27

Return to and Flight from Wierzbnik

The former prisoners of the factory slave-labor camps in Starachowice had arrived in Birkenau as a result of the first wave of mass camp evacuations that the Nazis undertook in the summer of 1944 in response to the rapid advance of the Red Army into Poland. The Starachowice prisoners were then dispersed among various work sites at Auschwitz-Birkenau and its subsidiary camps. They were further scattered in the maelstrom of two additional waves of mass evacuations—effectively “death marches”—in 1945. The first took place from Auschwitz in January 1945, when all but a few thousand prisoners were force-marched to railheads and then shipped to various camps throughout Germany. These camps were horrifically overcrowded, shelter and food were lacking, and hygiene conditions were frightful. The death rate among prisoners, both on the exhausting marches and in the new camps, skyrocketed. Worse was still to come. As the Allied armies penetrated into the Third Reich in March and April 1945, camp commanders sent off their starved and exhausted prisoners on yet another wave of even more lethal death marches—often with no destination or purpose other than to keep their dying prisoners one step ahead of the Allied armies—until the final collapse of the Third Reich.¹ Starachowice prisoners blended into the mass of Nazi prisoners who suffered extraordinary loss of life during these last five months of the war. Of the approximately 1,200 to 1,400 Starachowice Jews who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of July 1944, I would estimate that about one-half of them—some 600 to 700—were still alive at the end of the war.

After the war, most of the surviving Starachowice Jews gathered in various DP (displaced persons) camps established by the Allied occupation government in Germany, seeking to recover physically and to locate and reunite with any surviving family members. Gradually they left the DP camps and Europe behind and emigrated overseas. For the Starachowice Jews, three destinations in particular became their new homelands: Israel, the United States, and Canada. This was a common pattern for most Holocaust survivors. What distinguished the Wierzbnik-Starachowice Jews from other waves of immigration out of the DP camps was that their largest single community of survivors clustered in Toronto, Canada, where they continue to preserve their community ties to this day and annually meet with other Starachowice survivors in North America as well.

Precisely because the Starachowice prisoners were dispersed and followed different paths after their evacuation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is not possible to write a common narrative of their fate after July 1944. However, adequate closure of the history of the Jewish prisoners of the Starachowice factory slave-labor camps requires more detailed comment on two particular postwar developments: what happened when small numbers of Wierzbnik survivors trickled back into their hometown, and what happened to the German personnel of these camps when subjected to German judicial investigation.

In the already controversial subject of Polish-Jewish relations, one especially sensitive topic is the tragic fate of Polish Jews who—having survived the horrors of the Holocaust against all odds—were killed by Poles when they returned home after the war. Historian David Engel offers the conservative estimate of 500 to 600 Jews killed in Poland after the Germans had been driven out.² Princeton University scholar Jan Gross lauds Engel’s impeccable scholarship in the existing documentation but is more comfortable with the higher traditional estimate of 1,500, since he thinks many such killings went unreported.³ Gross focuses on the notorious Kielce pogrom of July 1946, the culminating massacre of a second wave of such killings. In contrast, the killing of returning survivors in Wierzbnik-Starachowice occurred earlier—in June 1945—in the midst of a first wave of such killings that stretched from March to August of that year. The region encompassing both Kielce and Starachowice was a stronghold not only of AK (Armia Krajowa or Home Army) activity but an area in which the extremist NSZ (National Armed Forces) was active. It was the region with the highest incidence of postwar killing of Jews even before the Kielce pogrom.⁴

In the wider historical context, Poland at this time was in the midst of what historian Daniel Blatman has called a “miniature civil war.”⁵ Large portions of the population supported the unequal struggle against an unpopular Communist takeover that was made possible only by the presence of the occupying Red Army and repressive Stalinist security apparatus—a struggle that resulted in some 10,000 Polish deaths on both sides and the arrest of an additional 150,000 to 200,000 Poles.⁶ But why, in this wider context of civil war and widespread violence, were handfuls of desperate and skeletal Jewish survivors—emerging from hiding or coming from camps in Germany and returning to their hometowns in Poland primarily to see if any other family members were somehow still alive—targeted for murder?

