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Oct. 27, 2006
Return to hiding place
Poet recalls war years in a Polish village.
PAT JOHNSON
When Lillian Boraks-Nemetz was a girl, she spent two years in the
Warsaw Ghetto. The conditions, at first, were tolerable. But as
time went by, more and more Jews were forced into the enclosed neighborhood.
In all, about 450,000 Jews resided in the ghetto at its height in
1942, before mass exterminations began and the ghetto was "liquidated."
Young Lillian's father managed to smuggle her out of the ghetto,
where she was scooped up by a Christian woman, as had been previously
arranged. Boraks-Nemetz was secreted to a home where her grandmother
was living with a Polish man, passing as his Polish wife. Boraks-Nemetz
would spend two more years in hiding in the house at Spokojna Street,
Number 16, in the village of Zalesie.
A noted Vancouver poet and author, Boraks-Nemetz has written about
her Holocaust experiences in such books as The Old Brown Suitcase
and poetry collections including Ghost Children. It was while
reading The Old Brown Suitcase that Claude Romney, a friend
of Boraks-Nemetz who is also a child survivor, happened to note
the name of the street and the village where young Lillian had hidden.
Romney's cousin had recently bought a house on that very street.
A quick check of the address book confirmed the coincidence. A photo
hastily scanned and e-mailed confirmed that it was the same house.
The Polish cousin, herself a noted writer, invited Boraks-Nemetz
to return to Zalesie and the home where her young life was saved.
"I hemmed and hawed and thought, 'it's a big trip,' "
Boraks-Nemetz told the Independent recently. "It's not
easy to make a trip like that and on your own."
But the Polish couple said they weren't getting any younger and
that sooner would be better. Boraks-Nemetz awoke one morning at
4 a.m. and padded to her computer, where she made the arrangements
for the trip.
She travelled there this past spring, spending a few days in Warsaw,
retracing the familiar streets that remained from the ghetto days.
She paid tribute to the Ghetto Heroes Memorial and walked past Mila
18 (the former headquarters of the Jewish Resistance and the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising).
"The ghetto was levelled with the ground, but I know the streets,"
said Boraks-Nemetz. A symbolic bit of the wall remains and, at the
Jewish Historical Society, Boraks-Nemetz perused evocative photos
of the ghetto that she had never seen before. Then the time came
to travel the short distance to Zalesie.
"As we approached, I was watching for the village, watching
for the street," she said. "I could see the house, like
a white dove, coming out of the leaves. It was so incredible."
Walking into the house seemed to take on a sacred significance,
she said, describing the moment as being "like entering a synagogue.
"I just felt divided in two," said Boraks-Nemetz. "I
was overwhelmed to start with, and then the child part of me started
remembering that time and how many things happened at that time.
I thought of my rescuers and they were all connected with that house."
Until she returned there this year, Boraks-Nemetz hadn't considered
some of the people who played a role in her survival as "rescuers."
Her father, for instance, was the one who smuggled her out of the
ghetto at the crucial moment. The woman who greeted her on the other
side risked her life in doing so. Her grandmother, who was herself
trying to blend in as a Polish housewife, was a rescuer, and the
man who lived with the grandmother, on a pretext of marriage, was
another. Along the way, there were others whose assistance helped
Lillian survive.
"The house had not changed," she said. "I slept in
the same room. It was surreal – the same room that I was in
in 1942, the same room overlooking the garden, the same outhouse.
The house was exactly the same."
Memories re-emerged.
"Suddenly," Boraks-Nemetz said, "I found this huge
connection with my grandmother. I could see her in every corner
of that place. The credenza that she used to own still was in the
house. The stoves that used to heat the house, they are now converted
to electric, but they were there, where we burned wood from the
forest. It was a small, dark, damp house, and I could even smell
the dampness, but it didn't bother me. Very familiar. It was the
smell of dampness that I loved. I could remember through it."
The garden, which had provided a pleasant view from her hiding place,
had also provided terrifying moments – and those moments returned,
too.
"We saw the ghetto burning from the garden," Boraks-Nemetz
recalled. "From that garden, we saw the whole sky was red.
A peasant came up and said, 'Oh, the Jews are burning,' and he was
laughing."
For more than a year, young Lillian lived without knowing what had
become of her parents and sister.
"We didn't know what happened to them and then one day they
were seen walking down the road," said Boraks-Nemetz. They
had escaped the ghetto before the destruction and were in hiding
themselves. "I wasn't allowed to run to them or anything, but
they came into the house and they stayed for maybe two hours. The
ghetto was already over, but what happened in the meantime was my
father got my mother out on a truck of laborers. They were working
for a German factory in Warsaw. Mother feigned illness and Father
had a friend who was a Christian doctor who came to get her at that
point because they had made the arrangement." Her father escaped
through the sewers.
Fate was not as kind to Boraks-Nemetz's toddler sister, Basia, who
had been hidden in a house in another village, where she was informed
on by someone.
"I remember going to that little room, getting down on my knees
and praying to God that He would save my sister," said Boraks-Nemetz.
"Of course, it didn't happen."
Eventually reunited near the end of the war, Boraks-Nemetz and her
parents could hear the Soviet cannons moving closer. When Warsaw
was liberated, her father, Stanislaw, walked to the city and his
wife and surviving daughter joined him shortly after.
"My mother was pregnant," said Boraks-Nemetz. "She
was in her ninth month with my new sister."
Her father, a lawyer before the war, was part of the provisional
Polish government based at Lwow in 1945, but most people knew that
the pendulum was about to swing from Nazism to Soviet communism.
An uncle from New York tracked the family down through the United
Nations relief agency and arranged for passage from Sweden. In 1946,
the Boraks family was aboard one of the first ships to cross the
Atlantic after the war, guided by a radar boat trolling for German
mines.
They arrived in New York and began to settle in – young Lillian
learned the national anthem and the school prayers – but they
were still on visitors' visas.
"The Americans gave us an ultimatum," she said. "If
we wanted to become landed immigrants, we had to wait either in
Canada or in Cuba."
They came to Canada – and stayed. But Boraks-Nemetz's father,
who had been injured by a falling tree while trying to earn a bit
of money as a forester while in hiding, suffered a misdiagnosis
that led to more serious health issues that claimed his life in
1949. Boraks-Nemetz's beloved grandmother, who had stayed behind
in Poland, died just days later.
An acquaintance in Vancouver rekindled an old friendship with Boraks-Nemetz's
mother, Wanda.
"He knew my mother from Poland and he came to Montreal,"
said Boraks-Nemetz. "They had a romance and they got married,
so we came to live here."
The coincidences surrounding the story of Boraks-Nemetz's emotional
return to her Polish hiding place will be the subject of a film
looking at the experiences of four disparate individuals, including
a poet from Hiroshima and a Kurdish writer who witnessed the genocidal
violence of Saddam Hussein. The idea for the film originated from
a conference Boraks-Nemetz attended this past September, an international
gathering of poets called The Resilience of the Human Spirit, where
Boraks-Nemetz was the only Canadian, the only Jew and the only Holocaust
survivor in attendance. Her remarkable story has also been accepted
for inclusion in an upcoming anthology.
"I really feel that the Jews have a wonderful word for it,"
Boraks-Nemetz said of the series of events that saw her survive
the war and the coincidences that led to her return, this year,
to the fateful house in Zalesie. "It's called basherte. That's
all I can say."
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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