A STORY OF MIRACULOUS SURVIVAL Life Before the War: My parents were born and raised in a beautiful medieval town in Poland, named Sandomierz, about 100 kilometers south of Warsaw. They were cousins and were a part of numerous extended family members. Jews in Sandomierz made up almost half the population of the city. My father, since he was a Jew, was ineligible for university education so his family pooled their scant resources and sent their oldest son to Liege in Belgium to study chemical engineering. My mother was trained as a teacher, but once again, being Jewish she was not able to work in her profession. She worked in a bank. Upon his return to Poland, my parents were married in 1936. They moved to Warsaw where my father eventually started a small fur dying business. At the beginning of 1940, in the midst of a very stormy political climate and with the Nazis poised to destroy Poland, they awaited the birth of their baby, in a brand new apartment in a lively suburb of Warsaw. The Ghetto: Turbulent times were becoming more and more of a reality and it was not long before the Jews of Warsaw, numbering some 300,000 persons were gathered in the newly established ghetto area which previously housed some 30,000 Poles who were unceremoniously ordered to vacate their homes.. There were initially two ghettos, the large, in which could be found commercial establishments as well as living quarters; and the small ghetto where people lived. We were very fortunate as we were able to secure a room for our small family including my parents, me and two cousins (a mother and daughter) of my mother’s. Regina Bankier, my mother’s cousin and close friend whose mother and sister shared our room worked as a security guard in the prison in the large ghetto. In the cellar of our building there was a one way telephone which could be used only to make calls, not to receive them. My father arranged with Regina, that should there be any kind of emergency in which we needed her help, he would advise her immediately by phone. Conditions worsened daily in the ghetto with disease, starvation lack of sanitation and clean water caused great hardship and increasing numbers of deaths. Life became increasingly unbearable. My father worked as a slave in Tebenz, the German factory which processed furs for the war effort. Because he was essential to the process, he enjoyed a somewhat privileged position. He was able to smuggle out skins which he sold on the black market to secure food for his family and as many neighbours as possible. People were dying by the thousands and the organized Jewish “government” of the ghetto, established to force the Jews to do the dirty work of the Nazis was trying to cope with the increased numbers of dead and dying. Corpses lined the streets until they could be collected by the “Chevra Kadisha” burial society. The Jewish “authorities were required to provide hundreds of people every few days for what was termed as “relocation”. Some people really believed that life would improve once they were “relocated” while others knew that “relocation” meant almost certain death. Evacuations of hundreds of people from the Warsaw ghetto began early in 1942. One day, all the men were ordered to report to the Tebenz yards where they were locked up for several hours. When he was released, my father headed straight for home where he found the entire area cleared of women and children…empty. All the women and children had been taken to “umschlagplatz” where they were loaded unto cattle cars destined for the Treblinka death camp. My father raced to the phone to alert Regina and then ran to the train yards. He was prevented from entering, but could see hundreds of women and children being loaded. Regina meanwhile also ran to see if she could help. Because she was a woman, or perhaps because she wore a guard’s uniform, she was able to come closer. She arrived at just the nick of time. A moment later she would not have seen my mother, holding me in her arms already in the cattle car. She began to scream that I was her child and that my mother was just minding me. By some miracle or twist of fate, my mother passed me hand to hand until I was literally thrown from the train, into Regina’s arms My mother of course went on to die at Treblinka. Only as a mature woman, have I really considered what that moment must have meant to my mother. As a mother and grandmother I know that a mother’s instinct is to hold your child close at times of danger. How courageous, how quick witted she was to know that her sacrifice was my only, dim hope for life. When she had outlived her usefulness to the Nazis, Regina followed my mother to her death at Treblinka. My father and I were left in the ghetto. I became sick with dysentery which came very close to taking my life. As a young child I had become dehydrated and the best efforts of my father’s friend, a doctor also in the ghetto, could be of no help without a re-hydrating solution. Dr. Kalinowski informed my father that I would be dead in a matter of hours, without it. My father begged the director of Tebenz who, as a non Jew could come and go at will, to secure the essential medicine for me. Once again I was miraculously saved. Each time there was a threatened roundup of more people destined for “relocation” my father had to find a place to hide. People desperately searched for a