Leon Lifsches
Sopot
Poland
Interviewer: Anna Szyba
Date of interview: March 2006
I meet Mr. Lifsches in his spacious apartment in Sopot where he lives surrounded by books and flowers. Mr. Lifsches is not eager to speak about his family and I get the impression he is actually embarrassed by the fact that his parents were orthodox Jews. Modernity and progress contrast in his story with backwardness, the symbol of which is his “fanatic” father. Mr. Lifsches gets agitated when he starts speaking about his career as a communist, he is proud of having fought in the Battle of Lenino, and of his role in the founding of the Jewish War Veterans Association 1.
My family background
I was born on 29th December, 1915, in Chrzanow [town 50 km west of Cracow]. I come from a bourgeois family. My mother’s name was Aurelia Lifsches, nee Rosenbaum, and she was born in 1876 in Chrzanow. I knew her mother, her surname was Rosenbaum, but I don’t remember her first name. She lived in Chrzanow, on Krakowska Street. She used to have a husband, but he died. I know nothing about him; I don’t even know his name.
My grandmother was religious, because everyone was religious then, but she was also progressive. She wasn’t a fanatic. She lit the candles but I don’t think she kept kosher. We often visited her. I spoke with her in Polish and Yiddish, she spoke Polish fluently. She was a housewife. That’s all I remember about my grandmother.
My father’s parents’ name was Lifsches. I don’t remember the first names of my paternal grandmother or grandfather, because I didn’t know them. They lived and died in Volhynia [region in the east of prewar Poland, today western Ukraine], but I don’t know when.
My father, Pinkus, was born in 1877 in Radzillow in Volhynia [small town ca. 100km north-east of Lwow, today Ukraine] and he lived there until his marriage. My parents’ marriage wasn’t unarranged. All Jewish marriages were arranged then. They got married around 1900, I think, because my eldest brother was born in 1905.
My father was a salesman, a merchant. He sold tea and flour products. There was a store in the basement, he sold there; we helped him on an irregular basis. My mother ran the house; she was, as it was called, ‘with her husband.’
I had four brothers and a sister. Michal was born in 1905, Heniek [affectionate for Henryk] in 1906, my sister Hanka [affectionate for Hanna] in 1911, I was born in 1915, Iziek [affectionate for Izajasz] in 1917, and between them there was one more brother who died.
We lived in Chrzanow at 12 Aleja Henryka. It was a four-story building, the landlord’s name was Szmajdler; we had a four-person apartment on the third floor. There were four rooms, a kitchen and a balcony . I think I shared a room with my brothers, but I don’t really remember. Our whole family of seven lived there.
In the neighborhood there lived relatives named Szott who had six daughters. All those daughters survived [the Holocaust] and [until recently] they lived in Israel. One went with the Maccabi 2 to Palestine before the war and stayed there. She was the eldest one, and I met her when I visited Israel ten years ago. Her name is Jozefa Wajnsztok.
Chrzanow was a Jewish town, an artisan town. Seventy percent of the inhabitants were Jews – tailors, shoemakers, etc. There was one famous factory in Chrzanow, Poland’s first railway engine manufacturing plant. It was the only factory in Chrzanow, the only such factory in Poland, and the only plant [in Chrzanow] where Jews worked next to Christians.
There was a wooded area in Chrzanow. We often went there. There was a fence [around] the house that we lived in, and beyond the fence was a park. We played there. Our backyard adjoined the park. My friends were mostly Jews.
There was the sports association, Maccabi, which I joined at the age of ten or eleven. We met several times a week to practice, exercise. Besides that, there was also the Sokol sports association 3, they did rifleman training, gymnastics, kind of government-affiliated [founded in 1867 in Lwow]. We also went there from time to time, but then they stopped it.
My father was religious but come Saturday, he would invariably fall ill to avoid going to the synagogue. He didn’t work on Saturday, he was a fanatic [derisive for ‘religious’]. There was a synagogue in Chrzanow 4, and there were prayer houses. My father went to both. On the high holidays you went to the synagogue, and on the other occasions you went to the prayer house close to home.
My mother wore a wig but she didn’t keep kosher. She had progressive views. Before the war, it was like that: in the matchmaker’s presence, every woman wore a wig. It was a kind of rule. Whether she was religious or not. And what that woman really thought [about religious laws] was a separate matter. My mother generally didn’t go to the synagogue, but she lit the candles [on Friday], made the chulent.
