bridges, trains and buildings. We lived in the forests. In winter it was freezing. Sometimes, we had no food. It was difficult, but we fought. We fought and we killed those German bastards, as many as we could.’
When I was younger and had not yet heard my father’s stories too many times, I did ask him some questions. I knew that the partisans operated in fairly small groups, ten or twenty, at most. They were up against a vastly superior force which was much better armed.
‘How did you manage to get weapons and explosives?’ I asked my father.
‘It wasn’t easy, Arnold, but we managed. We got them from the Germans, of course. They were the only ones who had weapons. We stole their weapons during the night. Sometimes we had to fight the Germans for their weapons.’
‘Weren’t you outnumbered?’
‘Yes we were, always. That’s why we had to be smarter than those German bastards, and we were smarter. That’s how we survived. Unfortunately, not all of us survived, but you must already know that.’
I nodded. I had done some reading about the partisans. Very many were killed.
‘We managed to steal German uniforms,’ my father said. He didn’t add that those uniforms were taken from soldiers who they had killed, usually by slitting their throats.
‘I didn’t look particularly Jewish when I was young, I still don’t. I was the one who often made the first contact. I was able to speak a few words of German, which helped. Often there were dogs, German shepherds, trained to kill. I was bitten more than once by those dogs.’
That explained my father’s dislike of all canines. We were never allowed to have a dog when I was growing up.
‘I would carry small amounts of meat with me,’ my father said. ‘That would distract the dogs so we could get close enough to the German soldiers to kill them. We all knew how to use our knives. That’s how we got our weapons. We had to kill for them.’
To be honest, I could not imagine my father doing all those things, but I knew he did. He even managed to sneak back into Częstochowa a few times.
‘I put on a German uniform,’ he said. ‘I managed to see my family in the ghetto. The first time my mother saw me in a German uniform, she screamed. It was night and I had to put my hand over her mouth and whisper my name to her in Yiddish, so she knew it was me.’
I didn’t think I would have had the courage to do the things of my father did. Perhaps if I had been in his situation, I might have found the courage. I sometimes tried to imagine what it would have been like but it was impossible. I could not imagine constantly living in fear for my life, as I know my parents had done. Sometimes, especially at night, in bed, if I thought about it, I would break out in a sweat, my heart racing, and my breathing fast and shallow. It was a panic attack yet I was safe, in my bed in Australia, not in occupied Poland.
He continued. ‘On one of my visits, I found my sister Sheindel in tears. Everyone looked very solemn and I asked why she was crying but no one answered. I insisted and finally Ruthie told me that Sheindel had been attacked by Piotr, a Polish boy who I had known since childhood. He was a man now and from what my brother Israel told me, he helped the Germans whenever he could. They gave him a uniform and he strutted around the town as if he owned it. He often came into the ghetto to taunt the Jews, often striking or kicking anyone who got in his way. Piotr and I had many fights when we were younger, fights I always won. He was a friend of sorts in those days but even then I knew that he was an anti-Semite.’
My father stopped at that point. He then took a deep breath. ‘I knew where he lived and that night I paid him a visit. He was fast asleep and didn’t see it coming. He would never bother Sheindel again. He would never bother anyone again.’
My father didn’t say what he did to Piotr and I didn’t ask. I’m sure he would have told me had I asked, but I don’t think I wanted to know.
He told his stories over and over. He told so many stories and spoke of his wartime experiences so much and so often, that I eventually found I had stopped listening, something that I have deeply regretted for many years. I should have paid more attention, I should have documented his stories for posterity, but I didn’t. And when I was much older and wanted to know more, it was too late. He was gone. Taken much too early by cancer, brought on by many years of heavy cigarette smoking.
The war left my father with an anger which stayed with him until he died. And who could blame him, after everything and everyone that he had lost. Again, the details are now sketchy, maybe they always were, but somehow, my father, Jacob Rosen, the Jew, ended up fighting with the Russian partisans. My understanding is that the Russians were not at all fond of their Jewish compatriots, who had to contend with the Russians’ anti-Semitism and discrimination. My father was fair and tall and managed to pass himself off as a non-Jew.
‘The Russians did not know I was a Jew,’ he told me. ‘I had no problem with them at all. I was a good fighter, at least as good as they were, probably better. The Russians respected that.’
Hundreds, possibly thousands of partisans were killed in the fighting, or executed by the Germans but my father managed to survive and returned to Częstochowa with the Soviet forces in nineteen forty-five. It was there that he joined the Communist Party.
‘I had no other choice,’ he told me. ‘It was expected, demanded. I was no Communist, but that’s how things were in Poland then. And, Arnold, it did give me the chance to get revenge. Revenge on those bloody Poles, who were all too happy to help the Nazis kill us. The Nazis were bad, but the Poles were worse. Why do you think the Nazis chose Poland to build most of the concentration camps? Bloody anti-Semites, the Poles, always were and still are.’
My father did not spell out what he meant by revenge. He didn’t have to. I’m sure it gave him some measure of satisfaction but in no way compensated for all that he had lost.
What my father did not know then, but would eventually find out, was that his joining the Communist Party, of which he was a member for only a short time, was to have a profound effect on the course of the rest of his life and consequently on mine.
My mother, Rivka Rosen (nee Jotkovich) was seventeen when the Germans invaded. She was still in high school. She referred to it as ‘Gymnasium’. That term always confused me but it was one of the Polish terms for secondary school and was spelt ‘gimnazjum’ in Polish.
‘I was a top student,’ she often told me. My mother was a modest woman, not one to brag about anything, but clearly she was proud of her scholastic achievements.
She was not tall, perhaps five foot five. She had black hair and green eyes and a warm smile. It was obvious that she was very bright and she could have gone far had circumstances been different, although as a Jew in Poland in the late nineteen thirties, her educational opportunities would have been very limited. Very few Jews were accepted into universities at that time and those that were, came from big cities like Warsaw and from wealthy families.
My mother attended a Jewish high school, walking distance from her home, which was a small apartment, on the second floor of an apartment complex where all the neighbours were Jewish.
‘When we walked to school, the Polish boys would throw stones at us,’ she said. ‘This was before the war. Uh, the Poles! They were worse than the Germans. Anti-Semites, all of them! Remember Arnold,’ she used to say. ‘I never want you to visit that horrible country. Never! The Poles are no better now. Anti-Semites!’
I could never understand why my parents’ hatred for the Poles was even greater than their hatred for the Germans, but that’s how it was.
My mother was a proud and principled woman, traits she carried with her until the last few years of her life when she was struck down by Alzheimer’s disease and no longer had any traits at all.
The German army, the Wermacht, entered Częstochowa on the third of September, nineteen thirty-nine.
‘I will never forget that day,’ my mother told me. ‘There were so many of them, so many German soldiers.