I was born Alexander Radzinski in 1934 in Warsaw. Our family was well-to-do, and we lived in Praga, a suburb on the other side of the Vistula River. My father, Yitzchok, and mother, Gittel, and my little sister, Frieda (Zosha), and I lived a happy life. When I was five years old, in 1939, the war broke out.
My father owned a furniture factory, warehouse, and store. My family was traditional, and I remember going to shul on Shabbos. We spoke Polish at home, but my parents spoke Yiddish to each other and I picked up some of it. My mother was an educated woman and taught Polish subjects in Janush Korshak’s Jewish school in Warsaw.
On September 1, 1939, the Germans marched in with their flags and swastikas, and we watched fearfully from the terrace of our apartment on Targova Street. Within a few months, there were signs posted everywhere that Jews should be ready to move at a moment’s notice to an area that would be designated for them. That was the Warsaw Ghetto. A wall was erected straight down the middle of a street.
In October 1940, we were ordered to leave our homes and most of our belongings and move to the other side of the wall. Jews on one side, gated and locked in, and Aryans on the outside, free as ever.
We left our beautiful home and our furniture factory and moved to an old second-floor one-bedroom apartment at the corner of Gesia and Pavia Streets. There was little food coming in and we survived on frozen potatoes. Pavia Street was the location of the infamous Nazi Paviak prison. When we passed it, we could hear screams coming from the basement windows.
The ghetto was horrible. People were so hungry that they would run, grab and steal food, and eat it as they ran, so by the time they were caught, the food was gone. Little children would sit begging for money or food. There were outbreaks of typhus and cholera, and corpses were scattered on the sidewalks. There were always sirens and round-ups.
One day, a siren blared and everyone ran. My father opened a manhole, and my mother, father, Zosia, and I climbed down into the sewer. Zosia was a baby and started to cry. Other people already hiding in the sewer were furious with my mother for bringing a baby into hiding. Someone had a small rag and my mother stuffed it into Zosia’s mouth and she stopped crying.
The ghetto walls were pretty solid. The wall was only the height of a person, but the Germans had stuck cut bottles and jagged glass in soft cement over it, which hardened, so it was impossible to climb over it without getting mutilated. Every few blocks, there was an opening with a guard booth watched over by German police through which they permitted some traffic into the ghetto. Jews couldn’t leave, but Poles could come in to trade and loot empty houses.
The Germans said that they wouldn’t deport anyone who worked in a ghetto factory. My father and mother got jobs working in a factory that manufactured wooden clogs for prisoners. My sister and I went along and sat on the straw floor.
We were always starving. Sometimes, my friends and I would sneak through an opening in the ghetto wall and grab some potatoes that had fallen off wagons. The Polish kids who spotted us would run quickly and slice open the bags we had filled, so the potatoes fell out onto the street.
One day, my father and I were walking on the Jewish side of the ghetto wall while, on the Aryan side of the wall, Polish goyim with guns were on their upstairs terrace shooting down at us for fun. We stood as close to the wall as possible and miraculously were not hit.
* * *
In September 1942 the deportations began. One day, the Germans came to the factory shouting, “Raus Juden,” and they began hitting people to get out. We were terrified. My parents grabbed us and held us close. The Nazis made us walk in a column of around 100 people surrounded by Germans with guns and Ukrainian guards. We were marched towards the Umschlagplatz, the train station. We knew we were going to be sent on trains to Treblinka or another concentration camp.
As we walked, my father noticed an empty trolley car and ordered me to jump inside and hide there until we had all marched by and then to run to my Uncle Moishy’s apartment and stay there until my parents came to get me. I refused to let go of my father. It is the only time I remember him being very angry with me.
As we reached the train station, my father spotted a Jewish policeman with a yellow arm band whom the Germans used for crowd control. He asked the policeman, “My baby daughter is thirsty. Can I go into a home here to get her a drink?” The Jewish policeman looked at the Nazi guard and he distractedly waved his hand, and we ran into an empty house.
