The Light in Hidden Places

by Sharon Cameron

  The pieces of so many shattered lives are not going to fit back together again. Not all of them.

  Mrs. Bessermann leaves first with Janek, early in the morning, without saying goodbye, and so does Jan Dorlich. Cesia tells us that they’ve gone, wiping her tears. She will stay with Siunek and his father. It hurts, after all we’ve been through, to have them turn their backs in this way. But I decide it isn’t me they’ve turned their backs on. Just the very worst moments of their lives.

  No one wants to remember the attic.

  Then Dr. Schillinger takes Dziusia, hoping to restart his dental practice. Dziusia clings to my neck and kisses me goodbye.

  I worry what will happen to her in the dark. When the fear comes back.

  Sometimes I dream that the nurses are in the room with me, crawling up, up the walls, to listen at the ceiling.

  I dream of my babcia, crying out as they take her from the ghetto.

  I dream of Izio, hanging upside down.

  I dream that I am trying to catch Max as he drops from the window of a moving train.

  But when I wake, Helena is there, sleeping beside me, and I remember that life has started over again.

  Max doesn’t need me to save him anymore.

  I wander into the kitchen in my nightgown, wishing there was tea, and find Monek and Sala fixing their breakfast. Henek and Danuta aren’t awake yet, and Old Hirsch is snoring on the sofa. But Max’s blanket is empty, left heaped in his spot on the floor.

  “Where’s Max?” I ask, stifling a yawn.

  “He left,” says Sala. “Early this morning.”

  I stiffen. “What do you mean?”

  “She means he walked out the door,” says Monek.

  “When is he coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” replies Sala.

  Max left.

  Something squeezes inside my chest.

  He left. He left. He left.

  I turn on my heel to go to the bedroom, to yank on my dress, to do I don’t know what, and Monek laughs a little.

  “Max doesn’t need his little goyka anymore …”

  I stop in my tracks. Goyka. Non-Jew. Me. But the way he said it was ugly. Demeaning. Like I am a piece of gum to be spit out once the flavor is gone. I run into the bedroom, button my dress, and barely tie my shoes before I hurry out the door again.

  “Fusia!” Sala calls, but I don’t listen to her.

  Max has left. He can’t have done that. He shouldn’t have done that.

  I think he let me go.

  “Fusia, wait!”

  I let the front door slam, round the corner in the courtyard, and Mr. Krajewska is at the well.

  “You,” he says. “I should have known there was something strange about you. The wife always thought there was something strange …”

  I move on, ready to ignore him. He might be a little drunk. And then he says, “They killed a Jew this morning. Down in the market.”

  I freeze. And the fear rises inside me like a bird. Flapping. Fluttering.

  Squeezing.

  I look at Mr. Krajewska. “Who did they kill?”

  “Some boy. Stayed hidden the whole war.”

  Max.

  “And now somebody decided he should be punished for not getting killed in the first place …”

  He left this morning. Max walked out the door.

  “… someone thinks they should be doing what the Germans left undone …”

  No. No. No.

  “And you, I knew there was something. I saw those men coming out of your apartment. You weren’t reading novels with them, were you? I don’t suppose you could …”

  All this time, and Mr. Krajewska still doesn’t realize that I have been hiding Jews. He thinks I’m a prostitute. I stop listening. I don’t even care. I leave him talking and go flying down Tatarska Street.

  My feet hit the pavement so hard the soles of my feet sting.

  I didn’t want to love him. Love leads to hurt.

  But I do love him. And being without him is going to hurt so much worse.

  Why did you leave, Max?

  Why, why, why?

  There’s a man coming up the opposite sidewalk with a package in his hand. He stops to stare at me.

  “Fusia?”

  And when I look at him, I see the big brown eyes, the quirking eyebrow. The boy who used to make me laugh at the windowsill. The man who can survive anything.

  I run across Tatarska and throw myself at him, and his package goes rolling down the paving stones.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Max says.

  I smack him in the chest. “You left!” I smack him again. “You left! You left!”

  “I went to get my hair cut!”

  No wonder I didn’t recognize him.

  “And then I bought some butter, and you made me drop it.”

  And now I start to cry. Not because he’s gone, but because he’s not. I am such a Dummkopf. He pulls me into his arms.

  “You’re supposed to be with me,” I tell him. “You belong with me!”

  “I know,” he says. “And you belong with me.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  I nod.

  He takes my face in his hands.

  “You gave me my life,” he says. “Now let me give it back to you.”

  I nod again. I let him kiss my lips and my tears.

  We belong together.

  And we will survive everything.

  Stefania and Helena Podgórska, during the war.

  Stefania Podgórska married Max Diamant on November 23, 1944. All the Podgórskis survived the war, including Stefania’s mother and brother in the labor camp in Salzburg. However, they disapproved of Stefania’s marriage and disowned both sisters for saving Jews during the occupation of Przemyśl. Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Poland at the time, with vigilante groups bent on finishing what the Nazis had begun. To keep his new family safe, Max changed his name to a very Polish one, Josef Burzminski, and together Joe and Stefania raised Helena until her entrance into university and medical school.