At the heart of the anti-Communist resistance, and most frequently implicated in the killing of returning Jews, were conservative nationalist Polish forces in various underground groups. Their self-image of Polish identity (Catholic, culturally and linguistically Polish, patriotic, anti-Communist, victim) had been constructed in opposition to a diametrically contrasting “image of the enemy” (Jewish, cosmopolitan and Yiddish-speaking, traitor, Communist, perpetrator). This conglomeration of non-Polish traits was summed up in the fateful phrase and mythical concept of “Judeo-Communism” (Zydokommuna), which, like all myths, proved impervious to empirical refutation.⁷ It was rather the lens through which they viewed political events and interpreted reality. The “overrepresentation” of Jews (in the form of some totally secularized Jews who had long abandoned any Jewish identity) in the Communist Party of the interwar period or in the Stalinist security apparatus after the war was taken as self-evident proof of the identity between “the Jews” and Communism. The fact that “the Jews” welcomed the entry of the Red Army into eastern Poland in 1939, saving them from Nazi occupation, and then welcomed the reentry into Poland of the Red Army in 1944 as “liberators” rescuing a surviving remnant, was confirmation that “the Jews” were traitors to Poland. In short, interpreting Polish history through the lens of “Judeo-Communism” transformed Polish violence against Jews into understandable acts of self-defense and justifiable acts of revenge.⁸

The lethal potential of “Judeo-Communism” to returning survivors was intensified by at least three additional factors. First, Jewish suffering in the Holocaust rivaled and threatened to obscure Poland’s claim to double-victimization at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin. The traditional Christian accusation that proclaimed Jews as Christ-killers now neatly dovetailed with the new nationalist accusation that proclaimed Jews as the killers of Poland as the Christ among nations and conveniently transformed helpless Jewish victims into dangerous Jewish perpetrators.⁹ Second, much Jewish property—now conveniently designated “formerly Jewish property”—came into Polish hands either during the war or after the German withdrawal. The return of survivors threatened the new owners, and resistance to restitution motivated by simple greed could now be legitimized as an act of patriotism and anti-Communist resistance.¹⁰ Third, Jan Gross has argued that the intensity of hostility to returning Jews required more than political and material explanation. He therefore emphasizes an additional collective psychological factor—namely, the guilt that Poles felt in the presence of returning survivors over their behavior vis-à-vis the Jews during the Nazi persecution. In effect, to expunge any discomforting reminder, they now killed or drove out those whom they had already harmed.¹¹

According to David Engel’s research in Polish records, two Jewish women and two children were killed in Wierzbnik on June 8, 1945, two more victims perished on June 15, and a final victim was killed on June 17.¹² The community book lists a total of eleven Jews from Wierzbnik, Wachock, and Bodzentyn who were killed when they returned to Poland after the war.¹³ How do survivors remember these lethal events of June 1945, and what can this contribute to our understanding of the dynamics behind the murder of returning Polish Jewish survivors after the war?

The first Jews to return to Wierzbnik-Starachowice were those who had escaped from the camps and survived in hiding when the Soviet army liberated the region in January 1945. When Naftula Koren wasser, his wife, and other relatives returned from the village where they had hidden, people looked at them as if they were “crazy” and could not believe they were still alive. As other Jews returned, Naftula sensed that Poles with whom property had been left had “prayed” that their Jews would not come back, and the situation was becoming dangerous.¹⁴ Abraham Rosenwald also emerged from hiding in the forest to join the group of survivors assembling in Wierzbnik-Starachowice. His first task was to join a grave-digging group that learned from Poles where Jews had been killed and left in shallow graves in order to give them a proper burial. It was he who disinterred the body of the beautiful Tobka Wajsblum, who had left camp with Walther Becker and never returned. She had been shot in the head.¹⁵ He also traveled to Lublin on behalf of the assembling survivors to get money and clothing from the aid organization there.¹⁶ Another forest survivor, Chaim Flancbaum from Wachock, was warned by a Jewish officer in the Soviet army that Jews should stick to the large cities and not return to small towns. He came back anyway but fled in June 1945 when the killing began.¹⁷

