"Feel like a man": Stories of women who were not broken by the Holocaust
JANUARY 27 HOLIDAYS INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST VICTIMS DAY. The Nazi regime sentenced the Jews to death - men and women, old people and children. No one was spared: women were used for sterilization experiments, they were raped and beaten, their children were taken away.
Like men, women fought against inhumanity and oppression. Some were participants in the resistance and took part in armed uprisings, others tried their best to save life for themselves and those around them. We tell the stories of three brave women.
Stefania Vilchinskaya
The name of the Polish teacher, doctor and writer Janusz Korczak is widely known, but few know that for more than thirty years a woman has accompanied him in all matters - Stefania Vilchinskaya, or Mrs. Stefa, as the pupils called her. In stories about the tragic episode in which Korczak refused to rescue, so as not to leave the children alone on the way to the gas chamber, Stephanie is rarely mentioned among those who calmed the children in the last hours. Meanwhile, she had a tremendous impact on the life of Korczak and the Orphans House he created. "It is difficult to determine where Korczak ends and Vilchinskaya begins. They are twins, who are meant to merge in one soul, one idea - to love children," said the creator of the Warsaw ghetto archive Emmanuel Ringelblum.
Before meeting Korchak in 1909, twenty-three-year-old Stephanie had already managed to earn the reputation of a talented young teacher. Behind a Polish Jewish woman was a private school in her native Warsaw and a higher education in the natural sciences at the universities of Belgium and Switzerland. Polish researchers note that afterwards she, a lonely girl, because of prejudice, could not open her practice as a doctor or continue the journey through Europe. Then Stefania returned to Warsaw and through her parents' acquaintance, she volunteered for a small shelter for Jewish children, where she soon occupied a leadership position. Once Janusz Korczak came to them - either to watch a play staged by the children, or to evaluate the exhibition of their works. Anyway, biographers believe that it was then that Korchak decided to devote himself to raising children - Stephanie became his companion.
In 1912, with the money of philanthropists in Warsaw, they opened a unique orphanage for Jewish orphans, where the child’s identity was at the forefront. The director was Janusz Korczak, the main tutor - Stefania Vilchinskaya. They introduced a self-government system in the shelter with a constitution and a court in front of which both children and adults were equal, and lived with the pupils as parents. The management of the shelter was kept on Stephanie - she was engaged in organizing order in the house, communicated with lawyers and sponsors, followed the appearance of the children and their occupations. "She got up before us and was the last one who went to bed, worked even during her illness. She was with us while eating, taught us to make bandages, bathe children, cut hair, everything. High, in a black apron, with a short man she always thoughtful and vigilant about her haircut, she thought about every child even during the holidays, ”her pupil Ida Mertsan recalled Stephanie.
In the First World War, Janusz Korczak went to the front as a doctor, and all the worries about the shelter piled on Stephanie. One of the letters has survived, where she complains of terrible loneliness and fear of not coping with responsibility. These fears were in vain: all the memories of Stephanie describe her as a talented organizer, the best partner for Janusz Korczak, who spent more time working with children, and sometimes he forgot to take a handkerchief, going outside to catch cold. In 1928, Panna Stefa - she was addressed as an unmarried woman - wrote on the blackboard in the classroom: "From now on, I will be called Mrs. Stefa. It is not a woman who has as many children as I have called panna."
Stefania Wilczynska and Janusz Korczak did not agree to leave the children, although friends from the Polish underground offered them to flee. They took the train to Treblinka, where they were sent to the gas chamber with the children upon arrival.
Stephanie rarely left children. But in 1935 she went to Eretz Yisrael, where Korchak had recently returned from, and several times over the next four years she returned to live in a kibbutz. On the eve of the war, when the situation in Europe became harder and harder, Stephanie returned to Warsaw. She met the German invasion in the orphanage. In the basement of the building, Mrs. Stefa organized a first-aid station, where she and the children took care of the wounded and homeless. Soon Warsaw surrendered, and the Nazis established their own rules in the city. Mass executions of resistance participants began, anti-Jewish laws were introduced. Despite the difficult situation, Stefania refused to leave Warsaw, although her friends from the kibbutz offered to help her. In April 1940, she wrote them in a postcard: "I did not come, because I can not leave the children." Soon after, the Orphanage was transferred to the ghetto.
