My mother’s name was Marija, nee Katz. She was born in Narewka in 1896. She attended a grammar school and spoke German, Russian and Polish. Before World War I my mother worked for the Post Office. After she got married and had children she became a housewife. She occasionally helped out in the soap factory, but mostly she stayed at home.
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Emilia Ratz
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My mother had two older sisters and many brothers of whom I only knew one. One of her sisters was Bertha, who was married to a man who owned a wine-merchant’s in Grodno [today Belarus]. They didn’t have children. The other sister was Sonja; she wasn’t married. The only brother I knew was Joel Katz. He was a businessman and owned a timber trade in Bialystok [today Poland]; he was married and had a son, Josef. They were all killed in the Holocaust. Sometimes my mother’s brothers and sisters came to visit us but I don’t recall that my parents ever visited them. My mother was certainly happy to live in such a big city as Warsaw. They were all killed during the Holocaust.
My father, Israel Endler, was born in Warsaw in 1890. His mother tongue was Polish. He had a commercial education and was a soap manufacturer. He was a businessman. He was away a lot; his company was small and he tried to sell his goods by traveling from village to village.
I know that my father met my mother on a business trip. I assume that my mother was at her brother Joel’s in Bialystok when they met because I cannot image that my father would have even tried to sell his goods in such a small place as Narewka, but rather in bigger places such as Bialystok. I don’t know for sure though. They got acquainted before World War I and probably got married in 1919 or 1920 because I was born on 9th December 1921 in Warsaw.
When I was a child I had a nanny who even spoke German. Later we usually had peasant girls that helped my mother around the house. They had to put up with very modest conditions: they slept on a folding bed in the kitchen because our apartment only consisted of a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a small anteroom. Besides, the apartment was very dark because it was on the first floor.
We spent our vacations with our mother somewhere near Vilnius, what is today Lithuania. She took us to the countryside where she was born. Sometimes we just went to small villages close to Warsaw or we hired a farmer and a cart and went on a summer holiday. It took about an hour to get there and the road was named ‘the line’. Along this ‘line’ there were a number of small villages, the last of which were a bit more We rented an apartment and our father came by train to join us on either Friday morning or before Sabbath and returned Saturday evening or Sunday morning. If we went away for longer, we took our own bed sheets and dishes with us. My mother cooked for us; sometimes a peasant girl helped her. We, children, usually spent our holiday playing. There were also lakes in the area, so we could also play in the water. My mother often joined us playing, otherwise she read the papers or books.
I attended a private elementary school for two years. I wasn’t extremely industrious but I had to do my homework; that was my duty. My parents must have been doing quite well at that time because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to afford to send me to a private school. Afterwards they took me out of that school and I had to study in a public school, which was free, for four years. It was only when I entered grammar school that I went to a private school again. I could have attended a public grammar school, but due to anti-Semitism it wasn’t so easy for Jewish children to enter grammar school.
At the grammar school I went to there were mainly Jewish teachers who would have had a hard time finding a job at a public school and who were very committed. I assume my parents sent me to this school on purpose because there was a strong anti-Semitism in Poland at the time, whereas I didn’t have to face anything of the like in this school. It wasn’t a Jewish school; all the students there were assimilated Jewish children who stood by their Jewishness and the fact that they were Polish citizen and regarded Poland as their homeland. There were even Jewish members in the Polish parliament back then. Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s brought an end to that.
I had a cousin – I don’t remember from which side of the family – who went to school in Breslau. He was expelled from Germany in 1938 because he was a Polish Jew. Once he came to our place for lunch. He had very right-wing political views, but he told us in detail about the ‘Jewish Laws’ in Germany. I was hardly 16 at the time and loathed this cousin of mine. I said to my mother, ‘If you ever invite Henry – that’s what my cousin was called – for lunch again, let me know so that I can make sure I won’t be home then.’ Jozef Pilsudski 4 was a dictator, but he was well disposed towards Jews.
I did look Jewish enough, but it never happened that anyone abused me on the street; I never ever experienced anything the like. A gym teacher – she wasn’t Jewish - was said to be anti-Semitic. I met her again by accident after the war and she almost squashed me when she hugged me, out of joy that I had stayed alive. It has to be said though, that many Christians who were anti-Semitic before the Holocaust changed their minds after they realized what that meant. There was this familiar quote in Poland at the time: Away with Jewish men, Jewish women stay with us!
I took an interest in politics as early as 1935, at the age of 14. It was at the time when Polish fascism started to rise. I met leftwing students and developed a leftist attitude.
There was a drama theater at our school. I was a member and worked on plays under the direction of the teachers. We also created the sets ourselves. Each year a subject that we wanted to adapt for the stage was discussed and agreed on. I remember one of them, which was ‘My favorite book’. This way the reading matter for children was supposed to be influenced. We performed a fragment of a historical novel and a fragment of a thriller, and of course children were advised against the thriller. I was also part of a literary circle and very good at writing.
