The fifth tape, an interview with Noemi Makower, is brought to you by Joanna Wróblewska.
I would like to return to the January action, which started at the beginning of 1943,
suddenly, in which the State of Jasuń and all the councillors of the Jewish Community were killed.
This action lasted for three days, and I was in the Faderka shop during this action.
But I didn't mention that our friends were killed, and their daughter-in-law Bronka,
whom I loved very much, who had blonde hair and blue eyes, could save her life.
They kept persuading her to do it, and she wanted to stay with her family.
Now I'm going back to the moment when we were in the Jewish police station,
and the officer asked us, "Why did you run away?"
My husband, with a dramatic gesture, took out the ID of the Jewish Community in his pocket,
saying that he was the coordinator of the Internal Affairs Department.
He said, "You don't do that. You don't run away when you know that this ID can betray you."
However, this was after the suicide of colonel Szelicki, the head of the Jewish police,
who was the cause of this suicide.
We all thought it was the end of the ghetto, and that's why we ran away.
At first, the officer listened very carefully to everything that my husband said.
He spoke German very well.
And as a proof of his respect for my husband, he told me to give him a chair and a glass of water.
After a while, we got back some of the things that had been stolen from us,
because the Germans managed to hide everything.
Among other things, I got my coat back.
The officer told me to return my coat and give him a glass of water and a chair.
After a while, when my husband found out that the suicide of colonel Szelicki was the cause of our escape,
he started to think deeply.
And before that, he said, "I'm returning your coat against the Fuehrer's order."
And the Fuehrer was surprised.
Then he thought deeply and said,
"I'm going to release you, and you'll be taken back to the SS base."
It was the worst base there could be.
But everyone thought that they would be disappointed on the way,
except for my husband, who thought he was telling the truth.
And that's how it was.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'd like to go back to the suicide of Szelicki.
I have to tell you something.
On that night in January, he woke us up by knocking on the door.
That was the first time he did it, as I said.
And then, the second time, he knocked on my husband's door,
and he said that Szelicki had committed suicide,
and that he had to go to the basement.
It was in Nowolipki, and we were in Zamenhof.
He got dressed and left.
He meant, and he described it in his book,
that he repeatedly passed by Szelicki's house and thought about killing him.
Because he was a cold-hearted man.
He went to Umschlag and beat his shoes with a chisel.
And he behaved as if he didn't care about anything.
One of the hospital nurses, and they had already evacuated the hospital,
asked if she was going to take the children to the wagons.
And he said, "I'll give you an example, Korczak.
You can use that example."
So Maniek often thought about it.
But he was killed by someone else, by an unknown hand.
It was the insurgents in the ghetto who organized it.
They shot at him.
He was shot in the face.
But the shot only made him withdraw from work for a short period.
But he didn't die from it.
I'm sorry, was he treated after the shot by your husband?
No, no. He came and woke him up.
He told him to come, that Szelicki was going to die.
That he was close, that he was going to commit suicide.
I went with my husband.
There were about ten doctors in the room.
Among them was Dr. Brewda, who knew a lot of people.
She is no longer alive.
She was treating Szelicki.
She was also a police doctor.
My husband ordered one of the doctors, Dr. Willondo,
to do a transfusion.
Because he had no blood, it could have worked.
Of course, at the beginning, his condition improved a bit.
But he was unconscious and strong.
And it was obvious that it was all for nothing.
And next to him, his wife was sitting on the bed and praying.
Of course, she was a priestess.
And on the other bed, there was a daughter,
who my husband saved several times during his illness.
Because she had this duty as a police doctor.
So, Szelicki's suicide was an argument for an officer,
who didn't tell us to shoot, but to take us to the SS.
Excuse me, what was Szelicki wearing?
- A tank top. - A tank top.
He had it prepared just in case.
We are now in the SS camp.
All of us.
There were two SS men waiting for us.
Both of them spoke good Polish.
One had a tall, black, very intelligent face.
And the other had a short, blonde hair.
A tall, black man took command and ordered us to enter.
At first, they beat us all up.
But there were fewer women and more men.
The blond man was beating us.
He didn't move at all.
And then they put us in a room like a prison.
We were in a small, stone chair.
We were sitting on the chair and on the floor.
And the blond man called the women four times to a cell.
He said, "If you don't give everything back, I'll shoot you."
Four times.
When we were coming back after the fourth time,
I want to add that one time a gendarme was watching us.
He had blue eyes and he looked us in the eye.
He said in Polish, "I won't kill you until morning."
It meant that we still had 10 or 8 hours to live.
The women were begging the gendarmes for their lives.
And indeed, the black gendarme brought us to that room for the fourth time.