Jakob Binstock from Szydłowiec had joined the partisan band of Mieczyslaw Moczar. He was in Łód in June 1945 when he encountered Abraham Wilczek, who told Jakob that his aunt was still alive in Starachowice. As Abraham was going there, he asked Jakob if he had any message for his aunt. Jakob told him to tell his aunt to come immediately to Łód, as he had lodging for her there. She departed for Łód two days before the killing in Wierzbnik began.¹⁸

Perhaps the earliest returnee from camps to the west was Symcha Mincberg. Liberated at Fünf Teichen in January, he made his way on foot back to Wierzbnik, arriving on March 16, 1945. He first encountered Abraham Rosenwald and then was joined by his surviving son, Mendel. Returning to the camp grounds, he found the lists of Jewish slave laborers of Majówka that were subsequently reprinted in the community book. Initially, the returning survivors stayed together in the home of Leib Brodbekker on the marketplace, “since most of the Jewish homes in town were already taken over by Poles and even going out on the street alone was dangerous.” When the Brodbekker house became too full, Mincberg and his son found shelter in another apartment.

Another early returnee from Germany was Mania Isser. Having survived posing as a Polish worker in Germany, she was liberated by the American army in Frankfurt and headed back to Poland even before the fall of Berlin and the end of hostilities. She too was warned in advance that it was dangerous to return to Starachowice. Nonetheless, she went from the train station directly to her house, where she encountered a Polish woman who asked her what she was doing there. When Mania replied that this was her house, she was told, “Shit is your house. I advise you quickly to go away.” Since she came from one of the wealthier Jewish families in town, others warned her again that she was particularly in danger. This time she took the advice and left for Łód one day before the killing began.¹⁹ When Nathan Gelbard returned to Wierzbnik, he too received a “cold” welcome from Poles who warned him to leave. He took the warning seriously and departed for Łód.²⁰

By mid-May, the number of returning Jews in Wierzbnik had swelled to fifty-six, including ten children.²¹ While infinitesimal in comparison to the prewar Jewish population, apparently it was enough to provoke the right-wing Polish underground into action in the form of a murderous assault on the Brodbekker house. A Polish family was living on the ground floor, and the returning Jews lived in two rooms on the second floor. The men lived in one room, and in the other were the widows and children of two former members of the Judenrat and the Lagerrat—Sarah Wolfowicz and her two children Fischl and Rifka, as well as Ruchele Einesman and her daughter Rozia. Rozia remembers the fine June day on which they were sitting at the entrance and enjoying the sun, when three men carrying rifles stopped and looked at them from a distance. In the middle of that night, they were awakened by shouts and knocking on the door. The man on the ground floor came up and told them all to flee to the roof before he would be forced to open the door. The men on the second floor reached the roof, jumped, and got away. Rozia and her mother made it to the roof as well, but the Wolfowicz family did not. The intruders called up, promising no harm, and the Einesmans returned to the apartment. Ruchele Einesman recognized one of the men and addressed him by name, but he did not answer her. Instead, the five Jews were lined up along the bed, after which the intruders turned off the lights and opened fire. Apparently they fired over Rozia, the shortest one in front, and she was initially not hit. But the other four were killed. Not wanting to be left alive alone, Rozia shouted. They shot again and she was hit in several places but was still alive. After the killers had left, she went downstairs, where the frightened neighbor eventually let her in. She was then rescued by her uncle Noah, who came and took her to the hospital.²²

