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"Finally, for the price of 100 zlotys, [Meir] Alter received a bit of snow, handed to him on the tip of a bayonet."
Before the Nazis commenced their mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto, a distinguished lawyer named Stanislav (or Stanislaw) Adler resigned from the "Jewish Police" (Jewish Order Service) and later wrote In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 -- 1943, An Account of a Witness: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler (Jerusalem: Daf-Hen Press, 1982). This incomparable record of life and death inside the Warsaw Ghetto appeared through the efforts of Vancouver's Ludmila "Lola" Fiszhaut-Zeldowicz, who daringly escaped with him from the Jewish Quarter -- as they knew it then -- in early 1943. The book jacket cover, a photo caption and Lola's notes spell his first name as Stanislaw; whereas the Yad Vashem preface and cover flaps use Stanislav.
Decades later, having lived with him in hiding from the Nazis for a year, it was Lola Zeldowicz who arranged for this sophisticated memoir to be translated from Polish by Sara (Chmielewska) Philip, to be edited by B.C.-born Betty Keller and to be published in English by Yad Vashem. Lola Zeldowicz also wrote a foreword for the book’s original Polish edition in 1977.
Betty Keller recalls: "Lola had brought the translation by Sara Chmielewska Philip to Cherie Smith of November House in the hope of having it published here. Unfortunately, Philip's English was imperfect, to say the least, and she had great difficulty with English sentence structures and idioms, and that's where I came into the picture. I would edit the 'easy' sections, then Lola and I would do battle over the obscure sections together, she with the Polish version, a dictionary and her memory of the events in hand. It was a great experience--which is not always true of the substantive editing process as you know--and we became good friends. And by the time the edit was finished, she had found the necessary funding to have the book published by Yad Vashem."
Although a few other ghetto memoirists also looked beyond their individual perspectives to report on the social structures of the Warsaw Ghetto -- such as Ringelblum, Katznelson, Kaplan, Levin and Brisker -- according to the Yad Vashem Editorial Board, "There is no one like Adler -- an intelligent man with a broad education and sensitive to the needs of the public -- to explain the motives and conflicts that arose between the Jewish police and the Jewish public in the ghetto."
In January of 1943, Dr. Lola Zeldowicz entered the Ghetto on a special permit to tend to a very sick child. When there was an unforeseen ghetto blockade, she was forced to climb over dead Jewish bodies on a staircase and hide for days in a cellar bunker with Stanislav Adler, Dr. Julian Lewinson and his elderly mother. Calls from outside, in Polish, saying, 'Jews come out, it would be better for you,' were met with their complete silence.
After four days in that bunker, Dr. Levinson, a physician for the Jewish Police, dared to leave the bunker first, when the explosions outside finally ceased. Houses were smouldering or in flames. Streets were strewn with cadavers. Grisly evidence of the first Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis filled their hearts with joy.
As the Ghetto's Director of Housing, Adler, born in 1901, made known his intentions to escape to his superior, Marek Lichtenbaum. A philanthropist and a surviving member of the Judenrat, Lichtenbaum told him, "The captains are the last to leave the sinking ship. However, our ship has already sunk."
Thereafter, in early February, Adler devised a hasty plan to escape by hiding among the dead bodies that were routinely hauled away on a hearse, drawn by horses. Adler recalled, "In January and February of 1942, at the height of the typhus epidemic, the mortality rate in the Jewish Quarter exceeded five thousand a month.
"In the street every few hundred paces, one could see a human corpse covered with newspaper. Somehow, in the passage of time, people got used to this sight and only the most sensitive crossed to the opposite side of the street and turned their heads away. But even the most courageous or insensitive lost their nerve when, in the darkness of the night, they happened to accidently step on some soft object that turned out to be a cadaver. On those occasions, invariably, hysterical screams rang out.
"The number of burial enterprises rapidly increased. They used the old-fashioned type of horse-drawn hearse that carried eight corpses simultaneously. Six inside the hearse while two were placed on the roof. From beneath the sheets that covered them, it was quite common to see a brownish, emaciated leg sticking out."
A courageous driver bade Adler to don a gravedigger's cap instead of hiding among the corpses. Alongside him, Dr. Zeldowicz, with her medical pass, wore her doctor's coat. At midday, in the vicinity of the Schultz factory, when they were about to be inspected by gendarmes with machine guns at the ready, the hearse driver said, in garbled German, "Alle Tote, alles Kaput!" (all are dead corpses) and whipped the horses, speeding through, leaving the gendarmes bewildered.
To avoid inspection at another checkpoint, surrounded by throngs of German factory police and a 'rat-faced gendarme' that Adler recognized, their daring driver gave the necessary password to indicate he was carrying contraband, thereby gaining swift passage to the safety of Aryan streets. On Bonifraterska Street, they rushed into the waiting room of their devoted friend, Dr. Wladyslaw Jakimowicz; then went by droshky to the apartment of Polish underground members Henryik and Dr. Halina Kotlicki; then they found refuge in the apartment of the Polish writer Zenon Skiersky and his elderly mother on Saska Kepa.
Finally, in April, Adler began this third attempt to preserve his memoirs in A Chronicle of the Events Which Led to the Extermination of the Jewish Population in Warsaw, Poland. "My memoirs from the first months of the war," he wrote, "were thrown into a stove by the border police. My reconstruction of those notes was lost when I moved into the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw in 1941."
