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

Rose Gelbart

71 Sabina Grosman desperately wanted the job of housekeeper for a widower named Adam Zak. But Zak, a Warsaw banker with two children, left the choice up to his thirteen-year-old daughter, Hanna Barbara (called Hanka ). Which of the two people sitting in Zak’s office, facing the Warsaw Ghetto, would it be—Sabina or another woman who also had applied and who wanted to marry Zak? Hanka did not hesitate. She pointed to Sabina. And in so doing, though no one could have known it at the time, she helped to save not only Sabina but also her little daughter, Rozia (now Rose Gelbart). “The other woman was very angry and jealous,” Rose told us when we interviewed her in her home in suburban Cleveland. So Zak took his daughter Hanka aside and said of Sabina, “But you know she’s Jewish?” Hanka’s response, Rose said, was “I don’t care. I want her.” As Rose explained, “My mother made a very good impression. She was a beautiful woman.” So Sabina worked in the Zak household off and on for several years, and Rose was hidden there whenever Sabina could not find other safe locations for her. Indeed, dozens of Polish non-Jews knew that Rose was Jewish, but—despite some threats to do so—none of them ever went to the Germans and turned her in. They either said nothing or they intentionally gave Sabina time to get Rose out of danger, even though the Germans were offering rewards to people who would turn in Jews. Protecting Rose and her mother at times required extraordinary and unusual actions. For instance, after Hanka chose Sabina to be their housekeeper, her father worried that the woman who had failed to get the job would, in her anger , denounce Rose and Sabina as Jews. “So Adam Zak’s son, Marian, who was twenty-one years old, married this woman who was ten years older, just to keep her quiet.”Marian worked with the Polish underground and eventually was captured and sent to his death at Auschwitz. By then, Rose said, Marian’s wife also was working in the anti-German underground and, thus, was not of a mind to turn Rose and Sabina over to German authorities. Rose’s circuitous path through the war began in Leszno, fifteen or twenty miles west of Warsaw. She was born there on January 3, 1935. When Rose was two, in 1937, her parents, Sabina (originally Sura) and Jozef Grosman, moved to Kalisz in west-central Poland, where Jozef manufactured children’s and women’s shoes. Sabina traveled around and sold them, along with merchandise from her Rose Gelbart Rose Gelbart Hanka Janczak 72 73 own textile business. “They did very well. My mother was a business entrepreneur .” The Grosmans lived in a beautiful apartment in the newer part of the city, though most Jews at the time lived in what was called the Old City. In fact, of the six families in their apartment building, the Grosmans were the only Jews. They had a shoe store in Leszno and were preparing to move their manufacturing business from the back of their apartment and the basement of their apartment building to a factory. Rose’s maternal grandparents (Henoch and Sisel Langner) as well as her mother’s sisters and a brother all lived in the Old City in Kalisz. Among her earliest Kalisz memories are the times she spent in a nearby park with her cousin Belusia, the daughter of her mother’s sister Rozia. Their mothers would dress the two girls alike. Belusia was just a few months younger than Rose. Another memory is of Rose’s fourth birthday, which the whole Langner family gathered to celebrate in 1939. But nine months later Germany invaded Poland. “My first war memory was running away from Kalisz with hordes of people and horses and cars. Planes were overhead bombing and shooting at us. We were hiding in ditches, and my uncle covered me with his body to protect me.” The Polish army surrendered after a few weeks, and Rose and her family returned to Kalisz to rejoin family members. (Jozef’s family lived in Łódź.) Kalisz was home then to about 15,300 Jews, which was roughly 30 percent of the city’s total population.32 “As soon as we arrived there back at our apartment in Kalisz,” Rose told us, “the...