We climbed up to the top floor and scrambled up a ladder to the roof. The houses were terraced, and you could jump from one roof to another. We ran at least five houses down, ran downstairs, and fled back to our ghetto apartment.
By 1943 they were liquidating the ghetto systematically. My father knew that they were killing Jews. In February, two months before the Warsaw uprising began, my father arranged for the four of us to join a group of Poles who had come into the ghetto to loot. My father gave them a few gold coins in return for them allowing us to mingle with them as they exited the ghetto. When they crossed through the ghetto opening, the Germans took their identification papers from them without paying attention and let all of us go through. We all spoke Polish, and my mother had dyed her hair blonde and had blue eyes.
Polish police on the other side saw our group and suspected that some of us were Jews. They pointed to my father and called him over. My father bribed them too and we escaped, but we knew we had to separate. My mother had pinned an address inside my jacket, and had sewn a few coins into the lining, and told me to run. Suddenly, a Polish policeman grabbed me. I was dark and looked Jewish. I started screaming and kicking. A group of goyim gathered around and told the policeman to let the little Zhid go. “He’s just a kid.”
I ran off and found the address. It was our warehouse. My father had made arrangements with a non-Jewish worker to help us. This Pole opened the door and recognized me. “You’re Itchik’s son? Come!” He locked the door and I started crying. He said, “Be quiet or they will hear you. Go up and sit on one of the couches. Your mother will come get you.”
I went upstairs and sat quietly in the eerie darkness. I remember two long frightening nights. My mother came each day with some bread and crumbs of sugar but, because of the Pole, she was afraid to stay with me at night. My mother then brought me to a Polish family named Kozman, who had been a former employee of my father. She told me, “Stay with the Kozmans until I come back and get you.” I was just nine years old.
I spent the last two years of the war with them. My father had paid them enough to care for me. The Kozmans were religious Christians but didn’t force me to join them. They lived in a basement apartment in a suburb called Mokatuv. They had two kids, Bodik, who was about my age, and Lala, who was older than me. Bodik went to school, but I didn’t go. The Kozmans were afraid that people would realize I was a Jew.
One day in 1944, Bodik came home with some kids and they asked him who I was. He told them, “This is my cousin,” but the kids told him point blank, “Come on. He looks like a Zhid.” Mr. Kozman panicked and decided to move to Novemiastoh, a small village on the Pilitza River, where they rented a cottage for the year before the war ended.
They had me do a lot of the manual labor. I would get up early, make the fire in the oven, and get milk from the farmer. A German soldier would come occasionally to town looking for Jews, and then Kozman would tell me to run down to the river, where log rafts were anchored. Each raft had a hut where a person could sleep on a straw mattress. He told me to stay in the hut and they’d get me when the search was over. I would stay there for five to six hours until I was called back.
Once, my mother arranged for me to be brought to the city to get a haircut in a specific barber shop. I was told that my father would be sitting in a chair getting his hair cut and I was not to speak to him or look at him. I could only look at him in the mirror. That was the last time I saw my father and he saw me.
* * *
The war ended in 1945. The Russians requisitioned the Kozman house and appointed Mrs. Kozman as their cook. That first night, Mr. Kozman became drunk from all the Russian vodka. He pointed to me and told the Russians, “He is a Jew.” He patted his chest and said, “I saved him.” The Russians were surprised and pleased. They lifted their bottles and saluted him.
The fields all around our village were full of dead Germans. The Russians would capture the Germans, take them to their camp, and shoot them dead on the spot. The Russians took the Germans’ quality leather boots and weapons for themselves, while the Polish farmers took their military backpacks and other goods.
Each day, we saw Russian tanks go by, waving a sheet on which was written, “On the way to Berlin.” It was three months after the war, and I was crying a lot. Would my mother show up or was she dead? Was my father alive? One night, when a blizzard was raging outside, we suddenly heard banging. We opened the door and a snowman with hanging icicles entered. It was my mother!
