Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

By Richard C. Lukas

“Moving testimonies recount the sadism, mass murders, deportations and imprisonment which Poles suffered at the hands of Hitler’s invading army.” —Publishers Weekly

Richard Lukas’s book, encompassing the wartime recollections of sixty “ordinary” Poles under Nazi occupation, constitutes a valuable contribution to a new perspective on World War II. Lukas presents gripping first-person accounts of the years 1939–1945 by Polish Christians from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Their narratives, from both oral and written sources, contribute enormously to our understanding of the totality of the Holocaust. Many of those who speak in these pages attempted, often at extreme peril, to assist Jewish friends, neighbors, and even strangers who otherwise faced certain death at the hands of the German occupiers. Some took part in the underground resistance movement. Others, isolated from the Jews’ experience and ill-informed of that horror, were understandably preoccupied with their own survival in the face of brutal condition intended ultimately to exterminate or enslave the entire Polish population. These recollections of men and women are moving testimony to the human courage of a people struggling for survival against the rule of depravity. The power of their painful witness against the inhumanities of those times is undeniable.

“Lukas presents a selection of oral and written memoirs of some 60 Polish men and women who lived through the German occupation of Poland in World War II.” —Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813143323

Book preview

JAN ARCISZEWSKI

The day before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, our company of a hundred men met in a large empty building on Okopowa Street. We spent the night on the concrete floor. The older ones among us felt the effects of this night in our bones. We had so few weapons that it was laughable—a few pistols and one automatic. I went into action, like the majority of us, for that matter, armed with a wooden stick. About 5:00 p.m., we moved off in the direction of Stawki Street, where the Germans kept their supplies in a school building: uniforms, food, and such. Since we were not fully armed, my unit went into action in the second line.

After weak German resistance, we occupied the building. It was already dark, and we made ourselves comfortable for the night. Unfortunately, this did not last long. During the night the Germans counterattacked with the support of a cow, a heavy mortar fired from an armored train. We retreated to the eastern side of Wola through the ruins of the ghetto.

Our next position was on Wolska Street, where few men armed with automatic weapons were sent up to the first floor [the second story]. However, one or two shells from a German tank quickly destroyed this position. An attempt to fire at an approaching tank on Młynarska Street ended in similar destruction [of our men on the higher floor]. If I had not gone down to the ground floor in search of a drink of water, there would be no one to write this account.

Our unit was then transferred to Old Town, where it was really hot. The Germans attacked several times a day, and our positions were bombed from the air regularly. We were now based on the large premises of Spiess and Son, which manufactured pharmaceutical products. One Sunday several bombs dropped on the gateway of the building while Mass was being celebrated in one of the side wings. There were many civilian casualties. One of those killed was my friend Danilewicz, who was sitting right next to me on a bench in the stairwell. Once again I was lucky. I got away with just a small wound in my right eyelid.

After a month of heavy fighting, it was decided to leave Old Town and get through to the City Center by way of the sewers. At the outset, there was great panic when someone at the front of the line of evacuees shouted Gas! All of us assumed that the Germans were gassing the sewers. But the smell in the sewers was actually coming from the fumes of chemicals and medicines from Spiess that we had thrown down the drains a short time earlier because they were highly flammable and likely to explode.

After about ten hours, we climbed out of the sewers in the City Center near the Prudential Building. After a bath—what bliss!—our unit was allowed to rest in comparative safety. We then took up positions on Bracka Street, on the first floor above the confectioners called Szwajcarska. Since I was only slightly wounded, I distributed barley from the brewers Haberbusch and Shieke, and carried water from the cellars beneath the Swiatowid cinema on Marszałkowska. In the end the tragic moment of the capitulation. Then I was deported to the camps of Ożarów, Sandbostel, and Murnau, all well known to prisoners of war.

Son of a former Polish premier, Arciszewski studied law at Warsaw University before the war. During the German occupation, he worked at the Warsaw Power Station. Today he lives in London.

