Andre Nowacki, a Polish Holocaust survivor, reunites with Hanna Kwiecinska Morawiecka, the woman who helped him and his mother hide from the Nazis for two years
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BY JENNIFER SMITH
STAFF WRITER
November 25, 2004
STAFF WRITER
November 25, 2004
Andre Nowacki lives in a condo near the boardwalk in Long Beach, a short walk from the ocean and the house where his 3-year-old granddaughter lives. At 68, Nowacki, a food chemist, runs a thriving consulting business that takes him across the globe. He and his wife celebrated their 38th anniversary this year.
It is a good life, one worlds away from his childhood as a Jew in Warsaw, where he and his mother spent four desperate years hiding from the Germans in occupied Poland.
"It was a time of madness," he remembers. "This is something that nobody will understand unless they were there ... there is nothing that compares, nothing that connects."
Nothing, that is, except the sole surviving member of a Polish Christian family who took extraordinary risks to help Nowacki and his mother evade the Nazis. Yesterday Nowacki was reunited with Hanna Kwiecinska Morawiecka, 73, who sang him songs and brought him books during the two years he hid in their Warsaw apartment, unable to even peer out a window for fear of being caught.
"This is my older sister," Nowacki said, embracing Morawiecka, who had been the youngest of three Kwiecinska daughters. Their emotional reunion at Kennedy Airport was financed by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that provides financial support to non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
For years the Kwiecinskas had assumed Nowacki and his mother had perished, until he tracked down the three daughters, all since married and bearing different names, in Poland and called them nearly 20 years ago. The eldest daughter visited him in 1986, but Nowacki and Morawiecka hadn't seen each other since the end of the war. But the bond the two children closest in age formed during the harrowing years of hiding and fear endured.
Shrugging off fatigue from her long flight, Morawiecka starting chatting animatedly in Polish with the man she said she'd know anywhere because of his big ears. She didn't stop, her eyes bright and hands still gesticulating hours later after she and her daughter Wanda were whisked off to Long Beach to meet Nowacki's family for an early Thanksgiving dinner.
"I loved him dearly," she said of Nowacki as he translated. "But I hated him, because if they were caught, we all would die."
The Kwiecinskas hid the pair in their Warsaw apartment for years. Later, after the shattered city was evacuated following the disastrous Warsaw uprising, the family helped them in the scramble for a safe haven in the countryside.
"Their fate was my fate," Nowacki said. It is a debt, he said, he can never repay.
During the war Nowacki lost everything: his home, his father, even his name. By the time Poland was liberated in 1945, the only documents that Nowacki, who was born Solomon Tejblum, possessed were the forged Christian identity papers that allowed him and his mother to slip out of the Warsaw ghetto in the first place. Of an extended family of 150, he believes only he, his mother and one aunt survived.
When Nowacki and his mother, Helen, came to the Kwiecinskas' apartment in 1942 seeking shelter, they had already endured years of trauma since the Germans invaded Poland three years earlier.
In 1940 his father's knitting factory was taken away and given to a Polish manager after a Nazi decree forced Warsaw's 375,000 Jews into the ghetto. Thanks to the intervention of the manager, a friend, the Tejblums got permits allowing them to work outside the ghetto at the factory, where Haim Tejblum, Nowacki's father, , obtained forged identity papers for himself, his wife and his son. But he was arrested while trying to arrange an escape route through Eastern Europe for the family when Nowacki was just 6 and sent to a concentration camp, where he died.
Soon after, Nowacki's mother, a strong-willed woman with nerves steeled by adversity, walked out of the ghetto with her son and never came back. Blue-eyed, with no trace of a Yiddish accent, she passed for Christian and from then on, her son Solomon became Andre.
Sustained by a lifeline of money from the factory manager, the pair sought anonymity in Otwock, a rural town outside of Warsaw. But they constantly ran into trouble as people began to ask questions, especially about Andre, who looked more Jewish than she.
Eventually the risk of being denounced to the Germans became too dangerous, and the pair returned to Warsaw in 1942, where the factory manager used contacts in the Polish underground resistance to locate a safe house.
Janina Kwiecinska, whose husband was an underground member in hiding from the Germans, was already sheltering other Jews in her apartment when she agreed to take in Nowacki and his mother.
"You cannot describe the risk," the Kwiecinkas took, Nowacki said. "People who were caught were shot ... and some people lost their nerve right there in the middle. The pressure was extraordinary."
Adults sought release in the only sedative left during years of wartime privation: vodka, which Nowacki said was always on the table. "There had to be some escape, just for a minute, just for an hour," he said. Occasionally he would lick the glasses to catch the last drops. "That was enough for me."
Andre played with the girls and the family's two dogs and two cats. The excruciating tedium was punctuated only by the panic of a knock on the door, often from the Gestapo agents who had a habit of scouring the apartment in hopes of finding the girls' father. If there was time, Nowacki shimmied up a ladder to a high cupboard over the front door, where he would bolt the door from inside and remain silent until the agents left. Sometimes there was no time. Once, the Kwiecinska girls had to shove him under the covers of a bed which they then sat on, feigning nonchalance, until the agents left.
"They looked at me," Morawiecka remembered, "and my heart was beating like I could collapse."
The Nowackis hid with their protectors in the basement of the apartment building during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when Polish insurgents hoping in vain for support from Russian troops just outside the city rose up against the Germans. The Russians did not come, and the movement was crushed, laying waste to most of Warsaw. "When we walked out the building was a pile of rubble," Nowacki said. "There was not a building standing."
