Zakopane, the Polish Summer Vacation Town

Somber memories for the vacation season.

In 1946 the Poles massacred survivors. The survivors who tried to return to their homes experienced terrible pogroms. Jewish blood was spilled in the streets of Poland, and there was no one to protect them.

Even in Zakopane, the magical resort town, Jews were beaten and persecuted. Sole survivors of their families and communities found no rest in the beautiful ski town. I was reminded of this when I saw the advertisement calling for the ultra-Orthodox community to vacation in Zakopane.

I remember myself in the Ganzach Kiddush Hashem library, reading about the history of the post-Holocaust period; reading and becoming upset, reading and tears falling.

I would have thought then, that what, for G-d’s sake, flowed through the veins of these Poles, who looted, without paying the price, the homes and property of the Jews and even dared to persecute them to death when they returned sick, lonely, plagued by disaster, and destitute.

There were Jews who tried to escape the bitter fate. They jumped from speeding trains or escaped from camps and ghettos in any way. They were lonely, sick, and weak, but they had their lives, until they were discovered by their Polish neighbours, who did not hesitate to viciously and cruelly hand them over to the Gestapo for a kilo of sugar or a litre of oil.

What price did these Poles pay for this pure evil?

When I saw the name Zakopane, I remembered the children’s home of Lena Kuchler-Zilberman, where over a hundred orphaned and sick children found shelter, but they did not find comfort there either. They had to flee in the dead of night from the terror of the Polish rioters!

Children’s Home in Zakopane (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House)

“The homes in Zakopane and Rabka were almost ready…When we collected the records of one hundred and seventy Dluga (Street) children, we realized that they were, in fact, almost all Jewish children who survived out of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the area. A hundred children from this tremendous treasure were entrusted to me…”

From Kuchler’s book, about her first meeting with the childen in the Jewish Committee building in Krakow:

I was left alone with all the children. They were about fifty, maybe more. And could they be counted? They ran across the room like crazy. Ran into each other. They beat each other and dragged each other by the hair, and after they hit each other, they ran to the corners to hide… In one corner there were several dirty blankets on the floor, and in these blankets the children dug and hid, like in the piles of rags before the selection in the camp… Now the children surrounded me with outstretched hands and hungry eyes and shouted: “Eat! Give me soup!” A little girl scratched me under my dress, on my knees, scratched and pulled my dress and shouted: “Give me soup!”… I turned to the children and said: “Come to me, children! Let’s make a circle, let’s play.” But no child gave me a hand… there was no use in me trying to play with these children. They were starving.

(Lena Kuchler-Zilberman, Meah Yeladim Sheli, 1961, pgs. 146-7)

Yosef Farber, a Jewish soldier who fought in the ranks of the Red Army and was released, was the commander of Jewish self-defense at the children’s home in Zakopane. He told about the circumstances that forced them to leave the place:

We stood day and night and guarded the lives of the Jewish orphans. The danger increased day by day. The Poles threw leaflets at us in which they threatened to kill us like they killed Jews not far from Zakopane in Nowy Targ… “This will also be your fate,” they wrote. We had to run away from there.

The guarding of the children’s home in Zakopane, against Polish persecution (courtesy of Yad Vashem)

Batya Kermish (Bobker), one of the caregivers in the children’s home in Zakopane, told about their arrival in France:

The escape was financed by Agudath Israel. The children were brought to the town of Barbizon and there the life of the children’s home was run by the young men. Kuchler ran around Paris for days in search of a hostel more suitable for her views. She was afraid that the children would be sent to the United States and not to Israel…

(From the Yad Vashem magazine)

In the book “Meah Yeladim Sheli” (My Hundred Children), Lena Kuchler tells about the horror and fear that she faced when she managed to escape from the arms of the Gestapo. For years she lived in terrible fear that the Poles would discover her and hand her over to the Nazis, a matter that was an “everyday occurence,” and this was the fate of her sister Faigaleh, a few days before the liberation. Evil Poles handed her over for pennies!

In general, what diary of a Holocaust survivor does not contain outrageous descriptions of the treachery of their gentile Polish neighbors?

There is a heartbreaking passage from Lena Kuchler-Zilberman’s book in which she tells about the devoutly Orthodox Jew who hid in the garbage, in the village of Olchowiec where Lena pretended to be an Aryan, how he hid, and what his fate was when he was discovered by Poles.

In the previous chapter, Lena tells about the Jew who escaped from the train going Treblinka, his wife and children were taken to “a place from which no Jew has ever returned”… and he, wallowing in garbage, hid in the remote village where she herself lived in fear that they would find out that she was Jewish, because then the Poles would take her to the Gestapo. Later, Lena returned and describes her life and her longings, until that day when she managed to return, with self-sacrifice, to the hiding place of that Jew.

At one in the morning, I cautiously left the house, and in my hands were two bottles of water, bread, and money.

I went behind the barn and I began to call out.

“Jew! Jew!”

