Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

Maria Radecka

142 Out of the Inferno Educated in Poland, Belgium, and the United States, Pogonowski came to the United States in 1950. He has written several books, induding Poland: A Historical Atlas (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1987). He is also an inventor and holds numerous patents. MARIA RADECKA At about 2:00 a.m. on July 17, 1943, four Lithuanian policemen came to arrest me at my aunt's apartment. I insisted that I could not get dressed in front of them. They allowed me to go into my aunt's bedroom to get dressed. Since most people tended to assume that everyone belonged to some clandestine organization, my aunt suspected that I might be a member of the Home Army. She asked me if I had hidden anything that was incriminating in the apartment, to which I replied in the negative. I got dressed and returned to the living room, where I sat in an armchair and waited for the Lithuanians to search the apartment. Meanwhile, one of them told my aunt in Lithuanian to get what bread and bacon she had in the house and give it to me. Needless to say, that sounded very ominous. I was taken away to Gestapo headquarters, which was quite close to my aunt's apartment, surrounded by armed guards who warned me that if I tried to escape they would shoot me. I told them that I had no intention of trying to escape because my arrest was a mistake. While I was led away, I was aware of what a beautiful, clear night it was. At Gestapo headquarters, I was in German hands, a matter of some importance because the Germans were much harder to bribe than the Lithuanians. The Germans took away my handbag and put me into a small, stuffy cell. As the door closed behind me, I heard a voice asking what was happening in town. I thought it was somebody who recognized me, but it turned out to be someone who simply wanted to find out who had been brought into the cell. It was Saturday morning. Since the Gestapo did not function on Saturdays or Sundays, I thought I would not be interrogated until Monday. This turned out to be a mistaken idea. I was called in for questioning that morning. I knew German, but I asked for an interpreter anyway, to give myself more time to think of answers. I was 143 Maria Radecka kept in the underground cells of Gestapo headquarters for three weeks-one week of solitary confinement and two weeks in an ordinary cell. Conditions were appalling. Cockroaches dropped from the ceilings. They denied food parcels to me. No one even knew I was there. During this time, I was interrogated three times for periods of four to five hours at a time. They asked the same questions over and over. I was a courier between Wilno and Warsaw, and the courier whose pseudonym was Czarny (Black), who worked on the same route, had been arrested by the Germans and had divulged my name. They told me that if the answers I gave did not agree with what was being said about me in Warsaw, I would be taken there for a confrontation and would most likely end up in Auschwitz. Although I was questioned interminably, I was not beaten. Somehow I guessed that I would not be mistreated when my interrogators said that Poles always accused them of beating and torturing people, implying that the accusation was a totally unfounded one. On~e during questioning, one of my interrogators said something that infuriated me. I blazed with anger. But when I saw the look of triumph on his face, I decided to change my tactics and to be very meek, whatever the provocation. I had never before realized that it was possible to alter the expression of one's eyes. But I did so during the remainder of my interrogation. >After this, they took me to the main prison of Lukiszki. The food was very poor, but at least the Germans allowed the inmates food parcels every week. Perhaps the most humiliating aspect of life in the prison was not being allowed to go to the toilet without a guard standing at the open door. We were allowed to go to the toilet at 5:00 a.m. and then about 5:00 p.m. Facilities in the cells were strictly limited . Some of the older prisoners suffered terribly because they...