We celebrated Sabbath. We ate dinner together at the table, and that was it, after dinner everyone went where they wanted. My father’s method of preventing us from going anywhere on Saturday was to hide one shoe from each of us. But since we knew the trick, we had an extra pair stashed away at the neighbors’ and we ran away to the woods.
We didn’t go to cheder but we had a melamed, a Jewish teacher. I remember he was a very dull man, so I didn’t learn much from him. He didn’t teach the Torah, he taught the Yiddish language, not Hebrew but Yiddish. He was such a man that his teaching was really very primitive so we didn’t have much respect for him. He came to us when I was nine or ten, I was the only one to be taught [during that time], my brothers were all progressive [that is, dissociated themselves from the Jewish tradition].
I remember the following episode: when I was 13, I was rehearsing for my bar mitzvah, my father kept provoking me unnecessarily, I simply couldn’t properly read the text, and he gave me a slap on the face. I got angry and I calmly took off the tefillin, placed them on the table, and it was then, at the age of 13, that I became ungodly. It was a memorable episode that I remember very well.
My sister went to a normal [public] gymnasium, I also attended a normal elementary school. I have only one memory from there: of a teacher named Szeligowski whose teaching method was to smack you on the hands and on the backside, he was really cruel. I think he taught Polish. It was a normal, large elementary school. There were Polish boys, Jewish boys, everyone played together. No antagonisms whatsoever. It was a Jewish town, it couldn’t have been otherwise.
With our mother we spoke virtually only Polish at home, and with our father it was basically the same. My father could read Yiddish, he bought the Haint 5 and the Morgenshtern 6. He completed a normal elementary school back in Volhynia. My mother finished elementary school in Chrzanow.
We usually all spoke Polish. I cannot read Yiddish, cannot write it, I’m only familiar somewhat with the spoken language. I never learned Hebrew. I don’t know what language it was you recited the Torah fragments in. You learned all those poems, the [Torah] excerpts, memorized them. I don’t remember how the holidays were observed at home.
When we were 13 or 14, there were May Day demonstrations on the 1st of May [worker holiday established by the 2nd International, celebrated since 1890 in the form of street demonstrations, marches, and rallies].
Growing up
Our house stood near the prison. We heard screams and it turned out it was the guards giving the inmates a beating. By that time, I had already joined the Red Scouts [leftwing scouting organization, 1926-1939]. So we went to demonstrate in front of the prison, the whole group of Jewish and Polish youth. The Red Scouts were affiliated with the KZMP 7 [Editor’s note: the Red Scouts did not have any direct political affiliations]. It wasn’t strictly a Jewish organization. I don’t know why I went there. My father had no political views.
We lived in Chrzanow until 1932, and in 1932 our whole family moved to Bielsko [large town, today city, 50 km south of Chrzanow]. Henryk’s brother worked in Bielsko, he was a commercial representative for the fruit product company Parol. We lived at 24 Rynek. The landlord was a German. We had a four-room apartment on the second floor, there was a bathroom, a kitchen, everything. I no longer went to school, I was already on my own. I had completed a textile college there.
In Bielsko, I was a member of the Communist Youth Union and, on its orders, an activist for the MOPR 8, which was a KPP 9 affiliate. Before that, I was a member of the Jewish Worker Cultural and Educational Association [a.k.a. Sila (Strength), founded 1908]. That was purely Jewish, and then, in Bielsko, I began my political activity in the communist party. Later I linked up with the left-wing movement. Being active on the communist party meant taking part in manifestations, in strikes, the whole political life.
We were divided into three-person cells that met secretly, and the police knew about them only if they had informers inside. There was a division into districts, neighborhoods, and then into cells. The party activity took place on three levels: the cell, the neighborhood, the factory. The cells usually met at the factories. At the time, I worked as a dyer at a textile plant, and that’s where I conducted my activity as a communist.
My mother knew I was a communist but my father did not. She was very progressive. She only kept telling us, ‘Alright, everything’s fine, but just don’t get yourself arrested.’ We were all very involved, my sister, too.