Before the war, the Jews of Warsaw accounted for about 30% of the population of the city, there were 350 thousand people. Almost all were driven into an area measuring less than three and a half square kilometers, which occupied only 2.4% of the capital's area. People huddled in rooms of six to seven people, hunger and unsanitary conditions reigned. Under these conditions, one hundred and seventy orphans under the tutelage of Janusz Korczak and Stephanie Vilchinska were found. When they were transferred to the ghetto at the Orphans House, they took away all the stored products, Kortchak, who had protested, was in prison, and during the first months all concerns about survival fell on Stephanie. For two years, Korchak and Vilchinskaya took care of the children in the ghetto. Stephanie organized rooms for the sick in the basement of the house, afraid to send them to a local hospital. In July 1942, the first deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka began. Stephanie believed that children were not touched - after all, the Orphanage was a well-known and respected institution in Warsaw. But in August came the order to eliminate the shelter. Then everyone in the ghetto already knew that they would not return after deportation.
On August 6, 1942, a procession of children moved to Umschlagplatz, the deportation square. They lined up in fours, all were neatly dressed, and each carried a bag on his shoulder. Mrs. Stefa was responsible for the appearance of this ceremonial procession: she instructed the children to put the best shoes under the bed and the clothes not far to be ready to go out at any moment. Stephanie led the second group of children, the first headed by Korczak, followed by other educators and orphans. "I will never forget this ... It was not a march to the train - it was a silent protest against banditry!" - recalled the eyewitness Naum Remba.
Neither Janusz Korczak nor Stefania Vilchinskaya agreed to leave the children, although friends from the Polish underground offered them to flee. They boarded a train to Treblinka, where, upon arrival, they were sent to the gas chamber with the children and killed.
Christina Zhivulskaya
Facts and fiction in the story of this heroine are intertwined: in different sources, the year of her birth was 1914, then 1918, and she managed to live at least under three names - Sonya Landau was born, worked underground under the name of Zofi Vishnevskaya and was imprisoned in Auschwitz as Christina Zhivulskaya. Under the latest pseudonym, she released her most famous book, "I Outlived Auschwitz." Kristina, or, as her friends in the camp called her, Kristea, survived the only one of her vehicles — one hundred and ninety women brought to the concentration camp from the Warsaw prison Pawyak. There, Christine Zhivulskaya managed to hide her nationality, and even in the book - a peculiar chronicle of the death factory - she did not mention her connection with the Jews, whose destruction was observed daily. Her whole past was dangerous.
Christina grew up in the Polish city of Lodz, studied in a Jewish gymnasium, but the family was secular. Like many secular Polish Jews, her father and mother celebrated some Jewish holidays, but did not go to the synagogue. After graduating from school, Kristina went to Warsaw to study jurisprudence, working part time in law offices, but did not finish her studies: in September 1939, Germany occupied Poland. The girl returned home to her parents and younger sister. The persecution of Jews in Lodz tightened, a ghetto was created, and the family decided to flee to Warsaw, hoping to get fake documents. In the capital, to avoid the fate of the rest of the Jews of the city did not work: in 1941, the Zhivulsky were in the ghetto, where Christina spent in inhuman conditions for almost two years. Every day her mother put a pot on the stove, although there was nothing to cook - but she tried to support the household with the appearance of dinner, boiling and serving water on the table.
In 1942, when the threat of deportation or death from starvation seemed inevitable, Christine managed to escape from the ghetto with her mother. She joined the ranks of the Polish Resistance and began preparing false documents for Jews, Craiova Army soldiers and German deserters. The Nazis, who were persecuting members of the underground, called her "blond Zosya." They managed to catch the underground worker in 1943. The girl filed documents addressed to Christina Zhivulskaya. Thanks to her appearance, which is similar to the ideas about Slavic, she managed to pass herself off as a Polish girl. After being interrogated at the Gestapo, the newly-minted Christina was sent to prison, and two months later in freight cars for livestock - in Auschwitz. "We all differently imagined this place. Each had its own associations, its own random information. As there really - we didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Only we all knew very well - they didn’t return from there!" - this is how Christine described the moods of her neighbors in Paviak.
