time to time in the Travel Section.

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Krakow, her hometown, is a perfect city to come from if you want to return one day in search of the past. Neither World War II nor urban renewal has touched this picturesque, medieval gem along the Wisla River. To the hordes of tourists besieging the city, this means a feast of architecture, art and history. For my mother it means that her ghosts and memories can still be visited at their familiar addresses.

While we joined the crowds parading around the Rynek Glowny, the ancient, massive market square ringed with Renaissance townhouses, we were soon drawn to a nondescript neighborhood of residential apartments about a mile away.

No. 95 Starowislna, third floor, corner apartment. It had been 45 years since my mother last saw this building. She looked up and stared. This was where she grew up, secure in the safety net of family, friends, school, community. Here she began her long chess game with death.

German Invasion

September, 1939. The lightninglike German invasion separates Sala Unger from her family, who have been visiting relatives in the unoccupied Eastern zone of Poland.

My mother must make the most difficult decision of her life. She senses her future as a Jew under the Germans. But her family members are now refugees without support; only she has a job--bookkeeper at a textile store--that can provide the money, contacts and information necessary to save them.

Instead of fleeing to safety, she remains at home for the moment, alone in the storm. My mother has always measured family above everything. Here, in her home at No. 95 Starowislna, she would never see her family together again.

Wawel Castle, massive and haughty, looms over Krakow’s old city. Along with thousands of visiting Poles, we marveled at the gracefully arcaded Renaissance courtyards and the magnificent tapestries and sheer bulk of the fortifications, which proclaim its history as the seat of Polish kings for 500 years.

We continued south from the Wawel’s base for about two minutes, until we reached a storefront in the middle of Krakow’s bustling business district.

No. 10 Stradom now hawks small household appliances; at another time it was Dresner Textiles, where my mother worked. Either way, it seemed an improbable place for my mother to begin her “criminal” career.

Constant Danger

By 1940, my mother’s family had fallen under German jurisdiction. They were hiding in small country towns, in constant danger of being rounded up and shipped to prison camps. Only money could save them--money for bribes, information and transportation to a safer place--when a roundup threatened.

And so my mother used her base at No. 10 Stradom to become a black marketeer. German troops had been issued scrip to use in purchasing store goods. The scrip sheets they presented were often unsigned, and therefore reusable.

My mother often stole the scrip and sold it to Polish contacts--a crime punishable by death under Nazi law. But this money bought her the information she needed about future German roundups--and the power to act on it.

The roads out of Krakow open up onto a countryside of placid, timeless beauty--an alternating pattern of rolling hills, deep woods and checkerboard farmland stretching to the horizon.

For my mother, though, the fear and sadness echoing along these roads is as real as the haystacks that line them. Here she traveled at night--without her Jewish armband, posing as an Aryan, with a truck and a driver bribed with black market money--to remove her family from towns that she knew were threatened with evacuation.

Car Breaks Down

At one point in the road we stopped. Here, in the middle of just such a mission 40 years ago, my mother’s car broke down in the dead of a wintry night. Working frantically with her driver, they muscled the car off the road to avoid German patrols.

My mother wandered on the spot, awash in memory; I tried to picture her at 20, straining against a car’s fender in the black, icy night.

Time after time, my mother managed to transfer her parents to the different towns that the road now unfolds to us.

Finally, in Dabrowa, one of those peaceful, sleepy villages that today seems an unlikely setting for treachery and terror, her string ran out. Her family, worn down by the strain, refused her plea to move further. My mother, worn down by her responsibilities, gave in and returned to Krakow alone. Her father, sister and brother remain . . . and their fates are assured.

In her office the next day, my mother receives the news: There had been a roundup; her family was caught and shipped to the city of Tarnow, and then to a concentration camp. Her brother has been shot at the train station, trying to escape. She knew the others were doomed.

Now, 40 years later, as we rode through Tarnow, my mother retreated into silence and communed with ghosts. I began to feel how deeply my mother’s American life had misrepresented her. The woman whose experience seemed bounded by menu planning and needlepoint had, in her time, straddled the knife-edge.

Tranquil Suburb

Our tour of Krakow continued, past the gently bending Wisla River, where tourists and locals sun themselves on the sloping banks.

No. 4 Jozefinska St. is on an apartment block in a tranquil residential suburb across the bridge. As we approached it, my mother grew jittery, agitated.