When the Gestapo arrived to arrest them, they saved their lives with bribery and escaped from Saska Kepa to a villa in Anin owned by some of Lola's former patients, the Jaskiewicz family. They frequently had to hide in the attic until the approach of the Russian army in the autumn of 1944. Eventually, this final house of refuge was taken over by Nazis who failed to find their concealed hideaway.
Inside the walls, Lola and Alder had to take turns sleeping--this way they could prevent one another from any loud and protracted snoring. They used their minimal water supply as sparingly as possible to prevent the need for urination. They were in the darkness for so long they completely lost track of whether it was day or night. Finally, they were thrilled to hear exploding bombs. They joyously welcomed the opportunity to avoid starvation in the dark. They were either going to die or be liberated. When they assumed the house must be empty, they crept into the light only to discover a Nazi asleep nearby. They were forced back into hiding until finally the Nazis in Warsaw were defeated.
There is no clarity afforded in the manuscript as to whether Adler and Lola were ever romantically entwined. In his narrative he introduces her as "a physician employed by Schultz and Co… who had been called to attend a sick child in the area of the brushmakers shop." Betty Keller has confirmed that Lola and Adler were lovers:
"In the course of long lunches and even longer editing sessions together, Lola told me many stories of those terrible war years in Poland. As more than forty years have elapsed since the telling, I cannot guarantee I have the all the details correct. However, Lola Zeldowicz and Stanislaw Adler were most definitely lovers. That story actually began in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. At that time she was a young neurologist, and Henry Zeldowicz, her husband, was a psychiatrist in Warsaw, but he was also required by law to belong to the Polish reserve army, and when the invasion began, he was on maneuvers in the countryside. His unit fled from the Germans and for the next five years Lola heard nothing whatsoever from him and believed him dead. Thus, she considered herself a widow when she entered the Warsaw ghetto. However, at war’s end the Red Cross erected bulletin boards all over Europe where people could put up notices about missing persons, and that’s where one of Lola’s friends found a note from someone who had seen Henry in Palestine with the British Army. He, by the way, also believed her to be dead."
Born in 1905, Lola was the daughter of Jakub Fishaut and Saomea Czapek. At war's end, Adler opted to stay in Poland whereas Lola left to meet up with her husband, Dr. Henry Zeldowicz, who had managed to join the Allied forces. Married in 1932, the re-united couple planned to immigrate to Canada. Lola told Keller that, in fact, her the couple had been planning to include Adler in their immigration plans, leaving Europe as a trio. "However, at the last minute," according to Keller, "Adler was asked to take a role in the new Polish government, and he decided to accept the challenge; he would join them later."
When Lola was leaving from Warsaw for Prague on May 4, 1946, Adler handed her his unpublished manuscript. "My heart was heavy," she recalled… "All the letters and cables I sent to Adler during the months that followed, failed to lift his spirit. His own courage and the initiative for swift action that had supported him during the war now failed him. Anti-semitism was still rife in Poland and when the news reached him of a pogrom against the Jewish survivors in Kielce, he was shattered."
Lola later elaborated for Keller; she said Adler had become deeply disturbed by the news that an orphanage for Jewish children that been established in a small town outside of Warsaw had been attacked by local Poles who burned it to the ground, killing most of the children. Whether it was this tragedy, or the end of his love affair with Lola, or the combination of both, Stanislav Adler shot himself, at home, out of despair, on July 11, 1946.
There is one more explanation: guilt. Adler could not reconcile any degree of complicity by the Jewish ghetto police in the earliest roundups for the labour camps. "It stopped at moaning and swearing at the fate that brought one to such detestable service. Evidently, it was preferable to catch than be caught… Like the others, I did not take immediate measures to quit at once."
The degree of detail in Adler's 300-plus-page memoir makes it valuable to historians. Here, for instance, are some paragraphs about the complex nature of the Jewish Quarter.
"For many scores of thousands of Jews, transfer to the ghetto meant complete material ruin. There were relatively few who could exchange their apartments with Aryans who had been living in the area that was to be the Jewish Quarter. These exchanges, due to a greater demand for homes in the Quarter, were conducted with a much greater burden on the Jewish contracting parties. Usually, the Jew had to pay the Aryan a year in advance for the difference in rent when it was higher in the apartment he was receiving. He had to leave the Aryan his coal supply, part of his furniture, and so forth. A strange sort of wandering had begun. Two hundred thousand people were exchanging living quarters. The Aryans carried out their moving operations with furniture trucks and lorries; the Jews pushed handcarts. It was a rare case when the modest chattels of a Jew were moved by lorry.
"The area of the Jewish Quarter was not accurately defined until the last moment. Originally, for instance, it had looked as if the boundary in the south and south-east would run along Chmielna and Marszalkowska Streets, and in the south-west along Wronia Street, but later it was decided that the dividing line should run along Zlota and Zielna. At the last minute, due to the impossibility of building an eleven-kilometer-long wall down the center of the street in a few month's time, the invaders adopted provisional measures. They erected fences, usually across streets, which closed them in such a way that, as a rule, the Quarter's boundaries ran along the external walls of apartment houses. The population did not realize that these arrangements were only temporary, and tens of thousands of them were faced with continuous wandering as a result of the endless population resettlement as the ghetto's boundaries changed.
