The day of their departure in mid-August, the train station was jammed with people leaving the city for the safety of the countryside.
Jack’s father got Mama and the children settled into a first-class compartment on the train. They each had one suitcase, and Mama carried a basket filled with food for the twelve-hour journey. Papa said he would ready a shipment of clothing, money, and other necessaries and send it along just as soon as he could.
“I will see you within a month,” he promised as he kissed each of them good-bye. “There is nothing to worry about.”
Jack knew his parents were acting braver than they felt. Mama blinked back tears as she and Papa gave each other a final tender kiss.
Jack waved to his father as the train pulled out of the station. People were pushing and shoving, trying to grab hold of stair railings to hop on, even as the train began to pick up steam. Later, Jack would wonder how his father had managed to get them first-class tickets on the overcrowded train. The road leaving town was jammed with automobiles and horse-drawn wagons. Was everybody trying to leave Gdynia?
But Papa had said not to worry. The Polish military would stop the Nazis. Papa would join the family in a few weeks. In the meantime, Jack was on vacation—and riding a train, which was a special treat.
He and Jakob kept their faces pressed to the window, fascinated by the thatched roofs of the simple country cottages and the sight of farmers plowing with horses. They saw Polish troops marching off to fight the Nazis, and they waved wildly to them. When the train passed through small towns and villages, they saw men with beards. Most wore long black coats and hats. Jack knew they were Jews, but he had not realized that many towns and villages had large Jewish populations. He asked Mama if Grandfather would look like these men. She said he would, that he was devoutly religious. He sang the prayers at his synagogue and never missed a service. She also said he had been a widower for a long time but that he had recently remarried.
Grandfather’s house as it looks today. His home occupied the two top floors and overlooked the town square. Jack stood on the balcony to watch the Nazis march into town in September 1939.
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
The next day, Grandfather was waiting for them at the train station in his little town. He looked distinguished with his full white beard and his long coat. When he met Jack, he frowned. “I am shocked to see the day my Jewish grandson goes without a hat,” he said sternly. Jack saw his mother’s face redden.
As they walked to Grandfather Mandelbaum’s house, Jack noticed everything—all the tiny shops and all the Jewish people dressed in black and speaking Yiddish. “Our town of ten thousand people is mostly Jewish,” Grandfather told them. “Everyone is friends. We have no trouble.”
Jack soon felt at home in Grandfather’s comfortable, large house on the edge of the town square. He eagerly explored the Jewish shops and got to know the friendly shopkeepers. His favorites were the two cheerful deaf-mute brothers who ran the barbershop and who loved to clown around. To please Grandfather, he wore a small round skullcap to show he was Jewish. He also went with Grandfather to have his first ritual Jewish bath in preparation for the Sabbath.
Jack’s favorite thing to do was to watch his grandfather paint the lettering on signs, which was his profession. “Grandfather was very much an artist, and I was fascinated by this,” Jack said.
Along with everyone else in town, Jack cheered the Polish soldiers riding horseback through the streets on their way to the border to protect Poland. Anticipation about the coming war was building to a fever pitch.
Jack’s excitement was tempered by his first tastes of anti-Semitism. Perhaps all the adults in the community were friends—or at least acted as if they were. That was not true of the boys Jack’s age. They might have a common enemy in the Germans, but the non-Jewish boys constantly taunted and picked on the Jewish boys. Jack had to learn which parts of town it was safe for him to be in without risk of being beaten up by a non-Jewish gang, or, at the very least, called anti-Semitic names.
On September 1, 1939, two weeks after the family arrived at Grandfather’s, the Nazis invaded Poland. Within forty-eight hours, England and France declared war on Germany, and World War II officially began. Within a week, the German army had all but crushed the Polish forces. Several days later, when Jack and everyone else in town first heard the rumble of tanks a few miles away, they dared hope it might be English tanks coming to defend them.
It was the Nazis. As the troops and tanks entered the outskirts of town, most people hid. The streets were deathly quiet. At Grandfather’s house, everyone was staying inside behind closed curtains. Jack could not stand it, and at the last moment he dashed onto the balcony, which overlooked the town square, to watch them come.
“There were tanks, and trucks full of soldiers, and motorcycles with little sidecars. It was thrilling,” he said.
Thrill quickly turned to fear. Even though the town did not resist being occupied, the Nazis had a list of prominent citizens, both non-Jewish and Jewish, and immediately arrested them. In many other places, important people who were arrested were then murdered. Hearing this, everyone in town was shocked. They had thought that if they cooperated, the Nazis would not hurt anyone during the occupation, the war would soon be over, and life would be as it was before. Instead, everyone had to be wary of the soldiers occupying their town. Several townspeople were shot when they disobeyed orders.
“The Germans were the enemy and they could kill you, and they did not have to answer to anyone,” Jack said. “We were all afraid.”
Throughout September and October, Jack’s mother worried constantly about Papa. Why had they not heard from him?
“All of Poland was occupied, including Gdynia—which was never bombed, even though everyone had feared it would be,” said Jack. “Was Papa okay? And where were all our things, which he’d said he would send?”
Finally, the depot master at the railroad told Jack’s mother not to expect the shipment, that the Nazis were seizing everything coming in by rail. At the end of October, a postcard arrived from Jack’s father.
“He said he was in the Stutthof concentration camp and was okay and we should not worry about him,” Jack recalled. “That was all he wrote. We did not know that he had been forced to write the card. We did not know what a concentration camp was or why he was there or for how long.”
Conditions for Polish Jews worsened. In November, two months after the start of the occupation, Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David, the symbol of Judaism, on the front and back of their clothing; they could be shot on sight if they did not. The star had to be yellow. Next came the order that Jewish children could no longer attend school, nor could most Jews hold jobs. Grandfather, on the other hand, was busy, for he was ordered to change all the signs in town from Polish to German.
Grandfather and his Jewish friends had assumed that if the Nazis made any move against them, their non-Jewish neighbors would defend them. “Instead, almost all of them shunned us and wanted nothing to do with us,” Jack said. “It was not that people were Nazi sympathizers, just that deep down, even if they had not realized it before, most of them were anti-Semitic. This was a terrible blow, especially for my grandfather, who had lived in harmony all his life with non-Jews and thought they were his friends. As for me, I considered myself Polish, but now I was identified as a Jew, and I was confused by this.”
Jack’s grandfather read prayers at this synagogue. After the Jews were deported, Polish residents of the town looted the once-magnificent structure and allowed it to fall into ruins.
Courtesy of Jack and Claudia Mandelbaum
Everyone, Jewish or not, began to worry about food shortages. Mama had no money—just the few pieces of jewelry she had brought with her. Jack’s aunt, who lived in a nearby town, was expecting a baby and wanted Jack’s sister, Jadzia, to come help her. She and her husband owned a flour mill and promised that Jadzia would never go hungry.
“My sister wanted to go,” Jack said. “She thought it would make things easier for Mama. Finally, my mother said yes, because she did not want my sister to suffer hunger, but it broke her heart to have Jadzia separated from us.”
Soon after Jadzia left, the Nazis set up a border between the two towns. In an instant, the land on Jack’s side was now officially part of Germany. His sister’s side was still in Nazi-occupied Poland. And travel between the two towns was forbidden.
Distraught, Mama decided in December that they should go stay with her older brother in a nearby village. With her husband and daughter gone, she yearned for the comfort of her own family.
“Somehow, she got word to my uncle, and he said for us to come,” Jack said, “but to hurry while travel was still permitted. My grandfather understood my mother’s need. I hugged him very tightly and said good-bye.”