What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [88]
Over the next four years, he carved four hundred heads of varying sizes, shapes, and expressions. As his skill increased, so did the size of the stones he used and the sophistication of his designs. After originally concentrating on the softer red sandstones he found on the beach along the Hudson, he began experimenting with a wider range of rocks—granite, quartz, limestone, basalt, marble, and glacial stone. “I discovered a method. I pick up rocks and turn them round and round until I find a face. Once I do, I peel away what’s there. I take pleasure in it. It’s just fun. I can’t stop. I wake up at night and can’t wait to go out and get to work. But sometimes, it’s too early to start, especially now that I use a compressor. I don’t want to wake the neighbors with the noise. So I have to wait. I make myself some oatmeal—for lunch I make a large salad, for dinner fish. I listen to classical music on the radio and I wait. Every day, I chisel. It’s my life.”
The only child of Tadeusz Ludwiczak and Jadwiga Szelong was born in Otwock, Poland, on January 2, 1926, and named after his father. He remembers little more of his mother than her sitting in a chair. She died of tuberculosis during an epidemic when he was four. “I probably missed my mother at first, but you get used to these things when you’re so young,” he said.
If he speaks of the event matter-of-factly, it is not difficult to understand. Even when there was no epidemic, tuberculosis was a constant in Otwock, a picturesque resort town on the Swider River fifteen miles south of Warsaw. With its mild climate, pine tree woods, unique alpine Russian architecture, and proximity to the city, it was the ideal location for the first tuberculosis sanatorium in lowlands Poland, founded there in 1893.
By 1933 Otwock had become the first town connected to Warsaw by electric train, and during Ted’s childhood it developed into a cosmopolitan resort. As the home of a Hasidic dynasty of revered rabbis and yeshivas, it attracted a large number of Jews. Its full-time population swelled to thirty thousand residents, half of whom were Jewish.
Ted’s father had a good job as the secretary of the Otwock court, and the family had a comfortable existence. For Ted, there was school in the morning and handball and soccer in the afternoon. The Catholic family lived in a villa with four private houses—three of the families were Jewish, and Ted counted Abraham Orbach, Nathan Hirschberg, and Anthony Hoffman among his best friends. “When they had matzoh and gefilte fish for Passover, we did, too. We lived together from the day we were born.”
September 1, 1939, should have been a happy day for young Ted. It was the day he learned that he had been accepted into the local gymnasium to begin his secondary education. Just before dawn, however, more than a million German troops, in five armies, stormed Polish borders on several fronts. They marched through towns, throwing grenades, making arrests, and plastering buildings with swastikas. By 9 A.M. German planes had bombarded Warsaw, and German soldiers had entered Otwock. The Nazi nightmare had begun.
The beautiful Goldberg synagogue on Warszawska Street in Otwock quickly went up in flames. Within weeks, the Wajnberg synagogue was demolished so its bricks could be used to build a Nazi administrative building. Jews were randomly attacked, shorn of their beards, and arbitrarily arrested. The cruelties mounted. Jewish women were forced to strip and wipe the floors of the Nazi barracks with their own undergarments. Still, the Jews of Otwock, like those elsewhere, held out hope for a rapid end to the war and a return to the way things were. With that in mind and to protect their belongings, they signed over their property to non-Jewish Poles for safekeeping.
In December 1940, shortly before Ted turned fifteen, the Nazis established a Jewish ghetto in Otwock, as they had in Warsaw and other Polish cities. To create the