"The outline of the boundary ran in fantastic zig-zags. Wherever a German industrial enterprise or any important German institution happened to be located on the periphery of the Jewish Quarter, it was sufficient reason for a whole complex of ghetto housing to be cut off and included in the Aryan sector. In such a way, an enclave was formed of Grzybowska, Walicow, and Ceglana Streets for the companies of Haberbusch, Schiele, and Ulrich; this was connected to the Aryan Quarter by a narrow neck only. Along both sides of Biala Streets, fences were erected to provide a passage to the courthouse, which had been excluded from the Jewish Quarter. Only a portion of that building remained, until the "resettlement action" that began on July 22, 1942, as a special place of meeting where Jews and Aryans could mingle more or less freely.
"The basic necessities, both economic and religious, of the Jewish population were not considered in the least; this population was not a subject for regulation but an object for destruction, all the more pleasing to the invader's eyes when it was accompanied by pain and suffering. The wooded areas, therefore, were purposely and maliciously excluded from the Quarter and the Morowska bazaars and adjoining streets, an area inhabited exclusively by Jews before the war, were cut out of the middle of the ghetto. The intention was clear: to prevent Jewish access to the largest market place.
"An additional result of this arbitrary boundary was the division of the Jewish Quarter into two parts. The smaller part, known as the 'small ghetto', was the seat of the more important pre-war Jewish institutions, including the Community Council, and had a population of nearly one hundred thousand. It was connected to the other part of the Quarter, or the 'large ghetto', where more than three hundred thousand people lived, by a single communication artery composed of Ciepla, Grzybowska, and Zelazna Streets. Where Zelazna intersected with Chlodna Street, the Jewish Quarter joined Aryan territory for a length of forty meters.... The extent of the traffic and masses of people who used this artery cannot be described and these crowded conditions contributed greatly to the spread of the typhus epidemic which decimated the Quarter."
Married to psychiatrist Dr. Henry Zeldowicz, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UBC, Dr. Ludmila (Lola) Zeldowicz, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurology at UBC first met Robert Krell in 1976, at the Oakridge Auditorium, when they were guest speakers for the launch of the First Holocaust Symposium for High School Students. That evening she spoke about the Warsaw Ghetto. It wasn't until the early 1980s that she handed Krell a copy of Adler’s memoir. Robert Krell recalls. "In her strong Polish accent, she said, 'Robert, this is my story, also.'"
After Dr. Lola Zeldowicz died of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease in 1991, Dr. Irene Bellinger of UBC donated funds from her parents' estate (Edwina and Paul Heller) to establish the Ludmila and Henry Zeldowicz Award presented annually to support a resident physician to undertake studies and/or research in neurology. Bellinger's parents, Edwina and Paul Heller, a UBC pianist and BC lumber mill owner, were members of Vancouver's Jewish community who had fled Europe, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, Poland, and befriended Henry and Lola.
[Particular attention has been paid to this Adler and Zeldowicz story because Adler's narrative, initiated from Vancouver, translated from Polish in 1982, is so little-known. -- A.T.]
*
In collecting these excerpts from B.C.-related sources, it is easy to include biographical details and moments of heroism and bravery to stress the dignity of the Jews. To do so exclusively, however, runs the risk of under-estimating and under-representing the extent and magnitude of cruelty and horrific behaviour perpetrated by German soldiers on Jews and other Holocaust victims.
A few historians, such as Martin Gilbert, have taken it upon themselves divulge the evil degradations that evidently occurred routinely. Gilbert, for example, does not hesitate to quote sections of a 29-page notebook that was uncovered in 1952 near one of the crematoria at Birkenau.
At the outset of 1943, a member of the Sonderkommando recorded how S.S. Staff Sargeant Forst "stood at the gate of the undressing room in the case of many transports and felt the sexual organ of each young woman that was passing naked to the gas chamber. There were also cases of German SS men of all ranks who put fingers into the sexual organs of pretty young girls."
The German soldiers often took pleasure, according to this Nazi diarist, in "torturing people and mastering their minds." For instance, when "shrivelled and emaciated" Jews arrived at Birkenau from another camp, "they undressed in the open and singly went to be shot. They were horribly hungry and they begged to be given a piece of bread at the last moment while they were still alive. Plenty of bread was brought; the eyes of those men, sunken and dimmed due to protracted starvation, now flashed with a wild fire of staggering joy, they snatched big chunks of bread with both hands and voraciously swallowed, at the same time descending the steps straight on to be shot."
Stanislaw Adler's memoir is unusual because he not only records his personal predicaments and emotions, as well as the nature of German and Jewish organizations within Warsaw. He also describes how, in January of 1943, naked and barefoot gypsies were loaded into wagons and brigands from Treblinka set up tents at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw in order to strip the doomed Jews of their money and jewelry, accepting bribes to forestall dreaded deportations to the death camp, only to be loaded onto the trains the following day.
Adler takes care to record how some of the S.S. men ostensibly befriended some of the German Jews and workers who were brought to the gathering grounds at the Umschlagplatz. When they went for drinks together, one of the S.S. officers asked if they had any wishes, whereupon one of the Jews had the courage to say his greatest wish was to not be sent to Treblinka. "Go back and don't worry," was the reply, "We shall see to it that you are not deported." Elated, the Jews mounted the stairs of a nearby house, whereupon, according to Adler's reportage, "they received from their saviours a volley or revolver shots that killed almost all of them on the spot. Thus, the S.S. men kept their promise literally."