Forty-five years ago, this neighborhood was the sector designated as the ghetto, where Krakow’s Jews were herded before their final evacuation. Here my mother learned what it was to be hunted like an animal--and, like an animal, to resist.

This row of buildings on Jozefinska formed one of the ghetto’s borders. Before every evacuation, a cordon of guards was stationed along the block to isolate it.

When my mother saw these guards, it signaled her to scurry for the latrine on the balcony and cram herself into the false ceiling, where no human being could be expected to fit.

She huddled there while the Germans, just a few feet away, conducted their search. She waited until the shrieking and commotion of the roundup subsided. Eventually there was nothing left but the quiet of a tomb. She was safe . . . until the next time.

I was struck by a thought: At the age when I was attending college lectures and resting on college lawns, my mother was wedged into the crannies of this building, hiding for her life.

Site of Labor Camp

No. 4 Jozefinska exists untouched by time, but our next destination had been obliterated.

In the suburban hills of Krakow, we searched for the remnants of Plaszow, the labor camp to which my mother was sent when she was finally caught; the camp where she became a slave. More than 30,000 inmates lived here at any given time, shoehorned into row upon row of prison barracks.

The terrain is now lush country land, undisturbed except for some grazing cows. It’s hard to believe that the horrors of mass dehumanization ever existed here. Yet, they did. At the base of a hill we stumbled on a plaque commemorating the camp’s existence.

Without physical reminders, only the imagination can reconstruct the earlier scenes.

Somewhere here, my mother marched into camp for the first time and realized that it had been built on the former site of the Jewish cemetery, where her mother was buried; the headstones of the graves were gone, used for paving the camp’s roads.

Here, where the hills now lie in blissful quiet, my mother developed the ability to go diligently about her work while fellow prisoners were being shot only 50 yards away. Here she hid among mounds of discarded, disease-ridden prisoners’ clothing.

My mother remained among the last 150 prisoners. When the camp finally closed, they were marched to Auschwitz.

Horror and Mystery

The Auschwitz we visited, with a busload of tourists, remains largely the way it was at the moment of its liberation.

My mother roamed the grounds, following the camp’s intricate path of death, which no prisoner knew. After 40 years, the pain and the horror were rivaled by the awe and mystery of this place.

“Grundlichkeit, Grundlichkeit (efficiency),” my mother repeated grimly, bitterly. One wonders, over and over: What sort of human beings could proceed so calmly and efficiently about the business of murder?

Wandering through this landscape of death, a lost vignette recurred to me. I was a young boy watching my mother play mah-jongg with three American-born housewives from the neighborhood.

Despite their common interests and concerns, she seemed to me to be different from the others in some crucial way. After several months, my mother parted from the group and never again sought out non-Europeans for friends. For those who survived the Auschwitz experience, the gulf between themselves and those who couldn’t even imagine such a world would remain a hard one to bridge.

Sole Survivor

The final stage of our journey was not on the itinerary. My mother had been shipped to Bergen-Belsen--a concentration camp deep inside Germany itself--and lay in a coma, deathly ill with typhus, on the day the British liberated the camp. Of her large family, only she had survived the ordeal.

Before the war, 60,000 Jews lived in Krakow. Now, 300 remain--just enough to keep the 16th-Century R’Emuh Synagogue and its ancient cemetery open.

Every visit here is an act of commemoration as well as prayer, and for us there was something especially significant. My mother’s father was a member of the synagogue’s last prewar board of directors, and in recent years a memorial plaque to them has been erected.

The plaque is the only remaining vestige of my mother’s family in Poland. And so, on an overcast morning in the cobblestoned courtyard of the R’Emuh, I looked at my mother through the viewfinder of a camera as she pointed to the gold-embossed letters spelling “Zvi Unger” (her family’s name), and linked up for a moment with a vanished world.

Weight of Memories

Age has shrunken her a bit, and she seems to sag further under the weight of memories. On this day she bit a trembling lip to hold back her tears. Then she steadied herself, and seemed to grow larger. Because if there is tragedy here, there is also vindication.

The woman who forced herself to believe there was hope that some could survive even this kind of a catastrophe, and that she would be one of them, had come home.

She was there, and she had indeed survived. And I was there too, a partner standing witness to her tragedy and her triumph.

Being there has put me in touch with the other side of my mother, the side I always knew but could never really feel. Those two sides stared back at me through the viewfinder, sisters under the same skin.