Destined to Live: One Woman's War, Life, Loves Remembered

By Diana Bagnall and Sabina Wolanski

An extraordinary story of courage, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Sabina Wolanski was just 12 years old when her home town in Poland was invaded by Nazis. In her diary, along with innocent adolescent longings, she recorded what happened next: the humiliations and terrors, the murder of her beloved family and the startling story of her own survival. Leaving Europe after the war, Sabina forged a new life in Australia, juggling a thriving design business, her family, and an unorthodox love life. But as time wore on, she began asking herself why had she survived when so many died? And what kind of justice fitted such crimes? In May 2005, when Germany opened its controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, Sabina was chosen to speak as the voice of the six million dead. In her speech she noted that although the Holocaust had taken everything she valued, it had also taught her that hatred and discrimination are doomed to fail. Her ability to survive, to love, and to live well, has been her greatest triumph. 'I couldn't put down this engaging, honest story of love, loss and survival.' Diane Armstrong, bestselling author of tHE VOYAGER OF tHEIR LIFE 'important and wonderfully written' Australian Literary Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 31, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730400516

Diana Bagnall

Diana Bagnall is a well-known journalist who has written for The Bulletin and The Monthly, among other publications.  

Book preview

Prologue

I GREW UP IN the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains with the smell of oil in my nostrils, dreaming of Paris. My mother was a romantic. Her own exuberant nature was channelled into running the wholesale business that she and my father owned and into caring for her children. We lived in Boryslaw, a hard-living oilfields town in eastern Poland, and to my knowledge she never travelled beyond our backwater province. But she found it utterly natural to suppose that her saucy little daughter, Binka, would one day take the French capital by storm.

I did get to Paris, and as my mother had promised, found it was my kind of town. That was in 1948, and the doors of the world were just beginning to open for me. I was young and in love. I was intoxicated by the air. I could breathe without fear. It wasn’t the smell of oil I wanted out of my nostrils when I left Poland, but the paralysing stench of fear and death. Yet even as I was joyfully diving into a swimming pool on the banks of the Seine, wearing that season’s sensation, the bikini, I would have given anything to be able to go home to Mama. Mama was dead, as were my brother and my father, and any possibility of life for me in Poland. Hitler’s Third Reich had seen to that.

As the decades rolled over I returned to Paris from my new home in Australia many many times. It still is my kind of town. How strange then, how surreal, that now, at this end of my life, when I look at what it all adds up to, it is Berlin, not Paris nor Sydney, to which I must give the starring role.

My mother never spoke to me much of Berlin, though German was her second language and German culture almost as familiar to her as our own Polish culture. Her favourite brother, Adolf, lived in Berlin between the two wars. I remember him coming to Boryslaw to say goodbye when he emigrated to America in 1936. By the time my parents were ready to follow him, it was too late. Our family stayed in Boryslaw, and what came next is, as they say, history.

My mother, my father and my brother were murdered by Hitler’s brutes. I, Sabina, daughter of Sala and Fischel Haberman, and younger sister of Josek, survived. More than survived. I’ve lived, and lived well. And though I never took Paris by storm, I did take Berlin. I took it not as a pianist, nor as a writer, as Mama and I had dreamed, but as a Holocaust survivor. It wasn’t something I expected to happen. When the war was over, I wanted to forget that I had ever shared the Jewish fate. Who didn’t? I was never much interested in Judaism as a religion and even now I can’t be sure what it means to be a Jew. But I was born to Jewish parents in 1927 in Poland, which made it my lot, as an adolescent girl, to confront the worst manifestation of evil in human history, and now that I am growing old I feel an urgent need to remember my and my family’s part in that history. Remembering is painful, but not as painful as forgetting, and being forgotten.

So it was that on 10 May 2005, I stepped up to a podium to speak at the opening of Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin. After much hand-wringing, the Germans chose to build their memorial, an open and permanent display of their shame and guilt, a stone’s throw away from where Hitler had his bunker. Beneath the memorial’s vast undulating field of stone pillars there’s an information centre that documents the history of the Holocaust and, within it, our story, the story of the Haberman family of Boryslaw, together with the stories of 14 other families of European Jews.

