Abstract
Mia describes her life in Warsaw as a “hidden Jew” from September 1939 until she was able to leave in April 1940. Armed with bogus Bulgarian visas bought on the local black market, twenty-year-old Mia, her young husband, Jan, his mother, Regina Lotto, and Jan’s seventeen-year-old cousin, Ryszard Landau, travel to Switzerland and then Italy. They manage to get twenty-four-hour transit visas into Italy, and end up staying throughout the war. A central theme of this chapter is the near universal rejection of asylum and safe haven for Polish Jews and other refugees of Nazi oppression during World War II.
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Notes
- 1.
Gustawa Truskier’s brother, Julian, was Jan’s father. Gustava married her first cousin, Efroim Truskier, whose nom de guerre was Franciszek Fiedler. This was the name Mia always used for him. Peter Truskier never heard any relatives refer to him by any other name. Ironically, Efroim stated that he changed his name to avoid tainting his capitalist relatives with his political activity. Truskier was/is not a common name and given the family’s wealth and prominence, he would have been easily recognized as a member.
- 2.
The Comintern, or Communist International, was the third of the international organizations that coordinated communist parties throughout the world. It was headquartered in the USSR and lasted from 1919 until 1943. Franciszek’s position as a Comintern representative indicated his importance in the KPP.
- 3.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Vintage, 2010), 113.
- 4.
Timothy Snyder, 116.
- 5.
Christopher R. Browning, Richard S. Hollander, and Nechama Tec, Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.
- 6.
After the fall of Poland, the German army’s rapid conquests of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and the installation of collaborationist governments, essentially derailed the promised assistance to Poland from England and France. The placid response from the rest of Europe led people in Germany to see the period from 1939 to June 1941 as the “peace years.” No one was coming to the aid of the Poles in much more than rhetorical denunciations of Soviet and German aggression, Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 257.
- 7.
Christopher Browning, correspondence with author, May 5, 2018.
- 8.
Ron Nowicki discusses the importance of film and the large number of movie theaters in prewar Warsaw. He mentions “Fame,” which Mia called “Fama,” Warsaw: The Cabaret Years (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992), 54.
- 9.
Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War, Final Report (Zurich, 2002), 117.
- 10.
The word “emigrants” in the report means those persons who have left their own country to settle in Switzerland. The word is defined as those who “permanently” settle, but that was not an option open to the emigrants, in this case.
- 11.
Most were members of the “liberal professions,” who were hoping to avoid the anti-Semitic laws or to leave the country. Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 210.
- 12.
Yad Vashem’s policy recognizes converted Jews as Jews and a number of the Catholic priests who baptized were deemed “Righteous Among the Nations.” Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), n.6, 252. Presumably, the Catholic priest who instructed, baptized, and married Jan and Mia had to know that two Jews seeking to convert to Catholicism in early 1940 Poland were doing so for reasons other than religious faith.
- 13.
Trujillo offered asylum to socialist and communist Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War fleeing Francisco Franco’s fascist government, while jailing, torturing, and killing any leftists, trade union organizers, and members of his own homegrown opposition. In this case, the Spaniards’ whiteness overrode their politics, Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR and the Jews of Sosúa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); and Wells, “Playing God: Choosing Central European Jewish Refugees for the Domnican Republic During World War II,” in Luis Roniger, James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich, eds., Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 80–99.
- 14.
If they paid 2000 złoty for each visa that was a bit more than $525 in today’s exchange.
- 15.
Adam Czerniakow records the tragedy of the Landau family in his diary: “In the morning, hysterics at home. Night—the shelter. Truskier’s son-in-law, daughter, and granddaughter buried in debris.” The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, Raul Hilberg, ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 77.
- 16.
The record is filled with similar events, at many times in history, of people putting themselves in even greater danger to protect frivolous and expendable valuables. In his diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, Adam Czerniakow occasionally despairs of the self-centered refusal of some people to contribute money and valuables so the leaders could purchase life-sustaining necessities for the ghetto population.
- 17.
The original 748 Poles who were taken to Auschwitz were teachers, lawyers, intellectuals, Catholic priests, and members of the Polish resistance, but Jews, resisters or not, were being killed beginning in 1939. After the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Nazis embarked on the organized genocide of the Jewish population and Auschwitz-Birkenau became one of the largest concentration/extermination centers. For a history of the German’s genocidal policies see, Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
- 18.
After a distinguished record in the US Air Force during the War, Turner went on to appear in several movies as a skater, including as a double for Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife (1948). He died in 2010 at the age of ninety in Yountville, Napa Valley. A Norwegian woman, Laila Schou Nilsen (1919–1998), near the same age as Turner, won the gold medal in alpine skiing at the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics and she was in Norway when the Germans invaded on April 9, 1940. That is as far as Mia’s story can be verified, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Turner.
- 19.
Allen Welles, “Playing God,” 80–99.
- 20.
Avraham Milgram, Os Judeus do Vaticano (Rio: Imago, 1994), pp. 35–36. Special thanks to Rui Afonso and Fabio Koifman for this information.
- 21.
Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 222.
- 22.
Raoul Wallenberg was the Swedish special envoy in Budapest in 1944–1945. He is known to have hidden thousands of Jews who were destined for Auschwitz. In 1945, he disappeared and is reported to have been imprisoned in Moscow and subsequently killed. The Soviets’ motive for arresting Wallenberg has never been fully resolved, but he is honored as one of the most important rescuers of Jews in the territory under German control. Martin Gilbert, The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 389–405.
- 23.
Righteous among the Nations is an ancient Jewish tradition stemming from the story of the efforts of Shifra and Puah, Egyptian midwives who in defiance of Pharaoh’s orders to drown the male children of Israel rescued and hid them. In particular it draws from the tale of Pharaoh’s daughter, called Batya in the Bible, who found Moses in a basket in the river and raised him as her son. The “nations” refers to the lost tribes of Biblical times. Martin Gilbert, xv–xvi. Regrettably, Gilbert neither mentions Sousa Mendes nor the extensive work of the relief committee of the Lisbon Jewish Community (COMASSIS) that provided an infrastructure for the processing of thousands of Jews out of Europe to other parts of the world. The only reference to Portugal is in the work of the Portuguese Charge d’Affairs, Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquino, who protected over 800 Hungarian Jews with ties to Brazil, Portugal, or any Portuguese colony in safe houses in Budapest. In addition, Portugal cooperated with the Swiss, Swedish, and Spanish Legations in 1944 on the rescue of over 25,000 Hungarian Jews, largely attributed to the heroic work of Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg.
- 24.
Rui Afonso, Um homen bom, Aristides de Sousa Mendes (Alfragide, Portugal: Texto Editores, Lda., 2009), 370.
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Meade, T.A. (2021). Fleeing Poland, 1939–1940. In: We Don't Become Refugees by Choice. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84525-4_3
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