Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

Maria Kolator

99 Maria Kolator think more than ten of us made it out of that catastrophe. But the Germans had heavy losses too. Kolarski, a member of an anti-Communist group after the war, was killed in an engagement with Communist forces in 1948. This account is based on the notes and diary of Pelagia Lukaszewska, a former Polish-American social worker who visited Poland in 1947. MARIA KOLATOR I do not remember the Germans entering Warsaw in 1939, but a memory that remains with me to this day is the German parade before Adolf Hitler in the Polish capital, after the Germans defeated Poland in the September Campaign. For some reason I can no longer recall, I had to go from Wola to Pius Street. There must have been some prior German warning about not going into Warsaw that I interpreted as applying only to the very center of the city, for I took a very circuitous route to my destination. I remember being struck by the emptiness of the city. There seemed to be no one around. As I reached the extension of Jerozolimskie Avenue beyond the main railroad station, I stumbled upon the German parade. I stood quite alone. There was no one else on the street. No faces at the windows. No one in any of the doorways. Just Germans. I could not take my eyes off them. There were thousands of them. I was riveted to the spot, staring at the vast quantities of "iron" passing before me. The very long barrels of the antitank artillery particularly struck me. As I think about it, it was as if there were no troops at all, just the weaponry rolling by before my eyes. The whole episode had an eerie, unreal quality about it. No one came up to me; no one told me to move off. I do not know how long I stood there but I had to wait until they had all gone by. I watched without feeling. There was no hatred, no admiration; rather awe at the vast quantity of weaponry. At the beginning there were very few Germans in Warsaw. The first one I saw in the Wola district was helping a blind orthodox Jew across 100 Out of the Inferno the road. Since so much was said at the time about the persecution of the Jews, I remember thinking that despite all the rumors, perhaps the Germans were human after all. On one occasion, the Germans distributed bread to the civilian population of Warsaw. The bread was brought in huge canvas-covered trucks, and the Germans stood on them and handed the bread out, one loaf per person. The loaves were enormous and terribly heavy. I do not know what they were made of; the texture was very fine and the loaves quite flat, as if no yeast had been used. At the time I lived with two friends, one of whom refused to go for the bread on the grounds that she was not going to eat anything the Germans offered. But the other girl and I decided to swallow our pride and went to get some. The German who handed out the bread accused the boy in front of me of coming up a second time and kicked him in the face. Despite this, I changed coats with my friend and went up for a second loaf myself. We had very little to eat, and we must have been very hungry, because we ate this bread even though it barely resembled bread as we knew it. My family was in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, and I decided to join them. I knew I needed a pass but when I went to the German authorities to get it, they said they were not issuing any more. 50 I decided to try my luck without a pass. At 5iedlce, the Germans tried to dissuade me from going over to the Soviet side. When we finally got to the border, the Germans stood on one side of a strip of noman 's-land, the Soviets on the other. At certain times, the Germans opened their side of the border to let people through, so when they told me to go, I entered the no-man's-land. The Soviet troops, however , refused to let me cross into the zone they occupied, so I had to return to the German side. The Germans then refused to let me back in, and I...