CHAPTER 8
THE JEWISH ORPHANAGE OF OTWOCK WAS HOUSED in a white, longish, rectangular, two-story building, with a big front yard and a garden in the back. Surrounding it all was a thick pine forest where mushrooms, blueberries, and wild strawberries grew in abundance. A narrow paved road led to the orphanage from the town of Otwock. The orphanage could also be reached by walking through the forest along some well-trodden paths. Before the Second World War, Otwock was a well-known resort with many sanitariums where people suffering from tuberculosis could stay. Some of these facilities, converted to other uses during the war, lined one side of the road leading to the orphanage.
For me, the Jewish orphanage served as a halfway point from one life to another. It was here that I underwent a gradual transformation from being a perennially frightened and hungry camp inmate struggling to survive to an eleven-year-old child with a relatively normal life. I enjoyed almost every minute of my stay at the orphanage, although there were moments when I looked back with nostalgia on the adventure-filled life I had in the Polish army and wished I still had my pony with me.
The orphanage housed teenage boys and girls, as well as some younger children, separated into different groups. I was placed with the oldest group of boys. Here I was the youngest among some fifteen to twenty boys, which made me feel very important. Not all the children in the orphanage were real orphans. Some still had one or both parents. These children had been temporarily placed in the orphanage while their parents sought to reestablish their lives or were still abroad. I was among those whose parents, as far as we knew, had been killed during the war. We were the real orphans and saw ourselves as the orphanage’s tough guys, lording it over the other kids. In some perverse way, our attitude resembled that of hardened criminals or “lifers” in a prison who take pride in their status. At the same time, of course, I continued to believe, without telling anyone, that my parents were alive and would find me one day soon.
The vast majority of children in the orphanage had been hidden during the war by Polish families or in convents. During that period, some of them lived under terribly difficult conditions. One girl, Tamara, who was my age, spent more than two years hiding in the low attic of a house. There was no room in that attic for her to walk or even to stand up. By the time she was liberated, her legs had become seriously deformed. Other children and their parents had managed to obtain false identification papers. This enabled them to pass themselves off as Poles in various towns and villages around the country, though they lived in constant fear of being denounced to the Germans. Some of these children were left to fend for themselves when their parents were caught in SS raids. Among the older kids, there were also some survivors of different German work camps. Each of us had a story to tell that was more horrendous than the next, but we rarely, if ever, talked about our past, although my friends loved to hear me regale them with tales of my life in the Polish army.
Since I was the only one in the orphanage who had survived Auschwitz, our administrators publicized this fact. As a result, I was frequently interviewed by journalists and trotted out to meet important visitors. I even appeared occasionally in the newsreels that were shown in Polish movie houses in those pretelevision days. From time to time, we were also visited by representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the “Joint,” as it was known), the organization that, I believe, was the orphanage’s main benefactor.
We were treated very well in the orphanage. When I first arrived, I was examined by a doctor who decided that I was too thin for my age and needed to be put on a special dietary regimen to gain weight. For quite some time thereafter, my breakfast, in addition to the standard bread and boiled eggs, consisted of a bowl of light cream into which I usually stirred strawberry jam or orange marmalade. Some kids who were on this special diet did not like the cream we were served. Since I loved it, I frequently traded my eggs for their cream. Never before had I eaten so well! There were moments when, on seeing all that wonderful food in front of me, I felt sure that it was all a dream and that, instead of the white cream I thought I saw, I would wake up and look down on the snow we ate on the Auschwitz Death Transport. In the late summer or fall, when the mushrooms in our forest were bursting out of the ground, our cook would send us out to gather them for her. For the next few days, we could count on wonderful mushroom soup or some special mushroom dishes. I thought I was in heaven.
