Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II

Prologue

Hena in Hiding

ZAGÓRZYCE, POLAND 1944

Heavy footfalls thudded on the road that rainy May night. Passing miles of freshly plowed fields, men moved in menacing formation.

Eighteen months in hiding had honed Hena Rożeńka’s hearing, alert to sounds of danger from Germans or anyone who would betray her and her family. Perched on a hilltop in central Poland, it was easier to notice approaching intruders. The farm hideout lay a few kilometers and a world away from the house and shop where she had spent her life nestled among so many relatives. But who were these men out here shouldering long guns? Why were they heading directly toward the farmhouse as if it was their target?

Hena’s apprehension grew with every footstep the gunmen took toward the house. Her parents, her sisters, and her brother were inside. This late in the war, with liberation expected any day, they had dared to seek comfort and refuge from this raw spring soaker.

The dark forms encroached on the house. Fear and helplessness gripped her gut. She could not warn her family without revealing herself. She could only steal peeks from her hiding place. That night, she may have had a thousand reasons for not joining them inside. After all, at age sixteen, she had been with her family every moment since September 1942. She longed to be on her own. The last time she saw peers in school, she was eleven.

Her parents kept telling her how lucky they were. Pan (Mr.) Radziszewski, a kind man and customer from their hardware store, had rescued them before the roundup. Otherwise, they would have been forced onto wagons and trains with the rest of the Jews of Kazimierza Wielka.

Out here on this farm so far away from everything, that brutality did not seem real, but their brave protector told them what had happened. The Germans shipped nearly two hundred Jews off to Bełżec, the nearest death camp. No one heard from any of them again. A second roundup happened not long afterward. Throughout the fall and winter of 1942, Pan Radziszewski brought back news from town of Nazis scouring the countryside, murdering any Jews they found and terrorizing townspeople with threats of punishing whole villages if they dared harbor Jews. The Rożeńeks took in these reports from their hideout, willing themselves invisible.

Since their arrival here, they had weathered two winters. Along the way, the farmer’s teenage daughter went away, one of the many Poles involuntarily deported for forced labor in Germany.¹ But recently her parents as well as Hena’s siblings were elated by word Pan Radziszewski brought back from town: Red Army troops were approaching. Their suffering wouldn’t last much longer.

Hope made her parents so much lighter. Some moonless nights, they stole out of the cramped outbuildings and took in fresh air, heavenly respite after interminable stillness crouching in the dirt. They had even dared to dream of ordinary life back running their shop, and that Hena might see her schoolmates again.

She strained for a furtive peek. Nothing about the approaching gunmen indicated they were Russian troops, or Germans for that matter. And why would they be taking up positions around this farmhouse?

Dark forms now massed at the door. Muffled voices carried on the cold, wet air.

Then came the sounds she would long remember. Metal on metal, guns poised for action. Thunderous banging on the front door ricocheted off nearby houses.

Men shouted in Polish. Give up your Jews! We know you have Jews. Hand them over!

Hena could not believe this was happening. How many times had she imagined an attack by storm troopers pulling up in big black cars in front of the house, soldiers fanning out across the farmyard before anyone could run? Now those shuddering fantasies had turned real.

A bleary Pan Radziszewski appeared. Light from within silhouetted him cradling a small child. Gunmen stormed into his house, shouting and beating the farmer with the butts of their rifles. Pan Radziszewski clung to the child, protecting the baby instead of shielding himself.

We know you have Jews. Hand over your Jews. Where are they?

What are you talking about? Radziszewski protested. The child screamed. What are you doing here? he demanded. Who are you?

The gunmen stormed the house, breaking dishes, ransacking everything. Their noisy assault and accusations reverberated across the fields to surrounding farms. Hena heard no German, no Russian. Only Polish.

The stately cherry tree outside the house, now freighted with wet blossoms, had just shaken off winter doldrums. Knotty buds had emerged, opening with clusters of pale petals that cheered the wartime landscape. Hena may have huddled under it. Maybe the attackers would not find her family, she consoled herself. Maybe they would not look in the space behind the stove or in the attic, where some Rożeńeks had hidden during other scares, like when a neighbor’s daughter came by to play.

The house erupted with sounds of furniture tumbling and more assaults on the farmer. After moments of quiet came exultant shrieks. Her heart sank. The gunmen must have found their quarry. Her beloved family.