I had friends from different classes of society and therefore I clearly saw the difference between my typical petit bourgeois home and other milieus. My father was conservative in every respect and therefore we almost always had different opinions. He was a typical small-scale businessman who wanted to support his family and make sure that his daughters behaved properly.
I met most of my friends at school, through drama classes and courses. We didn’t go to the cinema or coffee houses because we didn’t have enough money for that. Sometimes we met at the home of a more progressive friend, if his or her parents allowed it.
If I look back at my parents’ cultural life and compare it to mine, I have to say that they had a very poor one. They rarely went to the theater and when they did they watched operettas or revues. They took me along to a revue twice.
All the Jews in our surrounding were kosher; there were many kosher stores. We lived on a very long street, one side of which was Jewish – apart from one non-Jew, Mr. Stanislaw, the janitor of our house – and the other was Christian. There was a Catholic church opposite our house; it was the only building in what later became the Warsaw Ghetto that survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 6. The Great Synagogue was quite a bit away from our house, so my father and mother went to a prayer house close to our home, on the high holidays.
My father prayed daily, and on Friday afternoon, at the beginning of Sabbath, he stopped smoking. No lights were lit up any longer. He was deeply religious and followed all rules. There was no cooking on Saturday; the food was completely prepared beforehand. I remember the single time my father entered the kitchen. He had found a knife for meat among the cutlery for dairy products. My mother, in her despair, said that the nanny had probably mixed them up. My father immediately put the knife into a pot of earth. I had the impression that my mother was way less religious than my father. I can’t describe it exactly, it’s just that she was always very tolerant towards me. She never punished me either.
None of us was a Zionist. I never heard any conversations about emigrating to Palestine or anything the like. Maybe there were such talks among other adults, I don’t know. It was probably also a question of money because we were people who couldn’t afford to go abroad.
The war broke out on 1st September 1939 [see Invasion of Poland] 8. My friend and I went to the Technical University by tram to hand in our documents. I wanted to study chemistry; it was my dream to become a chemist. When we reached the center of town I noticed young boys crying out loud and distributing a special edition of a newspaper. I said to my friend that I would get off the tram to see what was printed in the paper. War was already in the air! When I read about the mobilization of men in the newspaper, I told my friend, ‘I’m not going to leave my documents with the university. It’s almost certain that there’s going to be a war.
When the Germans marched into Warsaw I stood on the street with my fists clenched. They marched into town like heroes, dressed in black, with an arrogant expression on their faces, and with tanks. I ran home and had an argument with my parents. I wanted us to flee together. My father said, ‘What do you think you know? You’re just a child. That’s all exaggerated.’ And my mother said, ‘ You know, the Germans are a civilized people, just think of Schiller and Goethe!’ I realized that my attempts were hopeless. Two years before the war the economical situation had improved, people bought furniture and things like that and they clung to that. So I began to fight for my sister. And at that point my father burst out in a fit of rage: ‘What do you think you’re doing! You’re not even grown up yet!
As a result of this I moved in with my friend Halina Altmann. Her parents were progressive. Her mother was in prison for her political convictions, or perhaps she had already been released at the time, I don’t remember exactly. They were all left wing and decided to flee. Halina escaped to Lwow [today Ukraine], where she studied at university. Her parents and her younger brother fled to Lutzk, a small village, which was under Russian rule back then, and which today belongs to Ukraine. Halina’s father happened to be on a business trip in Kiev when the Germans marched into Lutzk and killed her mother and brother. Halina and her father survived the Holocaust. I ‘terrorized’ my parents and said I’d only come back home if they would at least let me go. I hadn’t attained my majority yet but was only missing a few months.
Shortly after the Germans invaded Warsaw, I saw how they cut off a Jew’s beard at the market place. I said to my parents, ‘I know I don’t have a chance here. You don’t either but I can’t force you to come along.’ My father remained stubborn; for him it was out of the question to let me go. At that moment my mother said to my father, and it probably took her a lot of courage to do so, ‘You know, I can’t take responsibility for Mila [Emilia]’. Upon that my father agreed with her. He allowed me to go on the condition that I wouldn’t leave with all the ‘insane’ people, so he went to get a taxi for me. In that taxi he wanted me to go to my mother’s brother, Uncle Joel, in Bialystok, who would take care of me. My father put 100 zloty into my shoes, which made no sense at all because I couldn’t have done anything with that money.
A woman and her baby were traveling with me; her husband was already on the Russian side. But we didn’t know then that a partition of Poland into German and Russian territory had taken place on 17th October 1939 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 9. The taxi had barely made it 20 kilometers when the Germans confiscated it. In this chaos, the woman with the baby said she would return home. I asked her to tell my parents that she had lost sight of me. Thereupon I joined some strangers and we continued on our way on foot. I think it was about 300 kilometers to Bialystok [today Belarus]. It felt like being in a flock of sheep a bit: everyone’s going so I’m going, too. Sometimes farmers gave us a lift in their carts; there were hardly cars around then and the Germans had requisitioned the ones that existed.