When I arrived at the orphanage, I did not know how to read or write, apart from what my parents had tried to teach me surreptitiously in Kielce. I am quite sure, though, that I must have received some individual instruction from one of our counselors before I was sent to the nearby Polish grade school attended by the other kids from the orphanage. Curiously enough, I remember almost nothing about that school, how long I was there, what grade I was in, or what I learned. It may well be that I was there for only a brief period of time. But a couple of things stand out in my mind from my time at that school: the big crucifix that hung above the blackboard, and the daily prayer our Polish classmates intoned every morning while crossing themselves. Even though I did not participate in this exercise and was quite uncomfortable just standing there, I soon learned the words by heart and can to this day still recite them in Polish.
I also still remember the day I dunked one of Tamara’s braids — she sat in front of me — into the ink pot on my desk. She gave me a terribly nasty look but said nothing to our Polish teacher. Instead, she reported me to the head counselor when we returned to the orphanage. A few days later, I was made to appear before an honors tribunal composed of some older kids. As punishment, the tribunal sentenced me to carry Tamara’s books to and from school for a period of two weeks and to perform any other chores she cared to assign to me. That led to our becoming inseparable friends and, after a while, she even volunteered to mend my socks.
Much of our free time in the orphanage was spent on sports. It soon became apparent that, despite the amputation of my two toes, I could run very fast, and I gradually developed into a good soccer player. Since I could kick equally well with my left or right foot, I was able to play a number of different positions. As a result, I was always among the first kids chosen when the two best players of the orphanage selected their teams. In the orphanage I also learned to play table tennis, which was a big sport there, and after a while I could beat many of those who had taught me the game. At some point during my stay there, the orphanage created a boy scout team. Although we were still waiting for proper uniforms by the time I left, I very much enjoyed the activities we performed as scouts.
In the evenings, particularly on weekdays and after the Sabbath services, Polish and Jewish books would be read aloud. At times too, some of the kids would put on musical recitals. I remember that one of the older boys played the piano very well, while others sang or performed some other musical instrument. I soon learned, to my great regret, that I lacked all musical talent and could not even carry a tune.
From time to time, some of us older kids would be taken on excursions outside of Otwock or be allowed to travel as a group by ourselves. Once we were given permission to take the train to Warsaw, a mere twenty kilometers from Otwock. The occasion for our trip was the reopening of the main bridge over the Vistula River connecting Warsaw and its Praga suburb, which had been destroyed during the war. We had been given money for our tickets, and when we reached the station, somebody suggested that I buy the tickets, since I was the youngest and could claim that we were all under either ten or twelve, whichever the cutoff age was. When I got to the ticket window, I made myself shorter than I was and got the reduced-price tickets. We spent the extra money on candy and felt really proud of ourselves.
We grew vegetables in the garden behind the orphanage, and if we wished, we were assigned a small plot for individual cultivation. We grew cucumbers, carrots, beans, cabbages, and tomatoes. I loved working in my little garden, particularly after one of the kids showed me how to change the shape of a cucumber by putting the still-small plant into a bottle. After following his instructions, I would faithfully inspect my bottled cucumber every morning to see what was happening to it. My experiment did not turn out the way I had hoped because when I tried to get the ripe but deformed cucumber out of the bottle, I mutilated it.
To one side of our building, near the garden, the beekeeper kept a row of beehives. Fascinated by what he was doing, I volunteered to help him one day. He instructed me on what to do, and, after donning the protective net he handed me, I tried to operate the bellows used to smoke out the bees so the beekeeper could remove the honey. As I struggled unsuccessfully to make the bellows work, I began to get stung on my gloveless hands and decided to run despite the beekeeper’s warnings to stand still. The beehives must have been located some twenty meters from the orphanage building, and as I tried to outrun the bees, whole swarms began to follow me. With my protective net no longer in place, I was being stung all over my face and neck. I made it to the building and slammed the door shut, leaving most but not all of the bees behind. The nurse I went to see later said that I was very lucky, because had I been allergic to bee stings, I might well have died. As it was, I was in considerable pain for a number of days with my swollen hands, face, and neck. I never again went near the beehives.