My entire body shook, that someone would hear my voice…

“Jewish rabbi!”

I added and called to him.

No movement was heard.

Is it possible that he ran away?

I already wanted to go back.

And behold, something moved inside the garbage.

Again the fear choked me in my throat.

I pressed against the courtyard door, stuck like a shadow.

It was him.

He crawled out with the rest of his strength.

I moved from my place. He was not shocked.

He turned slowly to me.

His appearance was terrible, his eye sockets were deep and black, his beard protruded from his face, like a dead man’s.

He looked at me with his black eye holes and mumbled something, but I didn’t understand.

I presented him with the bread and water.

He did not put out his hand to take it.

I started begging him: “Take it! Eat and drink!“

“I also brought you some money, and leave here.”

“Sneak away at night, and go to the village.”

“In the third house on the right side of the road lives a decent gentile, give him the money and he will hide you with him.“

The Jew didn’t answer or anything, as if he didn’t hear anything I said to him.

Suddenly he paid attention to the water bottle, lifted it up and began to say in a Shabbat tone and in a menacing voice:

“Yom HaShishi, Vayechulu HaShamayim VeHaAretz…” (The 6th day, the heavens were complete…), as if he were blessing over wine.

He mumbled for a long time and then drank some of the water.

After drinking he started pouring from the bottle on his surroundings, on the trash and said.

“This is for you, Racheleh, and this is for you Yankeleh, and this is for you, Chayaleh.”

“Drink from the wine of Kiddush and soon you will also receive the HaMotzi, the Shabbat challah.”

“I brought it back to you, I brought Shabbat back to you!“

This episode is terrible. The Jew, whose mind was destroyed, was hallucinating about his wife and children, and Lena was standing next to him, drowning in tears.

A street in Zakopane, Poland

Later, Lena tells about the quiet conversations she heard one morning, about the Jew who was there, “alive but gone crazy…” They discussed among themselves, the evil Poles, in which way it would be best to hand him over to the police…

After the Holocaust, as mentioned, Lena Kuchler searched for her sister Faigaleh (Fela) and then, in Krakow, she found her “hundred children,” whom she raised with love and devotion until she had to flee with them from Zakopane, the wonderful vacation town near the Polish border.

She had to escape from the terror of the Poles who simply wanted to murder them.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

I went home teary eyed. I walked from the Market Square through Dluga Street, the long and dark road. Until now I would always avoid passing there, and I knew very well why… I knew that at the turn of this street, in front of the tram station, there is a large house, it is the house of the “Jewish Committee” in Krakow, and in it a windmill turns and growls all day long. And it grinds the sorrows and troubles of the Jewish war survivors. I avoided passing in front of this building, because I couldn’t bear to go back and live in the nightmarish turmoil of the Jewish suffering concentrated within these walls.

But now something changed in me, and I followed that path…

Suddenly there was movement in front of the gate. Someone burst out happily from inside, shouting something loudly. A crowd gathered, everyone started shouting and announcing to each other and hurrying to enter the gate. I noticed only one word: “lists.”

Someone appeared in the window of the second floor and began to loudly give an announcement.

Lists –

Have come! Come! Lists of new survivors of Buchenwald and Mauthausen! Now complete anarchy arose. Everyone together started pushing towards the gate.

I was already standing near there too, to observe closely what was happening. Suddenly, through the shouting and commotion, the sound of a child’s cry reached me. First weak, then stronger. And immediately it became clear that it was not one voice that was crying, but several voices, and a thin, childish shriek uttered one word: “leg!”

I immediately pushed and went inside, and found children crying in the passage. There were four of them, all boys. Three of them were about the same height, about three years old, while one was much younger, and he was lying on the stone floor in a puddle of urine. Their heads were shaved to the skin, they held each other in their wet clothing, and they all cried together. One of them, black and extremely dirty, held his leg and cried out:

“Oh, it hurts! It really hurts!”

They looked terrible. They had festering abscesses on their heads, their hands and feet were like dry patches, and only their gums were swollen. Their faces could not be seen clearly, because the tears and green snot covered them.

I approached one woman in a handkerchief and asked: “Who are these children?”

“I don’t know “- she answered me – “they are standing here and will not move from their place. I wanted to bring them into the Committee, but they started screaming, as if I wanted to throw them into the oven…”

“Someone threw them here” – another Jew answered and said – “it was someone from a monastery…”

Bais Yaakov girls vacationing in Zakopane

I was left alone with all the children. They were about fifty, maybe more. And could they be counted? They ran across the room like crazy. They bumped into each other, beat each other, and dragged each other by the hair, and after hitting each other, ran to the corners to hide – even though there was nothing in those corners to hide behind. There was no furniture in the room except for a long table, a few benches that did not stand firmly, and a few wooden chairs. In one corner there were several dirty blankets lying on the floor, and in these blankets the children dug and hid, like in the piles of rags before the selection in the camp…

Now the children surrounded me with outstretched hands and hungry eyes and shouted: “Eat! Give me soup!” A little girl scratched me under my dress, on my knees, scratched and pulled my dress and shouted: “Give me soup!” An older boy pushed her off of me and started checking my pockets, pulling my coat down with all his might. I wanted to take the child lying motionless on my arm out of my hands and put him somewhere, but I could not take a single step forward, as long as I was surrounded by the children. They waved their empty pots in front of my eyes, and shouted with all their might: “Soup! Soup!”

