Family stories

It was really great for me to see my dad's sisters at an older age. I appreciated what they could offer me a lot more now that I'm older. The things that my dad's family went through were really remarkable and the stories that were told were incredible.



1.) My aunts and their mom hid in the basement of a church while Warsaw was being bombed. Their mother (my grandmother) took off her shirt and cut it into little pieces. She wrote each one's names and date of birth on each piece and tied them to her children. The girls thought that it was a game but really their mom was sure that they wouldn't make it through the night.

2.) My grandmother would walk by the Jewish ghetto in Poland and see really starved children. Even though her own children didn't have enough to eat and they barely were making it by, she would sneak out in the night past the army-enforced curfew, ride the trolley hidden under the seats to not be seen, and drop off food packages to these children. Something that my family reminded me: there were so many Jews in Poland because they were always welcome there and had a good life. The high numbers of Jewish deaths were NOT a result of Polish killings, but rather the Nazi's rule. It angers me that there were countless Polish families who risked their lives to protect Jewish families and yet Poland is blamed in many textbooks for the Holocaust.

3.) One night, my grandmother's mother came down the stairs at 2am. She woke up my grandmother and told her that she had a bad dream and had to leave the apartment. Without hesitating, my grandmother took her young children and carried the children (past curfew) for 2 hours to get to her sister's home outside of the city. The next morning she went back to the apartment and saw the front window broken. At night, shrapno had flown into the apartment and landed in the closet, right above the bed where the girls slept. Incredible.