High Holidays, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and spent most of the time in the front courtyard chatting up the girls. I am pretty sure I didn’t believe in God, although I kept that fact to myself. Just in case I was wrong and He did exist, I didn’t want to take the risk of Him striking me down.
My father was one of six children, four boys and two girls. His parents, Aharon and Sarah, had two more children but they died shortly after birth. My father was the youngest and, as he frequently told me, was spoiled rotten by his older siblings, especially his two sisters, Ruthie and Sheindel. Avraham was the oldest of the boys. He left Częstochowa in the early nineteen thirties and made his way to New York, where he became a successful accountant. Israel and Hershel were his other two brothers.
‘I want you to remember their names, Arnold,’ he would tell me. ‘They were your family, or would have been had it not been for the war and what the Nazis did to us.’
Apart from Avraham, who left Poland before the war, Ruthie was the only other member of my father’s family to survive. She now lived in the US.
‘I was in the army when they were taken,’ he told me. ‘I never saw them again, I never even got to say goodbye.’
I was named after my grandfather Aharon. My Hebrew name is Aaron (a version of Aharon) ben Yaakov. Yaakov is the Hebrew for Jacob and Arnold is the English version of my Hebrew name.
‘Did your father work?’ I once asked. This may have seemed like a silly question but I had always been under the impression that Jewish men spent all their time either in synagogue or studying the Torah.
My father gave me a strange look. ‘Of course he worked, how do you think he made a living?’
I was probably eight or nine when I asked that question.
‘He was a butcher, as his father had been. It wasn’t his own butcher shop, he was employed by someone. The wages were not great but we got by. At least there was always meat on the Shabbat table.’
My father, according to his telling, was a naughty boy. He did not do well at school, either through lack of interest or lack of ability. He never said which.
‘I didn’t like school,’ he often told me. ‘I couldn’t wait to leave.’
And he did leave when he turned fifteen. His father was not very happy about it but I had the impression that he had little control over his youngest child, Yaakov.
‘What did you do after you left school?’ I asked.
‘I worked, what else could I do?’
His father convinced his employer to take my father in to the butcher shop to learn the trade.
‘I worked hard, Arnold, but I didn’t mind. I was a good worker. Even at the age of fifteen I was very strong. It was better than going to school. I didn’t like school,’ he told me yet again.
‘I am sure I was a big disappointment to my parents, especially to my mother. She wanted me to continue my studies. I am sure my father did too, but it was less important to him. His father was a butcher, he was a butcher and he would have been happy enough for me to be one too.’
My father had a number of friends who were Poles, non-Jews, which was unusual at the time.
‘I was the only one of my brothers who mixed with the Poles. My father didn’t know. He would not have approved, I’m sure of that.’
It must have been a love-hate relationship, as he often got into fights with the Polish boys, which, according to my father, were fights he always won.
‘I never lost a fight,’ he said. ‘Not one.’
I guess he was accepted by the non-Jewish boys because of his toughness and because he didn’t look particularly Jewish. His hair was fair, he had blue eyes and at well over six foot, he was unusually tall for a Jew in pre-war Poland. These physical features were to come in very handy later in his life.
At the age of twenty my father was drafted into the Polish army. This should have occurred at the age of eighteen, but it was common for Jewish families to delay reporting the birth of boys to the civil authorities. This was done to put off the inevitable military service which they knew lay ahead. As a result, my father’s official papers showed him to be two years younger than he really was.
My mother, Rivka, came from a smaller family. She was one of only three children, which was unusual, as most Jewish families had large numbers of children. She was the oldest. She had two younger sisters, Hannah and Leah. They lived with their mother, Sarah, and their maternal grandmother, Fruma. My mother’s father vanished in mysterious circumstances when my mother was very young. The circumstances were mysterious to me, as she refused to ever speak about them.
‘What happened to your father?’ I once asked my mother. ‘You never speak about him.’
My mother looked at me and I thought I could see tears in her eyes.
‘He left,’ was all she said.
I looked at my father enquiringly but he just shook his head. Clearly this subject was taboo. Many years later I found out that my mother’s father left the family and travelled to South America, to Argentina, I think. For all I know he remarried and I might have a whole other family somewhere.
Both my mother and her mother were seamstresses, which is how they made a living, once my mother’s father had left. I know that Fruma, her grandmother, was a very important influence in my mother’s life. I have seen a black-and-white photo of her and in that photo she appeared stern and unsmiling. Perhaps it was just a bad photo, because my mother always spoke of her as a warm, loving and caring person.
‘My grandmother was a very clever woman,’ my mother told me. ‘She wasn’t educated but she learned to read and write in Polish herself.’
That would have been very unusual in those days.
‘Work hard at school, Rivka,’ she would say. ‘You’re a clever girl. You can make something of yourself. You’re very good at mathematics and you could even become an accountant. I did work hard at school and I did do well, I was even offered a scholarship. If it wasn’t for the war, who knows what might have happened.’
My mother was the only one of her immediate family to survive the war. She spoke of her wartime experiences reluctantly and sparingly. I could only imagine the horrors that she had to endure.
My mother told me that she knew my father before the war but not well.
‘You should have seen how he looked back then,’ my mother told me. ‘He was so tall and so good looking. And he was blond; very few Jewish boys were blond. I was much younger and I don’t think your father even noticed me.’
They reconnected after the war in Częstochowa, and were married in nineteen forty-five.
My father was twenty-two years old when Germany invaded Poland, on the first of September, nineteen thirty-nine. Just two weeks later, Russia invaded from the East and by the first week of October the war in Poland was over. Germany and Russia then divided Poland between them.
My father spoke very little about his time in the Polish army. I can imagine that as a Jew, it was not an easy time for him. Anti-Semitism in the Polish army was even worse than in Polish society generally. Fortunately for my father, the Polish army was defeated so quickly that he did not see any fighting at all.
The rest of my father’s wartime experiences were very different to most of the other Jews in Poland.
‘I was never in the camps, or even in the ghetto,’ he used to say. ‘I fought the Germans.’
I knew that my father joined the partisans, after Poland’s defeat. I cannot recall how that happened or which group or groups he belonged to. I do have a vague recollection of him speaking about Lublin, a city three hundred kilometres east of Częstochowa, where a number of Jewish partisan groups operated. Some of the partisans in that area became well-known, although when I looked up the list of names in a book on the