One day two of my friends found a handgun in the forest, and they told me about it because, as they put it, I knew “how to handle guns.” They had buried the gun near a tree and wanted me to look at it in order to see whether it worked. The three of us went into the forest, and my friends dug out the gun. I inspected it with all the apparent expertise I could muster for their benefit. It was quite dirty and even rusty in places, and I wondered whether it would work. What to do? Here we faced a real dilemma, for there was only one bullet in the magazine: if we tested the gun to see whether it worked, we would end up with a gun but no ammunition; if we decided to save our only bullet, however, we would always wonder whether the gun worked. Eventually, our curiosity got the better of us, and we convinced ourselves that at some future time we would be able to acquire the needed ammunition. Since I had bragged to all willing to listen that I had lots of experience shooting guns, my friends decided that I should be the one to try it out. I was not happy about this decision because I had been told by those who gave me my little gun in the Polish army that a dirty, rusty gun might explode when used. When it appeared that I had no choice but to demonstrate my expertise with guns, I asked my friends to stand some distance behind me as I proceeded to aim the gun at a big tree a few meters away. I pulled the trigger, and the gun went off with a big bang, emitting a great deal of smoke. But I was still standing, gun in hand and uninjured. We decided to rebury the gun after wrapping it in some cloth. We had planned to come back a few days later with bicycle oil or butter to clean the gun. In the meantime, though, Polish government placards appeared all over town, some of them nailed to trees near the orphanage, calling on the population to turn in all weapons. My two friends and I debated what to do with our buried gun and decided to leave it where it was. It is probably still there.
The mail for the orphanage had to be picked up at the Otwock post office in town. This chore was usually assigned to one or two of the older kids. They hated it, however, because to get to the post office they had to pass a nearby Catholic orphanage, where the Polish kids would bombard them with stones or try to beat them up while hurling anti-Semitic curses at them. Our kids therefore tried to avoid the Catholic orphanage by taking elaborate detours through the forest, although even then they might sometimes be set upon. Not long after I arrived at the orphanage, it was decided that because I did not look Jewish and could easily pass for a Pole, I should be given the job of picking up the mail. For a time, I passed the Polish orphanage without any problems. But once the Polish kids figured out that I came from the Jewish orphanage, I was no longer immune to their attacks. Although I could not escape their anti-Semitic catcalls, I usually managed to outrun the Polish kids. The worst part of my job as mailman, though, was that there never was any mail for me.
During my stay at the orphanage, its administration was in the hands of the Jewish Bund, a leftist socialist political party that among other things believed that Jews should help build a socialist Polish state rather than emigrate to Palestine to help create a Jewish state. Those who ran the orphanage therefore made no effort to encourage emigration to Palestine or to engage in activities preparing us for it. This situation did not go unnoticed by some Zionist groups in Poland and prompted one of them — a Zionist youth organization known as Hashomer Hatzair — to infiltrate the orphanage in order to secretly promote emigration to Palestine. That is how a young woman by the name of Lola ended up at our orphanage. By the time I arrived at Otwock, she had become either the head counselor or the counselor for my group. While I am not sure what her precise position was, I know that I adored her, as did all of my friends.
After I had already been in the orphanage for some time, Lola invited me to go for a walk with her. As we left the orphanage grounds, she asked me whether I had ever thought of going to Palestine or whether I planned to stay in Poland. I must admit that I had never given the matter any thought, as I expected that my parents, whenever I found them, would make such decisions for me. Nevertheless, I had heard my father speak of Palestine and of the need for us Jews to have our own country someday. With his words in my mind, I told Lola, “I would love to live in Palestine because there I would not have to worry about being called a dirty Jew or have Polish kids throw stones at me.” “If you are sure that you really want to live in Palestine,” Lola said, “then I will let you in on a very important secret. But you must promise not to tell anyone.”