Adler chooses to devote much of his final few pages to the story of Meir Alter, who had been a very successful cantor prior to the war. Alter had accumulated considerable wealth due to his foreign singing engagements as far afield as South America. After nearly four months without a single deportation, the Germans commenced their second major round of expulsions to Treblinka on January 18, 1943. On that Monday, 5,000 Jews were sent to their deaths, including 50 doctors -- and the cantor Meir Alter.
"Alter was the first resident of our house whom the Nazis took away...
"With him they dragged out his father and his brother Mieczyslaw. On the way to the Umschlagplatz, [Mier] Alter supported his father, who was moving with difficulty. When asked by the S.S. escort why the old man did not walk by himself, Alter explained that his father was blind. The Nazi fired a shot, killing the blind man instantly, and then ordered Alter to run. Alter pretended not to hear the order, but he understood that the executioner's intention was to shoot him if he started running, so he continued to trail along.
"Thanks to generously distributed bribes, Alter spent twenty-four hours in the Umschlagplatz. Sometimes, in return for a substantial bribe, one could avoid deportation on the appointed day, and receive, in addition, a lavish supper, but one was pushed onto the train the following day…
"Alter was placed in a freight car loaded, as always, with at least one hundred people. The cars were fastened with wire but the train did not start up. The prisoners began to suffocate -- the Germans had released gas. Owing to his formidable strength, Alter was able to reach the little window, and help his brother Mieczslaw get some fresh air. Meanwhile, in the cars, people groaned and howled, tearing their clothes; completely naked and suffocating, they fell on top of one another. The train started to move and was shunted onto more distant tracks, probably to prevent the cries of the sufferers from reaching the town.
"The train was surrounded by soldiers in uniforms like the ones worn by the Ukrainians during the 'resettlement action.' Alter, who could speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian, started begging the sentry for a bit of snow. Finally, they reached an understanding, and for the price of 100 zlotys Alter received a bit of snow, handed to him on the tip of a bayonet. Seven such portions quenched Alter's thirst, and enabled him, in the moments when the Ukrainian turned away, to renew his efforts to tear the barbed wire from the window. Some time later, when he had finally succeeded, he felt somebody energetically shoving him away and shouting to the supposed Ukrainian, 'Listen, Karl, don't you remember me?' A minute later they were into a lively conversation in German. Karl, the masquerading Ukrainian, expressed -- in excellent German -- his willingness not to impede the prisoners' escape in exchange for 10,000 zlotys.
"The stranger took out 3,000 and turned to his co-prisoners, asking for the rest. The remaining 7,000 was finally given by Alter, because none of the others had cash; the total amount was tossed over to the soldier. The 'Ukrainian' counted the money, put it away, and gave the signal to jump and the first to get out of the car was the soldier's acquaintance. Before he could reach the ground, he was shot by the 'Ukrainian' and fell dead on the spot.
"Shortly afterwards, the train started. The majority of the Jews in the freight car were already dying. After held on to the window desperately, standing on a pile of corpses. His brother Mieczyslaw was losing his remaining strength. To place him at the window for a breath of fresh air, Alter had to enlarge the macabre pyramid. For this purpose, he began pulling a corpse by the leg when he heard a moan; he bent over and recognized the novelist, Jarecka. A moment later, she breathed her last breath. Then, in terrible torment, his brother Mieczylaw died, too.
"Even before the train gained speed, people began to jump out of the freight car. However, in the vicinity of Warsaw, the tracks were closely guarded by gendarmes and Ukrainians, who finished off these bold ones on the spot. The gendarmes rode in the last car which was equipped with reflectors that illuminated the tracks, so that in the fading light they could see and shoot anyone who jumped from the train. Even so, attempts to escape were repeated from time to time.
"Only past Wyszkow, when the train accelerated, did Alter pluck up the courage to jump out; he chose to jump as the train rounded a curve, reckoning to fall as near as possible to the track. That way the escorting gendarmes, even when they noticed him, did not have time to aim carefully. They shot three times but missed, and soon the train disappeared from sight.
"Alter got up, and dragging his legs, swollen because of the gas, he reached the highway. Here he noticed another three refugees; he joined them, and in the darkness they consulted.
"Suddenly, Alter caught sight of another figure approaching them. He thought he could discern the glitter of a helmet, and jumped into a nearby thicket. A moment later, he heard four revolver shots, and then nothing.
"His return to the ghetto took two days… Now he had come to take his wife and children out of the ghetto. I look at Alter's hands wounded by the wire of the freight car window; I see his legs swollen like pumpkins in reaction to the mysterious gas, and I wonder if and when those guilty of the bestiality and tragedy into which Europe has now sunk will ever pay the penalty for their villainous deeds."
BOOKS:
In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 -- 1943, An Account of a Witness: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 1982; printed by Daf-Hen Press).