In the autumn of 1943, when Christina was in Auschwitz, the complex was already fully functioning. It consisted of three camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Entirely it is often called Auschwitz by the name of the nearest Polish city. It was the largest camp founded by the Nazis: more than a million people died in it, 90% of them were Jews. About two thousand people were killed in each large gas chamber at a time. Arriving at the camp, Christine did not yet know that the majority of Jewish prisoners were sent from the station immediately to their deaths, and the living conditions of the others were so severe that few survive. At the first women met in the barracks, the new arrivals began to ask why all of her group of ninety people died, to which she replied: “From death! In the concentration camp they die from death, you know? ... You don’t understand, you probably understand you will die. "
Once Christina's poems, calling for revenge, fell into the hands of the camp authorities - she spent the night waiting for death, but the girl who found the texts did not give her away
Never before did Christina write poetry, but during the many hours she stood on the apele (check) she began to pick up rhymes. Her poems about life in the camp began to memorize and recite the neighbors. Among those who liked the work of Christine, there was an influential prisoner, thanks to whom she worked for a short time on the street and soon found herself in a block where they were engaged in newly arrived prisoners. Running to her friend in a revir, a block of patients, Christina contracted typhus. She tried to move the disease on her feet, but she still found herself in a hut, where "on all the beds were naked creatures, bald, covered with spots, boils, plastered with plasters, scrubbing furiously."
Following them, Christine picked up scabies. After a few months she managed to recover - by this time she was already the only survivor of her transport. With the assistance of the same influential prisoner, Cristina reached the “peak of the camp career” after she left the revier - she found herself in the team that selected and kept the property of the prisoners. She had access to things that could be exchanged for food, besides, parcels from home helped feed themselves. Despite all the privileges, she had to work alongside the crematorium. Pipes were visible from the office, and the smell of burning was leaking through the closed windows. Often she happened to communicate with the doomed to death, who asked what would happen next, and Christina did not know how to respond. Once her poems, calling for revenge, fell into the hands of the camp authorities - Christina spent the night waiting for death, but the girl who found the texts did not reveal it.
At the end of 1944, rumors reached the camp about the approach of the Soviet army, while the prisoners simultaneously hoped for the end of Auschwitz, and feared that the Germans would cover their tracks and kill the rest. Christina, together with other girls from her team, was expecting death from day to day, because they had access to a file cabinet. Once in the shower they even exemplified that they started up gas. A few days before the arrival of the Soviet troops, the Germans announced the evacuation of prisoners to German territory. She was called the "death march": people walked in the cold, the laggards were shot. Christine managed to fail and hide in a haystack. For several hours she lay still, even when a German soldier sat down on a stack. Finally she managed to escape and reach the Polish village. The peasants Christina was hiding until liberation. After the war, she lived in Poland, became a writer, composed plays and poems to songs. In 1970, Christina moved closer to her sons, in Düsseldorf, where she lived until 1992.
Fania Brantsovskaya
At the age of ninety-five, Fania Brantsovskaya (Yokheles) tells the story of life to full halls standing without a microphone; She is an active member of the Jewish community of Vilnius, still works as a librarian and teaches young people Yiddish. Today Fanya is the last partisan in Lithuania of a Jewish military unit that has passed through the ghetto and has been hiding from the Germans in the woods for a year.