My mother sat down with the Kozmans and told them what had happened. She and my father had been hiding in Warsaw. Three days before the Russians crossed the Vistula, the Germans were taking people off the street and forcing them to dig ditches to block the Russian tanks. When my father walked by, they grabbed him and gave him a shovel to dig a ditch. A Pole recognized my father and told the German guard that he was a Jew. The German shot him on the spot and he fell dead into the ditch. It was the third of Elul, close to the end of the war.
My mother had hitchhiked on horse-drawn wagons to reach me, sleeping in farmhouses on the way. We went back to Warsaw the same way. My mother had German-issued Polish money. When the Russians came, they abolished the money, but people in the villages didn’t know and my mother paid our expenses with the worthless currency.
My mother had left my little sister with a Polish family who lived in Katovitza and had agreed to keep her for the money. But a few weeks after taking her, they gave her up to an orphanage run by nuns without informing my mother. When we arrived in Warsaw, my mother left me with a Jewish family and went to Katovitza to get my sister. The family denied knowing anything. “You took my daughter in 1944. Where is she?” my mother demanded.
“Go away, you crazy Jew,” they told her. She ran out of their house screaming. A Russian jeep drove by and stopped, asking why she was screaming.
“They stole my daughter!”
They said, “What? Where?” She took them to the house. When the Poles saw the Russian with a gun, they started whimpering, “Don’t kill us. We were afraid of the Nazis, so we gave her to the nuns.”
The Russian officer grabbed the Pole by the neck and said, “Show us where she is.”
They drove to the church orphanage. Zosia was already six years old. She had no recollection of us. The nuns had a record of who had been brought to the orphanage and pointed to my sister. My mother hugged her, but my sister didn’t know who my mother was. It was bittersweet, and we were reunited but without my dear father.
* * *
After the war, the Communists took over. My mother tried to make a living but couldn’t get back anything we had owned before the war. She knew that we had no future in Poland. They wouldn’t let her out, but it was easier to get children out.
Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld from London came to Warsaw wearing a British uniform with a Two Tablets (Jewish Military Insignia) tag on his uniform. He put an ad in the Polish paper saying that he represented British Jewry and was looking for orphans who survived the war and would pay for any orphans brought to him.
My mother saw this as an opportunity to get me out of Poland. We were late for the ship, but when another orphan didn’t show up, Dr. Schonfeld gave me his name and told me to walk up the ship’s plank when this other child’s name was called. I was only 13, with no father, and I left my mother and little sister, not knowing if I would ever see them again. The ship stopped at a German port Kooks-haven on the way to England. The Jewish boys on the ship stood at the railing. They pointed at themselves and shouted at the Germans on the dock, “Ich bin ah Yid.”
I came to London in 1947.
We disembarked at Edinburgh in Scotland and were sent by train to London. We arrived at Charing Cross station on a Friday night. All these years I had lived with a Christian family and had forgotten what Shabbos was.
Rav Gedalya Schneider of Yeshivas Toras Emes was waiting there even though it was Shabbos. They randomly divided us up into three groups. I happened to be in the group that Rabbi Schneider took. Other kids went to Dr. Schonfeld’s school. A third group ended up in a secular Jewish school. Rabbi Schneider told us to take the coins out of our pockets. That was my reintroduction to Shabbos and a life of Yiddishkeit.
During the second Shabbos at Toras Emes, they asked who was 13 years old. I raised my hand with another three or four boys. They called us up to the Torah for an aliyah and told us that this would be our bar mitzva. They put us under a chupah, made a bracha, and I received a set of tefillin.
My mother wrote to me often. She told me to go to the U.S. because my father had siblings there. When I was 14, I went to the American embassy in London. I told them that I was a Polish refugee who wanted to go to the U.S. I spoke a little English by then. They were very nice. They put my name down, gave me my Polish quota number, and told me that they would call me when my number came up.
I lived in the Toras Emes dormitory on Cazenove Road in Stamford Hill. I didn’t learn much secular studies, but my Torah studies were flourishing.