PHOTO: Emaciated corpses of Warsaw Ghetto children: By Nieznany/unknown - Emil Apfelbaum (red.), Choroba glodowa. Badania kliniczne nad glodem wykonane w getcie warszawskim z roku 1942, American Joint Distribution Committee, Warszawa 1946, a photo between pages 20 and 21 Warszawskie getto 1943−1988. W 45 rocznice powstania, Wydawnictwo Interpress, Warszawa 1988, ISBN 83-223-2465-0 (photographs at the end of the book; pages not numbered), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27912806
Before the Nazis commenced their mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto, a distinguished lawyer named Stanislav (or Stanislaw) Adler resigned from the "Jewish Police" (Jewish Order Service) and later wrote In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 -- 1943, An Account of a Witness: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler (Jerusalem: Daf-Hen Press, 1982). This incomparable record of life and death inside the Warsaw Ghetto appeared through the efforts of Vancouver's Ludmila "Lola" Fiszhaut-Zeldowicz, who daringly escaped with him from the Jewish Quarter -- as they knew it then -- in early 1943. The book jacket cover, a photo caption and Lola's notes spell his first name as Stanislaw; whereas the Yad Vashem preface and cover flaps use Stanislav.
Decades later, having lived with him in hiding from the Nazis for a year, it was Lola Zeldowicz who arranged for this sophisticated memoir to be translated from Polish by Sara (Chmielewska) Philip, to be edited by B.C.-born Betty Keller and to be published in English by Yad Vashem. Lola Zeldowicz also wrote a foreword for the book’s original Polish edition in 1977.
Betty Keller recalls: "Lola had brought the translation by Sara Chmielewska Philip to Cherie Smith of November House in the hope of having it published here. Unfortunately, Philip's English was imperfect, to say the least, and she had great difficulty with English sentence structures and idioms, and that's where I came into the picture. I would edit the 'easy' sections, then Lola and I would do battle over the obscure sections together, she with the Polish version, a dictionary and her memory of the events in hand. It was a great experience--which is not always true of the substantive editing process as you know--and we became good friends. And by the time the edit was finished, she had found the necessary funding to have the book published by Yad Vashem."
Although a few other ghetto memoirists also looked beyond their individual perspectives to report on the social structures of the Warsaw Ghetto -- such as Ringelblum, Katznelson, Kaplan, Levin and Brisker -- according to the Yad Vashem Editorial Board, "There is no one like Adler -- an intelligent man with a broad education and sensitive to the needs of the public -- to explain the motives and conflicts that arose between the Jewish police and the Jewish public in the ghetto."
In January of 1943, Dr. Lola Zeldowicz entered the Ghetto on a special permit to tend to a very sick child. When there was an unforeseen ghetto blockade, she was forced to climb over dead Jewish bodies on a staircase and hide for days in a cellar bunker with Stanislav Adler, Dr. Julian Lewinson and his elderly mother. Calls from outside, in Polish, saying, 'Jews come out, it would be better for you,' were met with their complete silence.
After four days in that bunker, Dr. Levinson, a physician for the Jewish Police, dared to leave the bunker first, when the explosions outside finally ceased. Houses were smouldering or in flames. Streets were strewn with cadavers. Grisly evidence of the first Jewish armed resistance to the Nazis filled their hearts with joy.
As the Ghetto's Director of Housing, Adler, born in 1901, made known his intentions to escape to his superior, Marek Lichtenbaum. A philanthropist and a surviving member of the Judenrat, Lichtenbaum told him, "The captains are the last to leave the sinking ship. However, our ship has already sunk."
Thereafter, in early February, Adler devised a hasty plan to escape by hiding among the dead bodies that were routinely hauled away on a hearse, drawn by horses. Adler recalled, "In January and February of 1942, at the height of the typhus epidemic, the mortality rate in the Jewish Quarter exceeded five thousand a month.
"In the street every few hundred paces, one could see a human corpse covered with newspaper. Somehow, in the passage of time, people got used to this sight and only the most sensitive crossed to the opposite side of the street and turned their heads away. But even the most courageous or insensitive lost their nerve when, in the darkness of the night, they happened to accidently step on some soft object that turned out to be a cadaver. On those occasions, invariably, hysterical screams rang out.
"The number of burial enterprises rapidly increased. They used the old-fashioned type of horse-drawn hearse that carried eight corpses simultaneously. Six inside the hearse while two were placed on the roof. From beneath the sheets that covered them, it was quite common to see a brownish, emaciated leg sticking out."
A courageous driver bade Adler to don a gravedigger's cap instead of hiding among the corpses. Alongside him, Dr. Zeldowicz, with her medical pass, wore her doctor's coat. At midday, in the vicinity of the Schultz factory, when they were about to be inspected by gendarmes with machine guns at the ready, the hearse driver said, in garbled German, "Alle Tote, alles Kaput!" (all are dead corpses) and whipped the horses, speeding through, leaving the gendarmes bewildered.
To avoid inspection at another checkpoint, surrounded by throngs of German factory police and a 'rat-faced gendarme' that Adler recognized, their daring driver gave the necessary password to indicate he was carrying contraband, thereby gaining swift passage to the safety of Aryan streets. On Bonifraterska Street, they rushed into the waiting room of their devoted friend, Dr. Wladyslaw Jakimowicz; then went by droshky to the apartment of Polish underground members Henryik and Dr. Halina Kotlicki; then they found refuge in the apartment of the Polish writer Zenon Skiersky and his elderly mother on Saska Kepa.
Finally, in April, Adler began this third attempt to preserve his memoirs in A Chronicle of the Events Which Led to the Extermination of the Jewish Population in Warsaw, Poland. "My memoirs from the first months of the war," he wrote, "were thrown into a stove by the border police. My reconstruction of those notes was lost when I moved into the Jewish Quarter of Warsaw in 1941."
