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By Root 1215 0

ghetto, non-Jewish Poles were forced to vacate their apartments and to “swap” with Jewish residents. The Ludwiczaks were forced out of their home and into a three-room house that had belonged to a Jewish optician. “It was small, but we weren’t looking for comfort. Life was so strenuous. People were disappearing overnight. You never knew who would be next. The small stores had all been in Jewish hands. And suddenly the Jewish merchants disappeared, and there was no food—no fruit, no vegetables, no medicine. We were only looking to survive.”

On August 19, 1942, the hope of survival for the majority of the Jews of Otwock vanished. At 7 A.M. a truckload of Ukrainian soldiers drove through the main gate of Otwock’s ghetto firing their rifles. A limousine carrying S.S. officers followed. A Jewish woman—a dentist and the mother of two young children—rushed forward to show the Ukrainians her official certificates. Without a word, they shot her in the head—the day’s first victim but hardly its last. “We heard them as they began rounding up the Jewish population. It took a whole day. The Germans herded them into columns and then into cattle cars, one hundred people in each one, and sent them to Treblinka. It was terrible. It’s hard to imagine,” Ted whispered.

Under the Nazi master plan, educating Poles, whom the Germans planned to use only in forced labor, was pointless. They ordered gymnasiums to eliminate all academic subjects for Poles and offer only a trade-school curriculum. “But secretly, the teachers taught us the forbidden subjects—history, literature, math. It was very risky. When someone found out what we were being taught, teachers disappeared to the concentration camps. Everyone was quiet.”

Ted once came frighteningly close to losing his life. Ironically, the German he had learned to speak in the trade-school classes most likely saved him. One morning, as he was putting on his coat and leaving his house, he looked up to find two German soldiers pointing rifles at him. Behind them, a Nazi van sat idling. Poles arrested off the streets huddled inside it. “ ‘What’s your name? What are you doing?’ the soldier asked me. I answered him in German. I said I was a student. And he let me go.”

After the war, Ted began a three-year program in accounting at the University of Warsaw thanks to a certificate stipulating that he had completed standard high-school studies in secret. But in 1948, the Stalinist era introduced Poland to mass intimidation, arrests, deportations, and murders. And while Ted was working at a summer job as a dockmaster at the ancient port city of Stettin, now known as Szcezin, he was befriended by an officer on a Greek-owned merchant ship, who helped him stow away on the S.S. Epiros. “Poland had changed only from an occupation by the Nazis to an occupation by the Soviets,” Ted recalled. “The country was ruined, and I didn’t see any future in it.”

He believes his artistic impulse was born during the several months the ship was dry-docked in Bombay and when it stopped in Alexandria, where he got the chance to explore, respectively, the Buddhist temples, caves, and ruins of India, and the pyramids of ancient Egypt. In Ancona, Italy, he ran into a group of demobilized World War II soldiers from the Polish II Corps, who warned Ted not to return to their homeland or risk being sent to a Soviet labor camp or, more likely, to his death. He went to Rome to get aid from a Polish refugee organization. While waiting for a visa to the United States, sponsored by an aunt in Flushing, Queens, he survived by giving tours of the ancient city to some of the hundreds of thousands of German-speaking tourists making pilgrimages for the Holy Year of 1950. He assumes that that experience added to the feeling for art that he would later draw upon. “I went to the Colosseum every day. I knew every stone in the place—the obelisks, the columns, the statues,” he said. “I must have stored up what I saw and forgot about it until I started carving my own work,” he said.

Instead of a visa from the U.S. consulate, he received an invitation