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

Feliks Karpman

When Marianna Konarzewska’s family hidWolf [now Feliks] Karpman from the Germans, the two teenagers fell in love. They married on January 6, 1946, less than a year after the war ended, and were in their sixty-second year of marriage when we interviewed them in their home in Góra Kalwaria, southeast of Warsaw.42 “We were two stupid kids,” Feliks said, laughing as we sat at the dining-room table of the couple’s home. “We went to school together and knew each other but we weren’t falling in love then. All my other family died in the camps. So after that, I had her.Where else am I going to go look for someone? Just after the war, I was twenty and she was eighteen. We knew each other and liked each other and we promised each other that we would get married. So we got married and now I’m over 80 and we still love each other a lot.” Feliks was born on November 29, 1926, and Marianna was born on January 2, 1928, both in Góra Kalwaria. We asked Feliks if he felt some sense of obligation to marry Marianna after she and her family saved him from death. “No, no,” he said. “I could have taken another girl. What’s the problem?” At which point, Marianna laughed and added,“And we got used to each other.” Feliks has had many reasons to love Marianna—beyond the fact that she and her family saved his life. They have had a fruitful life together that produced two children, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Marianna’s family members were not the only non-Jews who came to Feliks’s aid in the war, but he said that, without Marianna, her brother Edward Konarzewski, and her mother, he may not have survived. The odds against Feliks surviving the war to marry anyone were high. At the start of the war, at least three thousand of Góra Kalwaria’s seven thousand residents were Jews, according to Feliks’s memory.43 When we interviewed Marianna and Feliks in August 2007, he was one of just two Jews left in town. The other one was a man in his nineties. Feliks’s father was a butcher and operated two stores that sold beef. Marianna ’s parents were farmers. The Germans took her father to Germany to be a forced laborer. Her mother was left behind and struggled to make a living on the small farm. After the war, Marianna’s father obtained some land in Germany and stayed there. Marianna’s siblings moved there and lived with him until he died. But Marianna and her mother stayed in Góra Kalwaria. Marianna’s and Feliks’s families knew each other before the war. In fact Marianna ’s mother, Helena Konarzewska, often bought milk from Feliks’s parents, Feliks Karpman 98 Marianna Konarzewska Karpman and Feliks Karpman Marianna Konarzewska Karpman and Feliks Karpman 99 100 The Stories and when she came for that purpose Marianna’s mother would set out tea and challah (a braided bread Jews traditionally eat on holidays and on the Sabbath). The two women would talk as old friends. But soon after the Germans took control of Góra Kalwaria, they established a ghetto. The ghetto lasted until 1941, when most of Góra Kalwaria’s Jews were transported to the Warsaw Ghetto. From Warsaw, many of them were deported to Treblinka, where they were murdered. “Just before the Germans took Jews from the ghetto here in Góra Kalwaria,” Feliks told us, “my family was left with two cows. We sold them to Jews in Otwock . So one Jew and one Pole came at night to get the cows. But one of the local people saw the cows and began to yell, ‘Jews! Jews!’ So he took the cows to his place. He stole those cows, and we didn’t know where they were. Later, the mother-in-law of the man who stole the cows was walking by Marianna’s parents ’ house, and she told them, ‘The cows are at our place.’ So I and my brother and father ran over there and took the cows. We told them that they were not their cows, that they stole them and we’re taking them back.” Because of later developments, the cow-theft incident came to figure in Feliks ’s...