My brother Michal emigrated to Palestine in 1932. He wasn’t a Zionist. He went alone, as a chalutz, and there, in Palestine, he joined the communist party and was active in it. He eventually got arrested and deported and he returned to Chrzanow, I don’t remember when, and he remained an active communist.
Heniek got married before the war. His wife’s name was Gienia, nee Kizler. A Jewess from Bielsko. She gave birth to a baby girl, in 1939, I guess, but that was already in Lwow. They named her Wiera.
We weren’t the upper-income kind of petty bourgeois merchants, not at all. Medium-income, I’d say. We didn’t go away for the summer holidays. I don’t really remember what we did; in Chrzanow, we had a newsstand, selling newspapers, buns, that sort of thing. Besides that, we frolicked. Wandered around the parks, the squares, got into mischief, as boys do. I never went to Volhynia.
There was also my mother’s sister who lived in Chrzanow. Her last name was Klajn, I don’t remember her first name. Her husband was a money lender; they had a son. His name was Berek Klajn and during the occupation he was in Auschwitz, after which he found himself in Israel where he had two children and where he died.
His wife, Maryska Klajn, was born in Przemysl and is alive, she lives in Ramat Gan. We keep in touch. She was virtually the only relative we had in Chrzanow. My mother had no other siblings, I think, and I don’t know whether my father had any brothers or sisters at all.
In 1937, there was a pogrom in Bielsko 10, organized by the Stronnictwo Narodowe 11, the endeks, whose local leader was a man named Zajaczek. And we, as the communist party, together with the class-conscious trade unions, dispelled that pogrom. We took several thousand workers out to the street, they started setting houses, businesses on fire, and at the head of that communist party committee stood a woman, Szyfra Goldszlak, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who spent ten years in prison for her activity. She was arrested in Bielsko. Nobody died in that pogrom.
Financially, we all depended on Henryk who had a business. We weren’t strapped for money; I was independent, had a job. We initially lived together, and then Henryk got married and moved out, but he still lived in Bielsko, it was called Aleja, a Jewish neighborhood, new houses. My sister also had a job; she was a bookkeeper in a very big clothing store. Iziek was a textile worker in a factory, and Michal ran a store for Henryk throughout all that time.
In March 1938 I was arrested and sentenced to 18 months. I still have the original indictment. I did my time together with other communists in a prison in Cieszyn [town 50 km west of Cracow]. During that time, my father died of tuberculosis. I wanted to attend his funeral, but the police said that had to be under escort, and I didn’t agree to that. So I didn’t attend his funeral, but my father is buried at the Jewish cemetery [in Bielsko].
I was released in June, a few months before the war, and was banned from the town for ten years as an ‘undesirable element.’ I went to Lodz. There I moved in with my second brother, Iziek, who had also served time in prison and has been banned. Michal was banned too, he moved to the Tarnopol province, lived in Trembowla [ca. 130km east of Lwow, today Ukraine]. He got married there, his wife’s name was Buchholz, I don’t know her first name.
During the war
We were in Lodz from June to October 1939. From September, we were under German occupation 12. We left the city with my brother [Iziek] sometime at the turn of October and November. It was still possible to flee, the Germans allowed families to reunite and issued travel permits. It was in Zgierz [suburb of Lodz], and we took advantage of the opportunity. We were leaving at the last moment, acquaintances had already let us know that the Polish police had made communist activists’ files available to the Gestapo.
We went to Warsaw, and from there to Bialystok, and from there to Lwow. The years 1940-1941 we spent in Lwow. Henryk was there, Iziek, me, and Hanka. We all worked with tricot in a textile factory. I worked as a foreman in the dye room, my brother worked as a weaver, and Hanka was a tricot worker. Each of us lived on their own. I lived in Lyczakow [Lwow neighborhood], in a rented apartment.
My mother didn’t want to go with us to Lwow, she went to her sister in Chrzanow instead. And there she died, and Hanka also went to Chrzanow during the Lwow period, to be with our mother, and they both died in Kety, near Chrzanow, in a kind of ghetto sub-camp [Editor’s note: the town of Kety is located 40 km south-west of Chrzanow, 20 km south of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) 20 km north-east of Bielsko. No information has been found on the existence of any camp or sub-camp in Kety. The likeliest possibility is that it was a permanent outpost for Jewish workers working outside the ghetto].