In Vilnius, Fanya spent almost her entire life - she was born in Kaunas, but in 1927, when she was five years old, the family moved. Vilnius was one of the spiritual centers of Jewish culture in Europe, it was called the "Lithuanian Jerusalem". About a quarter of the city’s population were Jewish, there were Jewish hospitals and schools everywhere, Yiddish newspapers were published, and there were more than a hundred synagogues — now there is only one left. Fani’s family was not religious, but celebrated holidays and tried to light candles on the Sabbath. Before the war, Fanya managed to graduate from a Jewish gymnasium and went to study in Grodno. When the USSR annexed Lithuania, Fania joined the Komsomol and began teaching at a school in a Belarusian village.
The German invasion in the summer of 1941 found her in Vilnius, where she had come for the holidays. Soon after the occupation of the city, the persecution of the Jews began. By August, about five thousand people were shot in the forest near the village of Ponary, near Vilnius. All the inhabitants of the street where Fanya’s girlfriend lived were sent to Ponar, because at night a German body was thrown there and they announced that he was killed by Jews. Half an hour - Fana, her parents and sister, were given so much time for gathering when in September 1941 they were sent to the ghetto. It was necessary only to cross the street, but another life had already begun there — the gates were closed behind the Jews and they were isolated from the city. Fania left the ghetto only for work, outside she was forbidden to walk on the sidewalks or speak with friends.
In the Fan Ghetto, the "active girl", as she called herself, went underground: "It was not a hope to survive, but a certain revenge and [way] to feel like a man." By September 1943, destruction actions had become frequent, and it was clear that the ghetto would be liquidated. Then, on the instructions of the underground, Fan, among six pairs of girls, ran away from the city and went to the partisans — she saw her parents and sister for the last time before leaving; on the same day the liquidation began. On the way, the girls got lost, miraculously took refuge in the village and with the help of the local population came to the partisans.
Fania joined the "Avenger" squad, whose fighters were also mainly from the ghetto of Vilnius. Three weeks later, she went on the first mission - to cut off the telephone connection between parts of the German troops. For almost a year, Fan, along with men with a rifle at the ready, fought in a battle group. In the squad, she met her future husband. One of the last tasks of Fani in the detachment was to blow up the rails so that the German army was harder to retreat. Returning from the operation, she found her comrades ready to return to Vilnius, liberated in July 1944, - an empty, burnt down, destroyed, but native city. “I lived with the hope that my family would return to Vilnius, because someone escaped,” Fanya recalled. Every day she went to the station, where the trains came from Germany, and waited for her relatives. She later learned that her family had died in camps after being deported from the ghetto.
Fania stayed in Vilnius. Together with other Jews, she visited the place of massacres in Ponar, where one hundred thousand people of different nationalities were killed, and achieved the installation of a monument. He was dedicated to the dead Jews, but the Soviet authorities after two years replaced it with a memorial, which mentioned only the death of Soviet citizens. After Lithuania gained independence, Fanya and other caring people ensured that the monument to those who had been shot in Ponara wrote that seventy thousand Jews had been killed here, not only by the Nazis, but also by their local accomplices. Fania always openly said that Lithuanians were actively involved in the murder of Jews, because of what she occasionally found herself in the center of scandals. Когда в 2017 году её наградили орденом за заслуги перед Литвой, некоторые выступали против. Ей припоминали расследование о нападении советских партизан на литовскую деревню Канюкай. Фаню вызывали по этому делу как свидетеля. Она утверждала, что вообще не участвовала в этой операции, но предполагала, что партизаны вступили в бой, потому что жители деревни поддерживали немцев.
Сейчас у Фани шесть внуков и семь правнуков. After retirement, she began to work actively in the community, established a committee of former prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps, and created a library at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. Fan is eager to share her memories with young people who visit Vilnius on special programs dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust: “I consider it my duty to tell. Let people know the truth and pass it on and on.”
In the preparation of the material used: the books "Muses, Mistresses and Mates: Creative Collaborations in Literature, Art and Life" (Izabella Penier), "Philip E. Veerman)," I survived Auschwitz "(Kristina Zhivulskaya ), essay "Stefania Wilczyńska - A Companion In Janusz Korczak's Struggle" (Elżbieta Mazur, Grażyna Pawlak), the film "We Are Humans" (International School of Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem)
Photo:Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3, 4)