In addition to the men at Brodbekker house who got away over the rooftop, others also narrowly escaped the killing spree that night. When Sala and Channah Glatt had visited their old house, they found it inhabited by a school girlfriend who warned them to get out before her brother came back, for he would kill them if he found them there. The common greeting from Poles to returning Jews was: “The streets are yours but not the houses.” One Polish family that had kept valuables for the Glatts returned a few silver spoons and cups, explaining that they had had to sell the rest to survive. The sisters found that believable and were glad at least for a few souvenirs. That evening, two men in trench coats (whom they identified as AK members) and a dog came to their room, asked some questions, and left. Next morning, the sisters learned that the two men with the dog had gone on to another room of Jewish refugees, where they had killed the Wolfowicz family and Ruchele Einesman, leaving only the badly wounded Rozia alive. The two sisters ran to the train station and left for Łód the next day.²³

Another pair of sisters, Rosalie and Chanka Laks, was staying with a Russian family, the Paleschewskis, who had been good friends of the Laks family before the war. They had saved the Passover silver and Passover wine cups that their mother, Pola Laks, had left with them. After the two men in trench coats—referred to as NSZ by Rosalie—had killed the two women and two children in the one room, they knocked on the door of the Paleschewski house and demanded to see the Jews staying there. The Paleschewskis refused, and the men left. The two girls remained in hiding all of the next day, but the Paleschewskis bought them tickets for the train the following day, took them to the train station in a covered wagon, and waited with them until the train had left for Łód.²⁴

Chava Faigenbaum was staying with one of the clusters of returning Jews, but on the fatal day she and her aunt visited old family friends, the Wykrota family, who welcomed them. After consuming much vodka, the son warned them to “run away from here.” They were then taken to the safety of another family member’s house farther from the center of town. It was there that they heard the gunfire from the killing at the Brodbekker house. Chava and her aunt boarded the “first train” and fled.²⁵

Also narrowly escaping were Perele Brodbekker and her sister. Returning from Theresienstadt (Terezin), they took up residence in the family house. Old Polish acquaintances greeted them with the astonished inquiry, “You’re alive?” They, too, were warned that they were risking their lives by returning. On the day of the fatal attack, they visited the family graves in the Jewish cemetery. As it was getting dark when they were returning home, they accepted an invitation to stay overnight at a different apartment and thus did not return to the Brodbekker house on the marketplace. It was there that Leib Brodbekker later found them and told them about the slaughter in the family home. After giving the victims a Jewish burial, they left Wierzbnik “forever.”²⁶

When Jacob Kaufman arrived back in Starachowice on the morning of June 9, 1945, he was met at the station by a Jew who warned him that a number of Jews had been killed the night before, including the wife of a Jewish council member. He was told of three places where Jews were hiding, and he finally located a second cousin among the survivors who had returned. He left for Łód the next night. Even the train trip was filled with uneasiness, for stories were spreading about Poles throwing Jews off trains.²⁷

Channah Glatt was not content with having escaped Wierzbnik with a few silver spoons and cups. She knew that her father had hidden fabrics from the family store in the double wall of a warehouse that the Germans had confiscated. It was a good place to hide things, since a German warehouse was one place the Poles could not loot after the Jews had been deported. She suspected that the fabrics would still be there, but the problem of getting at, much less removing, half a store’s worth of fabric was perplexing under the circumstances. She then encountered an old boyfriend who had fled to the Soviet zone in 1939 and had now returned as an officer in the Soviet army. Channah offered a deal. If he would provide two trucks and protection, she would split the recovered fabrics half and half. Channah, the Jewish officer, and eight Soviet soldiers drove to the warehouse. Some soldiers set up a perimeter guard, while others broke down the wall and filled the two trucks with fabrics. Some of the fabrics were water-damaged, but most were still in good condition. The soldiers then drove back to Łód and split the take, as agreed.²⁸

A subsequent attempt to recover Jewish property in Wierzbnik ended far more tragically. Abram Kadyszewicz heard of Channah Glatt’s exploit and talked to her about it.²⁹ He decided to return to Wierzbnik to sell his father’s buildings. His friend Moszek Szpagat warned him of the danger. Moszek traveled with Abram to Wierzbnik but parted company with him there and traveled immediately on to Ostrowiec. Abram negotiated the sale of his father’s properties, but no sooner had he finished signing the papers than he was killed.³⁰ His killers chopped off his head and, by one account, placed it on a stick in the marketplace.³¹ It would seem that in this case the killers were local Poles with whom Abram had negotiated the sale and who, once in possession of the ownership papers, killed rather than pay the seller.