When the Gestapo arrived to arrest them, they saved their lives with bribery and escaped from Saska Kepa to a villa in Anin owned by some of Lola's former patients, the Jaskiewicz family. They frequently had to hide in the attic until the approach of the Russian army in the autumn of 1944. Eventually, this final house of refuge was taken over by Nazis who failed to find their concealed hideaway.
Inside the walls, Lola and Alder had to take turns sleeping--this way they could prevent one another from any loud and protracted snoring. They used their minimal water supply as sparingly as possible to prevent the need for urination. They were in the darkness for so long they completely lost track of whether it was day or night. Finally, they were thrilled to hear exploding bombs. They joyously welcomed the opportunity to avoid starvation in the dark. They were either going to die or be liberated. When they assumed the house must be empty, they crept into the light only to discover a Nazi asleep nearby. They were forced back into hiding until finally the Nazis in Warsaw were defeated.
There is no clarity afforded in the manuscript as to whether Adler and Lola were ever romantically entwined. In his narrative he introduces her as "a physician employed by Schultz and Co… who had been called to attend a sick child in the area of the brushmakers shop." Betty Keller has confirmed that Lola and Adler were lovers:
"In the course of long lunches and even longer editing sessions together, Lola told me many stories of those terrible war years in Poland. As more than forty years have elapsed since the telling, I cannot guarantee I have the all the details correct. However, Lola Zeldowicz and Stanislaw Adler were most definitely lovers. That story actually began in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. At that time she was a young neurologist, and Henry Zeldowicz, her husband, was a psychiatrist in Warsaw, but he was also required by law to belong to the Polish reserve army, and when the invasion began, he was on maneuvers in the countryside. His unit fled from the Germans and for the next five years Lola heard nothing whatsoever from him and believed him dead. Thus, she considered herself a widow when she entered the Warsaw ghetto. However, at war’s end the Red Cross erected bulletin boards all over Europe where people could put up notices about missing persons, and that’s where one of Lola’s friends found a note from someone who had seen Henry in Palestine with the British Army. He, by the way, also believed her to be dead."
Born in 1905, Lola was the daughter of Jakub Fishaut and Saomea Czapek. At war's end, Adler opted to stay in Poland whereas Lola left to meet up with her husband, Dr. Henry Zeldowicz, who had managed to join the Allied forces. Married in 1932, the re-united couple planned to immigrate to Canada. Lola told Keller that, in fact, her the couple had been planning to include Adler in their immigration plans, leaving Europe as a trio. "However, at the last minute," according to Keller, "Adler was asked to take a role in the new Polish government, and he decided to accept the challenge; he would join them later."
When Lola was leaving from Warsaw for Prague on May 4, 1946, Adler handed her his unpublished manuscript. "My heart was heavy," she recalled… "All the letters and cables I sent to Adler during the months that followed, failed to lift his spirit. His own courage and the initiative for swift action that had supported him during the war now failed him. Anti-semitism was still rife in Poland and when the news reached him of a pogrom against the Jewish survivors in Kielce, he was shattered."
Lola later elaborated for Keller; she said Adler had become deeply disturbed by the news that an orphanage for Jewish children that been established in a small town outside of Warsaw had been attacked by local Poles who burned it to the ground, killing most of the children. Whether it was this tragedy, or the end of his love affair with Lola, or the combination of both, Stanislav Adler shot himself, at home, out of despair, on July 11, 1946.
There is one more explanation: guilt. Adler could not reconcile any degree of complicity by the Jewish ghetto police in the earliest roundups for the labour camps. "It stopped at moaning and swearing at the fate that brought one to such detestable service. Evidently, it was preferable to catch than be caught… Like the others, I did not take immediate measures to quit at once."
The degree of detail in Adler's 300-plus-page memoir makes it valuable to historians. Here, for instance, are some paragraphs about the complex nature of the Jewish Quarter.
"For many scores of thousands of Jews, transfer to the ghetto meant complete material ruin. There were relatively few who could exchange their apartments with Aryans who had been living in the area that was to be the Jewish Quarter. These exchanges, due to a greater demand for homes in the Quarter, were conducted with a much greater burden on the Jewish contracting parties. Usually, the Jew had to pay the Aryan a year in advance for the difference in rent when it was higher in the apartment he was receiving. He had to leave the Aryan his coal supply, part of his furniture, and so forth. A strange sort of wandering had begun. Two hundred thousand people were exchanging living quarters. The Aryans carried out their moving operations with furniture trucks and lorries; the Jews pushed handcarts. It was a rare case when the modest chattels of a Jew were moved by lorry.
"The area of the Jewish Quarter was not accurately defined until the last moment. Originally, for instance, it had looked as if the boundary in the south and south-east would run along Chmielna and Marszalkowska Streets, and in the south-west along Wronia Street, but later it was decided that the dividing line should run along Zlota and Zielna. At the last minute, due to the impossibility of building an eleven-kilometer-long wall down the center of the street in a few month's time, the invaders adopted provisional measures. They erected fences, usually across streets, which closed them in such a way that, as a rule, the Quarter's boundaries ran along the external walls of apartment houses. The population did not realize that these arrangements were only temporary, and tens of thousands of them were faced with continuous wandering as a result of the endless population resettlement as the ghetto's boundaries changed.
