A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [46]
BY THE TIME the war ended, thirteen-year-old Barbara Gora, her mother, her father, and her sister had all gone by a variety of names. When she was ten in 1942, she had been Barbara Englisz. A German who checked her papers on a Warsaw street thought Englisz was a droll name in wartime Warsaw, and he laughed. He would not have laughed if he had known that her real name was Irene Hochberg and that she had been smuggled out of the ghetto.
She had come from a comfortable Jewish household on Urabia Street, in the old center of Warsaw. Her mother had grown up in a devout Orthodox home, where she had hated the rigid religious life with its dietary laws, special clothing, and constant rules about what to do each day and at different times of the day. She married a Jew from a nonreligious home, and they had raised their two daughters like Poles. They spoke Polish at home, reserving Yiddish for times when they wanted to keep secrets from Irene and her sister.
Irene was sent to a new school in the center of Warsaw where many of the students were children of people in powerful positions and where she was the only Jew. Relative to the experiences she would soon have, being the only Jew in this Polish school in the 1930s was a minor trauma. Yet it shaped her as much as any of her later experiences. The school had a compulsory religion class, but her parents told her she did not have to go if she did not want to, so she did not attend. The school, even the religion teacher, were very agreeable about it. They gave her a comfortable place to sit and wait, to study, play, and do whatever she wanted while the other children were in religion class. But because she was absent from the class, the children were merciless in their attacks on “the dirty little Jew/’ They battered her with phrases they had learned from their parents. They didn't know what these things meant, and Irene didn't know either. But most days she left school crying.
When she was eight years old, the Hochberg family was forced to move to the ghetto, which was not far from their home. Irene's father, Wiktor, knew a non-Jew who lived in the neighborhood that was becoming the ghetto. Since the non-Jewish family had to move too, the two families simply swapped apartments. Irene was happy that she did not have to go to school anymore.
Once the Germans began their roundups at the Umschlagplatz, her father used his contacts in the city to smuggle the entire family and himself out one by one. They all got new birth certificates with new names—authentic documents of deceased people who had been born in Warsaw. Only Irene's mother hid. Even though she was blonde and not particularly Jewish-looking, her Orthodox background had fixed such a strong Jewish identity in her mind that she imagined that anyone at a glance could see she was Jewish. Irene's sister was placed in the old part of Warsaw, where she lived openly and worked in a factory. Irene, now called Barbara, was moved from family to family. She would stay for a time in one Christian home, and then her father, now calling himself Witold Gora, would suddenly show up and take her to a new Christian home. The Germans were killing more and more people, and it was getting harder and harder to find families with the courage to take her. Finally, he placed her with what was called a Treuhander, a collaborator.
The Treuhander knew the war was going badly and that when the Germans were gone, he was going to be in trouble with his fellow Poles. Now at least he could say he had saved someone. Besides, it was a perfect cover for his smuggling business to have this little girl riding in a wagon with him as he brought black market goods into Warsaw. She worked very hard at the business while her “uncle”—a lanky man with round little glasses and a hard, bitter face—spent most of his time drinking and smoking cigarettes. Sometimes Barbara would even bring the goods into Warsaw by herself.
Her “uncle's” family and friends were mostly Volksdeutsche,