As a fearful warning to any other Jew who might try to remain in Wierzbnik, much less dare to reclaim property, the beheading of Abram Kadyszewicz had the predictable effect. Icek Guterman had returned to Poland to fetch his father, but his father stubbornly refused to leave, since he did not feel he had enough money to start a new life elsewhere. The AK placed a death sentence on the father. When Icek went to the marketplace, a woman made the sign of the cross over him and warned him that a female mill owner had been shot the night before and a young man had been beheaded. Now “really afraid,” Icek was able to get his father to the train station and aboard the next train, regardless of the direction in which it was going.³²

Rozia Einesman languished in the hospital and never again saw her uncle Noah, who had taken her there, for he too was subsequently killed. The Polish doctor, Borkowski, who was treating her, reportedly received threatening letters, which he courageously ignored.³³ After two months, Rozia was taken to a farm in the countryside to recover further. In the fall of 1945, a relative fetched her and put her in an orphanage in Łód.³⁴ Jewish life in Wierzbnik-Starachowice was at a complete end, and the last Jew to die there was murdered not by the Nazis but rather by Poles.³⁵

Much of the discussion over the postwar killing of Polish Jewish survivors revolves around motive. At least in the case of Wierzbnik-Starachowice, the determination to preserve the benefits that Poles accrued from the Nazi murder of the Jews—in terms of both property transfer and homogenization of the Polish population—are most prominent, at least in the postwar testimonies of the survivors. The men who committed the first killing on June 8 were members of some Polish underground nationalist movement—whether AK or NSZ, the survivors naturally could not be expected to know for certain. What is clear is that these men surveyed the situation and, with calculation and premeditation, decided upon a murderous assault on the Jews in the Brodbekker house. In the end, they knew they were shooting only women and children. They were aiming not at active agents in league with the Communists but rather the most defenseless and helpless targets they could find, whose murders would have the most frightening effect in persuading other Jews to flee. Poland having been cleansed of Jews by the Nazis, these self-proclaimed guardians of Polish national purity were not about to sit by passively while handfuls of returning survivors posed the danger of a rebirth of Jewish life in Poland. In this regard, they were quite successful. In June 1945, the survivors who had returned to Wierzbnik fled to Łód. In general, returning Jews found greater safety in larger cities and especially in the western regions that had been newly acquired by shifting the German-Polish boundary westward. The following year, those who had gathered in Łód fled back to Germany in the wake of the Kielce pogrom. The June 1945 killings in Wierzbnik thus constituted just the first stage in a two-stage process of chasing these survivors out of Poland entirely.

Among the local Polish population in Wierzbnik-Starachowice, the issue of property was most salient. During the war, most Poles with whom Jews had left property had honored these arrangements, and Jews survived in the camps there in no small degree due to the access they had to their hidden property. But when they were deported from Starachowice in July 1944, it was as if a switch had been flicked. Those who had been keeping Jewish property or lived in Jewish houses now seemed to have felt that they had rightfully inherited the “formerly Jewish” properties whose previous owners were presumed dead. The trickle of survivors back to Wierzbnik-Starachowice in 1945 raised the unexpected prospect to all such Polish inheritors that their ownership of “formerly Jewish” property might be challenged—if they had the colossal “bad luck” that one of “their” Jews had survived. Those Jews who did return were greeted with numerous warnings from the new owners to make no claim to their property. When the Polish underground’s deterrent killings on June 8 did not ward off all such claims, locals took matters into their own hands with the murder and beheading of Abram Kadyszewicz later that month. The complementary goals of the Polish underground on the one hand and local Poles on the other—no rebirth of Jewish life and no restitution of Jewish property—were achieved.