I didn’t want to start an argument with him so I just went to the center of town a few days later, where I found a refugee organization. They gave me a free ticket to Lwow, so I went to my uncle and announced, ‘I’m going to Lwow tomorrow!’ Of course this caused a similar scandal as the one I had had at home. But I didn’t let them stop me. I wanted to study and there was no possibility to do so in Bialystok. My uncle said, ‘But you don’t even know anyone there’. Upon which I just murmured, ‘For goodness sake, I’m not going into the desert!’
When I got off the train in Lwow in the evening I stood at the railway station like a poor orphan. I had never been to this city before. I knew that Lwow was a cultural center, but that was about it. A woman approached me, saying, ‘Girl, you must be a refugee!’ ‘Yes’, I replied. ‘Do you have a place to stay?’ ‘No.’ ‘You can stay at my place. I only have a small apartment but I’ll put a mattress into the bathtub and you can sleep there.’ My benefactress turned out to be a teacher. I told her, ‘You know, I want to study at the university here. I have no money but I’ll probably meet many friends at university.’ I knew many people from Warsaw, also older students. The next day I wrote to my uncle: ‘I have arrived.’
And, indeed, I met a lot of old acquaintances at the university. I was the youngest and everyone felt obliged to help me. It was the beginning of November and exams were over already. However, there was a student committee because this was an unusual year: there were a lot of people who wouldn’t have been allowed to enter university, both Jews and communists. And this committee had fought for us to be allowed to take special entrance exams.
When I got off the train in Lwow in the evening I stood at the railway station like a poor orphan. I had never been to this city before. I knew that Lwow was a cultural center, but that was about it. A woman approached me, saying, ‘Girl, you must be a refugee!’ ‘Yes’, I replied. ‘Do you have a place to stay?’ ‘No.’ ‘You can stay at my place. I only have a small apartment but I’ll put a mattress into the bathtub and you can sleep there.’ My benefactress turned out to be a teacher. I told her, ‘You know, I want to study at the university here. I have no money but I’ll probably meet many friends at university.’ I knew many people from Warsaw, also older students. The next day I wrote to my uncle: ‘I have arrived.’
And, indeed, I met a lot of old acquaintances at the university. I was the youngest and everyone felt obliged to help me. It was the beginning of November and exams were over already. However, there was a student committee because this was an unusual year: there were a lot of people who wouldn’t have been allowed to enter university, both Jews and communists. And this committee had fought for us to be allowed to take special entrance exams.
All my friends helped me with my studies so that I would pass the exams with good results, and indeed, I succeeded. My dream had come true: I could start my chemistry studies. With a trick I also got a space in the student hostel after two months. When I had finished my exams I was granted a scholarship but it was hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I worked besides my studies: I cleaned floors and knitted pullovers for a shop. The owner of the store had hidden some wool, and I knitted the pullovers from that wool, which was forbidden. The third job I had was also the most daring: I drew boards to illustrate the vocabulary for the language classes of the English Faculty, and it was daring because I had no talent when it came to drawing. Drawing bodies I could cope with somewhat but when it came to heads a friend of mine, who studied architecture, came to my place in the evenings to help me out.
Anti-Semitism was particularly horrible at universities. Polish nationalists achieved that Jews and non-Jews had to be in separate classrooms – we called that ‘bench ghetto’ – and they constantly instigated fights.
I experienced the reality of this ‘socialism’ for two years. I had already read The Communist Manifesto back in Warsaw and I believed that Soviet Russia was paradise. The materialistic side of things was left out of account – no one thought about things like that. Once I watched a historical Soviet film on the tsarist era, against imperialism, in which they also trampled on Polish flags. I was upset: after all I was a Polish patriot. Sometimes I approached the older ones students to draw their attention to certain things, which, in my opinion, weren’t politically correct. They always had some kind of excuse: ‘Yes, there are mistakes, but it’s the right principle’, they would say.
There was a shop on the university grounds where you could buy drawing paper, ink and things like that and I continually met this handsome young guy in the dean’s office, where you got vouchers for the learning material. Well, that handsome young guy was Martin and he became my boyfriend.
On 23rd June 1941 I was supposed to sit an extremely difficult exam in mechanics. I was in the fourth term. At 6am on Sunday, 22nd June [the beginning of the so-called Great Patriotic War] 10, a colleague of mine, who I knew from school, came to my place and said, ‘War has begun!’ We all thought she was out of her mind, but the very moment she said it, firing started. A few minutes later we understood that this was no mere training.
I volunteered for the army along with two other girls; we wanted to fight against Hitler. They didn’t want to accept us though because we didn’t have the proper training. So we just told them that we had had a class on the subject in school, where they had trained us to be nurses in the war. Thereupon we were accepted as assistant nurses. A military hospital had been set up in the building of the university, but there were no wounded people at that stage yet.