by Andrew Potok
In mid-September 1939, the skies already darkened by German airplanes, and vast parts of the country flattened by tanks, I stood on the sidewalk in front of our Warsaw apartment house, hugged and kissed good-bye by tearful aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. What did I know? My heart might have been beating fast, curious and eager to begin a new adventure. I thought that I was about to ride in Max’s sky blue Packard with its gorgeous silver hubcaps on red and white wheels, a treat, war or no war, but my father took me by the hand and walked me over to the Citroen van which, in peacetime, had delivered fur coats to Apfelbaum’s customers. Uncle Max’s chauffeur, Twardowski, drove my aunt Zosia, her six-year-old daughter Anita, Anita’s governess Pani Potocka, my father, and me. My mother, along with an aunt and uncle I hardly knew, rode in the Packard with Max at the wheel. “Where are we going?” I asked my father who sat next to me in the Citroen.
“Romania,” he said. I think I saw fear on all the grownups’ faces. How could they not have been afraid? Afraid that we were leaving too late, afraid that the cars would break down, afraid of bombs. It was a precarious time to leave, nearly two weeks since the first day of the war, and early in the morning the streets were fairly empty. On Marszalkowska, Twardowski ran inside the Apfelbaum salon and came back with many fur coats, which he piled up in the back of the van. I begged Twardowski to drive first to Wieliszew to pick up my new bicycle and was told that we didn’t have time. I recited favorite poems, such as “Lokomotywa,” about a huge locomotive chugging and steaming in the station before pulling its hundreds of cars through the countryside. A little way out of town, the roads were jammed, horns honking, people yelling and cursing. Our two cars drove south toward Romania until, in the city of Lublin, we were forced by blitzkrieg armies, one from the west, another from the east, to turn back; we skirted Warsaw and headed toward Lithuania. The road was packed with people fleeing in cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, bicycles, and on foot.
On the second day, they had to leave the beautiful Packard with Twardowski, who said he would return it when we came back after the war. Anita’s governess, Pani Potocka, said that the Packard used too much gasoline, and so the four who rode in the Packard crowded into the Citroen van, which Max drove north, the direction determined not by plan but by changing circumstances.
On August 23 the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact had been signed, and the two barbaric states planned to divide Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland into one camp or the other. Until that date, the rational decision was to go east, as far from the Germans as possible, even though the Soviet Union, allied for the moment with Western powers, was hardly a safe destination for Jews. Still, it was the only destination that made sense at the time, and thus it was taken by much of my family, including my uncle Stash, London Anita and Swedish Anna’s parents, and my Australian cousin Jurek and his family.
Lithuania was not exactly a haven for Jews either, but we in the Citroen made it to safety, while the ones who chose to drive east ended up in Soviet labor camps, where all but my father’s brother Szymon survived.
My cousin Jurek, eleven years older than I, was nineteen when the war began. His father, the Izaak who made the gift of a stained glass window to a Krakow synagogue, was my grandfather Solomon’s brother.
Jurek and his family lived in Krakow, managed a timber business, and owned a farm miles away where they spent every summer tending cows and horses; they loved being away from the city. “My parents left in the car,” Jurek told me years ago. “I was on horseback, others in horse-drawn carts and horses, all headed toward the Romanian border. In Lwow, I spotted my father getting off a tram. This is what happens during war. By accident I found my family.” In the middle of one night in 1940, a Russian soldier banged on the door of the flat they lived in, ordered them to pack one suitcase each, and put them into a cattle car bound for Siberia. There was no food or water. So each time the train stopped at a station, everyone ran to buy boiled water, almost undrinkable except for those who brought tea with them. They walked twenty-five kilometers from the railroad station through the rugged Ural Mountains and moved into one of the thatched huts, three or four families in each, some eight hundred people in all. From five in the morning until seven at night, they chopped down trees, sawed them into logs, and burned the branches, the ashes becoming the charcoal needed to make steel for the Russian war effort. They had to stack four cubic meters of wood in order to get the daily ration of four hundred grams of black, heavy, wet bread, plus soup in the morning and again at night. “It was very cold,” Jurek said, “and we had to dig graves nearly every day for those who died from exhaustion, malnutrition, illness, or accidents.” They lived like this for three years; then in 1942 the British and Americans made a deal to free 100,000 Polish prisoners of the millions in captivity.
