by Leon Leyson
One time my cousin Yossel asked his teacher if he could change his name to Józef in honor of Józef Pilsudski, a Polish national hero. The teacher told him that a Jew was not allowed to have a Polish first name. I couldn’t figure out why my cousin would want to exchange his Yiddish name—which in English means Joseph—for the Polish version, but the teacher’s rebuff didn’t surprise me. That was just the way life was.
I made my second home with our neighbor Lansman the tailor. I was fascinated by how he could direct the thinnest, most even spray of water from his mouth onto the clothes he was pressing. I loved visiting him, his wife, and their four sons, all of whom were skilled tailors. They sang at their work and in the evenings sat together making music, singing and playing instruments. I was mystified when the youngest son, a Zionist, decided to leave his home for distant Palestine. Why would he go so far away from his family and give up working and playing music with them? Now I realize his decision saved his life. His mother, his father, and his brothers all died in the Holocaust.
Narewka lacked most of what we consider necessities today. Streets were made of cobblestones or were unpaved; most buildings were constructed of wood and were only one story high; people walked or traveled on horseback or by horse and wagon. I still remember when the marvel of electricity reached us in 1935. I was six years old. Every household had to decide whether or not to opt for electrical power. After a lot of discussion, my parents made the daring decision to bring the new invention into our home. A lone wire led to a socket installed in the middle of our ceiling. It seemed incredible that instead of a kerosene lamp, we now had a single glass bulb overhead by which we could read at night. All we had to do was pull the cord to turn it on and off. Whenever I thought my parents weren’t looking, I’d climb on a chair and pull the cord, just to see the light appear and disappear as if by magic. Amazing.
In spite of the wonder of electricity, in most other ways life in Narewka remained as it had been for centuries. There was no indoor plumbing, and in the bitter winter the trip to the outhouse was one I learned to delay as long as possible. Our home had one large room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room—all in one—and one bedroom. Privacy in the way we think of it today was entirely foreign to us. There was one bed, and we all shared it, my mother, brothers, sister, and I.
We collected our water from a well in our yard, dropping a bucket until we heard a splash, then winding it up full of water. The challenge was not to lose too much of the water as we lugged the bucket from the well to the house. It took several trips a day to meet our needs, so there was a lot of going back and forth to and from the well. I also gathered eggs, stacked wood chopped by Tsalig, dried dishes that Pesza washed, and ran errands for my mother. Most days I was the one who went to my grandfather’s barn to carry home a pitcher of milk from his cow.
Our village at the edge of the Białowieża Forest was made up of farmers and blacksmiths, butchers and tailors, teachers and shopkeepers. We were agrarian, unsophisticated, industrious people, Jews and Christians alike, whose lives revolved around family, our religious calendars, and the seasons of sowing and reaping.
Those of us who were Jewish spoke Yiddish at home, Polish in public, and Hebrew in religious school or at the synagogue. I also learned some German from my parents. It turned out that knowing German would prove more useful to us than we ever could have imagined.
Because Polish law prohibited Jews from owning land, as had been the case for centuries for Jews in Europe, my maternal grandfather, Jacob Meyer, leased his farmland from the Eastern Orthodox Church. He endured long hours of physical labor to support his family. He tilled his fields. He dug potatoes out of the earth with a spade and cut down hay with a scythe. I felt grand riding atop his horse-drawn wagon when it was piled high with bundles of hay at the end of the harvest. After my father left for Kraków, my mother increasingly relied on her parents for help. My grandfather frequently came by our house with potatoes and beets and other produce from his garden to make sure his daughter and his grandchildren didn’t go hungry. Still, even with her parents’ help, my mother had her hands full, since by and large she was a single parent raising a houseful of children. Just keeping us fed and in clean clothes and making sure we had the supplies we needed for school was a huge job. She never had any time completely for herself.
In Narewka everyone knew their neighbors and knew what they did for a living. Men were frequently identified by their occupation rather than by their last name. My paternal grandfather was known as Jacob the blacksmith, and our neighbor was Lansman the tailor. A woman was often referred to by her husband’s name—as Jacob’s wife, for example—while children were sometimes known according to who their parents or grandparents were. People didn’t think of me first and foremost as being Leib Lejzon. They didn’t even think of me as the son of Moshe and Chanah, but rather they referred to me as Jacob Meyer’s eynikl, Jacob Meyer’s grandson. That simple fact says a lot about the world in which I grew up. It was a patriarchal society, in which age was respected, even revered, especially when, as in my maternal grandfather’s case, age meant a lifetime of hard work, of caring for his family, and of devotion to his faith. I always stood a little taller and felt a little more special when people spoke of me as Jacob Meyer’s eynikl.
