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

Barbara Turkeltaub

140 It was still dark when the clip-clop clip-clop of horse hooves awakened Barbara Gurwicz and her little sister, Leah, near the brick kiln where they had found rest and warmth. Barbara looked up and saw a priest driving a buggy. He slowed and gazed at the girls, and they at him, but then he drove on. So not knowing what else to do, Barbara (called Basha) and Leah went back to sleep. They were scared children who, to avoid being turned in to the Germans, had slipped away earlier that night from a farmhouse where they were hiding near Vilna (today Vilnius).60 An hour or so later the priest returned. “This time he looked at us, and he stopped,” Barbara told us when we interviewed her in her home in Canton, Ohio. The priest asked the girls if they were Jews. Barbara’s father had prepared this little girl well for exactly this question. No, she lied. Bombs had fallen on their family’s house, she told him, and she and her sister did not know where anyone else was. They were lost. That was the story she had rehearsed and rehearsed . And she thought she told it well. The priest nodded and smiled. Barbara later decided that the man knew right then and there that the girls were, in fact, Jews. “Would you like to come with me to a safer place?” he asked. Barbara, speaking for herself and for her younger sister, said yes. So the priest loaded them in his buggy, hid them under some blankets, and took them to a nearby convent run by Benedictine nuns on a farm not far outside Vilna. The priest, known to Barbara only as Father Jan (she never knew his last name) took them to safety, to survival, to a future that many times in the war before then had nearly been cut off. He was not the only non-Jew who helped Barbara, her sister, her brother, and her mother survive the Holocaust (her father and two other sisters perished), but to Barbara he was the most important. “When I look back I’ll tell you the truth: I am alive today because of one person, Father Jan, who was ready to sacrifice his life.” To be sure, her survival required the willingness of Father Jan to pluck these two little girls from danger and carry them to relative safety. But without Barbara ’s own ingenuity, her mother’s careful preparations, the warm embrace of nuns, the police chief of Vilna who was a family friend, and a farmer willing to risk the life of his family by hiding Barbara and Leah at least for a time (though only in exchange for money), Barbara Gurwicz would not have survived. She Barbara Turkeltaub Barbara Turkeltaub 141 142 The Stories never would have gotten to Israel, then to the United States, and never would have become a nurse, a wife, a mother, a grandmother. Barbara was born in Vilna, probably in 1934 and possibly in October, though she is not sure of the exact date. Her parents, Mina Gimpel Gurwicz and Moses (called Moishe) Gurwicz, already had two daughters, Mira and Hannah. About two years after Barbara was born, Mina gave birth to Luczia (or Leah) in 1936. Then in 1943 Barbara’s brother, Henry, was born. Barbara’s father and her two older sisters were killed near the end of the war by retreating German soldiers. Barbara’s early years were full of good family times. Her father was an accountant with the Vilna city government, and her mother ran a profitable seamstress business out of their house, located near the Vilia River not far from a synagogue. Her father came from an assimilated Jewish family while her mother’s family was Orthodox. Mina, a native of Kovno, kept a kosher house that, because she was running a business, required help. So she hired a non-Jewish nanny named Anastazia Boyar (called Nastia) and an Orthodox Jewish cook named Dobcia. “It was a happy household,” Barbara said, located in a city often called the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” because of its large Jewish presence and Jewish scholarship. Vilna—and Lithuania as a whole—had a substantial Jewish population then. Nastia, in fact, sought to help Barbara’s family after they were sent to the Vilna Ghetto and, for her troubles, was beaten by a German...