I lost touch with my mother and sister when I was still in Lwow. At the end of 1941 I learned that they were both dead, acquaintances wrote us from there, non-Jews with whom we indirectly kept in touch.
Before the outbreak of the [German-Soviet] war 13, I was enlisted in the Red Army, and Iziek was called up for the so called reserve drill. And there war met us and we didn’t return home, becoming, as you call it, front-liners instead. I served on the Ukrainian front and there we were demobilized and sent away – we were to join the Anders’ army 14. All those who came from Western Ukraine were demobilized with us, as ‘unreliable element.’ That was early 1942.
We were enlisted in the work battalions, the so called ‘stroybats’ [Russian stroityelniy battalion – construction battalion]. They told us we would join the Anders’ army and instead we found ourselves in Novosibirsk as stroybat members, building a metallurgical plant at minus 40 degrees Celsius. And there, a group of 200 soldiers, we mutinied and organized a strike.
Among us was Lucjan Szenwald [1909-1944, poet, communist, fought in the Battle of Lenino], I remember, he was a famous writer. We refused to go to work. A district military prosecutor came and, surprisingly, asked us what we wanted, so we said we were professionals and had nothing against working in the stroybats – but in our professions. To our surprise, 24 hours later the military prosecutor personally arrived with some buses and those buses took us to boarding houses where we were given jobs [consistent with our professions]. And that was an episode that could have well ended tragically.
Iziek was still on the front, somewhere near Moscow. And from there, he was also sent to the trudarmia 15, to Tashkent. We met many of our friends in Novosibirsk. One was a guy named Sternlicht, from Bielsko, his wife worked in the canteen, gave us some extra food, and it was there I learned that my three brothers, Michal, Henryk, and Iziek, were in Tashkent.
It was 1942. And so, illegally, me and a whole group of people, we hopped on a train carrying Polish soldiers released from camps, and we rode towards the Anders’ army, towards Tashkent. Eventually I found myself in a place near Bukhara where they told us to pull our pants down and said, ‘about turn!’ End of story, they checked whether we were circumcised. By that time, Jews were no longer admitted into the Anders’ army 16.
Some people went to Fergana, me and some other people went to Tashkent, but my brother Henryk was no longer there, having left with the Anders’ army. Michal lived in the Kyrgyz Republic, worked in a kolkhoz 17. I got a job in Tashkent as a dyer in a cooperative, Iziek worked in a state textile factory, also in Tashkent. We lived in an Uzbek quarter, called Barkhan, with a Russian lady who had also been evacuated, in very primitive conditions.
We received support from the MOPR Central Committee. There was a large group of Jews in Tashkent at the time, several hundred people. Tashkent had a sizeable Jewish minority in itself, plus there were many of us, the émigrés. We were a large, strong communist group, kind of affiliated with the MOPR Central Committee. The party itself had been banned.
We were in Tashkent until 12th May 1943, after which date we left the city to join the 1st Division 18. Me and Iziek fought in the Battle of Lenino, and my brother was killed virtually a couple of steps away from me.
I was the second in command of the regiment’s medical company. I personally took part in taking wounded soldiers away from the front line under enemy fire. During one such excursion to the front line I was heavily wounded. I went through several hospitals between October and May, and eventually found myself in a Polish hospital in Moscow, where I underwent the final surgery.
After being released from the hospital, I was sent back to the front, to the headquarters, in Lutsk, Ukraine, and from there I went with the army as an officer, already wounded in battle, with the back units. I took part in the liberation of Lublin [23rd July 1944, the city was Poland’s temporary capital for the next 164 days], and then in the liberation of Warsaw [17th January 1945].
Following the liberation of Warsaw, in 1945, I was sent back to Lublin, and directly from there, already released from service, to Silesia, to Katowice, and from Katowice to Bielsko, because the rule was that all officers and professionals were sent to areas they knew to join the reconstruction effort there. I took part in the reconstruction of industry.
After the war
I was a member of the Polish Workers’ Party [PPR] 19, a party official; I served for some time as secretary for economic matters on the provincial committee in Bielsko. All the time in the textile industry, in the Textile Industry Federation, and in 1952 I was transferred to Warsaw.
I met my wife in 1945. She had also come from Lublin, delegated by the PPR Central Committee. Her name was Zofia Kubik, born in 1919. She wasn’t Jewish, but she fought in a partisan unit in the Rzeszow area. She was a dressmaker by profession.
