My father’s parents were from Wysokie, a town in eastern Poland, a country in Central Europe in between two neighbors, Russia and Germany.
Throughout history, Russia and Germany (Prussia) ravaged, divided and occupied Poland’s territory.
In 1913, my grandparents decided to leave Wysokie for a new life in America. Perhaps they’d had enough of Poland’s aggressive neighbors.
Henry and Sarah boarded the S.S. Kroonland, an ocean liner that cruised between Antwerp, Belgium and New York, and disembarked onto Ellis Island in July 1913.
This is where immigrants entered the United States near a great statue, which welcomed them with these words:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send them, the homeless, to me.
Henry and Sarah settled in New York City, started a family and Henry founded a travel agency on Broome Street in lower Manhattan’s east side.
As Henry read the news, he had a premonition that bad things would happen to friends and family left behind in Wysokie. Most of the people Henry left behind were Jewish. (Henry and Sarah were Jewish by heritage but did not practice any religious faith.)
As Henry watched the rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1930s, he wrote letters to friends and relatives in Wysokie begging them to leave Poland and start a new life in America, whose Constitution assures freedom of religion.
Nazism is an ideology based largely on racism, anti-Semitism and hatred.
Through his travel agency, Henry offered friends and relatives free transportation to leave Poland. But Wysokie’s Jews were enterprising and had built a decent existence for themselves, so they mostly remained.
In 1937 Wysokie fell victim to a pogrom.
A pogrom is an organized attack on persons of a particular ethnic group. The particular ethnic group targeted was Jews. Many houses belonging to Jews were looted and trashed and destroyed, and many Jews were injured.
On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. Nine days later, German soldiers arrived in Wysokie and set much of the town on fire, just because they could.
The Germans rounded-up Wysokie’s Jewish men from age 17 upwards and herded them to a Catholic Church and refused them food and drink for three days. On the fourth day, the Germans marched their herd of Jews to Zambrow, a city 20 miles east, to work as slaves. All Jews who walked too slowly and could not keep up were shot dead.
Perhaps overcome by his prophetic premonition, my grandfather Henry suffered a heart attack and died, at age 58, three weeks after World War II started. Henry had three sons of military age—and he most surely believed they would be drafted and sent to war, perhaps his worst nightmare. (They were indeed sent to war—and all three safely returned, limbs intact.)
A few days after Henry died, Germany negotiated a deal with Russia to divide Poland (again).
Under Russian rule, Wysokie’s Jews were allowed to return to their town. They rebuilt Wysokie, though their community had dwindled—through organized murder—from 2,500 to 1,100 Jews.
When Germany and Russia went to war two years later, on June 23rd, 1941, German soldiers seized Wysokie again. This time the Germans did not kid around. They did not march Wysokie’s Jews to Zambrow and shoot some of them dead for walking too slow. Instead, in late August, the Germans created a ghetto in Wysokie.
A ghetto is a segregated neighborhood whose inhabitants are squeezed together in cramped conditions. Wysokie’s ghetto comprised of three streets surrounded by a barrier of barbed wire.
German soldiers marched Jews from other towns into Wysokie’s ghetto. Soon, 20,000 Jews were squeezed so tight they could hardly breathe.
When winter arrived, German soldiers marched Jews into the forest to chop down trees for firewood. In return, Jews were allowed to keep tree roots to boil as soup so that they had something to eat.
A year passed.
On November 1st, 1942, 300 empty wagons, borrowed by Polish police from local farmers, arrived in Wysokie. Next day, all Jews were summoned to the main square and ordered to climb aboard the wagons.
A crowd of Polish people, armed with garden tools, stood by. They did not stand by to defend Jews. They stood by to steal all the possessions Jews were forced to leave behind.
Three hundred wagons of weeping Jews rolled to Zambrow.
In Zambrow, Wysokie’s Jews joined 17,500 Jews from other nearby towns in conditions more cramped than Wysokie’s ghetto. The Germans provided each Jew one quart of water and one slice of bread, daily. About 100 persons—mostly children and the elderly—died, daily.
The arrival of a new year did not bring celebration. Two weeks into 1943, the Germans murdered any Jew who suffered ill health. Jews who could still stand were marched to Chizev train station. Along the way, people who hated Jews beat them, gauntlet-style.
It was winter, and very cold. Many Jews froze to death before reaching the trains.
Those were the lucky ones.
However bad my grandfather’s premonition, Henry could not have foreseen the horror of the Holocaust.
On January 17th, Wysokie’s Jews were forced to board trains that rolled them to Auschwitz, a German concentration and extermination camp in southern Poland. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, women and children and the elderly were separated from their husbands, fathers and sons and led to a building where they were ordered to undress. Naked, they were guided into a special chamber, and the door screwed shut behind them.
They were not told what would happen next.
Inside the special chamber they were introduced to Zyklon B.
Zyklon B is a poison made with cyanide. It was created to kill insects.
Zyklon B pellets were dropped into the special chamber, creating a poison gas.
The Jews inside shouted and screamed for 20 minutes as their mouths foamed and their ears oozed blood.
Then all were dead.
Young Jewish men were spared because the German army needed slave labor to assist their war effort.
Auschwitz had a motto: Arbeit macht frei (“Work brings hope”).
But this motto was just a cruel lie.
There was much work, but little hope.
After working as hard as they could, many young Jewish men were also sent to the special chamber—to an agonizing death by Zyklon B poison gas.
A dictator named Adolf Hitler had ordered this genocide against Jews.
“Who, after all,” Adolf said in 1939, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”