Slowly and without haste, caressing the children’s heads covered with sores and abscesses, I pushed myself and moved with my Felush to the corner, and there I placed him on a blanket. Afterwards, I turned to the children and said: “Come to me, children! Let’s make a circle, let’s play.” But no child gave me a hand…the children did not know what I wanted from there. They did not know what playing meant…”and so,” I said to them, “we will sit together on the blankets and I will tell you a story. Once there was a big king…” But the children did not listen.

“To eat! To eat!” – they interrupted me – “Give us bread! Soup! Soup!”

I made my way through the whole crowd in the yard and started running home with all my might. I hadn’t run home so fast since I lived in Krakow. I had always dragged my feet like an old woman, and now I was light-footed and nimble. In a small shop, not far from the house, I bought some loaves of bread on the black market.

…but I entered, the same confusion and the same dirt were revealed to my eyes again, and the same voices and screams deafened my ears. I did not believe that I would be able to overcome this turmoil. But I immediately thought of the magic power that I had with me in my bag.

“Children!” – I shouted loudly – “I brought you bread!”

The children looked at me in disbelief at first, but immediately several of them approached my bag and started touching it. I put the bag on the table, opened it, and showed them what was inside. At that moment the children started pushing and shoving me with force.

“Whoever sits on the blanket quietly, will get first” – I announced.

All the children hurried to sit on the blankets. I ordered them to be quiet. I chose two older girls to help me, and we started distributing the bread to the children. Woe to the eyes that saw how hungrily the poor ones swallowed their slices. In the blink of an eye, the sandwiches were gone. Some hid part of their eaten slice under their shirt and shouted: “I haven’t received it yet!”

“Please, Miss, she snatched half the slice from my mouth!” said one girl.

“For all the children there is a second slice!” – I reassured them – “Eat slowly, everyone will get more! And then, sweethearts, instead of eating so fast, it’s better to look and see what’s on the bread. Not everyone has the same spread.” Only now the kids began opening their sandwiches and peeking inside:

“Oh, I have sweet jam!”

“And I have white butter”

“And I have yellow butter with crumbs”

“Give me one crumb, and I’ll let you lick my jam once” – exchanges began between them.

“Each child should eat his own bread, and not touch another’s bread!” – I announced “And whoever will be a good child, will be able to choose for himself the extra slice with whatever spread he wants.” The children tried to be “good”. The right to choose was an important matter; It was worth making an effort for it. Finally the eating ended and the distribution of sweets began. The children calmed down a little. They now held their candies in their mouths and sucked them slowly and calmly, which would be enough for a long time.

At that hour, I put the smallest children one by one on my lap and fed them. And so did the girls helping me. I even fed my poor Felush. Now it was appropriate to bathe the children, I reflected in my heart, and cleaned the room a little. In the corner of the room were the faucet and the sink. I moved a bench there. I took out my towels and the soap.

“Who of the older children is able to bathe a child, like a mother bathes her children?”

I asked.

“Me,” volunteered a girl who was not big.

“But you are still small, you cannot. How old are you?”

“I am eight years old,” the girl answered, “but look, miss, I can do it. I always helped Miss Bella.”

“I can also help,” another older girl humbly reply, a girl with red, swollen hands. I caught a glimpse of her hands and wanted to reject her. But she spoke before me and said:

“With these hands I did a big load of laundry at my lady, and I washed the whole floor. It’s not for nothing that they are red. They only froze once. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“What are your names, girls?”

“My name is Hanka Feder,” answered the younger girl.

“And my name is Maria Kowalska,” said the older one.

“Is this your real name?”

“Yes, I even received a birth certificate from the priest.”

“But here you do not need the birth certificate that the priest gave you. You do not face any danger here if you say your true name.”

“But I cannot.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know it…”

“Well, now we’ll try to work together. We will take the youngest children first.”

“This is where Miss Bella hides the comb,” said Hanka.

“Do you have one comb for all the children?”

“Yes.”

The little Hanka worked incredibly quickly and nimbly. And “Maria” immediately discovered a power of influence on the children.

“I served with a German boy,” she explained to me.

(…)

At the end of the chapter, Lena tells:

My G-d, my G-d! – I prayed in my heart – help me so that I can help these children! That I can bring them back to life and health, that I can provide them with everything they need: medicine, food, clothing and their lost homes. May they be children again as all other children! Help me so that I can be their mother and father! So that instead of my one lost child, I will be the mother of a hundred children! My G-d, my G-d, give me this merit, this happiness.