Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

Stefan Petri

136 Out of the Inferno Paulinska, a former officer in the Polish Army, emigrated to England in 1947. She married a pharmacist and is the mother of three children. Now a widow, the 77-year-old is active in Polish affairs in England. STEFAN PETRI When the war broke out, I lived with my wife, our sons, and my wife's family on Halicki Street, now called Barburki Street, in Warsaw. During the first months of Hitler's occupation, I built in my home a small hiding place in the cellar. Access was through a cabinet in the laundry room. Being an engineer by education, I executed this in a comparatively short time. This secret place was to serve me and my family in case of a threat to our lives. In 1942, when the Germans began the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, I decided to hide in this secret place a Jewish family by the name of Szapiro-Kaufman and Ela Szapiro, together with their sons, Jerzy and Marek. I had known the family of Dr. Szapiro before the war. I decided to hasten to their assistance because this was my obligation . In the spring of 1942, the four of them escaped from the ghetto and with the help of a mutual friend, Irena Wroblewski, hid themselves in a tollgate in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. Late at night I escorted them along side streets to my home on Halicki Street. From that time they had to spend the day in the secret hiding place, but at night they could be in the apartment. One day someone reported to the Gestapo that I was hiding fugitives from the Jewish ghetto. The Germans appeared at my home. They conducted two detailed examinations, attempting by beatings to compel me to reveal the place where the Jews were concealed. During the searches they used dogs, but even the dogs were unable to uncover anything because in the apartment and in the cellar I had placed a preparation of nicotine, which blunted their sense of smell. After the intrusion of the Gestapo, I realized the high probability that the hiding place would be uncovered during subsequent searches; many people knew about it, too. During the absence of other 137 Adolph Pilch residents, I constructed another hiding place for the Szapiro family in 1943. This time the hiding place was located under the cellar. Under the first cellar, I dug out another one. The access was under a workbench with locksmith's instruments in the upper cellar. In the floor of the upper cellar were found ideal movable boards, opening the way to the hiding place. The Szapiro family spent the night in the apartment, but during the day they sheltered themselves under the cellar. This situation continued from April 1943 to July 1944. From July to September 11, 1944, the day of liberation of the Praga section of Warsaw from the Germans, the Jews remained constantly in their hiding place. The sons of Kaufman and Ela Szapiro live to this day. Marek lives in the United States, and Jerzy Szapiro is a professor of medicine in Warsaw. Petri worked in communications after the war. He died in 1987. ADOLPH PILCH During the tim~ of the Warsaw Uprising, in August and September 1944, I was commander of the Palmiry-MXociny Regiment, one of the largest units of which was the Kampinos group, whose commander was Major Alfons Trzaska-Kotowski, known by the pseudonym OkOll. . On August 21, our security forces around Modlin informed us that the commander of a Hungarian detachment had asked for permission to pass through the Kampinos Forest to the south, to reach Laski. I sent an officer to explore what was going on. I received a report indicating that this was a detachment of Hungarian Jews, numbering around two, hundred, who were escorted by twenty armed soldiers. The comm,ander of the convoy was Lieutenant Zelinka Sandor Josef. I agreed to let th~m pass on the condition that the armed escorts lay down their arm,s on a wagon, which would be guarded by our partisans. When th~ detachment arrived at our location in the forest, ...