Mama, can you imagine? I, little Binka, spoke for the Nazis’ six million Jewish victims and for those of us who survived their systematic torture and slaughter. If you could have seen me that day … Graciously smiling and shaking hands, making small talk — in English to the German foreign minister and the Israeli ambassador, in German to the German chancellor and the president of the parliament, the Bundestag — before taking my place in the front row. I don’t know if you’d call it double vision, but while I was waiting my turn to speak, I could see what was happening in our town during the war. But Mama, I was in Berlin, in the lion’s den. I wasn’t frightened, not any more. Nervous, yes, and apprehensive, but not frightened. I knew why I was there and what I had come to do.

My given name on the programme was Sabina Van Der Linden, a name which belonged to the man I call my third husband (but that’s a story for later). My two adult children, who carry the name Wolanski, the name of my second husband, their father, were there in Berlin with me, with their children, my grandchildren. My fourth husband, a gentle Dane whose name I have never taken, was there too. I would have liked to call myself Sabina Haberman, but the time for that was long past. During the years when I hid my Jewish identity I was Sabina Kulawicz, the name of my maternal grandparents. I clung to it for many years after the Russians liberated our town. For years afterwards I didn’t admit to being Jewish. When I rose to speak in Berlin that day it was as a longtime exponent of the art of disguise.

I began my speech with these words: ‘Not even in my wildest dreams could I have dreamed of this extraordinary day.’ What I didn’t say was that for many years the only dreams I had were nightmares, and that as a rule, I like to leave the past where it belongs. There is a Polish proverb ‘co bylo a nie jest nie pisze sie w rejestr’, which means, whatever was is not now. I have a talent for living in the present for which I am deeply grateful. But this was a time for looking back.

The media reported my words around the world, highlighting where I said that I did not believe in collective guilt. I borrowed the thoughts of the great writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel: ‘The children of the killers are not killers,’ he wrote. His notion that the children of killers should not take the blame for their elders’ crimes, but are responsible for what they do with the memory of those crimes was not just a vague idea to me. My deep friendship with the daughter of an SS officer over four decades had helped to bring me to this understanding.

As a girl, I was always writing. I kept a succession of diaries during the war, mostly in the cheap notebooks we used for schoolwork. Miraculously, I still have a few of these diaries, or fragments of them, as well as precious photographs of my family, and letters written to me by my brother while I was living under a false identity. I don’t know to this day how that is possible. If anybody had found these documents which identified me as Jewish, I would have been killed instantly, no questions asked. I didn’t look back at my diaries until very recently. I couldn’t bring myself to. But as I have allowed myself to read, I remember how, even as our world closed in around us, my brother and I and his friends, who were my friends too, would talk about what we’d do if we survived. We wanted to study. We made plans for our lives. We understood the hopelessness of our situation, but still we tried to think and behave like normal young people. I’m a bit embarrassed re-reading a letter which Josek sent to me when I was hiding with a Christian family in May 1943. He tells me of progress on the bunker he and his friends were clandestinely preparing and writes of what was happening around us — an impending Aktion (that dreadful word which strikes fear into me even now), the approaching Russian front, and of four Gestapo officers having been killed in our provincial capital, Lwów. Then, he writes: ‘I have ordered gloves for you, and also eau de cologne.’ In the middle of everything, I was asking for gloves and eau de cologne! I was something. I haven’t changed. I still need my comforts.

My mother once told me that while I was not beautiful, I had ‘salt and pepper’. I didn’t know what she meant. She told me I would find out one day. Today she might say that I had sex appeal. I liked being around boys, and as a woman I have always enjoyed the company of men. But I think she was talking about my joie de vivre which could never be completely extinguished, even on that terrifying night when I was flushed out of the hiding place my brother and his friends built and thrown into a filthy police cell to await execution at dawn.