We got them! someone shouted in triumph. The muffled shouts from inside the house turned sharp and clear. She saw why. Windows at the top of the house had been thrust open. Gunmen inside yelled to others swarming below.

Next she saw the form of her sister Frania. Her teacher and protector, Frania was five years older than Hena. She appeared in the opening, her face twisted in terror. Her body lurched into view. The gunmen laughed while shoving her out the window. Her slight form floated for a moment. Bullets sprayed upward. She landed with a sickening thump.

Acrid gun smoke drifted to Hena’s hiding place. The vicious attackers laughed and shouted, egging each other on for the next, her sister Frymet. How could she watch this again? The sounds and images repeated. Her stomach knotted in horror at the sight of her mother’s haggard face in the window. She must have been looking down on her daughters lying crumpled below. Ita was in her fifties and had calmed them over so many days and nights while they had to sit still on damp earth. She moved awkwardly. The sadistic attackers prodded and poked. Then came the push. Her screams rang out amid the barrage of shots.

Hena could glimpse the ends of the barrels of the guns aimed upwards murdering her family one by one. She struggled to believe her mother and sisters—who only moments before huddled together in fear—were already dead.

Her brother and father watched helplessly, restrained by other assailants. Again came the sickening sounds. The forms of her brother then father were pushed into a hail of bullets, their bodies falling onto the others.

The gunmen whooped and hollered, triumphant in their murderous cruelty, congratulating each other for killing the Yids.

The attackers made no attempt at secrecy. They staged the executions brazenly, their shouts and gunfire reverberating through the hamlet. No one in the village responded. No Germans. No Polish police.

For hours after the massacre, Hena did not move. The gunmen seemed to have gone. But she had heard them warn the farmer not to take any belongings of the Jews. They would be back.

How soon?

Long after the shuffling boot steps had receded, she remained frozen in place. She was alone in the world.

Where could she be safe? She could not ask Pan Radziszewski for ideas. What if the gunmen found out she was alive and tortured him?

The cherry tree turned into the burial site of her family. But the location of the Rożeńeks’ remains would not stay secret. The tree itself refused to conceal the crime.

Each spring, it blossomed as usual. The flowers gave way to promising little stone fruits colored lime green. They cast a hopeful look. But never would they turn the blushing orange-red of Poland’s famed sour cherries. They withheld their promise as Poland’s pride and never ripened. Instead they turned black and rotted, refusing to allow villagers to forget what lay beneath.

Over time, the tree drew notice in the village and beyond. For miles around, people heard of the cherry tree. Murdered Jews, the Rożeńeks from Kazimierza, were buried under it. Was it cursed?

Word trickled out in whispers that someone escaped the fate of her family. It was Hena, the youngest daughter. Only she could walk away.

PART I

The eightieth birthday party of Benjamin Rakowsky, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. Ben celebrates with his younger brother, Joe, father of Sam (Rakowski) Ron, who stayed behind and survived the Holocaust. Judy attends this celebration as a seven-year-old.

1

Lost and Found

LIMA, OHIO 1966

Poppy sat at the head of a long table at Lost Creek Country Club, beaming at his family, who were all turned out in shimmery dresses and sharp suits for his eightieth birthday celebration. Ben Rakowsky, my beloved grandfather, had married Jennie Stokfish in Warsaw before anyone knew even one world war. From his family of eight children hailing from a village near Kraków, only three had survived and made it to this country. On this night, Poppy’s pale blue eyes shone between his wide cheekbones and heavy brow, indelible family features repeated on the squarish faces of his siblings and progeny around the table, including his only son, my father, Rudy.