Every Friday night and Saturday morning at Sabbath services in the synagogue, I would stand next to my grandfather, bowing my head when he did and following his lead through the prayers. I still remember looking up at him and thinking how strong and tall he looked, like a giant tree shielding me. We always spent Passover at my mother’s parents’ house. Since I was the youngest grandson, I had the nerve-racking honor of asking the four questions traditional to the holiday service. As I recited the questions in Hebrew, trying hard not to make a mistake, I could feel my grandfather’s eyes on me, willing me through my part. When I finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing I had fulfilled his expectations. I felt lucky to be his grandson, and I always wanted to earn his approval and be worthy of his affection. I especially enjoyed spending the night with my grandparents all by myself. I would sleep with them in their bed, happy I didn’t have to share it with my siblings as I did at home. How I loved being the center of my grandparents’ attention!
Protected by the love and support of my family, I had little knowledge of the past persecutions that Jews in Narewka and other villages had experienced over the centuries, at the hands of first one ruler and then another. My parents had lived through attacks, called pogroms, in the early 1900s. Afterward many of Narewka’s Jews left for America, among them my mother’s brothers, Morris and Karl. Even though they knew no English, they believed that a better future was possible in the United States. A few years later Shaina, the beautiful sister, also sought a new life in America.
My parents had experienced war firsthand, the Great War of 1914–1918. No one before 1939 thought of it as World War I, since we had no idea that only twenty years later the world would again erupt in conflict. During the Great War, the German soldiers who occupied Poland were usually considerate of Poles, regardless of their faith. At the same time, in Narewka and many other villages throughout Poland, men were conscripted for forced labor. My father worked for the Germans on the narrow-gauge railroad that transported lumber and other supplies from our area to Germany. In 1918, when Germany was defeated, the occupying troops withdrew and returned to their homeland.
In retrospect, my parents and many others made a terrible mistake in thinking the Germans who came to Narewka in the Second World War would be like the Germans who had come in the First World War. They thought they would be people like themselves, men doing their military duty, anxious to return to their wives and children, and appreciative of any hospitality and kindness. In the same way people thought of me in relation to my grandfather and held certain expectations of me because of who my grandfather was, we thought of the Germans who entered Poland in 1939 in relation to those who had come before them. Logically, there was no re
ason for us to think otherwise. After all, what can we trust if not our own experience?
When I think back to the place where I grew up, the village that gave me so many treasured memories, I am reminded of a Yiddish song I used to sing with Lansman and his sons. It is titled “Oyfn Pripetchik”—in English, “On the Hearth.” With a mournful melody, it tells of a rabbi teaching the Hebrew alphabet to his young students, just the way I was learning those letters in heder. The song concludes with ominous words as the rabbi warns:
When you grow older, children,
You will understand
How many tears lie in these letters
And how much lament.
In the evenings, when I sang this song with the Lansman family, those words seemed like ancient history. It never would have occurred to me those words were forecasting my imminent and terrifying future.
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A world without planes or cars, a world where people spent most of their lives in the same region and rarely traveled more than a few miles from their village, a world without the Internet or even the telephone. On the one hand, I cherish the memories of the small world where I lived the first years of my childhood. It was a world defined by the love and warmth of family. The predictable pattern of life made the rare moments of surprise especially memorable. As I think back to that way of life now so distant, I feel a sense of longing, particularly for my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
My father’s stories had given me a glittering image of the city of Kraków, three hundred fifty miles and light-years removed from the life I knew in Narewka. It must have been hard for Father to leave us for so many months at a time, hard for him to know the burdens he put on my mother. But my mother understood that my father was working to give us a better life and we had to be patient while he saved the money for us to join him. At last, in the spring of 1938, after five years of hard work and saving, he sent for us. I was thrilled. As an eight-year-old, I loved adventures. I knew the big city would hold plenty of them, and the thought of being with my father seemed like the best thing in the world to me. He had been away most of the time since I was three! So it was with excitement and not a hint of misgiving that I waved good-bye to my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, ready to begin a new life. I envisioned all my relatives and friends being there for me whenever I returned. Without a backward look, with my mother, brothers, and sister, I embarked on my first train ride.
I had never before been beyond the outskirts of my village, much less on a train. Everything about the trip was exciting: the sounds, the speed, the scenery rushing before my eyes. I was ready—or thought I was—for whatever would come next.
I don’t remember exactly how long the journey was, only that it was long, several hours at least. I do remember every moment was fascinating. How enormous the world seemed, and we were just traveling a few hundred miles. When it grew dark, I was afraid I would miss something if I didn’t keep my eyes glued to the window. It was well past eleven o’clock at night when our train reached the Kraków station. Father was there waiting, and we raced into his arms. We piled our luggage on the waiting cart and crowded up beside the driver. I was astonished that even at that late hour, way past my usual bedtime, there were streetcars and pedestrians everywhere. “We’re almost there,” my father assured us as we crossed the Vistula, the river that meanders through the city. As the horse clip-clopped down Kraków’s cobblestone streets, I finally gave in to my desire for sleep. I had absorbed all I could for one day.