hole, a space an attic where they could secure their safety even for a moment. With a young child, who might make a sound, cry etc. it was almost impossible to find a hiding place among other people. One day he and I gained entrance to a flooded cellar where a number of people were already hidden. He had to promise that he would suffocate me himself if I emitted a sound which could give everyone away. He was told in no uncertain terms that he should not seek to hide there again for he would not be admitted. He began to carry two cyanide pills in his pocket, one for me and one for himself. He was determined not to be taken alive. It became clear to my father that he had to escape with me, from the ghetto. There was no sure way but the safest was through the sewers. My father described this trip as a nightmare of mammoth proportions. Rats as big as cats, the stench and filth made the escape an escape from horror, through horror. We found temporary shelter with a friend of my family’s who was of German extraction and whom my father had helped before the War. Knowing that he could not hide and work to save the rest of the family if he had to care for a young child, my father pleaded with Dr. Lande, a friend and pediatrician who had looked after me from the time of my birth, to secure a hiding place where I would be cared for and relatively safe. Dr. Lande found Hanka Rembowska, an artist and illustrator of children’s books who agreed, at great risk to herself to take me in. She was already caring for another child; a Polish, non Jewish war orphan. Hanka was a wonderful human being, but she was sick with tuberculosis for which no antibiotics were available at that time. As she became too sick to care for her two little girls, we were moved to a convent for blind children in Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains in the southern part of Poland. Life in the Convent: My personal memories, although sketchy, kick in while I was hidden at the convent. I have no recollection of specific people, but do remember the poverty. There was little food. The nuns grew potatoes which were the staple of our diet. I remember sitting in a large circle with all the other children, all of them blind boys, except for Zosia (the little girl who was with me when we were with Hanka) and me. The boys would peel the potatoes and then Zosia and I would “fix” them removing remaining peel, before throwing them into a large pot of water. I was three years old at the time. The convent had one cow. I loved that cow which was the source of the scant protein we had access to. A little milk and butter only for the priest was how the cow rewarded us for her care. At the end of each day I was sent to the pasture to fetch the cow home for milking. Imagine, a three year old tiny child holding the giant animal by the rope around her neck and walking through the pasture. It was my favourite time of the day. The convent was situated at the top of a hill and when the Nazis came to the village below, someone was always sent to alert the nuns of their proximity. At times like this, I, the only Jewish child among them was hidden in a hole in the ground covered in some way to conceal my presence. Amazingly I do not remember being frightened to be placed in a “grave-like” earthen space and told to be very still. I remained in the convent until the War ended and my aunt, using the large number of sources which were searching for various people in order to reconnect families, came to bring me back to my father. It was 1945. I was 5 years old. Interestingly I do not recall the first meeting with my father or my departure from the convent which had become my home and safe haven. After the War: After the War, my father and I continued to live under my father’s assumed Aryan name, as non Jews. My aunt lived with us in a city named Bielsko where my father was the director of a large Soviet style fur dying plant. Having survived the horrors of the war, people were alternately desperately happy or desperately sad. There was damage everywhere…in our hearts, in our bodies, in society and in the environment. We were relatively well off as my father earned a good income. Problems arose again as he refused to join the communist party and was constantly under suspicion. I went to school, learned from my teachers to be anti-Semitic. My father remarried in 1947 and we emigrated to Canada in December of 1948. I was informed by my father aboard the luxury liner the “Batory” which carried us to North America, that I was Jewish. I was appalled! It would be a long time before I was comfortable with my new identity. As a child. adolescent or young adult, I was not very interested in the Holocaust, nor did I think a great deal about my mother. My father and step mother tried to make our life in Canada as normal as possible and spoke seldom to me of their wartime experiences. It was not until I was a mature woman with grown children of my own and even a grand child that I began to focus on my past. I prepared to videotape “my story” for Stephen Spielberg’s “Shoah Foundation” using as a main source an audio tape which my father had recorded six months before his death. Since I was the principal of a Jewish Day School at the time, I began to tell my story to the children in our grade 6 classes. Of course, my own children were familiar with the story. My