My Little Sister

My sister, Eva, was born on June 30, 1939, just two months before the outbreak of World War II. At that time my family lived in Zaleszczyki, a small town in Eastern Poland that had a natural border with Romania. Many people took advantage of this open border to cross over to Romania before the Soviet occupation of our part of Poland. Our father—who was the town’s dentist—thought the journey would be too hard for a small baby and made the decision to go alone. Some of the escapees, including our father, waited in Romania until the situation calmed down and then tried to cross back to Poland, hoping to blend back into our town. Unfortunately they were all caught and put on trial for spying. Father was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in Siberia. Subsequently, we were deemed to be the family of a criminal, thrown out of our house, and sent to the nearby town of Tluste.

Eva was very little and undernourished, and our mother was very concerned for her health. At first we did not know where Father had been sent and what was going to happen to us. But after a year he was allowed to contact us and Mother was able to exchange a few letters with him so we knew he was in Archangielsk, deep in Siberia.

Then, in 1941, the Germans occupied all of Poland, and there was no further contact with Father. We quickly returned to our house, where we were under constant threat from the German occupiers with anti-Jewish laws, food shortages, and the deportation and murder of Jews. Still very young and suffering from malnutrition, my sister was unaware that we were Jewish and that we faced a dire situation. In a desperate attempt to save the three of us, Mother obtained false papers that identified us as Catholic under a different, less obviously Jewish surname. We traveled for many days by train to another part of Poland, where we would not be recognized.

It was in this small town in central Poland that a local washerwoman, taking pity on us and not knowing that we were Jewish, agreed to take us in. She gave us a bed and our Mother promised to immediately look for a job and pay her for our keep. The lady who took us in was kind and looked after Eva while Mother tried to find jobs to pay for us, and I attended school, being careful not to give myself away.

Life was very dangerous at all times and Mother was trying to find some security if possible. She was particularly worried about my sister’s hair, which was, and still is, very curly. Polish girls had straight blond hair! The curls would have caused suspicion.

Mother did a very brave thing, going to the German military camp asking for a job! She explained to me that it was dangerous because authorities would be checking our papers, which were questionable. It would make a big difference if Mother had an ID showing that she worked for the Germans. She got the job—peeling potatoes for the troops—and she received the ID that saved us from being picked up and taken away. 

Her constant worry was Eva’s health and, again, concern that her curly hair would be considered “Jewish.” Left in the care of the landlady while I attended school, Eva remembers the landlady asking her if she was sure she wasn’t Jewish. Her indignant reply was that, as she did not have a tail and horns, she was obviously not!

We had no information about the progress of the war—newspapers and radios were strictly forbidden—so we were unprepared for what happened suddenly on July 27, 1944, when a bomb exploded over our landlady’s house, killing her and wounding my hand. Mother grabbed Eva and me and we walked to the hospital. Our lodging had been completely destroyed, but a neighbor took us in, still under the impression that we were Catholic.

Eva was by then five years old and not really aware of what was happening. When we finally made our way to England as refugees and gained citizenship there, Eva was just six years old with only a few vague memories of the war. She attended school and very quickly learned the language. When she was nearly 17, sadly, our mother died and Eva joined me in Israel where she met her future husband and, after a year on a kibbutz, returned to England, married, and had a large family.

Following the birth of her fifth child, Eva got back to her studies and obtained a master’s degree in history. She wrote her dissertation on the six years of World War II, an era she’d lived through but of which she had so few actual memories.

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