My longtime friend Róza, whose cool intelligence has drawn me like a magnet all my life, once sharply admonished me for ‘not understanding the difference between living life and having a good time’. I have tried to do both. My mother too was a woman with a zest for life. She was murdered, while I survived in order to live, and to live well, as she dreamed I would.

ONE

Growing up

BORYSLAW NESTLES INTO THE ROUNDED hills of the lower Carpathians amongst beautiful, deep forests that were once considered its best asset (Boryslaw literally means ‘famous forests’). For all I know, the Ukrainians who live there now may still enjoy the region’s natural beauty, as we once did. As children, we holidayed in summer in nearby mountain villages with cool rushing rivers, and in winter we skied close to town on powdery slopes (Boryslaw sits at around 900 m above sea level). But there’s not much left of the town itself as I knew it, except for its wide streets that straggle on kilometre after kilometre, as they always did. Western Ukraine, for all the fecundity of its soil and its much-vaunted democratic spirit, is these days a dirt-poor corner of Europe, and the vital juices of Boryslaw, once synonymous with Poland’s oil industry, have long been sucked dry.

In 1939, Boryslaw had a population of around 45,000. Roughly speaking, about one-third was Jewish, with the balance shared between Poles and Ukrainians. The borders in this trauma zone of Europe have been rubbed out and redrawn so many times and old enmities are stained deep in its soil. But I can honestly say that until war broke out I was blissfully unaware of the volatile ethnic mix in our town, and its potential for bloody mayhem. If I had been older, I might have been better prepared. I might have known that at the end of the 18th century, when Poland was partitioned between three great powers, Boryslaw became part of Galicia, the Austro–Hungarian province, which linked ethnically Ukrainian towns and cities in the east with purely Polish towns and cities in the west. Galicia had a rich Jewish heritage (important towns like Kraków, Przemysl and Lwów had been settled by Jews in the 14th century), but enduring ethnic conflict came with the territory. At the end of World War I, the Soviet Red Army, Ukrainian nationalists and Polish troops fought terrible battles over this corner of Eastern Europe and tens of thousands of Jews caught in the battle zone were massacred. A 1921 treaty — the Treaty of Riga — gave most of Ukraine to the Soviet Union, while the newborn Polish state took the territory of Galicia, essentially western Ukraine. This left the Ukrainian nationalists out in the cold, a ticking political time bomb of which I was largely ignorant.

In my defence, I was young, and oblivious to much beyond my immediate circle of family and friends. I knew that our family was relatively prosperous, and that my father was a prominent figure in town. He was the director of a bank, and a wholesale merchant trading in flour, rice and sugar. My mother worked as hard as my father in the business, and we had a maid and, later, a cook to help with the household.

Of course I knew that we were Jewish, but at that time, pre-war, it was hardly central to my identity. We weren’t a religious family. I don’t remember our family going to the synagogue except on special holy days, though my parents never worked on the Sabbath. That was the custom. All Jewish businesses in Boryslaw were closed on Saturday. In a small town, everybody knew each other, and it was prudent to keep up appearances even if one were not, strictly speaking, a believer. If, for example, a woman bought non-kosher meat, within five minutes everyone would know and people who were religious would stop doing business with her husband. I suppose my parents must have kept a kosher home, probably in deference to my mother’s parents who were observant. I have a studio photograph of my maternal grandparents, given to me by a cousin in Argentina, where they’re dressed in their Sabbath best; she wearing a wig as was the custom for Orthodox Jewish women, he a yarmulke. For me, Saturday was special because I loved having my mother at home. Every morning when I was very young, before I learned to count the passing of the days, I would get up and ask, ‘Mama, is today Saturday?’ She would say, ‘Not today, darling. I will tell you when Saturday comes.’

