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

Felix Zandman

Felix Zandman’s Grandma Tema once did Anna Puchalska a big favor that Anna never forgot. Tema Frejdowicz helped Anna through a childbirth at a difficult time in her life. So years later, when Felix knocked on Anna’s door and asked for a single night’s shelter to hide from the Germans, Anna took him in, glad for a chance to do something for a member of his Grandma Tema’s family. Anna told Felix, “God sent you.” And Anna let Felix stay more than one night. In fact, by the time Soviet troops liberated the area around Grodno, where Felix had grown up and where Anna and her family lived, he had survived for seventeen months hidden with at least four and sometimes as many as six other people in a small, dark, fetid pit under Anna’s home, a pit so crowded that the people hiding there had to take two-hour turns lying down and one person always had to sit on the waste bucket. Felix Zandman later would get his Ph.D. in physics from the Sorbonne in Paris . He went on to found what became a huge international electronics company, Vishay Intertechnology Inc. But it was Anna Puchalska who gave him a chance just to survive. Felix was born in 1927 in Grodno, then in Poland, now in Belarus. About thirty thousand of Grodno’s approximately fifty-seven thousand residents at the time were Jewish.76 Nearly all of those thirty thousand Jews perished in the Holocaust . In fact, only ninety-seven Grodno Jews showed up there again after the Soviets liberated the city. There is a Jewish community again today in Grodno, but it is made up almost entirely of immigrants from Russia. Felix told us that only one Jew, Gregory Hosid, survived the ghetto and still lives in Grodno. Like many Jews in prewar Grodno, Felix was part of a large close family. That family’s active engagement with political, religious, and social ideas was a microcosm of Grodno itself, which was an active Jewish intellectual center. Young Felix, his sister, Mira, and his parents, Aaron and Genia Zandman, lived in one of four apartments in a big house at 28 Brygidzka Street. His married uncle Grishka Frejdowicz had a second apartment there with his wife, Tania. His uncle Sender and his wife, Sarah, lived in a third apartment, while a large fourth unit on the second floor was occupied by his maternal grandparents, Nahum and Tema Frejdowicz, and their still unmarried children, Kushka, Fania, and Lisa. Felix’s father, a chemistry scholar with a Ph.D., had married into the Frejdowicz family, which operated a construction and building supply company. But Felix said Aaron Zandman was not allowed to teach chemistry in Poland because Felix Zandman 158 159 Krystyna Maciejewska and Sabina Kazimierczyk Felix Zandman (photo courtesy of Felix Zandman) 160 The Stories he was Jewish, so he joined the Frejdowicz business as a salesman. Felix’s paternal grandparents, Berl and Rifka Zandman, also were a big part of his young life. Rifka was the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century holy man, an itinerant Jewish preacher known as the Kelmer Maggid, and this lineage was a source of family pride. Rifka’s husband, Felix’s grandfather Berl, was a rabbi. Although Jews made up much of the Grodno population of Felix’s boyhood, he frequently experienced antisemitic behavior. Often, he said, boys from the Catholic school he had to pass when he walked to his school would beat him up merely because he was a Jew. Still, he told us, he had lots of wonderful memories of his pre-Holocaust life in Grodno. “I remember the Friday evening dinners at my grandparents’. I remember going to the synagogue, which was very nice. I remember how my grandfather, on holidays, would invite everybody from the synagogue to have some schnapps. I remember our vacations. We had a summer house where this Janova [the woman who later hid him] was the caretaker.77 I remember with fondness how she would take me to drink milk from the goat. I still remember the odor of that milk. I remember playing there, playing volleyball there with the kids, swimming in the Niemen River. All of my past life I remember,” including school and the political debates he and his peers had about Zionism and other subjects. Memories of his Grandma Tema stayed...