Poppy’s path to that birthday celebration started on another continent when his country did not even exist. Ben left home in his twenties, encouraged by his mother to avoid the draft. Poland had been carved up by Russia, Austria, and Germany. Jewish parents willed sons to emigrate rather than forfeit their lives to the Russian army. Family lore has it that he was involved in a plot against Czar Nicholas II, an added incentive to leave the country in times of pogroms against Jews and prewar turbulence. Ben evaded the czar’s clutches by leaving the country with a group of Polish Jews sponsored for immigration to the United States. Landing in Galveston, Texas, on September 11, 1913, the ship Breslau’s manifest recorded his arrival. At twenty-seven years old, he left behind his wife, Jennie, and baby daughter, Helen, in Warsaw. Filling swamps in Texas, malaria befell Ben’s group of immigrants. Their sponsor put them on a train to the Mayo Clinic. Ben, we were always told, was the only one healthy enough to walk off that train. After treatment, Benjamin Rakowsky, whose surname now ended in a y thanks to the stroke of an immigration official’s pen, headed east from Minnesota, stopping in a small town in northwest Ohio that once enjoyed an oil boom before Texas struck a much larger vein. Ben was earning money by measuring college students for tailored suits, and living in Lima, Ohio. Here he would settle. Why Lima, Ohio? He was so impressed by the warm reception: a bank president held the door open for him, a poor Polish immigrant.

Six years and a world war later, Jennie and Helen joined him in Lima. They left a place that once again had reclaimed its identity as Poland. No one else in their extended families followed.

After Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, Poppy sent letters that drew no response from his family in Europe. Finally, in 1946, a telegram arrived. It was from his unknown nephew, Samuel Rakowski, a son of his younger brother, Józef. Sam had helped the Red Cross locate Poppy using a clue he remembered from old letters to his grandmother: the return address included the word buckeye, part of the name of the company Ben started in Ohio, known as the Buckeye State.

"From our family survived your sister Lily with her son, nineteen years old, and your brother Józef, who is my father, and my mother survived. The rest of the family, I am sorry to say that they are all destroyed by y’mak shmo—his name should be blotted out—Hitler."

Ben sponsored the survivors for visas to America. Only then did he learn that American liberators of Mauthausen had found his once-brawny brother lying on a pile of corpses, barely alive at eighty-eight pounds. Joe’s son Yisrael, Sam’s brother, had perished in the same camp two months shy of liberation. Joe’s wife, Sophie, had survived three concentration camps and a death march from Gross-Rosen with her sister Minna.

Joe and Sophie came to stay with Poppy and Grandma in Lima, but my grandmother struggled with welcoming these immigrants, despite all they had endured. A prickly, thin-skinned woman, Grandma cringed at the reception Joe got around their adopted hometown, where after decades of trying to fit in, they finally felt accepted. But people kept mistaking her brother-in-law for her husband. All over again, she felt the sting of being a greenhorn and a Jew in a small white Christian town. Grandma hardly concealed her feelings, offering the newcomers instructions in table manners and begrudging them a second slice of toast.

By the time of the birthday celebration, those tensions had long since disappeared. Joe and Sophie had moved away from Lima soon after immigrating. Joe created a successful home-building business in Canton, Ohio. The two couples had grown close. In fact, at the party, Ben was still tan from their annual vacation in Miami.

For seven-year-old me, none of this background would mean anything for decades. The party loomed in my memory in flashed impressions—the itchiness of my dress and the pinch of my black patent leather shoes.

That night, I almost didn’t recognize Grandma with her flaming apricot hair sprayed into an elegant cloud. She clutched a mink stole over a champagne-colored dress. She chatted with visiting relatives in Yiddish, their cone of secrecy. They sounded just like her even when they spoke English: th sounded like t (ting for thing) and w’s were v’s (vat for what). And every sentence rose an octave at the end, always sounding like a question. But my eyes were on Poppy, whose smile flashed like sunshine. I tried to catch his eye, those blazing ocean blues he had passed down only to me, not to any of his three children or the other six grandchildren. He smiled in my direction, which I took as an invitation to wriggle off my seat and sneak under the tray of a waitress who was shouting at the old-country relatives as if their accents made them deaf.

At Poppy’s side, I waited. I expected him to pull me onto his ample lap as he usually did on our weekly visits, when anything I did or said made him laugh in belly-jiggling delight. But that night he left me standing there under his protective arm, riveted by his brother, Joe.

They seemed caught up in memories a world away.

Until I was in fifth grade, I didn’t think much about where Poppy and Grandma came from. The teacher said that people in America came from all over the world. We made up a wonderful melting pot with everyone casting off those former identities to pursue the American dream as one. She asked that we volunteer our families’ countries of origin. The class shrugged. Few of the white multigeneration American kids had a clue. A boy named Smith might be English, the teacher suggested. He did not know.