When I was older I went to school on Saturday. Observant Jews don’t even write on the Sabbath, but my brother and I went to Polish state schools. At home we spoke Polish, the language of the poetry I most treasure. For a short time, when I was about 10 or 11, I had Hebrew lessons, but all that sticks in my memory is a rhyming verse which, translated, means, ‘Bina, Bina, go to the corner’. I never learned to speak Yiddish. If my parents didn’t want my brother and me to understand what they were saying, they would speak to each other in German. For my parents, as for other educated Poles of their generation who had grown up under Vienna’s influence, Germanic culture epitomised civilisation as they knew it. For me, it was different. I was born on Polish territory, in the Polish republic. I was a patriot. I remember the day that our Polish hero, the soldier–statesman Marshal Józef Pilsudski, died in May 1935. I wore a black armband and cried along with everyone else.

Boryslaw wasn’t just any Polish town. It had its own raison d’être. Its currency was oil and its derivatives, profit and jobs. People came to Boryslaw to make their fortunes out of the black goo that seeped out of the ground and floated on the ‘river’ Tysmienica, which ran through the centre of town. (I say river, but it was normally only about 15 cm deep.) I remember seeing poor people mixing sticky oily muck in their hands with sawdust. They hawked the lumps as fuel. There was oil in the pores of our town.

The oil rush started slowly in the 1840s with the discovery of ozokerite, a waxlike fossil paraffin. At first, small land-holders dug deep pits and shafts by hand and laboriously extracted and processed the soil wax from the rocks. It was used for making candles and soap. But no-one got rich doing this. It was the discovery of crude oil at the moment when the world was developing its insatiable appetite for the stuff that transformed what was a little mountain hamlet into a busy, dirty boom town. From the mid 1850s people started to pour into Boryslaw. One of the first oil rigs in the world was built in Boryslaw in 1861, based on the work of pioneer oil researcher Ignacy Lukasiewicz, after whom the street we lived on was named. As oil drilling became more mechanised, large banks and foreign companies bought up land in expectation of huge profits.

Boryslaw’s geographical spread made it the third largest town in Poland in terms of territory after Warszawa and Lódz, but unlike those great cities, it wasn’t built to last. It was a jerry-built frontier town known for its wooden footpaths and muddy streets. When it rained or when snow melted in spring, the gutters would overflow and an oily sludge covered the footpaths, staining shoes and making it difficult to walk.

Boryslaw wasn’t laid out like a traditional medieval town with a town square and a town hall and streets radiating outwards from the centre. It had a long main street leading south towards the mountains, crossing the Tysmienica, and another street which crossed it at right angles. At the centre of town there was a bridge where young people met and men leaned against railings waiting to be hired for odd jobs.

Outsiders sneered at Boryslaw. It was a dump, a hovel, they said. There was a saying that people lived in Drohobycz (the neighbouring town, about 11 km away, and our region’s administrative centre), made their money in Boryslaw, but spent it in Vienna — a train ran once a week between Boryslaw and Vienna. Still, those of us who lived there, townspeople like my parents and their families who also profited from the oil money (though not so much as to be able to go shopping in Vienna), were fond of our home town. It was rough around the edges, but it had certain charms. When London was still lit by smudgy gas lamps, Boryslaw’s hundreds of oil well towers were strung with electric light bulbs, and at night our small town sparkled like a city of skyscrapers.

By the time I was born in 1927, the Romanian oilfields had stolen Poland’s thunder as Europe’s main centre of crude oil exploration, production and refining. But the Drohobycz–Boryslaw area was still vital to Poland, supplying the bulk of the country’s oil and oil products. For those who came to conquer, it was a valuable prize, a town marked out for special consideration. Not so special though that the Nazis and their collaborators refrained from ripping out its Jewish heart. They simply did so more slowly, so as to keep oil pumping into the war machine for as long as possible. Then, when the spoils of war delivered the town into the hands of Soviet ‘liberators’, they crushed what was left of its soul. Tadeusz Wróbel, an engineering professor from Warszawa who has devoted his retirement to chronicling the fortunes of the home town he left in 1945, called his first book Boryslaw Doesn’t Laugh Any More.

