They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Maria Devinki

For more than two years—from September 28, 1942, to January 16, 1945—Maria Devinki lived under barns. For more than a year and a half, it was in a hole dug in the soil under the wooden floor of a barn at the edge of the village of Droblin, outside Wodzisław, northeast of Kraków. Then fear of being discovered drove her and her family to another nearby farm, where she hid for eight more months until Soviet troops liberated the area. She, her husband, and her mother, and sometimes others were paying a lot of money for the privilege of hiding from the Germans in a hole in the ground, as much as two thousand dollars (in today’s dollars) a month. The young woman who emerged from those unspeakable places of darkness saw the realities of the world with remarkable clarity. We had barely sat down with her in her suburban home in Kansas City when Maria, more than sixty years after the end of the war, said this: “Just to make it short and sweet before we go any farther, that generation, my generation, will never forgive. Pardon me for making this statement, because I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for a Polish army officer.” That officer, Jozef (or Jusick) Gondorowicz, was a non-Jew in the Armia Krajowa . He had been a business partner of Maria’s parents, Solomon and Regina (or Rivka) Braun. Maria was known then as Mala Braun. Jusick acted as a trusted go-between, paying money the Brauns gave him to compensate a Polish farmer and his wife for hiding Maria, her husband, her mother, and sometimes her brothers and their wives as well. Maria’s father was murdered at the Treblinka death camp. The Devinki story contains a range of characters—from the good-hearted Jusick Gondorowicz to farmers who risked their lives by hiding Jews—but did it for money. Maria Devinki said she believes the first farmer to hide them, Wladyslaw Chelowski, probably did not realize how much danger he was putting himself in. The second was just desperately poor. When Maria, born June 1, 1920, was a small child, her family moved to Wodzisław from Hanover, Germany, where her parents had run a successful export business. Maria said she believed that at the start of World War II Jews made up more than half the population of Wodzisław.10 Maria had two brothers. She went to a public school as well as to a Bais Yaakov , a religious school for girls. Her goal was to become a teacher. But when the war came, she and some members of her family relied on a trusted business Maria Devinki 42 43 Maria Devinki 44 The Stories friend to survive. “Jusick [Gondorowicz],” she explained, “he was a very close friend to us. Matter of fact, we had a partnership.” The Braun family business was shipping merchandise, eventually getting it “to the Baltic and from there shipping to the United States, Canada, and other countries,” Maria explained. “So we had trucks and buses. There was a whole group of us. Because of Jusick we got the license to do that.” When the German threat to local Jews became clear, Jusick“came to me and he said,‘I have a place for you. If you feel comfortable, I will take you to a farm and they probably will hide you. But we have to make an agreement with him [the farmer]. To make it very short, I’m not going to go into every little detail.’” One detail Jusick told Maria about only later was that when Jusick (an army man long before the war) first talked to the farmer about hiding Maria as well as her mother and husband, he pulled out a gun and pointed it at the farmer as he said, “If anything happens to those Jews, it will be bad.” The farmer understood Jusick’s clear meaning. “So,”Maria said,“that was our guarantee that he’s not going to do anything to us.”11 In a written statement that Jusick made much later to the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, he said that he believed“my visits at the bunker played a very important role in the life of the Jewish families. On one hand, I had to make sure that the farmer was still willing to provide a...