younger daughter, who is named for my mother had always had an interest and a need to explore that part of our history. It was not until August-September of 2005 that I was ready to return to Poland and retrace my family history. What follows is an amazing series of circumstances and coincidences which reinforces my belief that some things are “beshert”, meant to be. The night before my departure for a month in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, I went to a meeting which I had not planned to attend, of the executive and board of the Auberge Shalom Pour Femmes, where I am an active member. I sat near a friend who told me that coincidentally, she too was going to Poland in October. She told me that a mutual acquaintance who had been on several “March of the Living” trips to Poland, had met an American genealogist, Yale Reisner, living in Warsaw, who is the director of the Jewish Historical Institute. This is an agency funded by the Ronald Lauder Foundation which helps people reconnect after many years, or at least retrieve a trail of documents which tell the story of their perished family members. I took Yale’s phone number and promised to contact him when I reached Warsaw. I didn’t think that I needed his help since I had researched wartime convents in Zakopane, had found the most likely one, and had an appointment to meet with the Mother Superior. I telephoned Yale when we reached Warsaw and made an appointment to meet with him. He was very interested in my story and thought that he could be of help. He is a frantically busy man and we landed up waiting for him for over 4 hours, while we toured the excellent photo and film exhibit of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. At long last we met and sat down to share my story amid the unbelievable clutter in his small office. He had access to millions of documents, books, papers and records, many of which were spilling out all over every surface of this office. I told him that I had been hidden in a convent for blind children in Zakopane during the last years of the War. He jumped out of his chair and slalomed over to his extensive bookcase where he reached for one volume. It was the Polish counterpart of the English translation of a PhD thesis of Ewa Kurek, who wrote: “Your Life is Worth Mine”, How polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939 -1945 Yale flipped through the pages while we sat in anxious anticipation. He was mumbling, “Jewish children saved in convents…..” At last he found what he was looking for: “Congregation of Franciscan Sisters Servants of the cross: Polish order established in 1918 for the purpose of caring for the blind. In 1939, 106 sisters worked in 18 homes. In Zakopane, Sister Klara Jaroszynska saved the life of a little Jewish girl” We were speechless! This had to be the one! Armed with the phone number which Yale had found, I tried to contact the Order the next day. After several tries I managed to connect with a nun in Laski (35 kms. Outside of Warsaw) where the Order has their main establishment. To my utter amazement I discovered that unbelievable as it may be, Sister Klara, now 95 years old and blind herself, is still alive and has a clarity of mind and memory of someone half her age. Of course my daughter who had joined me in Warsaw after my husband and cousins left, and I were at the convent that very day to meet Sister Klara. The meeting was so very emotional. Although I had no memory of her, Sister Klara remembered me in minute detail. She recalled how little I was and how I had a sense beyond my years. She remembered my excellent language skills and my sensitivity to the other children in the convent. She corroborated most of my memories and corrected others. She expressed her love for “her little Eva” of whom she thought often to this day, wondering what had befallen her in life. When asked why she took such a chance, risking her life and the lives of all the other children and adults for whom she was responsible, she simply said, “God sent you to me. I had no choice, besides I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you” I have no visual memory of Sister Klara from that time, but an emotional memory must have been there as we hung unto each other’s hands and stroked each other with love. The former deep connection had resurfaced. Today, Sister Klara is a very important part of my life. Through the services of Sister Rut who cares for her, Sister Klara and I communicate frequently via e-mail. I have tried to honour and thank her for her selfless courage by developing a project by which I am helping a child now in the care of the Order. Currently they care for 300 blind children at their amazing facility. Sister Klara is a mother-like figure to me, who had lost her mother, And finding her and hearing her speak of me as a three year old to five year old child with such love, has made my life whole. Like the proverbial cat, I have had several lives. Each time, through a miracle, if you will, someone came along whose heart and courage gave me one more chance at life. I owe to to all those who were not as fortunate to tell this tale of human goodness in the midst of horror. This is truly a life-affirming story and one which gives us hope for humankind amid the many horrors which still continue in the world today. What have we learned? Eva Kuper Rayman