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By Root 554 0

Poles whom the German Reich had officially recognized as being ethnically German and not of the inferior Slavic race. Once the “uncle” took her to visit his cousins. They had a daughter who was Barbara's age, a little Nazi in a Hitler Youth uniform. The two girls played together. Most people were kind to Barbara. She was a pretty blond girl with smart and cautious eyes in a handsome rounded face. She looked like a cute little Pole, but though her “good look” gave her a certain confidence, she was never sure if people knew about her or not. Sometimes other children would ask her to cross herself, and it seemed that this was a test. She thought it would look suspicious if she did it—it would look as if she were afraid. So she would just tell them it was stupid to cross yourself when you weren't even in church. And that seemed to sound good.

When she was selling smuggled goods in Warsaw, there was one man she met who worried her. Whenever she referred to her aunt and uncle, he would say, “They aren't your family.” She didn't know what he knew about her. But he was always very kind to her, this poor hard-working little girl.

At home with her false family, she cleaned house obsessively. When she had first moved there, she had seen that the apartment was not particularly clean. Now eleven-year-old Barbara scrubbed everything. She scrubbed places where no one had ever looked. She scrubbed the floor under the beds. She washed the walls behind the furniture. The taunt from her school days—“dirty Jew” — still stung. No one was ever going to call her dirty.

By the time Warsaw was liberated, little remained of the city. According to official history, it was 80 percent destroyed. The Polish Home Army had risen up against the Germans, assuming that the rapidly approaching Red Army would finish the revolt for them. But the Soviets—according to some versions, they were unexpectedly held up by German resistance, and according to others, they wanted the Polish army to be destroyed—did not enter Warsaw until the Germans had annihilated the Polish Home Army and most of the city. Since 1943, the site of the ghetto had been a large blackened lot. Most of the rest of Warsaw was now tall hills of debris. Witold Gora at last reunited his family, but he could not return to Urabia Street, where they had lived when he had been Wiktor Hochberg. Now the street was not even there, except for part of a path through the piles of rubble. Warsaw was nothing but mountains and valleys. On MarszaHcowska, one of the longest main streets, only four buildings were left standing.

Barbara Gora had a friend who lived near where the ghetto had been. She lived on the second floor of a building that had no first floor anymore—only the stairway. It scared Barbara even to look at the building, let alone go up to the apartment. But soon she learned that many people lived in buildings like this. She gingerly entered and exited them every day and grew accustomed to the fact that none of them ever fell over.

One of the few remaining buildings in the center of the city was the turn-of-the-century Polonia Hotel, with its ornate white exterior, its glass art nouveau awnings over the doors, its grand interior with sweeping staircase, and its two-tier rococo dining room. In its new status as one of the few intact structures in town, the hotel building now housed all of the embassies and was teeming with reporters. Poland was one of the big news stories of 1945 because of what had been found in the death camps there. The six main camps of Poland had killed 5,400,000 people. The world had never seen anything like it.

The Polonia Hotel became an exciting place to visit. Barbara Gora, now 13, was drawn to all the colorful flags draped on the building. Inside were Russians, Americans, French, and English. And there were journalists from all over the world—anxious aggressive people speaking dozens of languages, running up and down the stairs. She was particularly interested in the British and the Americans because she was going to school again and was studying English from a Polish