Three quarters of a century ago in Poland, Nazi soldiers forcibly separated a Jewish woman from her husband. She and her children, two young sons and a daughter, were forced toward a train station, bound for certain death at Sobibor extermination camp.
For the time and place, the mother was unusually educated and politically aware. She knew what was happening. She held back a bit, took her 13-year-old daughter’s belongings, tossed them into a ditch, then looked her square in the face.
“I don’t believe the whole world’s gone mad. There’s got to be someone who will help you,” she said. “If you survive, I will, through you.”
Then she pushed her daughter off the road and told her to run.
For Janina Zak-Krasucki, 62, a supervisor of special education for the New Jersey Department of Education, the Jewish girl her Polish Catholic grandparents saved from the Holocaust always existed on the edges of her memory.
It was a story that was retold in the summers when Zak-Krasucki would spend holidays at their house outside Lublin, eastern Poland’s largest city. Sometimes she would see mysterious packages of Western clothes postmarked from America, as if in thanks for some long ago kindness.
“I grew up on these stories,” she said in an interview.
One name stuck with her. Rozia, or Rose.
But time went on. Zak-Krasucki immigrated to America in 1981, when Poland was still under Soviet control. Her grandfather Stanislaw Jablonski, the key to the story, died in 1972, and the remaining evidence was too slim to chase down. A research visit to the archives of Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem turned up nothing.
A few weeks ago, however, Zak-Krasucki’s sister in Poland phoned excitedly to say she had just heard a radio interview with a woman talking about her survival during the Holocaust. They scrambled to find the interview online, and when they did, it was obvious: “The woman was talking about my grandparents,” Zak-Krasucki said.
The woman is Rose Lipszyc, now 89, who lives in Toronto and is active in Holocaust education, sharing her personal story of survival against the odds, a story in which Zak-Krasucki’s grandparents Stanislaw and Maria Jablonski play a central, inspiring role.
Their first meeting, like a long-awaited reunion of people who had never actually met, was a happy affair at Lipszyc’s home the other weekend. Lipszyc was surrounded by her large family, who would not exist but for this wartime bravery.
“We just could not stop talking,” Zak-Krasucki said.
“My whole family perished,” she said in an interview.
Lipszyc was born Rozia Handelsman in 1929 in Lublin, where there were many thousands of Jews, nearly all of them killed.
By October 1942, her family’s house had been confiscated, the ghetto liquidated, and Lipszyc was living in the countryside. Posters went up, ordering Jews to congregate in a marketplace, where men and childless women were separated from mothers and children.
Lipszyc would later learn that her father was taken with this group straight to Majdanek concentration camp, which was nearby. Years later, she would also find out her father was probably still alive just two weeks before Russians liberated the camp in 1944. It seems possible he was among those killed in final mass executions in Krepiecki Forest, in anticipation of the war’s end.
He left me standing there, the last guard. I don’t know how I found my way
Lipszyc and her mother and brothers, however, were marched toward the train station, bound for Sobibor, an extermination camp where most were murdered that same day.
Luck enters the story at this point, however, because Lipszyc was freckle-faced and fair. Shortly after her mother shoved her and told her to go, she was ordered to march on by a German soldier bringing up the rear.
“Are you a Jew?” he asked the little girl, who was frozen silent in “absolute fear.”
Some bystander then yelled out, “Can’t you see she’s a Polish girl?”
“He left me standing there, the last guard,” Lipszyc said. So she started running, maybe 15 kilometres. “I don’t know how I found my way.”
She was bound for a familiar home. Her father had done work for the Jablonskis, who had three daughters, including Zak-Krasucki’s mother, with whom Rose had played with in summertime. To Lipszyc’s surprise, when she got to his house, her maternal grandmother was already there. “We’re looking for you,” she said. “It’s like a miracle.”
Lipszyc slept in the attic that night, sometimes peering through the rafters in hopes her mother would arrive. The next day, Stansilaw Jablonski took her by horse and buggy to the train station and put her on a train into Lublin.
He handed her his own daughter’s identity documents. Thus did Rozia Handelsman temporarily become Helena Jablonska, and her aunt became her sister. The next day, they got two crosses, and volunteered to be shipped to Germany, where Polish labour was in high demand. Even after they made it to Germany, Jablonski kept sending them packages with scraps of bread and letters, referring to them as his dear daughters, in case anyone else might read them. They were terrified of being recognized as Jews.
“Those letters kept us safe,” Lipszyc said.
After the war, liberated by the English, Lipszyc went illegally to Israel, where she was caught and incarcerated on Cyprus in 1947 by the same English army. In 1948, she settled in Israel but the climate did not suit her, and so a few years later, after her marriage, she came to Canada.
By the time Polish authorities helped her get back in touch with Helena, whose identity she had used, Stanislaw Jablonski was dead. “I’ve always tried to compensate,” Rose said.
Helena also died, and the connection was lost. So Lipszyc went back to Poland last year, and met a radio reporter who had learned of her story and asked for an interview.
“I hadn’t spoken Polish in 65 years, and I had a Polish interview. Can you imagine?”
One mystery remained after the recent meeting in Toronto, however. Those care packages from America didn’t come from Rose. And so Zak-Krasucki and her sister have been casting back to other old war stories, of children hiding behind a wardrobe in their grandparents’ house, and people hiding in the woods. Their suspicion is that there are more people who were aided in this way.
“I think my quest is not yet finished,” Zak-Krasucki said.