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

Andre Nowacki

116 When Andre Nowacki thought back to the two years he hid in the Warsaw apartment of the Kwiecinski family, these were the painful words he spoke: “I did not exist. I did not exist. Officially I did not exist.” Making the outside world believe that Andre did not exist was, in fact, his mother’s goal. It was her way of making sure the Germans never discovered he was living with a non-Jewish family. So he stayed away from apartment windows to avoid being seen, he hid in a crawl space when strangers entered the building, and he spent his long days reading books, playing cards, and wondering what it might be like to have children his own age to play with. His mother, Helena (originally Haya) Tejblum, was remarkably resourceful. After her husband—Andre’s father, Henryk (originally Haim) Tejblum—was caught because he was staying illegally outside the Warsaw Ghetto and was sent off to a concentration camp, never to be heard from again, Helena showed enormous resourcefulness and creativity as she fought to keep herself and her only child alive. Andre was born on June 5, 1936, in Warsaw and was named Salomon. He gave up this name when his father arranged for him to have false papers showing him to be a Polish non-Jew named Andre Nowacki. Andre’s parents had a small textile factory in Warsaw named Serena, where they made bathing suits and other articles of clothing. The Tejblum family lived on Nalewki Street, which was in the northeast part of what would become the Warsaw Ghetto. When the Germans established the ghetto in late 1940, Andre’s aunt (his mother’s sister) moved into the Tejblum residence, too. But before the ghetto was completely enclosed by a wall, Henryk Tejblum transferred the location of his business to a location outside the ghetto and turned over purported ownership of it to a trustworthy Polish friend with the last name of Woznica. The man’s first name was lost to Andre’s memory, though he said his father had known the man since his youth. Although papers showed that the plant was in Woznica’s name, he continued to respect Henryk’s direction. Later, when Henryk was gone, Woznica continued to make monthly payments to Helena so she could help support herself. On the same equipment that the factory used to make bathing suits, the ten or twenty factory workers also made sweaters, socks, and other articles of clothing for the German army. Andre’s parents were able to leave the ghetto each day and work in the factory, taking their boy with them. And the plant stayed in business until the Warsaw Andre Nowacki Andre Nowacki Hanna Morawiecka 117 118 The Stories Uprising of August 1944. Andre’s father and mother were observant Jews, he said, “but the minute you went outside the ghetto, you tried to be as Polish as possible.” For that reason Andre’s parents did not teach him Yiddish. One day Andre’s father was caught outside the ghetto when he should have been inside.“He was taken to a concentration camp—I don’t know which one— and he disappeared out of our life,” Andre told us when we interviewed him at the New York City offices of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. When Andre’s father disappeared, “the only support we had was the Polish friend who was running the factory,” Andre told us. This man, Woznica, suggested that Andre and his mother not return to the ghetto but, rather, move to the small resort town of Otwock a little southeast of Warsaw and settle there, using false identification papers. Andre explained that the documents were not fake, merely false. That is, “they were original Polish documents that Poles were helping to make.” Woznica told Helena that in Otwock she and Andre could live in more safety using the monthly money he was paying her from the factory’s revenues. So Andre and his mother slipped out of the ghetto and moved to Otwock.“It was easy to escape, but once they caught you, that’s it.” They moved into a resort hotel that was busy and quite full. “But my mother felt a little bit uncomfortable there because people were asking questions—‘What is this little boy doing here?’‘Why is he not going to school?’ So we transferred to another...