After I promised her that the secret would forever be safe with me, Lola told me that some of the older kids, both girls and boys, had already let her know that they wished to live in Palestine and that she, in turn, would help them get there. She had drawn up a list with the names of these children, and if I was really sure that I wanted to move to Palestine, she would add my name to the list. Of course, I told her that I was more than sure. Lola then explained how the scheme would work. Starting soon, one child at a time would sneak out of the orphanage and be picked up by some people from Hashomer Hatzair. That child would then be taken to a temporary kibbutz in Poland, where arrangements would be made for him or her to be smuggled out of Poland to Palestine via either Italy or France. This process would be repeated every few weeks.
It all sounded terribly exciting. I immediately volunteered to be among the first kids to run away. But Lola explained that I had to be the last to leave the orphanage because I was “famous.” What she meant was that since the orphanage administration had publicized my background and presence in the home, my disappearance would most certainly lead to investigations and jeopardize the entire operation. In the meantime, though, she promised that my name would be placed on the list and that it would be sent to the appropriate offices in Palestine. This way I could be sure that I would not be left behind. I was thrilled at the prospect of living in Palestine, and, though I was sorry that I would have to wait my turn, I accepted that what Lola told me made good sense.
Some months passed after that conversation with Lola without my hearing anything more about our secret. Then one morning, when I had given up all hope of ever moving to Palestine, the director of the orphanage called me to her office. Because we were usually asked to see the director only if we were guilty of some serious disciplinary transgression, I was sure that she had learned of the Hashomer Hatzair scheme and would interrogate me about it. On my way to her office, I worried about what I would say and decided that I would rather lie than risk revealing Lola’s plans, which might get her fired. I certainly did not want to lose Lola.
A big smile greeted me when I entered the director’s office. She is trying to trick me, I thought, and get me to talk. After asking me to sit down, the director began to question me about my parents. Did I remember my mother’s name? “Gerda,” I said. “What did you call her?” she asked next, and I replied, “Mutti.” “Do you know where she was born?” I answered that she was born in Göttingen. There were more questions, some also about my father and when I had last seen my parents, and so on. I answered as best I could, still wondering what this was all about. Then the director asked me whether I would recognize my mother if I saw her. “Of course!” I said, and now I was totally confused. “What is this woman driving at?” I wondered and was sure that she would eventually get to the real reason for my being in her office.
Instead, the director pointed to a letter on her desk. “I have great news for you: Your mother is alive! This is a letter from her,” she exclaimed enthusiastically. As soon as I saw the letter, all the excitement and happiness I felt at the news the director had just conveyed vanished. It was written in Polish, and I knew that my mother could not write Polish. The handwriting was also not hers. I knew that right away because, even before I knew how to read properly, my father used to make fun of my mother’s handwriting by saying that it looked as if a chicken had walked over a piece of paper after stepping into a pot of ink. I knew that the letter the director handed me had not been written by my mother.
I felt like crying but did not want to let the director see how disappointed I was. I told her that the letter did not come from my mother and that it was probably written by someone who wanted to adopt me by pretending to be my mother. It was not uncommon for Jewish camp survivors, particularly those who had lost their own children, to come to the orphanage and offer to adopt us. Different Jewish organizations also encouraged adoptions in their publications. We older kids took special pride in refusing to be adopted, and since I for one was sure that my parents were alive and would soon find me, I had an even better reason to remain in the orphanage. The director tried to console me by suggesting that I might be mistaken about the letter. It could have been written in Polish for my mother by someone else, she suggested. After all, the letter was not addressed to me, she said, but to the orphanage, and my mother may have felt that a letter in German would not even be read. None of that convinced me, but as I ran out of her office in tears, I heard her say that she was not giving up yet and that I should not either.