I have two sons. Andrzej was born on 3rd November 1946, and Marek on 12th May 1950. Andrzej has a degree in sociology, lives in Canada, works as a librarian, and the younger one is a kind of electronics engineer. Andrzej’s wife is called Malgorzata, nee Kowalska, a Pole. They have two daughters, but kill me if I remember their names.
My other son had many wives and has a son with his second one. He lived in Denmark for a long time, left Poland in the 1970s, fed up with the anti-Semitism. He spent the last five years in Poland and is now going back to Denmark.
My children knew about their roots. Our home was completely non-religious, but they have never disavowed [their Jewishness]. In fact, everyone knew that my son would punch any kid who’d derisively call him a Jew. I’ve never changed my last name. My younger son opposes anti-Semitism vehemently if he finds himself among people of such views. As far as Jewish matters go, they haven’t forgotten their roots.
In Warsaw I worked at the Ministry of Crafts, as the head of the military department, and then in the State Reserves Office, I don’t remember since when. I was fired as part of the March story 20. People were harassed, fired from their jobs, my son was expelled from Warsaw University. The famous philosopher, Kotarbinski intervened on his behalf. My son was friend with his grandson and after some time he was readmitted to the university. [Tadeusz Marian Kotarbinski (1886-1981): philosopher, logician, ethic, member of the Lwow-Warsaw school of philosophy]
I got a job at a cooperative called Optima. I worked for some two years there as deputy chief executive for sales, but eventually left because the company was utterly corrupt and they wanted me to participate in their swindles, so I called it quits and took early retirement, at the age of 55 – that is in 1970.
In Warsaw I joined the Social and Cultural Society of Polish Jews 21 and was a co-founder and board member of the Association of Jewish War Veterans. That was in 1987. As a group of social activists, we undertook efforts aimed at setting up an organization of Jewish war veterans. I was initially the head of the veteran department for the Warsaw region, and then, for three terms, a total of 12 years, the chairman of the welfare committee.
As for my brothers, Henryk left Russia with the Anders’ army and went with it to Palestine, where he stayed with his wife and daughter. They had one more daughter, but I can’t remember her name. My brother died in 1978. I didn’t attend his funeral, it wasn’t allowed to go to Israel [the Soviet Bloc countries didn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel from 1967 to 1989].
Michal returned to Bielsko after the war and emigrated to Israel sometime in the late 1950s. There he had two sons with his second wife. He had no children with his first wife, the Buchholz girl he married back in Lwow, and they got a divorce. She moved to Szczecin after the war, and he married again in Bielsko. With the new wife he went to Israel and he has two sons there.
One has a PhD in economics, his name is Jacob. He lectures at the university. The other one, Janek, works for a branch of the Polish bank PKO, speaks good Polish. I keep in touch with them. The other one speaks Polish less well. Michal died two years ago in Israel. Cousin Berek’s wife, Marysia Klajn, who survived in a nunnery, is still alive.
I was in Israel once, as an individual tourist. That was in 1989, I visited my relatives. I never went abroad during the communist period, in 1992 I went to Denmark to see my son.
My first wife had a heart condition and we partly moved out to Sopot [town ca. 15km north of Gdansk], we helped organize the Jewish community there, and there we met [my present] wife who worked as a conservator. She was a family friend and she helped us organize the Jewish community, the Jewish war veterans association in Sopot.
My second wife, Hanna Domanska, is a Pole, born in 1932 in Poznan, who has lived in Sopot since 1946. When my wife died, fifteen years ago, she became my second wife. During the occupation Hania lived in Warsaw and was strongly moved by the Jewish ghetto 22 and Ghetto Uprising 23 experiences. So it’s no accident that she’s involved in these matters.
At a time when no one dreamed yet about reviving the Jewish community, Hania was already deeply into it as historical monument conservator, being in charge of care over the Jewish cemeteries. And we started writing together [books about the Gdansk-Sopot-Gdynia Jews]. We have organized a Jewish festival since 1990. And eventually, bit by bit, gradually, I moved out to Sopot.
Due to various misunderstandings we haven’t been involved with Jewish matters for two years now. I was tired with all that, in fact, I’ve had several surgeries so I want to slow down now.
Glossary