Minutes later we reached our destination. Our new home was in an apartment building at Przemyslowa Street 13, just south of the river. The building housed employees of the glass factory where my father worked. Our apartment was on the ground floor. Like our home in Narewka, it had only two rooms, a bedroom and a living room, but the living area in this apartment was much larger than in our previous home. What excited me most was the indoor plumbing. Before we collapsed into bed, my father led us down the hall to show us the bathroom we would share with three other families. He pulled a chain behind the toilet, and I watched, wide-eyed, as the water drained and the bowl refilled. Up to that moment I had thought the lightbulb was the greatest thing ever; but now, as I realized I would never have to make another late night trip to the outhouse, I decided the lightbulb and electricity were second to the toilet and indoor plumbing. As I pulled the chain and watched the water swish against the sides of the bowl, I thought this was about as extraordinary an invention as there could be. It had been a day full of wonders.
The next morning David and I set off to explore our new surroundings. Little by little, we ventured farther away from our building, first down the street, then around the block, and finally to the river where the Powstancow Slaskich Bridge connected our area to Kraków’s main attractions: the traditional Jewish quarter of Kazimierz; the historic district of the Old Town; and Wawel Castle, the royal palace of kings and queens who had ruled when Kraków was the capital of medieval Poland. Pretty soon I felt brave enough to risk exploring on my own. All those scenes I had admired on the candy boxes were even more impressive in reality. I was especially drawn to Kraków’s grand parks and historic buildings, such as the Old Synagogue, which dated back to the 1400s, and St. Mary’s Basilica, a majestic fourteenth-century Gothic church that towered over the main square. It was at this church where, every noon, the trumpeter I had heard on Tsalig’s radio played.
Every day was a new adventure, and I couldn’t wait to discover what I would find around the next corner. Sometimes I would put my hand on a building just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The hustle and bustle on the street made it seem like everyone had something important to do. Sometimes I tried to keep up with legs much longer than mine just to see where they were going. It was fun observing all the different kinds of shoes people wore and then looking up to see the face of the person wearing them. Sometimes I would stop in my tracks to stare at a department store window filled with lavish displays of merchandise, from clothing and jewelry to appliances. I had never seen anything like it. It was like being on a movie set or in an amusement park—although at the time I had no idea such places existed.
Our apartment was in a working-class, industrial neighborhood just a few blocks from my father’s factory on Lipowa Street. There were lots of boys my age. Sometimes they made fun of me for my openmouthed wonder at sights they took for granted. They liked being the sophisticated city kids who could explain how things worked to the naive country boy. Occasionally, however, they stopped with me to look at whatever wondrous object had caught my eye.
Before long I had a few special friends, and we loved making up games. One of our favorites was to ride the streetcars that traversed the city. Since my new friends and I never had any money, we devised what we thought was an extraordinarily clever way to ride for free. We would hop onto the car at the end opposite from where the conductor stood. As he made his way toward us, collecting fares and punching tickets, we would plot our escape. We jumped off the streetcar just before the conductor reached us and dashed to the other end of the car to repeat our adventure, at least for a few stops until the conductor caught on to our scheme. I never tired of pulling this trick.
The fact that I was Jewish and they were not didn’t seem to matter to my new pals. All that mattered was that I shared their sense of mischief and daring.
Kraków was not only a historic city but also a cosmopolitan and glittering cultural center, full of theaters and cafés, an opera house and nightclubs. My father’s modest income didn’t allow us any of those entertainments. The closest I got to Kraków nightlife was when I delivered love notes between a man at a cabaret and a woman who lived in the apartment next door to ours. The neighbor would give me fare for the streetcar, but instead of riding, I walked the short distance. When I reached the cabaret, I passed the note to the doorman. While awaiting the reply, I would peek inside, eager to see what drew people to go there night after night. I never got to see much, although I did hear livel
y Polish music. After a little while I would walk home, giving my fare to my mother, since even before the war, in my family, money was scarce.
My father was glad to have his family with him. He proudly introduced us around his glass factory, and he always welcomed David and me at his work. If he was busy with a project, he set us up with some time-consuming assignment such as sawing a thick log in half. There was no real point to the task, but my father showered us with compliments when the two sides dropped to the floor. A skilled tool and die maker, my father made replacement parts for broken machines and crafted forms for the glass bottles the company produced. As an expert machinist he was sought after by many factory owners in the area. His pride in his work spilled over into our home, where he was clearly the king of the castle, even if the castle was just a modest apartment. My mother tried to meet his every need; we children came second.
In the years we had been apart, my oldest brother, Hershel, had matured under my father’s tutelage. He had settled down, found work, and started saving money. Instead of being disruptive, Hershel was now considerate and responsible. He also had a girlfriend, so, though he was once again part of our daily lives, we hardly ever saw him.
Life in Kraków began to be familiar. We focused on getting settled, making a home, and enjoying being together. When we began to hear about the unrest and violence in Germany, it was disturbing; but we had our hands full with daily life, and that was all we could manage. In September 1938 we celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish year, and observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in a beautiful Reform synagogue, one of more than a hundred synagogues scattered throughout the city. There were about 60,000 Jews in Kraków, approximately one quarter of the city’s population. To me, it seemed like we were fully integrated into the city’s life. Now, in retrospect, I realize that there were signs pointing to troubled times ahead.