Weeks passed. I tried to put the letter out of my mind but did not succeed. Because I was sure that the letter had not come from my mother, I began to wonder why, if my parents were alive, they had not yet found me, more than a year after the end of the war. Once I asked myself that question, I was forced to think the unthinkable: if so many other people were murdered, wasn’t it possible that my parents had also died? No, that I was not willing to admit. It simply could not be true! Gradually, though, I began to have doubts and wondered whether maybe only one of them had survived. At this stage, I wondered whether, if only one of them made it, it would have been my mother or my father. I knew that my mother had had some health problems in the ghetto — I learned later that she suffered from a thyroid condition — and I also knew how good my father was at outsmarting the Germans. Those reflections convinced me that if only one of them had survived, it would have to have been my father. But if he survived, I thought, he would certainly have found me by now. In the past, before the letter, I had been able to avoid thinking about the fate of my parents by refusing to admit to myself that they might both be dead. Now it gradually dawned on me that I was probably all alone in the world and that there was not much I could do about it, other than go to Palestine. Suddenly, that prospect looked even more appealing.
Knowing that it would take some time before I would be able to leave the orphanage for Palestine, I tried to avoid thinking about my parents by spending more and more time playing soccer and table tennis. Then, one afternoon, while I was in the midst of an exciting soccer game, the director came running out of her office, waving a letter. I looked at it and immediately recognized my mother’s unmistakable handwriting. It began, “Mein liebster Tommyli” — My dearest Tommyli. Right then and there I knew that she was alive. “She is alive!” I kept repeating to myself. It was the happiest moment of my life. I began to cry and laugh all at once, casting off the self-control and tough-guy attitude I sought to cultivate at the orphanage. I had a mother, and that meant that I could be a child again.
If it had been today, rather than in 1946, that my mother had learned I was alive, she would immediately have gotten on a plane or a train, traveled to Poland, and taken me back to Göttingen, her hometown, where she had returned after the war. But none of that was possible in 1946, nor was it possible for her to telephone me from Germany. Also, it would have taken my mother many months to obtain proper documents for travel to Poland. And since I had no passport, nor any other documents allowing me to leave Poland, more time would have been lost. It was thus readily apparent that other, less traditional travel plans had to be put together to get me to her in Göttingen.
In the meantime, mail was the only way for us to communicate. But in those days it was slow and not always reliable. It took some four to six weeks for a letter from Germany to reach me in Otwock, if not longer, which meant that we were probably not able to exchange more than a few letters before we were reunited. Once I knew that she was alive, I was naturally getting more impatient and frustrated waiting to be with her. I can only imagine what she must have been going through at that same time. Oh, how I would have loved at least to have been able to hear her voice!
It took more than three or four months for us to be reunited. Many people were involved in getting me from Otwock to Göttingen: the director of our orphanage, who was magnificent at pulling all necessary bureaucratic strings, and various Jewish organizations, among them the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Bricha. The latter was a secretive Jewish organization that smuggled survivors from Europe to Palestine and, in the process, also helped reunite families dispersed throughout Europe. To this day, I don’t really know who coordinated the various roles these organizations performed in getting me to my destination. What I do know is that my journey from Otwock, via Prague in Czechoslovakia and the American Zone in Germany, to Göttingen in the British Zone, with various stopovers along the way, was executed with admirable precision and without any hitches that I was aware of. It must have taken at least three weeks.
Such a voyage, even under normal circumstances, would have required considerable coordination, since I was passed from one group or individual to another at different stages of the trip. Not only did I have to cross a number of borders, I had to cross them illegally because I lacked the proper papers. Some people were responsible for the border crossings, others for putting me up in temporary or clandestine Jewish transit centers and at times even in hotels. On the whole, the border crossings were not very perilous and were sometimes effected in plain view of border guards who must have been bribed. Only one border crossing involved trudging in deep snow in the dark through a forest while trying not to get caught. I am no longer sure whether it was the Polish-Czech frontier or the border between Czechoslovakia and the American Zone in Germany. What I remember most clearly to this day, though, is the cold. This particular border crossing took place either in late November or early December, and my feet, sensitive to the cold because of my earlier frostbite and amputations, hurt and made walking difficult. That, in turn, brought back unpleasant memories of the Auschwitz death march. Fortunately, it took only a few hours to make this crossing before we arrived at a warm transit center.