  Max and Stefania in 1944, perhaps on their wedding day.

  Henek Diamant married Danuta, became a dentist, and moved to Belgium in the 1970s. He died in 2004. Danuta passed away in 2011. Henek and Danuta have one daughter and seven grandchildren.

  After the war, Dr. Wilhelm Schillinger married for a second time and went to Wroclaw, Poland, to become an oral surgeon. His daughter, Dziusia, remained close with the Burzminskis, even living with them for a time, and always considered Stefania to be her second mother. She married and moved to Brussels, Belgium, in the 1950s, where she now has a son, a daughter, and four grandchildren.

  Max Diamant's ID card, which is stamped with “Jude” to identify him as a Jew.

  Malwina never married Dr. Hirsch. She and Janek immigrated to the United States in 1949, where Janek eventually became an electrical engineer for IBM. He has two sons and a grandson. After a short time with the Hirsches, Cesia joined her mother and brother and also immigrated to the USA. She traveled to Argentina in 1988 to testify against Josef Schwammberger, the officer responsible for many of the atrocities in the Przemyśl ghetto. She has a son, a daughter, and four grandchildren.

  After leaving Tatarska Street, Dr. Leon Hirsch and Siunek found themselves living in Russia after the restructuring of the Ukrainian border. Siunek Hirsch died of cancer in 1947. Monek and Sala Hirsch changed their surname to Jalenski and, along with Jan Dorlich, immigrated to Israel. Monek did eventually apologize to Stefania for calling her a goyka.

  Stefania Podgórska and Max Diamant in the 1950s.

  Max changed his name to Josef Burzminski in 1944.

  Josef and Stefania Burzminski moved to Israel in 1958. Joe ran a dental practice there, assisted by Stefania (or Stefi, as she became known), and testified at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Due to the medical procedure—or experiment—that Stefania endured in the German hospital, she was told she would never have ch
ildren. But eventually, after more than a decade of marriage, Stefi and Joe welcomed a daughter and a son. In 1961, they immigrated to the United States, where Joe discovered that his Polish medical degree would not be recognized. So despite nearly twenty years as a dentist and oral surgeon, and while learning to speak English, Joe went to Tufts University in Boston. He earned his second degree in dentistry in 1966. Helena remained in Poland, where she became a doctor of radiology. She lives in Wroclaw with her daughter.

  Stefania, Max, and Helena visit the beach after the war (from left to right).

  In 1979, Stefania and Helena Podgórska were named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, which is the leading institution for Holocaust education, documentation, commemoration, and research. Stefania and Helena’s heroism during the Holocaust has been recognized with numerous other awards, articles, film documentaries, television interviews, and a 1996 television movie called Hidden in Silence. Stefania gave a speech at the 1993 dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where she shared the stage with then Israeli president Chaim Herzog, then president Bill Clinton, and First Lady Hillary Clinton, and where she was famously snuggled by Vice President Al Gore. (It was cold.) She and Joe appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1994, where Stefi, also famously, pointed one finger and firmly told an ever-questioning Oprah to “Vait a minute.”

  I became aware of Stefania Podgórska in the early 1990s, long before I had ever thought of becoming a writer. Not from an article or a movie or Oprah, but when a portion of her oral history interview was aired on my local PBS station. I stopped everything to watch, and I never forgot her story. For more than twenty-five years. In 2017, I discovered her full interview on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I watched it three times, and when I was done, I knew three things. This was a story that needed to be told. This was a story that should be a novel. And for better or worse, I was the one who was supposed to write it.

  After some shameless internet stalking, I contacted Joe and Stefania’s son, Ed Burzminski, and he shared with me a writer’s chest of gold: Stefania’s unpublished memoir. This became the backbone of The Light in Hidden Places, fleshed out with hours of filmed interviews with Stefi and Joe, the oral histories of Cesia and Janek, other memoirs, and scholarly works documenting the city of Przemyśl before and after the Second World War. The family Stefania sees murdered by the SS is based on the killing of Renia Spiegel, the “Polish Anne Frank,” a young Jewish girl from Przemyśl whose diary has only recently come to the public eye. I believe this is the same murder of hidden Jews referred to in Stefania’s memoir. The man hanged in the market square of Przemyśl while Stefania was on her way to work was Michal Kruk, executed for hiding Jews.

  Stefania, Max, Helena, Henek, and Danuta after the war (from left to right).

  In 2018, Ed and I went together to Belgium, where we interviewed Dziusia Schillinger, one of the loveliest ladies I’ve ever met, and then to Poland, where we interviewed Helena, a beautiful soul who makes a potent homemade wine. Both of these ladies treated me with such generosity and kindness, when I was there to dredge up memories that were horrible. Then Ed and I walked the streets of Przemyśl, finding the apartment where his mother hid his father, the site of the tool factory, the basement window where Max had a hidden bunker in the ghetto. And oh, how we searched for the site of the Diamants’ store! We stood in the attic of Tatarska 3 and looked out to a beautiful run-down building that had once been a German hospital. We drove to the village of Lipa and sat in the kitchen of an elderly lady who could name all nine Podgórska siblings. We went to Bełżec, where Ed’s grandparents and uncle, and countless others were murdered. We climbed an embankment and stood at the curve of the railroad tracks where a young Max Diamant jumped from a moving train.