I piped up, I am of Polish-Jewish descent. The teacher found that interesting, and I shared the little I knew about my immigrant grandparents. I repeated the reference in the carpool after school. The mom at the wheel spun. She accused me of fibbing: Everyone knows all Polish people are Catholic. I was dumbstruck. Why would I lie about that?

I had a vague sense of why we had few relatives on Dad’s side. We knew Hitler killed many Jews, including our relatives. The ending had an American spin. Poppy was smart to leave Europe before the war and found freedom in the United States. No one mentioned the life our family left behind, who was lost, or how.

Twenty years later in Canton, Ohio, I slipped a tin of macaroons onto the table among the home-baked Passover treats, frowning at my store-bought offering. I was a guest at the home of that unknown nephew, who was born Shmul Rakowski in Poland; after the war, he and his wife changed their surnames to Ron, Hebrew for joy. He cast off the dark memories of destruction in Europe, renewing life in a new country.

I greeted the hostess, Sam’s wife, Bilha, who was stirring a pot of matzo ball soup like a pro. Bilha, a lively Israeli with sapphire eyes, asked, Did your mother teach you to make matzo balls?

I murmured, Just from the box. I recalled the high-anxiety seders my mother made in the years after Grandma Rakowsky could no longer manage the effort. Grandma’s scrutiny persisted long after her stamina flagged. Mom worked hard to follow her recipes and example. But when Grandma walked in, tension gripped our house. She toddled straight to the kitchen and our avocado-green range. Steam fogged her thick glasses over the soup pot. Arthritic hands spooned out a matzo ball. Pursing her lips, she took a bite. We held our breath. Then she issued her judgment with a snap of her tongue. My mother turned away, her hopes sinking like the third batch of matzo balls she’d made that day. It was hopeless. She could have made a zillion perfect matzo balls. But to Grandma, Mom’s heartfelt conversion and efforts to raise us in her adopted faith would never cut it. She could never compensate for not being born Jewish.

Here in the house of Sam and Bilha, the holiday was delightfully devoid of such undercurrents. These were second cousins I did not know well. Still I was on edge, wondering if they were noticing I’d lost weight since my recent divorce. No one mentioned it or that at twenty-three I was already divorced. Maybe they were judging me like my grandma would have if she were still alive, thinking, You’re better off, because he wasn’t Jewish. It turned out, their focus was not on me.

Bilha, a deeply knowledgeable Jewish educator, took center stage for the long seder, telling stories and singing songs while also serving a home-cooked feast. Sam sat at the head of the table, reminding me of my late poppy with the same accent and attempts to move us along and maybe skip a few pages of the service. I listened politely but was painfully aware of what I did not know, having grown up as the fourth kid, who got to trade Hebrew school for swim practice. By the last song of the night, I was looking at my watch, thinking about my long drive home and the news story I was in the middle of reporting.

Then Sam shot out of his chair like somebody had flipped a switch.

I want to show you guys something, he said, pulling out a slide projector. I’m going to show you where you come from.

He pulled down Bilha’s Israeli art collection, turning a living room wall into a screen. He loaded a wheel of slides that looked like they could keep us there until dawn. The projector hummed, beaming images in the dark living room of relatives I’d never seen in a place I’d never heard of.

This, he said, is Kazimierza Wielka. He pronounced it in whooshing syllables that made it sound as grand as Paris and as down-to-earth as Cleveland.

The buildup hardly matched the images of forlorn stucco buildings filling the screen. Sam clicked away, describing his first trip back to Poland since the war. He had gone there with his son David, who was watching the slideshow along with his wife, sister, brother-in-law and my brother Mike. Slide after slide displayed monochrome gray streetscapes familiar from news footage of life behind the Iron Curtain. But Sam saw something else.

He was still smiling over memories of his first homecoming since the war to the town northeast of Kraków where generations of our family had thrived. He could not believe the warmth of his reception. He and David had left a tour for Sam’s last-minute decision to visit his hometown. Sam said he was nervous in the taxi nosing through his old neighborhood.

Then a former neighbor shrieked with joy at the sight of him. She told the taxi driver, In your cab, you have the prince of the city.

Until that night, my memories of Sam were of a wallflower at large family gatherings. He sat with the old-country relatives who were speaking Yiddish and smoking cigars. He looked like a leaner, subdued version of my father, who was holding court across the room in an electric peach sport coat, twanging away in an Ohio accent with a Lucky Strike pressed in his lips.