IRENA BARBARSKA

I became involved in the resistance in 1941, when it was still known as the Union for Armed Struggle, while I was attending underground classes. I knew that many of my friends were members of the organization even before I joined, because they were not very careful about what they said.

About six months before the Warsaw Uprising, I was given ammunition and weapons to deliver to different addresses. I did this several times. On one of these occasions, I was on a streetcar carrying an ammunition case. As we approached Hala Mirowska near Grzybowski Square, I saw that the Germans were rounding up people. I could see soldiers and the waiting trucks. As the steetcar slowed down, I made my way to the rear and slipped out of the back exit. Fortunately, there were many people around so I quickly got away. I still remember the awful sensation as I saw the German troops. I knew that if I was caught, I had no hope of bluffing my way out of carrying ammunition.

During the Warsaw Uprising, I was assigned to the Field Dressing Station at No. 37 Ujazdowski Avenue. Since we were on the premises of Cukiernia Gajewski, which was a pastry shop, we had access to a kitchen. The stores of the Red Cross were on the same premises, so at first we had freshly baked bread. We were mobilized the day before the uprising. That night we were invaded by bedbugs, which fortunately disappeared later. We were in a sort of no-man’s-land between the German and Polish positions, so at first we were not involved, although we heard shooting. We just waited in an inside room without windows. I slept on a stretcher.

We had no contact with anyone. I was therefore delegated to go to our headquarters on Krucza Street to find out what was going on. Another woman volunteered to go with me, Wanda Przeworska, who was Jewish and the wife of a captain who served with the First Division in the West. She was a highly educated, very intelligent woman, and I was full of admiration for her. I felt I had no choice but to go, since she had volunteered. At one point during the first few days, there was a truce enabling the civilian population to get home, and that was when the two of us set out. We left through the main gate. Just as the gate was closed behind us, the Germans fired at it. We went past No. 39 Ujazdowski Avenue and around the corner into a small street leading to Krucza. I was petrified. I prayed that I would not be shot in the back. When we got to our headquarters, we were told just to go back to our station and wait . . . which we did.

When the Home Army broke through to Ujazdowski Avenue, the wounded started coming in to our field dressing station. One day they brought in four or five typical middle-aged, plump Warsaw townswomen, all civilians, who had been used by the Germans to shield their tanks. The Germans had forced the women to get on the Tiger tanks to stop the Poles from shooting. The legs of these women were like sieves, full of holes. They were soon moved to another hospital because we had no facilities to perform operations. What amazed me was the composure and cheerfulness of these women, who were so badly wounded.

When the uprising was over, the Germans told us to take the badly wounded to the corner of Marszałkowska and Jerozolimskie avenues. We carried the stretchers there. When we came back, we saw trucks standing outside the dressing stations. It turned out that one of our doctors had bribed some Germans to provide the trucks to take us to the hospital train. It had been converted from a goods train by the Germans for their own troops, and each car had a German medical orderly. Much to our surprise, we were given rations: vodka, chocolate, jam, and other luxuries we had not seen for a long time. The doors of the cars were then unlocked. Later we found out that there had been a Red Cross commission at the train, from Frankfurt on the Oder. After the Red Cross officials had seen the reception we received, the Germans locked the doors.

Born in Toruń, Poland, Barbarska was sixteen years old when the war broke out. She and her mother moved from the Soviet-occupied part of Poland to the General Government, where she became active in the Polish underground. After the war, she emigrated to England, where she lives today.

JAMES BOCHAN

I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between the Germans and the Soviets. At that time, I lived in eastern Poland in the town of Stryj, east of Lwów, which had been a great city of Polish culture for centuries. When the Soviets entered our area, they came in like a vast swarm of ants. They were barbarians. They robbed us. They raped the women and then cast them aside like rags. Many of the women were killed.

My father had died four years earlier. As the only man in the house, I had to assume responsibility for my mother and sister. There were shortages of everything, and like other Polish citizens I had to deal on the black market.

