During a time of war and a place of horror, a time and a place we consider unrelated to our own, friendship flourished between two young men wooing two Jewish sisters. One of the men was a Polish Catholic, the other, a Polish Jew. The Catholic youth became a smuggler. When Warsaw's Jews were walled into their ghetto, Janek's business activities allowed him daily access to the girl he loved. Unknown even to the members of his immediate family, he had joined the Underground.
Janek Bartczak was generally perceived as a dandy. His brother-in-law, a policeman who patrolled outside the Ghetto gates, dismissed him as a spiritual lightweight. He strutted through the streets of the Ghetto in knee-high black-leather boots, a black leather coat, and a Tyrolean-type hat. His hair was flaxen and his features, Slavic-sharp. His intimidating appearance made a powerful impression on his Jewish friend's teen-age sister Renata. His phantom would swagger through the back alleys of her memory for the next fifty years. Trying to transmit his image as vividly as she could, Renata would come to call her ghost "Richard Widmark."
During the height of the deportations in the summer of 1942, Renata was arrested by Janek's brother-in-law at the Ghetto gates. The arrest had been pre-arranged. Pawel Golombek used his position to lead out to safety the Jews he was supposed to be shutting in. His apartment had become a safehouse. He and his family supported not only themselves, but also the escapees he sheltered, by the smuggling activities of his wife's two brothers, and by selling the moonshine manufactured in the kitchen, as well as his policeman's salary. An unquestioned arrest, a child snatched from Umschlagplatz, hidden under his coat, and delivered to the sanctuary presided over by his wife and mother-in-law--he committed these acts of breathtaking heroism under the noses of the Germans and his anti-Semitic neighbors, acts which, had they been discovered, would have led not only to his execution, but to the execution of his entire family.
As of September 1, 1942, there were two Jewish girls sheltered by the Golombeks. There was the dark-haired, dark-eyed, ten-year-old Isabella whom Golombek's sister-in-law claimed to neighbors, to be her illegitimate daughter by a Gypsy. There was the blue-eyed Renata, whose chestnut hair had been bleached blond by her brother. Renata had come from a wealthy family, and had grown up on fashionable Krolewska Street. She'd been pampered and perhaps, a touch spoiled. Three years earlier, she'd been setting the table for her mother's birthday breakfast when the roar of the Luftwaffe signaled the invasion of Poland.
Since that day, she had endured bombardment, homelessness, and refugee hood. She had witnessed the death of her mother in Soviet-occupied Poland, and had been caught in Operation Barbarossa. She had slept in ditches and stolen food from fields. After an arrest and an escape, she had been chased through the woods, captured, and her throat was cut like any other hunted animal. She had been beaten by Polish police, thrown into jail, and further beaten in a cell shared with Polish prostitutes. She had smuggled her way into the Warsaw Ghetto, to her brother and sister, and her brother had her smuggled back out.
On the evening of September 1, 1942, the Russians sprang a surprise bombing raid on Warsaw. They tossed flares from the sky in order to identify their targets. The Golombek family, along with Isabella, hastened to the basement of their apartment building. Renata was instructed to remain upstairs, for fear she'd be recognized as a Jewess and betrayed by their neighbors. Feeling abandoned in the safehouse during the bombardment on the anniversary of her dead mother's birthday, the girl snapped. She went to the bathroom, found a razor knife, and was on the verge of using it when Janek Bartczak returned upstairs. He grabbed the knife before it reached her wrist, pulled the hysterical girl out of the bathroom, wrapped her in blankets and then into his arms.
Stroking her head, Janek rocked her and soothed her with visions of survival and a new world--a world at peace and free from humiliation, violence, and pain. He sang lullabies until Renata finally fell asleep. What sent Janek into the apartment precisely at the moment the Jewish girl was yielding to despair, we don't know, but clearly, he'd been sent. Had he not, I might never have been born.
My mother was yet to endure a return to the Ghetto and its subsequent uprising, an escape through the sewers, deportation to Germany and slave labor in the factories of Mannheim under false papers as a Polish Catholic, and the Allied invasion. Victory and peace, for her, heralded three years in a displaced persons' camp. Immigration to Canada in 1948 led to further exploitation as a domestic servant in the kind of homes which resembled the home she'd come from.