Cousins born one year and worlds apart, Dad and Sam, with their serious brown eyes and thick brows, looked like brothers. For cousins who met only after they were fathers themselves, their telltale mannerisms were uncanny. The arching brow of skepticism, the quick wink after telling a joke. But until that night I saw them as opposites.

Sam was full of pizzazz, holding forth about his hometown. He kept hopping up and darting to the screen, admiring the images, particularly one of him standing in a blue blazer and photo-gray glasses beaming by a road sign for his town. He brimmed with pride. Was he running for office or selling time-shares? My upbringing in Lima, Ohio, known for producing the country’s school buses, hearses, and army tanks, did not turn me into a booster. And no one there ever forced us to wear yellow stars or targeted us for slaughter.

Sam showed us a 1929 photo that introduced my imposing great-grandfather Moshe David Rakowski and his stern-looking wife, Pearl Chilewicz Rakowski, posing in front of the family lumberyard, the business that Moshe David established when he moved to Pearl’s hometown of Kazimierza Wielka. Two-year-old Sam sat cross-legged in a sailor suit at his grandfather’s feet.

At the sight of his grandmother’s image on the screen, Sam’s voice dropped. He took us back to the night his family went into hiding. His ninety-three-year-old grandmother was a formidable woman and quite healthy, but she could not keep up with a group dashing in the dark to a distant hideaway. The decision was excruciating. They had to leave her behind, even knowing what that meant.

Early Monday morning, locals later described, Nazis swarmed the city, thundering through the streets, blaring demands from loudspeakers for all Jews to report immediately to the market square. Heavily armed Germans scoured the houses for Jews who failed to obey.

Sam’s voice caught and he cleared his throat.

Pearl ignored the orders. A group of German soldiers who had been swigging vodka on a nearby stoop barged into her house, finding her alone. The two families—eight Rakowskis and Banachs—who lived there had vanished. Several Nazis dragged Pearl out. In front of neighbors, they cocked their weapons and opened fire. The townspeople remembered: It took many bullets to kill her. Pearl went down shaking her fist.

I shivered. The lights flicked back on and I froze, sitting like a bad guest, not even offering my help with the dishes. I stared at my scrawl on cocktail napkins, words I could no more pronounce than spell. As Sam talked, I’d tried to record the names, dates, and places as if they were shooting stars that would disappear if I did not capture them. The tragic end of my great-grandmother’s life filled me with pride and horror. The electricity around Sam was stunning, as if a sleepwalker had awakened.

Two newspaper reporting jobs later, after covering all manner of misdeeds from organized crime to priest sex abuse to a corrupt judge who exchanged leniency for a Mercedes-Benz from a drug dealer, I pulled out those napkins. I turned my sights on Sam and the remarkable untold story in my own family.

In the mid-1980s, the world had started paying more attention to Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel said something in a talk I attended that I could not ignore: Listen to the survivors. I lobbied Sam until he agreed to describe his long-bottled Holocaust experiences for a Sunday magazine story. In his first-ever interviews, we sat at his white-clothed dining room table for marathon sessions. I coaxed him back over painful terrain. He unpacked memories he had carefully boxed away. I found every detail of Sam’s stories compelling and his attention to accuracy reassuring. He embellished nothing.

My crime reporter veneer fell away. I asked him questions in a childlike voice that surprised me when I transcribed my interview tapes. He responded in kind, starting answers, You see, honey… Over time, I tried harder to push him to fill in more blanks and flesh out my understanding of scenes. He resisted. He started each response with No, no. Eventually, I learned that his noes were a throwaway, a beat of space, a chance to think. I sought constantly to tease out the way things looked, smelled, or felt. But Sam, whether by nature or experience, remembered action, not color.

In those interviews, he brought me along with the family into hiding in a barn for two months in the fall of 1942. Germans were flushing Jews out of hiding places and executing them all. Sam’s father decided they’d be safer in the ghetto in Kraków, thirty miles away. A nobleman friend of Sam’s father dating back to their service in the Polish army arranged their transport to the ghetto. The eight Rakowskis and Banachs dressed like farmers and rode a horse-drawn wagon into Kraków and jumped down just before they