I remember one time when my uncle, my cousin, and I had slaughtered a pig. Half of the pig I carried slung over my shoulder. We were walking across town to trade the pig for soap, which was almost impossible to find at the time. When my cousin and uncle spotted some Soviet soldiers in the distance, they ran away without saying anything to me. There I stood by myself. When I saw the soldiers, I started to yell, Uncle! Uncle! The soldiers, who saw no one else around me, assumed that I was mentally deranged. If they had chosen to investigate the matter, there is no question that they would have imprisoned or even shot me for dealing on the black market.

When I was eighteen or nineteen, the Germans, who were then in occupation of the area, summoned me and several other young men of the village for forced labor to build fortifications against the advancing Soviet armies. I had been involved earlier in several roundups by Germans who forced me to work. This time, I decided that I was through with working for the Germans, so when the summons came, I did not report for duty. I hid myself in the loft of a barn. Unfortunately, a German sergeant who remembered me from previous roundups found me in the loft. He yanked me by the ear and held it tightly as he dragged me to the commandant’s headquarters. The pain was so excruciating that it felt as though he would rip off my ear.

When we got to the commandant’s office, I fully expected to receive the death sentence. After all, thousands of Poles who refused to work for the Germans had been shot. But by a stroke of luck, the commandant was so preoccupied with other matters that he simply told the sergeant to put me in a column of men forming outside his office, on the way to work.

After a week of building fortifications for the Germans, they ordered me and the other young Poles to a railway station, where we boarded a train for France. Our job was to build antiaircraft fortifications in France. By that time we had heard of the allied invasion of Normandy. We realized that the war was finally coming to an end.

One morning our work battalion arrived at a construction area only to find that the German officers and enlisted men had run away in the face of the advancing Allies. When the Americans and British discovered us, needless to say we were all elated. It was the happiest day of my life to be liberated by the Allies.

The British sent me and other Poles to Great Britain. I underwent military training in Scotland. After that, we served with the Seventh Royal Engineers in France against the Germans. At long last, I was able to make a positive contribution in the war against the Germans. I was fortunate to have survived both the Soviet and the German occupations of Poland. There were so many Poles who perished at the hands of both these invaders.

Born in eastern Poland, Bochan endured many harrowing experiences at the hands of the Germans and Soviets prior to his service with the British Army in France. After the war, he entered the hotel and restaurant busines, and he now owns the Fisherman’s Haunt in Winkton, England.

ANTONI BOHUN-DĄBROWSKI

As World War II drew to a close, I commanded the Świętokrzyska Brigade, which had made its way between the German and Soviet lines in Czechoslovakia. After months of hardship, my unit stopped in the small village of Vshekary, hoping to join the forces of General George Patton.

When we arrived in Vshekary, members of the Czech underground informed me and my adjutant that the Germans had constructed a concentration camp for women a few miles away. It housed a thousand prisoners. Among the inmates were 280 Jews, housed in heavily guarded barracks surrounded by high-voltage wire. There was no way for them to escape.

I decided that something had to be done to liberate the camp. On May 4, 1945, members of the brigade scouted German positions to determine the kind of opposition we could expect. The next day, I ordered the entire brigade on full alert, beginning at 6:00 a.m. We began our assault against the Germans at 11:30 a.m. It was not an easy matter to liberate the camp since my unit encountered heavy German machine-gun fire. But thanks to the element of surprise, many of the SS-men were taken off guard and were eating lunch at the time of our attack.

After my unit overran the bunkers and a munitions factory that was part of the camp, the Germans surrended. We took two hundred SS-men and fifteen women prison guards into captivity.

Needless to say, the inmates cried with joy that they were now free. The courtyard of the camp was filled with emaciated bodies, dressed in striped prison clothes. But the joy was tempered when my adjutant informed me that two nearby barracks housing the 280 Jewish prisoners, were cordoned off by two rows of high-voltage wire. I ordered the German commandant to turn off the voltage. When I asked him why these Jews were isolated from the other prisoners, he replied that he had orders from Hitler to set fire to their barracks before the Americans could liberate Holiszów. When I pursued the matter further and inquired whether he intended to execute Hitler’s brutal orders, the German demurred, saying he was an officer of the Wehrmacht and did not intend to carry out the