Before that, he didn't dare to say, "The men are gone."
When we entered the room, it turned out that the men were there.
But we were beaten and called many times.
I sat on the floor.
And we slept for a few hours.
Half in the yard, half in the village.
And in the morning, the Germans showed up.
Those who were in charge of resettlement.
It was obvious that they were the militia.
There was a man called Brand.
And another one whose name I don't remember.
They were gendarmes with high ranks.
Colonels or something like that.
And there was one Jew who was a mediator between the leadership of resettlement,
between the leadership of the WFLF,
and the Jewish workers.
He was very praised by everyone.
He tried his best, and he had opportunities in the meantime.
His name was Czapliński.
It's worth remembering.
I don't know what happened to him.
In any case, he chose the same path as my husband.
Because among the people who were in that car,
there were a couple of decent people.
He told the decent people to run away,
because he took their lives.
As a result, the ghetto was sentenced to death.
One of them, they were discussing what to do.
One of them said that they had to kill us.
And the other one said that it was a pity to fight, because they would die anyway.
And they let us into the ghetto.
To the so-called Wfelschtel, which I didn't talk about, but I'd like to say a few words about it.
And there were Jews there, who told us to go home.
After the next German check,
we went to our apartment in Zamenhof.
But that apartment looked terrible.
It was dirty and there was a lot of...
It looked like an apartment after a visit to Wörtherfassung.
We spent one night there and decided to run away.
The second time, that is, four days after the first escape.
I'd like to go back to how you became Mrs. Makower.
It was a very long and interesting story,
because we had to have a marriage certificate.
And this marriage certificate was obtained by a rabbi who was from Łódź,
who knew my uncle, who came with me, and my husband, I think I've heard of him.
And he gave us the marriage certificate, which we needed.
But he made one mistake.
The marriage certificate went with us to the commune,
and there was a little rabbi who said that the marriage certificate was unimportant.
Why was it unimportant?
Because it was issued on the date of the temple's demolition.
And then you couldn't give a marriage certificate.
So my husband shook the table with his fist and said, "Don't you see what's going on around you?
You're using such formalities."
And there was a second, wiser rabbi, and he said, "Give them the marriage certificate."
And that was our marriage.
But then, in Lublin, we got an official divorce and an official marriage certificate.
So you got your second marriage certificate without a divorce.
Yes, of course, but we got a divorce in Lublin, but we got our marriage certificate in Wrocław.
I would like to ask you what happened to your mother in the meantime?
My mother was the most important.
I had a hospital leave for Leszno.
It was in 1941, before I was discharged.
I went to my father's house to tell him that my mother wasn't feeling well, so I ran to her.
She was in a lot of pain. She was fainting.
She was taking corticosteroids on her own.
My boss came, not Dr. Wertkań, the oldest boss, but Dr. Rothaup.
He was a bit younger than him, but he was a very experienced surgeon.
And he said that it was probably a tuberculosis outbreak.
They took my mother to the hospital in Leszno.
And when they took her up the stairs, she said to me,
"Listen, my father wouldn't let me go, but you let me go to the hospital."
And you can imagine my situation.
My mother was in the hospital, on my operating table,
where I operated on the patient's back.
They operated on her, and it was a success.
They took the egg bag, the size of a child's head.
They took the bag away, but my mother didn't fall asleep until she died.
So she didn't wake up?
She didn't wake up until she died, because the gases were accumulating in her body.
The vessels were squeezing.
They didn't know about it at the time.
And I learned about it from a beautiful book by a French surgeon, Montdor.
I read this book on my maternity leave, after so many months.
I learned that you have to put a patient on your stomach
and press the plexus solaris, i.e. the solar plexus, the nervous plexus.
But I didn't know about it at the time.
My mother died in my arms,
and the funeral was already held in a cemetery outside the ghetto.
Among those who took her away was her oldest sister,
who told me, "Emma, don't be so sad, because we'll all die."
At least she died in bed.
She took her sister, her mother, and her daughter-in-law with her.
I didn't say it, because it's impossible to say everything.
And there was my husband, who was after the abdominal typhus.
He barely walked. On the one hand, I had a husband,
and on the other hand, my mother-in-law, Mietka Fromm.
- Your first mother-in-law. - Yes.
And that was my life until the end of summer.
I had him and I had the Fromm families,
whom I loved like my own parents.
They probably forgot that I was Mietka's wife.
Yes, and I didn't say much about it, because there was no way.
What else did I want to say?
I wanted to come back and ask you, you were talking about Korczak.
Did you meet Korczak in the ghetto?
Yes, I had Korczak as a patient.
In the hospital in Leszno, there was a surgeon, a great surgeon.