"The outline of the boundary ran in fantastic zig-zags. Wherever a German industrial enterprise or any important German institution happened to be located on the periphery of the Jewish Quarter, it was sufficient reason for a whole complex of ghetto housing to be cut off and included in the Aryan sector. In such a way, an enclave was formed of Grzybowska, Walicow, and Ceglana Streets for the companies of Haberbusch, Schiele, and Ulrich; this was connected to the Aryan Quarter by a narrow neck only. Along both sides of Biala Streets, fences were erected to provide a passage to the courthouse, which had been excluded from the Jewish Quarter. Only a portion of that building remained, until the "resettlement action" that began on July 22, 1942, as a special place of meeting where Jews and Aryans could mingle more or less freely.
"The basic necessities, both economic and religious, of the Jewish population were not considered in the least; this population was not a subject for regulation but an object for destruction, all the more pleasing to the invader's eyes when it was accompanied by pain and suffering. The wooded areas, therefore, were purposely and maliciously excluded from the Quarter and the Morowska bazaars and adjoining streets, an area inhabited exclusively by Jews before the war, were cut out of the middle of the ghetto. The intention was clear: to prevent Jewish access to the largest market place.
"An additional result of this arbitrary boundary was the division of the Jewish Quarter into two parts. The smaller part, known as the 'small ghetto', was the seat of the more important pre-war Jewish institutions, including the Community Council, and had a population of nearly one hundred thousand. It was connected to the other part of the Quarter, or the 'large ghetto', where more than three hundred thousand people lived, by a single communication artery composed of Ciepla, Grzybowska, and Zelazna Streets. Where Zelazna intersected with Chlodna Street, the Jewish Quarter joined Aryan territory for a length of forty meters.... The extent of the traffic and masses of people who used this artery cannot be described and these crowded conditions contributed greatly to the spread of the typhus epidemic which decimated the Quarter."
Married to psychiatrist Dr. Henry Zeldowicz, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UBC, Dr. Ludmila (Lola) Zeldowicz, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurology at UBC first met Robert Krell in 1976, at the Oakridge Auditorium, when they were guest speakers for the launch of the First Holocaust Symposium for High School Students. That evening she spoke about the Warsaw Ghetto. It wasn't until the early 1980s that she handed Krell a copy of Adler’s memoir. Robert Krell recalls. "In her strong Polish accent, she said, 'Robert, this is my story, also.'"
After Dr. Lola Zeldowicz died of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease in 1991, Dr. Irene Bellinger of UBC donated funds from her parents' estate (Edwina and Paul Heller) to establish the Ludmila and Henry Zeldowicz Award presented annually to support a resident physician to undertake studies and/or research in neurology. Bellinger's parents, Edwina and Paul Heller, a UBC pianist and BC lumber mill owner, were members of Vancouver's Jewish community who had fled Europe, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, Poland, and befriended Henry and Lola.
[Particular attention has been paid to this Adler and Zeldowicz story because Adler's narrative, initiated from Vancouver, translated from Polish in 1982, is so little-known. -- A.T.]
*
In collecting these excerpts from B.C.-related sources, it is easy to include biographical details and moments of heroism and bravery to stress the dignity of the Jews. To do so exclusively, however, runs the risk of under-estimating and under-representing the extent and magnitude of cruelty and horrific behaviour perpetrated by German soldiers on Jews and other Holocaust victims.
A few historians, such as Martin Gilbert, have taken it upon themselves divulge the evil degradations that evidently occurred routinely. Gilbert, for example, does not hesitate to quote sections of a 29-page notebook that was uncovered in 1952 near one of the crematoria at Birkenau.
At the outset of 1943, a member of the Sonderkommando recorded how S.S. Staff Sargeant Forst "stood at the gate of the undressing room in the case of many transports and felt the sexual organ of each young woman that was passing naked to the gas chamber. There were also cases of German SS men of all ranks who put fingers into the sexual organs of pretty young girls."
The German soldiers often took pleasure, according to this Nazi diarist, in "torturing people and mastering their minds." For instance, when "shrivelled and emaciated" Jews arrived at Birkenau from another camp, "they undressed in the open and singly went to be shot. They were horribly hungry and they begged to be given a piece of bread at the last moment while they were still alive. Plenty of bread was brought; the eyes of those men, sunken and dimmed due to protracted starvation, now flashed with a wild fire of staggering joy, they snatched big chunks of bread with both hands and voraciously swallowed, at the same time descending the steps straight on to be shot."
Stanislaw Adler's memoir is unusual because he not only records his personal predicaments and emotions, as well as the nature of German and Jewish organizations within Warsaw. He also describes how, in January of 1943, naked and barefoot gypsies were loaded into wagons and brigands from Treblinka set up tents at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw in order to strip the doomed Jews of their money and jewelry, accepting bribes to forestall dreaded deportations to the death camp, only to be loaded onto the trains the following day.
Adler takes care to record how some of the S.S. men ostensibly befriended some of the German Jews and workers who were brought to the gathering grounds at the Umschlagplatz. When they went for drinks together, one of the S.S. officers asked if they had any wishes, whereupon one of the Jews had the courage to say his greatest wish was to not be sent to Treblinka. "Go back and don't worry," was the reply, "We shall see to it that you are not deported." Elated, the Jews mounted the stairs of a nearby house, whereupon, according to Adler's reportage, "they received from their saviours a volley or revolver shots that killed almost all of them on the spot. Thus, the S.S. men kept their promise literally."