With the exception of one border crossing, where I was the only person being brought over, I usually traveled in a group of between ten and twenty people — a “transport,” as our Bricha guides called it. The composition of these groups and their size changed from way station to way station. For example, we would arrive at a transit center after we had crossed a border and find others already waiting there. That group would have priority over us in moving to the next destination, while we had to wait a few days more for our turn. Although it was all very efficiently organized, it took a lot of time to transport us from country to country.
One event from that voyage was vividly brought back to me in a most dramatic way more than half a century later. In 1946, after having been smuggled from Poland to Czechoslovakia, I was detached from my group and taken to Prague. There, I was placed in the care of a young American woman who put me up for about a week in an elegant hotel where she lived. She was very kind to me, took me to nice places to eat, and showed me many interesting sights in the city. When the time came for me to leave Prague in order to join the transport that would take me to the American Zone of Germany, I promised that I would stay in touch. But I was not able to because, in the excitement of my anticipated reunion with my mother, I lost the piece of paper on which she had written her name and address. Then, on March 19, 2000, while working on my computer, an e-mail with the subject heading “Is it you?” flashed on my screen. The e-mail began with the following words: “I read in the Jerusalem Post of March 6 about your election to serve as World Court judge.” After congratulating me, the writer continued:
I am wondering whether you are the same “Tommy Buergenthal,” who during the year 1946 or 1947 was brought from Poland to Prague, by special escort, and had to spend a few days in Prague, waiting…to rejoin his mother in Germany. If so, I was the welfare worker of the American Joint Distribution Committee, with whom you stayed and who took care of you. My name then was “Freda Cohen.”…Although more than 50 years have elapsed, I have never forgotten the child or the name “Tommy Buergenthal,” and often wondered about your whereabouts. Seeing your name in print was a most exciting experience for me, and I would be very happy to hear whether you are in fact the same “Tommy Buergenthal.”
The e-mail was signed “Freda (Cohen) Koren” and it came from Tel Aviv. Of course, I replied immediately. We corresponded for about a year and a half and made plans to get together as soon as possible. Then, shortly after she advised me that she intended to visit me in the Netherlands, I received the sad news of her sudden death; by then she was in her mideighties and had lived a full life. At the very least, I had still been given the opportunity, after all these many years, to thank her for taking such good care of me in 1946. While I had forgotten her name, I had of course never forgotten how kind she had been to me. I had also thought of her frequently, particularly when walking through revolving doors. This incongruous association between revolving doors and Freda, I explained in my first e-mail to her, was prompted by an experience I had when she brought me to her hotel. At the entrance of the hotel, I came to an abrupt stop in front of its revolving door. I had never before seen a revolving door, and it took me a while to figure out how one passed through such a contraption. “That was obviously one piece of information I did not need to know in order to survive in the concentration camps,” I commented to her in that e-mail, as we tried to catch up on developments in our lives that spanned a period of more than fifty-five years.
After I left Prague, I crossed the Czech frontier with another transport and entered the American Zone near the Bavarian city of Hof, where another transit center awaited us. One more border remained, the one separating the British from the American Zone, before I would be reunited with my mother in Göttingen. I passed through that border in a U.S. military train, accompanied by another representative of the American Joint. The date was December 29, 1946. Göttingen was only some twenty kilometers away.
Once we had passed this last border, I got up from my seat and stood by the window until we rolled into the Göttingen railroad station. I could not contain my excitement. I spotted my mother even before the train came to a stop. As I try to describe the emotions of that moment, I realize that I am incapable of putting into words what I felt. And even now, so many years later, tears well up in my eyes as I see her standing there, nervously scanning the slowing railroad cars for a glimpse of me. While the train was still moving, I jumped out and raced over to her. We fell into each others’ arms and stood there long after the train had moved out of the station, hugging each other and trying in just a few minutes to recount all that had happened to us since that August day in 1944 when we were separated in Auschwitz. “Und Papa?” I finally asked. She did not answer right away but kept shaking her head as tears ran down her cheeks. Right then, I knew that my father had not survived the war that was now finally over for my mother and me.