Here their story parallels my uncle Stash’s, who was freed to leave his labor camp near the Finnish border. Not knowing about each other’s camp survival, they all found their way south, wherever that was and whatever the means, to thaw from the Russian winters. Jurek and his brother joined the Polish army in Persia where the Poles made him drop his pants to check for Jewishness, the Poles, of course, not wanting Jews to pollute their army. Jurek’s mother found a priest to swear that her son was Catholic in spite of his circumcision. They passed through Tashkent, Tehran, Iraq, Karachi, and Mombasa in Kenya, to East Africa, Uganda, Tanganyika, and eventually to Egypt, where Jurek stayed for two years as a provisions officer for the Polish army. Also in the Polish army under British command, Stash fought in the Allied invasion of Italy, surviving some of the fiercest battles of the war. Both he and Jurek then settled in London, Stash for the rest of his life, Jurek until 1949 when he sailed on a cargo ship to Australia. “The war years were very very bad, but when I think back on it now, it doesn’t seem so bad. We survived, the chance to do so a thousand times greater in Russia than under German occupation.”
I don’t know how Jurek’s, Stash’s, or London Anita’s family escaped being murdered. Jurek and Stash were young men, and young men of fighting age were a potential danger, but then the slaughter included women and children for no other reason than their Jewishness. When the German offensive against the Soviet Union stalled in December 1941, everything changed in Germany’s plans regarding the sub-human Slavs and non-human Jews. A German victory would have allowed for their deportation. Since the attack on the Soviet Union, the Germans were achieving their goal of ridding the world of Jews by means of mass shooting. Toward the end of 1941, a million Jews in western and central Soviet Union had already been murdered. Now the Germans had to figure out how to kill the remaining Jews. The game had changed. In the ghettos of Poland, tens of thousand of Jews had died of disease and malnutrition, but two million Jews were still alive in western and central Poland. How would these people be killed? Two million Soviet citizens had already died in the German starvation camps, and now the survivors as well as a million young men in the Soviet army were also persuaded to kill Soviet Jews.
Thus the despised Slavs were used to slaughter the more despised Jews. It is a wonder that Stash, Jurek and family, London Anita and her parents survived the Jew killers from Estonia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine, many of whom were then used to help with the extermination of the Jews in death camps.
Jurek’s wife, Liane, tells me that in 2006, when they were on a cruise from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg, they spent a day in Gdynia, and Jurek refused to go ashore. Neither Stash nor Jurek ever set foot in Poland again.
2.
How to recapture the mood in our car, now headed for the Lithuanian border? What was I even capable of thinking? Terror obliterates everything. Maybe I tried to think of horse chestnuts in the Saski Gardens, or hum a song about Jarek buying a lamb bone at the village market or the sorry national anthem. I must have wanted Max to drive fast, to drive straight ahead, make no more turns. I must have understood that we didn’t want to die, and yet I had never buried a rabbit or a bird so what
did I know about death? In some Polish children’s book, there must have been mention of heaven. My mother kept saying, “Borze, Borze,” God, God. She was asking for help from someone I didn’t know about, someone she turned to when the humans around her were mean or angry or didn’t pay attention. I might have remembered once springing up in the middle of the night, already night-blind, walking into doorjambs or toys on the floor. Barefoot and cold, I walked into the dining room where the nursemaid was polishing the silver. I touched her and cried. I said I was afraid. She didn’t turn toward me. She said nothing. I ran back to my room and buried my head under the pillows.