My childhood was full of laughter. I was the baby of the family, born three years after my brother, Josek. I was very spoilt. I was also high-spirited and liked to do things my way. ‘No, no, no. I’ll do it myself,’ I’d tell my mother firmly if she offered to help me. There’s a lovely Polish poem about a little girl called Zosia, whose name rhymes with samosia, which means ‘myself’. This little girl, like me, was very wilful and the poet calls her Zosia, samosia, which is what my mother called me.

My parents were not from Boryslaw, though my father, Fischel Haberman, was born not far away in Drohobycz. His younger brother, Joshua, lived in our town and ran a small delicatessen. This uncle had a wife and a son, Benjamin (known as Benio), but our two families were never close and I knew nothing else about my father’s wider family. I wasn’t interested in him at all as a child. I found him stern, and remote, though with hindsight I expect he was a typical middle-class European man of his time. After our main meal at midday we children had to be quiet so he could sleep. I always thought of him as elderly, though of course he wasn’t — he was 29 when I was born. I certainly never thought of him as handsome. I know this, because I remember thinking that my friend Ilka’s father was extremely handsome. I think my father probably adored me, and even preferred me to my brother, who sometimes got the rough end of his discipline. When he went away on buying trips he would often bring me back little treats, and nothing for my brother. But I had eyes only for Mama. Mama, whose soft dark grey cardigan I always kept close to me when she herself could not be, its fine wool holding in its fibres the comfort of her scent, a light floral fragrance of the kind I myself have always preferred. My mother, Sala, and my brother, Josek, were my ground and my sky.

When I was born, our family lived in a modest little house beside the Boryslaw police station. I found the house when I briefly visited the town in 2006. Nothing much had changed. Red foxgloves and the last of summer’s tall yellow flowers were in bloom against peeling pink walls. Around the back was a chicken run, and a garden planted with corn, potatoes and beans. The wooden fence against which Mama, Josek and I are standing in a very early photograph I have is still there, or at least a fence just like it. I am four or five in this photograph, and have a cheeky grin on my face. In the background you can just see our friend and neighbour, Jurek Staniszewski, who was the same age as Josek, peeking through his hands and his little hat into our garden. We were close friends. Josek and I used to celebrate Christmas with Jurek and his parents. I loved Christmas trees and I loved going to midnight mass when you could see snow floating in the night sky, beautiful lazy flakes, and hear your steps in the crispness of the fresh fall. And of course I loved presents. The Staniszewskis always had gifts for my brother and me.

Jurek and his family lived on top of the police station. We children used to play together in the yard at the back of the station, where there was a swing. I remember playing a game where we were on a ship. Josek and Jurek were both captains, and I was the cabin boy. I wasn’t happy about this. Why couldn’t I be a captain? I remember another game probably a few years later because I was in possession of a bit of pocket money, where my brother persuaded me to hand over my money to him. He told me that he would bury it next to his money, and that together his money and mine would make children. I gave him my money, and then I waited, and waited, and waited. Finally I asked him, ‘Well, what happened? Where are the children?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said we should go and find out. So we went to where he’d buried the money, and there was nothing. No money. ‘Well?’ I said. He shrugged. ‘Maybe they died or something.’

Maybe they did. If my brother said so, I was willing to believe it. He was my god. Anything he did, I wanted to be doing too. I usually got what I wanted. When I decided it was time to go to school, because my friend Ilka, who lived across the road and was a year older than me, was already at school, I carried on so much that my mother relented and walked me down there. The headmistress explained that I was too young to enrol, but my mother pleaded with her to let me sit in the classroom. So I went to school for a year before I was officially enrolled. I was very happy to be learning.

If I was a little nuisance, I was also a much-loved one. I remember going to visit my grandparents in the country. We didn’t go often because they lived several hours west by train in Hureczko, a tiny village near Przemysl, a trading city on the river San, southeast of Kraków. My grandparents kept cows and horses, and employed a few people in the fields. At midday, they sat down to eat with their workers. My grandmother Chana sat at one end of a