He met a surgeon with a knife.
I didn't operate on him, someone else did.
I think it was Werthem or Rothaupt, one of the oldest doctors.
He suffered a lot, he was in a lot of pain, he didn't sleep at night.
I was on duty with him, he told me about his home,
a child on Krochmar Street.
He was very poor, he suffered a lot of pain.
Then he was discharged and he continued to be treated.
I don't remember, maybe it was Rozanza.
I mean, I didn't have any contact with him then.
In any case, he could have saved himself,
because he was saved from the Aryan side.
He didn't want that and he went to Łomszczak with his children.
This is the truth I know from the ghetto.
So this is the truth about Korczak, he was a wonderful man.
Did your husband work only as a doctor in the ghetto?
Or did he also work as a teacher?
I haven't told you anything about that.
But it's very important.
In 1940, more or less in the mid-1940s,
a teacher from the Medical Academy in Warsaw
organized a course of medical education.
These were legal courses, and their name was "Courses to Fight the Epidemic".
The Germans agreed to that, because they were very afraid of that.
So these courses were attended by about 100 listeners.
They were ordinary listeners.
They were people full of enthusiasm.
They were mostly medical students,
who had three hours of normal life, taken from the ghetto.
The building where the courses were held was in Leszno, on the corner of Żelazna Street.
And you had to have a pass to get to that building,
because it was a few steps away from the ghetto.
I often went with my husband to these courses.
He taught physiology,
and he prepared very well for each course.
There were many lecturers.
Among them was Prof. Hitschlerd with his assistant Anzelówna.
There was also Dr. Zwerwan, who taught histopathology.
There was Dr. Stein, who was the chief physician of the Jewish hospital.
I think there was also Dr. Bieleńczyk.
I don't remember all the names.
Only a few people survived among those students, who were very diligent.
And it was Zwerwan who saved them.
He gave a certificate to those students, who survived.
It was the first two years of medical school, and even more.
These young people were admitted to the Warsaw University,
at the beginning, by the Polish Senate, of course.
On the basis of Zweibaum's certificates.
There is a lot to say about Zweibaum.
How long did this university last?
One and a half year.
One and a half year, and there were over 100 students.
When the deportation started, it all ended.
It started in the middle of 1940,
and lasted until 1941.
There were about two years of medical school.
Unfortunately, very few people survived.
It's hard to say how many.
They were all outside of Poland, outside of Sweden.
I didn't know all of them.
I only came to listen to my husband,
because he spoke very beautifully.
He was a member of a group of lecturers of this university.
He was teaching physiology.
I would like to ask, did you or your husband have any contact with the Aryan side?
Yes, and it's good that you mentioned it.
The only contact we had was through the so-called "Leszno 1" court.
These courts were closed during the deportation.
Before that, these courts functioned not as courts,
but as some kind of tax windows.
In any case, it was relatively easy to get to the Aryan side.
You just had to catch people, of course.
You could call the Aryan side from there.
My husband got in touch with Professor Paluch in this way.
Professor Paluch saved us.
We moved in with him in Dzieciątka Jezus.
Could you tell us who Professor Paluch was?
What was his position?
Professor Paluch was a lecturer in Łódź.
He was from a mixed marriage.
His father was a gardener, a Pole.
His mother was a Jew.
His wife was a Polish nurse.
Both of them were students in Kraków.
Hence their friendship with my husband, who studied medicine in Kraków.
They lived in Dzieciątka Jezus Hospital, where they worked.
They told their 12-year-old daughter, Dyzi,
who was a doctor for a long time,
that our friends would come.
We had to come once, but we didn't.
We came the next time.
She was at home, while they were playing bridge.
She called our parents.
The packages arrived.
Our parents came.
Of course, they were very happy.
They put us in a bed.
They slept on the floor.
It was after your second escape.
They gave us four eggs,
something new, which wasn't available in the ghetto.
They made contact with the state of Użykow.
After four days at Paluchów,
Janusz Użykowski came to us.
He was 17 years old.
He took us to Paluchów.
He comforted us on the way to the train station,
which was heavily guarded by the gendarmes.
The journey to the wagons could have ended very badly,
because we didn't have any documents.
It ended well.
There was a lot of people in the wagons.
Most of them were smugglers.
Did he take you to the wagons?
Yes, he came with us.
It was a regular train.
We got off at night.
It was snowing.
After 20 minutes, we got to the house of our future guardians.
What year was it?
It was 1943.
It was 1944.
You left the ghetto in 1943.
Yes, we fled in 1943.
The dates confused me the most.
I think we'll stop here and we'll have to change the tape.
I'll tell you everything in a moment.
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