In the front seat of the car, Max was yelling at other cars and farm trucks and horse-drawn carts, while my mother who sat next to him tried to calm him, always her job. Next to me, my father’s head was in his hands. He said nothing but then he never said much. Would we win or would we lose? What would happen if we lost? “Go, go, go,” I thought, and then the sky began to hum louder and louder until the planes were nearly above us and the van jerked to a stop. Max yelled to get out and we jumped into the ditch. Clumps of earth exploded, strafing bullets whizzed by, blowing earth and grass flat. My ears filled with the rattling of bullets, voices screaming, horses neighing. I buried my face in the mud and stones and garbage until the airplanes droned off to other targets and we ran back to the Citroen. Car doors slammed shut. People screamed. Dead or mutilated horses were dragged into the ditches. In school, we’d made cardboard gas masks, laughing at how silly we all looked. Now I felt alone, and touched the metal of the inside of the car, slid my hand over its curves and bumps. It was freezing cold and I lay my cheek on the icy metal.
When the red and white striped barrier of the border crossing appeared, the mood inside the van changed. Everyone stirred. We were close to getting out. One by one, border guards examined the cars. Some were allowed through, some pushed to the side. Our van inched ahead, hardly moving. There were five or ten cars in front of us. Polish soldiers hobbled past our van and threw their rifles into a growing pile before getting in line to walk across the border. Two Polish soldiers turned toward us and peered inside, then spat on the windshield, hissing, “Jews. Thank God for war. No more Jews.” Another soldier spat, then smacked the van so hard that it shook. Jews? “What are Jews?” I began to cry. My father pushed his way to the door of the van and climbed out, slamming it behind him. I watched him pace back and forth.
I once told a Polish friend about the border crossing, about the soldiers walking out of the country, spitting on our windshield, happy to witness Jews leaving. She said, “You’ve got to understand that the soldiers had no car, that they were bedraggled and came from very poor families, and then they passed a van full of people who seemed to have all the worldly possessions that they did not. That is the reason they demonstrated their rage to you and your family.” Her interpretation was comprehensible until I thought about it later, when it occurred to me that most of the people attempting to cross the border were not Jews, that there were many more rich Poles than rich Jews. So why did the soldiers accuse us of being Jews rather than capitalists or rich fucks, thus expressing a class hatred? Did the soldiers look inside our crammed van and catch us drinking Christian babies’ blood? Did we look Jewish, counting our money, our noses big and ugly? We must have looked prosperous, fur coats our currency, stashed in the back. Anita thinks that their name, Apfelbaum, may have been written on the side of the van.
But the border drama that would plague me the rest of my life was about to begin. I have reconstructed the events over and over in my mind. I see it clearly, in full color and surround-sound, as in a movie, though I’m not sure if it’s my movie or Rene Clement’s, or Stendahl’s Napoleonic retreat from Moscow in The Charterhouse of Parma. Suddenly my pacing father was nowhere to be seen. My uncle Max, turning purple with rage, shouted that my father crossed the border on the running board of a Mercedes a few cars ahead of ours. I closed my eyes. Voices argued, yelled, and whispered. Soldiers shouted. We were moving now and, in a blurred instant or hour, Max announced that we were in Lithuania. I was fully awake when suddenly the Citroen stopped. My father was standing on the side of the road. I pushed the van door open and ran into his arms. He was white as a ghost. His arms couldn’t hold me. I took his hand and led him back to the car. I will never forget his ashen face, the color of shame. All my life, I have searched for reasons other than the ones I know to be true. Could he really have betrayed his family, his only son? He might have entered the wooden guard house and, trying to assure all of our passage, offered them his gold wedding ring to let us through, plus a wristwatch, plus a bundle of zloty or dollars he had in his pocket. Then the guards could have grabbed all of it, pushed him out onto the running board of the Mercedes. They might have grabbed him, tried to hurt him, and he escaped, jumped onto that running board. He may not have had the proper documents and they pushed their rifle stocks into his belly. I was desperate for another story. Perhaps, in spite of my interpretation of his ghostlike face, hard etched in my brain, his face expressed not shame but an intolerable nausea for being forced to cross without us. But I would never know who he really was, what he might have said about the life-changing incident, or who he might have become if there had been no need to cross any border. If he did bolt at the border, leaving us to our chances, what could have driven him to his decision? A thought-free survival instinct? Did he not weigh the possibility of being discovered by us, a few cars behind? Did he plan it beforehand? It must have been a split-second decision. Had he acted based upon split-second decisions before this one? Was he hoping that our car would not get through? Did the people in the Mercedes agree to his hitching a ride with them? Why did the Mercedes people throw him out of their car and leave him by the side of the road where he stood in shame and self-hatred? Or did he ask to be dropped off? Now that he is long gone and I am once again in the neighborhood of his life story, the memories of this dark defining moment have returned to haunt me.