Adler chooses to devote much of his final few pages to the story of Meir Alter, who had been a very successful cantor prior to the war. Alter had accumulated considerable wealth due to his foreign singing engagements as far afield as South America. After nearly four months without a single deportation, the Germans commenced their second major round of expulsions to Treblinka on January 18, 1943. On that Monday, 5,000 Jews were sent to their deaths, including 50 doctors -- and the cantor Meir Alter.
"Alter was the first resident of our house whom the Nazis took away...
"With him they dragged out his father and his brother Mieczyslaw. On the way to the Umschlagplatz, [Mier] Alter supported his father, who was moving with difficulty. When asked by the S.S. escort why the old man did not walk by himself, Alter explained that his father was blind. The Nazi fired a shot, killing the blind man instantly, and then ordered Alter to run. Alter pretended not to hear the order, but he understood that the executioner's intention was to shoot him if he started running, so he continued to trail along.
"Thanks to generously distributed bribes, Alter spent twenty-four hours in the Umschlagplatz. Sometimes, in return for a substantial bribe, one could avoid deportation on the appointed day, and receive, in addition, a lavish supper, but one was pushed onto the train the following day…
"Alter was placed in a freight car loaded, as always, with at least one hundred people. The cars were fastened with wire but the train did not start up. The prisoners began to suffocate -- the Germans had released gas. Owing to his formidable strength, Alter was able to reach the little window, and help his brother Mieczslaw get some fresh air. Meanwhile, in the cars, people groaned and howled, tearing their clothes; completely naked and suffocating, they fell on top of one another. The train started to move and was shunted onto more distant tracks, probably to prevent the cries of the sufferers from reaching the town.
"The train was surrounded by soldiers in uniforms like the ones worn by the Ukrainians during the 'resettlement action.' Alter, who could speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian, started begging the sentry for a bit of snow. Finally, they reached an understanding, and for the price of 100 zlotys Alter received a bit of snow, handed to him on the tip of a bayonet. Seven such portions quenched Alter's thirst, and enabled him, in the moments when the Ukrainian turned away, to renew his efforts to tear the barbed wire from the window. Some time later, when he had finally succeeded, he felt somebody energetically shoving him away and shouting to the supposed Ukrainian, 'Listen, Karl, don't you remember me?' A minute later they were into a lively conversation in German. Karl, the masquerading Ukrainian, expressed -- in excellent German -- his willingness not to impede the prisoners' escape in exchange for 10,000 zlotys.
"The stranger took out 3,000 and turned to his co-prisoners, asking for the rest. The remaining 7,000 was finally given by Alter, because none of the others had cash; the total amount was tossed over to the soldier. The 'Ukrainian' counted the money, put it away, and gave the signal to jump and the first to get out of the car was the soldier's acquaintance. Before he could reach the ground, he was shot by the 'Ukrainian' and fell dead on the spot.
"Shortly afterwards, the train started. The majority of the Jews in the freight car were already dying. After held on to the window desperately, standing on a pile of corpses. His brother Mieczyslaw was losing his remaining strength. To place him at the window for a breath of fresh air, Alter had to enlarge the macabre pyramid. For this purpose, he began pulling a corpse by the leg when he heard a moan; he bent over and recognized the novelist, Jarecka. A moment later, she breathed her last breath. Then, in terrible torment, his brother Mieczylaw died, too.
"Even before the train gained speed, people began to jump out of the freight car. However, in the vicinity of Warsaw, the tracks were closely guarded by gendarmes and Ukrainians, who finished off these bold ones on the spot. The gendarmes rode in the last car which was equipped with reflectors that illuminated the tracks, so that in the fading light they could see and shoot anyone who jumped from the train. Even so, attempts to escape were repeated from time to time.
"Only past Wyszkow, when the train accelerated, did Alter pluck up the courage to jump out; he chose to jump as the train rounded a curve, reckoning to fall as near as possible to the track. That way the escorting gendarmes, even when they noticed him, did not have time to aim carefully. They shot three times but missed, and soon the train disappeared from sight.
"Alter got up, and dragging his legs, swollen because of the gas, he reached the highway. Here he noticed another three refugees; he joined them, and in the darkness they consulted.
"Suddenly, Alter caught sight of another figure approaching them. He thought he could discern the glitter of a helmet, and jumped into a nearby thicket. A moment later, he heard four revolver shots, and then nothing.
"His return to the ghetto took two days… Now he had come to take his wife and children out of the ghetto. I look at Alter's hands wounded by the wire of the freight car window; I see his legs swollen like pumpkins in reaction to the mysterious gas, and I wonder if and when those guilty of the bestiality and tragedy into which Europe has now sunk will ever pay the penalty for their villainous deeds."
BOOKS:
In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 -- 1943, An Account of a Witness: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 1982; printed by Daf-Hen Press).
PHOTO: Emaciated corpses of Warsaw Ghetto children: By Nieznany/unknown - Emil Apfelbaum (red.), Choroba glodowa. Badania kliniczne nad glodem wykonane w getcie warszawskim z roku 1942, American Joint Distribution Committee, Warszawa 1946, a photo between pages 20 and 21 Warszawskie getto 1943−1988. W 45 rocznice powstania, Wydawnictwo Interpress, Warszawa 1988, ISBN 83-223-2465-0 (photographs at the end of the book; pages not numbered), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27912806