* * *
In 1951, when I was 17, the American embassy contacted me. I had to furnish an affidavit of support that I wouldn’t be a burden on the government, a prepaid ship’s passage, and an x-ray showing I was healthy. My father’s sister in America, Aunt Fanny, provided the affidavit and paid for my passage.
Aunt Fanny was waiting for me when I arrived in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and hugged and kissed me. I stayed with her for six months, but she was not very religious. She took me to the Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin office and explained that I was a refugee from Poland. They agreed to accept me.
I attended Chaim Berlin from the end of 1951 and stayed there for six years. At first, they put me in the elementary school, because my level wasn’t good enough for high school. Rav Avigdor Miller’s son, Lazer, was my chavrusah with whom I learned in beis midrash. I attended Thomas Jefferson High School at night. After graduating high school, I applied to Brooklyn College and graduated with a degree in education and a minor in math in 1957. I stayed in Chaim Berlin until my marriage. The Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yitzchok Hutner, was very kind to me.
The Russians wouldn’t let my mother and sister out of Poland, and my mother would send me packages of things like dried mushrooms so I would have money to live on. My sister ended up going to medical school in Poland until I was able to bring both of them to the U.S. in the 1960s.
Every summer, the other bachurim in Chaim Berlin went home, but I didn’t have a place to go, so I stayed in yeshiva and got a summer job. For three summers, I worked in Chaim Berlin’s Camp Morris as a waiter, but in 1957 I got a job as a waiter in the Ocean Crest Hotel in Far Rockaway, whose owners were frum.
There, I met Eva Rosenberg. She was from an ultra-Orthodox family in Hungary that had survived the war. Her father had been the chief rabbi of their town, but he was murdered in almost the same way as my father. He was informed on by a Hungarian goyishe woman, who told the retreating Nazis where there was a group of Jewish men hiding in a bunker. Even though the war was just about over, the Nazis shot them all dead.
Her mother miraculously survived the war with her eight children. Eva attended Bais Yaakov in Hungary after the war and ran a large school when she was only 16 years old. When the Hungarian revolution broke out in 1956, the family escaped to Vienna and then made their way to the United States with the help of HIAS and the Joint.
During her first year in America, Eva attended Stern College’s Teachers Institute and taught at Dov Revel. She also took a summer job at the Ocean Crest. The hotel’s Hungarian owner, Mrs. Roth, told her to stay away from all the boys working there, except for a nice boy from Poland called Alex.
Eva and I married in 1958.
* * *
I went to Torah Umesorah and applied for a job for teaching couples. They sent us to a Talmud Torah in Kansas City, Missouri.
We traveled two days on the Santa Fe Chief train to the middle of the U.S. The Talmud Torah classes were held at the Kehillat Israel shul every day from 4 to 6 p.m. after the kids finished public school. They attended the Talmud Torah to learn a little about Yiddishkeit and prepare for their bar mitzvas. Eva and I both taught the kids and ran youth groups. On the side, I got a job teaching math in a Catholic high school.
Our oldest two children were born in Kansas City, but we decided to move because Jewish education was so paltry. In 1966, we moved to Connecticut, where I got a full-time job at a public high school teaching math and science, and my wife and I also taught in the local Talmud Torahs.
Our youngest son was born in 1970. The kids were getting older, and we were not happy with the level of Jewish education in Connecticut either. Baltimore had everything, so we moved here. I taught math in public school from 1977 until my retirement at age 67.
I told my children what I went through in my youth. They are very proud of their grandfather and grandmother, who are both survivors. I made them videos, and we have given Holocaust testimony. I never went back to Poland and feel no affinity for the Polish people. We were never able to retrieve my father’s business assets despite the government’s promises.
I look at my beloved wife of 59 years, kein yirbu, my accomplished children, my grandchildren and my many great-grandchildren, and my heart is filled with joy and Yiddishe nachas. I am sure that my parents and grandparents would be proud that all of us are living dedicated Jewish lives.
Alex and Eva Raden live in Baltimore
Reprinted with permission from Yated Ne’eman.
