Holocaust heroine recalled by two she saved
Posted: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 9:03 AM
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By NBC News' Don Snyder
WARSAW, Poland – Elzbieta Ficowska leaned forward to place red roses on a new grave in Warsaw’s Powawazki Cemetery. The 66-year-old woman also lit two votive candles.
They were in memory of Irena Sendler, the person to whom she owes her very existence.
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| NBC News/ Krzysztof Galica |
| Elzbieta Ficowska places flowers on the grave of Irena Sendler at a cemetary in Warsaw, Poland. |
Sendler, a Roman Catholic social worker, risked her life and survived torture to help save thousands of Jews after the 1939 German invasion of Poland. Sendler, who died earlier this year at the age of 98, led a group of 30 volunteers, the majority of them women, who managed to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and gave them false identities.
'A truly heroic act'
Ficowska was spirited out of the ghetto in a wooden carpenter’s box when she was just six months old. Hidden on a truck beneath a pile of bricks – arranged to allow air to reach her – she had been drugged to prevent her from crying. With her in the box was a silver spoon engraved with her name and date of birth, probably put there by the mother she never knew.
"It was a truly heroic act for my mother to give away her baby with no guarantee it would survive," Ficowska said. "That was the painful decision my mother made." She did so because thousands of Jews were being sent each day to the gas chambers at Treblinka and other death camps in occupied Poland.
The infant girl was brought to Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a Roman Catholic midwife who also delivered the babies of Jewish women in hiding. Bussoldowa, a member of Sendler’s clandestine network, adopted Ficowska and raised her as a Catholic.
The only physical trace of Ficowska’s rescue is the spoon, which she keeps in a dark-blue velvet box on her mantle piece next to a photograph of her late husband, Jerzy, a poet.
But there are other reminders, she says, one of which is her life-long fear of close spaces. "That’s why I think I’m so claustrophobic," she said, reflecting on having been hidden in the wooden box. "I’m always opening windows and doors wherever I go."
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| Courtesy Iwona Hoffman |
| Irena Sendler, seen in her nursing home in Warsaw, Poland in 2005. |
Two mothers
Like many of her contemporaries, Ficowska is still grappling with the emotional scars of having lived through the Holocaust and the uncertainty it left in its wake.
Interviewed recently in her spacious apartment in Warsaw, Ficowska, an imposing woman with sharply-defined features and neatly-coiffed dark-reddish hair, spoke slowly and haltingly, searching her memory. She had two mothers, she said: her Jewish mother and the Catholic mother who loved her so much that she didn’t want to admit the little girl with curly hair was not really her daughter.
"My Jewish mother gave me my life and my Polish mother saved that life," Ficowska said. "But when I say ‘Mommy’ I am talking about the mother who raised me, not that I will ever forget the mother who brought me into this world."
Ficowska now seeks to help those less fortunate than herself. She is one of the founders of Children of the Holocaust, an international organization that assists survivors. Many of its members were raised without love, often in orphanages, and face old age alone, tormented by their traumatic childhood. Many of these survivors share their feelings in group therapy sessions.
The biggest shock for many who were adopted is to discover late in life that the parents who raised them were not their birth parents. "They learn that their birth parents were Jews, and that they were murdered in the Holocaust," Ficowska explained. "Sometimes Christian parents, just before they die, tell their children they were born Jewish."
Ficowska herself was devastated when told that both her parents were Jewish and had perished in the Holocaust. She was 17 when her adoptive mother confirmed rumors about Elzbieta’s true identity and showed her the silver spoon. In fact, she was so deeply troubled by this revelation that she ran away from home.
Desperate to learn what being Jewish would mean to her life, she sought the opinion of a prominent Jew in Warsaw. "Forget you learned you are Jewish," he told her. "This kind of discovery never made anyone happy." She took his advice and is now comfortable as a Catholic.
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| NBC News / Krzysztof Galica |
| Professor Michael Glowinski in his Warsaw apartment. |
'She saved my mother’s life'
Another survivor saved by Sendler’s heroic acts took a different path.
Professor Michal Glowinski, 74, always knew he was Jewish. When he was eight, he was taken out of the ghetto with his parents by a German soldier who had been bribed.
He recalls his childhood with intense clarity. "The color of the ghetto is the color of the paper that covered the corpses lying on the street before they were taken away," he wrote in his memoir, "Black Seasons." The book is a blend of two voices – that of Glowinski as a young child and as an adult.
We recently spoke in his narrow living room, the shelves crammed with books and scholarly journals. A professor of literature at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, he described with animation how he and his mother pursued a tortuous escape route to avoid capture by the Gestapo.
Sendler eventually found his mother a job as a maid, using forged identity papers. "She saved my mother’s life," Glowinski said. At the same time, Zegota, the umbrella organization of Sendler’s underground railroad, arranged for him to be placed in an orphanage in eastern Poland where he was protected by impoverished nuns. Glowinski’s father, meanwhile, found work as a day laborer, part of a deliberate plan to separate the family in hope of improving their individual chances of survival.
‘Dominant element of my life’
In the orphanage, Glowinski said, he shut out the world that had existed before, never expecting his family to be reunited. He prepared himself only for bad news.
"I had grown deadened and indifferent," he wrote in his memoir. As a result, he did not rejoice when his mother came for him suddenly in February of 1945. His father also survived the war, and the whole family was reunited later that year. Glowinski revived the love for his parents he had smothered as a defense mechanism during the war and even dedicated his memoir, "Black Seasons," to his mother and father.
But, his experience during the Holocaust still affects him deeply.
"If one spends his life in the ghetto and then hiding, locked in a closet or in a stack of potatoes, his whole life is marked by that experience," he said. "It is the dominant element of my life that puts everything else in perspective. The childhood trauma remains the most important element of my biography."
Glowinski and Ficowska are just two of the thousands of Jews who are the beneficiaries of Sendler’s heroism. Her far-reaching legacy extends to today’s children.
"If she didn’t save you," Ficowska’s 10-year-old grandson, Karol, told his grandmother, "my mother would not be here, and I wouldn’t be here either."
Don Snyder was a longtime NBC News Producer who is now retired and is a freelance writer.