  I came home and wrote nonstop.

  The difference between The Light in Hidden Places and Stefania’s memoir is that I couldn’t tell it all. Not without writing a one-thousand-page book. And since real life is not a novel, time and order of events got some tweaking to suit a narrative structure. Peripheral characters were sometimes combined into one. Gaps were filled, particularly where Stefi’s emotions were concerned. But with the exceptions of Stefania getting her papers (we know she fudged the truth), getting her job (we know she slipped someone a bribe), and a punch to the nose of the one-eyebrow man (which I’m convinced she would have done if given the chance), every incident in this novel is how Stefania and Joe described it. It is a reimagining of what was.

  I met Stefania Podgórska once, in 2017, though she didn’t know she met me. She had dementia, and after our visit, I went with Ed to help pick out some new pajamas for her. Which is a long way from sitting in my living room, watching PBS on a weekday. Both Stefania and Helena suffered psychologically after the war. Dziusia told me that in one part of her mind, Stefania had never left Tatarska Street. Today we’d call it PTSD. But ironically, dementia freed Stefania from all that. She sang and danced and reverted back to the happy child she was before the war.

  Ed, Joe, and Stefania Burzminski.

  Joe told an interviewer in Boston that he wished they could have known on Tatarska Street that one day he and Stefi would be sitting in the United States, celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with their children. “It was a dream,” he said. “But it came true.” Josef Burzminski passed away on July 17, 2003, in Los Angeles, California, where he and Stefi had moved to be closer to their children. They had been married for fifty-eight years. His first grandchild was born after Joe had already passed away.

  Stefania Podgórska Burzminski died on September 29, 2018, during the writing of this book. I wish she could have known it was being written. I helped edit her obituary, which was an honor. How many people have the privilege of summing up the life of a person they admire so much? And how much more of a privilege to write an entire book about such a person? In a 1988 interview, Stefi was asked if she felt her life had a special importance because of what she did in the war years. “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied, waving a hand. Then she pointed that finger. “But I know my story will be published.”

  She was right, wasn’t she?

  The legacy of World War II has dark tentacles that keep stretching forward, deep into the present day. For many whom I talked to, it is an ongoing war. The scars are not healed, and the repercussions still ripple. Loss of family. Loss of friends. Loss of histories and futures. Fear that cannot be forgotten. But for all that was suffered, never in any written word or a single interview did Stefania ever say she regretted doing what she did. Only that she would do it again. “One death or thirteen Jews,” she said. “It was a good trade.” Even though the death she referred to was her own.

  That is my definition of a heroine.

  Stefania and Helena in the late 1940s.

  I’ve always found acknowledgments to be an impossible task. There is no way to properly thank the countless wonderful people who make a book come to life in just a few short sentences. With The Light in Hidden Places, this is doubly true, because this story was never mine. I am only the temporary custodian of it. This story came to be because extraordinary people lived it. The words came to be because some extraordinary people helped me. And I will do my best to thank them.

  Ed Burzminski. Thank you a million times for the unbelievable amount of time and care you gave to me and this project, like you give to all who seek you out, wanting to know more about your remarkable parents. Because of you, their story will live on. And, Lori and Mia, thank you for sharing him while we ran around Europe!

  Helena Podgórska-Rudziak and her beautiful daughter, Małgorzata Rudziak. I can honestly say that your kindness and generosity will never be forgotten. And, Helena, thank you for giving me what was most difficult to give: your memories.

  Krystyna Nawara (formerly Dziusia Schillinger) and her family. What a beautiful joy you all are. Thank you for making me so welcome in Belgium and in
your home.

  Maciej Piórkowski and Bożena and Wiesiek Skibiński. Thank you for the incredible tour of Tatarska 3. And for the cathedral, and the crypts, and allowing me to crawl through the floor of those crypts and run my hands over eleventh-century stonework, and the candlelit cemeteries, and especially for letting me open that casket! Best Halloween ever.

  Monika Lach. Thank you for teaching Stefania’s story to the children of Przemyśl and for helping me understand the Przemyśl that was.

  Piotr Michalski. Thank you for sharing your extensive knowledge and for all the calories I burned trying to keep up with you on the streets of Przemyśl!

  Ewa Koper of the Bełżec Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Thank you again and again for the kind and gentle way you explained the horrific experiences of the Bełżec camp and for your project to name every victim. I know my people when I meet them, and you are one.

  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I cannot thank you enough for making the personal histories of those who experienced the Holocaust available and at my fingertips. This is history that should never, ever be lost.

  Many thanks to Dr. Agi Legutko, Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program, Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University in the City of New York, who reviewed the Yiddish and offered many wise corrections, and to Tami Rich, Historian & Cultural Heritage Advisor, for her careful and insightful review of the manuscript. Any mistakes that remain are my own.