I don’t know the extent of my family’s anxiety at any of the borders we had to cross to escape, but it must have been huge and debilitating, for each crossing was a matter of life and death. I don’t even know what documents or bribes were necessary or how my mother, father, and uncle handled themselves with border functionaries who could not have had too much love for a bunch of “rich Jews.” Somehow, they must have obtained and carried the necessary passports, visas, proofs of birth and residency, as well as the furs, jewelry, and cash to grease every outstretched hand. They must have been aware that a life and death balance existed between offering too little or too much. A fur coat? Polish zloty? A diamond ring?
After Max and my mother got us out of Poland, we spent four quiet months in Sweden, waiting for some country to offer us visas. “Only New York,” my mother insisted in spite of offers from several South American countries that wanted the lucrative Apfelbaum fur business and reputation. Finally an American consul general recognized the name in a pile of applications and wondered for a moment why the name Apfelbaum was familiar to him, then remembered that his wife had recently bought a mink coat from them in Warsaw. The good official put the Potok-Apfelbaum visa application on top of the list and called them in their Stockholm apartment with the good news, another in a series of improbable moments, the kind that save lives.
In our rented Stockholm apartment, we were Max and his ex-wife, Zosia, their only child, six-year-old Anita; a governess, Pani Potocka; my parents and I. Pani Potocka chose to stay in Europe, but the interpretation of Zosia’s story and fate depended on who spoke of it in future years. Max and my mother insisted that Zosia, Anita’s mother, chose to stay in Sweden because she, a beautiful woman, had fallen in love with a Polish diplomat. Zosia, who eventually emigrated to New York in the 1950s, claimed that Max refused to take her to America. My father said that Zosia was a whore and could not control herself after another in a series of sexual encounters from which she could not tear herself away.
Anita adds a series
of events to our story. Even though our war memories differ to some degree and Zosia was never known for truth telling, Anita’s Zosia story makes sense. In Stockholm, Aunt Zosia gave me a ball bearing, the letters SKF written on its little black leather case. I played with it constantly and to this day believe that its magical action was instrumental in preserving my sanity in the crossing from one world to another. SKF, Svenska Kullagerfabriken, was already a large successful manufacturer of ball bearings, one of whose corporate heads Zosia had met on a train in Poland a short time before the war started. Zosia was a beautiful woman, always on the make according to family tales, so it’s easy to picture her seducing an unknown Swedish businessman traveling on the same train. From the time I was a little boy until late in her life, I found her round curvy body and her whiney Zsa Zsa Gabor voice very sexy. Whatever the connection between Zosia and the SKF man, on our arrival in Latvia, Anita tells me, Zosia called her new friend in Stockholm, related our story of escape, and asked for advice. Then, mirabile dictu, Herr SKF sent an airplane to the airport in Riga to pick us up and carry us to Sweden. Before hearing this version, I took it for granted that we drove to the airport, left the Citroen in some parking lot and paid, probably with a mink coat or two, for seats on the Riga-Stockholm flight. I still treasure the little ball bearing, which lives inside my desk drawer. From time to time, I roll the circular steel casing that holds the little ball bearings inside it, amazed that the thing spins and rolls as easily as it did when I was eight years old.