Then the two families traveled together to the countryside, facing danger equally because the Christians faced being shot if caught protecting Jews. They slept in barns until they found a farmer who hid them until the war's end. Food was scarce, but for Nowacki it was the beginning of a new life. For the first time in years, "I saw the sunlight, I saw nature, trees and fields," he said. "It was such a chaotic period that somehow we were not afraid anymore."
After the war the families lost touch. The Kwiecinskas returned to Warsaw and Nowacki and his mother settled in the Polish city of Lodz. They emigrated to Palestine five years later, when Nowacki was 14. Nowacki eventually moved to North America, graduating from college in Montreal, where he met his wife.
The next few decades Nowacki, who worked as a food chemist, spent in pursuit "of every American's dream," he said.
To this day Nowacki does not know how the Kwiecinska family found the courage to put their lives on the line for him and other Jewish strangers they hid.
"I don't know if there was a way to rationalize if you were ready to die for a person," he said. "I really don't know if I would take such a risk. Until you are tested, as they were, you cannot know."
It is a good life, one worlds away from his childhood as a Jew in Warsaw, where he and his mother spent four desperate years hiding from the Germans in occupied Poland.
"It was a time of madness," he remembers. "This is something that nobody will understand unless they were there ... there is nothing that compares, nothing that connects."
Nothing, that is, except the sole surviving member of a Polish Christian family who took extraordinary risks to help Nowacki and his mother evade the Nazis. Yesterday Nowacki was reunited with Hanna Kwiecinska Morawiecka, 73, who sang him songs and brought him books during the two years he hid in their Warsaw apartment, unable to even peer out a window for fear of being caught.
"This is my older sister," Nowacki said, embracing Morawiecka, who had been the youngest of three Kwiecinska daughters. Their emotional reunion at Kennedy Airport was financed by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, a Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that provides financial support to non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
For years the Kwiecinskas had assumed Nowacki and his mother had perished, until he tracked down the three daughters, all since married and bearing different names, in Poland and called them nearly 20 years ago. The eldest daughter visited him in 1986, but Nowacki and Morawiecka hadn't seen each other since the end of the war. But the bond the two children closest in age formed during the harrowing years of hiding and fear endured.
Shrugging off fatigue from her long flight, Morawiecka starting chatting animatedly in Polish with the man she said she'd know anywhere because of his big ears. She didn't stop, her eyes bright and hands still gesticulating hours later after she and her daughter Wanda were whisked off to Long Beach to meet Nowacki's family for an early Thanksgiving dinner.
"I loved him dearly," she said of Nowacki as he translated. "But I hated him, because if they were caught, we all would die."
The Kwiecinskas hid the pair in their Warsaw apartment for years. Later, after the shattered city was evacuated following the disastrous Warsaw uprising, the family helped them in the scramble for a safe haven in the countryside.
"Their fate was my fate," Nowacki said. It is a debt, he said, he can never repay.
During the war Nowacki lost everything: his home, his father, even his name. By the time Poland was liberated in 1945, the only documents that Nowacki, who was born Solomon Tejblum, possessed were the forged Christian identity papers that allowed him and his mother to slip out of the Warsaw ghetto in the first place. Of an extended family of 150, he believes only he, his mother and one aunt survived.
When Nowacki and his mother, Helen, came to the Kwiecinskas' apartment in 1942 seeking shelter, they had already endured years of trauma since the Germans invaded Poland three years earlier.
In 1940 his father's knitting factory was taken away and given to a Polish manager after a Nazi decree forced Warsaw's 375,000 Jews into the ghetto. Thanks to the intervention of the manager, a friend, the Tejblums got permits allowing them to work outside the ghetto at the factory, where Haim Tejblum, Nowacki's father, , obtained forged identity papers for himself, his wife and his son. But he was arrested while trying to arrange an escape route through Eastern Europe for the family when Nowacki was just 6 and sent to a concentration camp, where he died.
Soon after, Nowacki's mother, a strong-willed woman with nerves steeled by adversity, walked out of the ghetto with her son and never came back. Blue-eyed, with no trace of a Yiddish accent, she passed for Christian and from then on, her son Solomon became Andre.
Sustained by a lifeline of money from the factory manager, the pair sought anonymity in Otwock, a rural town outside of Warsaw. But they constantly ran into trouble as people began to ask questions, especially about Andre, who looked more Jewish than she.
Eventually the risk of being denounced to the Germans became too dangerous, and the pair returned to Warsaw in 1942, where the factory manager used contacts in the Polish underground resistance to locate a safe house.
Janina Kwiecinska, whose husband was an underground member in hiding from the Germans, was already sheltering other Jews in her apartment when she agreed to take in Nowacki and his mother.
"You cannot describe the risk," the Kwiecinkas took, Nowacki said. "People who were caught were shot ... and some people lost their nerve right there in the middle. The pressure was extraordinary."
Adults sought release in the only sedative left during years of wartime privation: vodka, which Nowacki said was always on the table. "There had to be some escape, just for a minute, just for an hour," he said. Occasionally he would lick the glasses to catch the last drops. "That was enough for me."
Andre played with the girls and the family's two dogs and two cats. The excruciating tedium was punctuated only by the panic of a knock on the door, often from the Gestapo agents who had a habit of scouring the apartment in hopes of finding the girls' father. If there was time, Nowacki shimmied up a ladder to a high cupboard over the front door, where he would bolt the door from inside and remain silent until the agents left. Sometimes there was no time. Once, the Kwiecinska girls had to shove him under the covers of a bed which they then sat on, feigning nonchalance, until the agents left.
"They looked at me," Morawiecka remembered, "and my heart was beating like I could collapse."
The Nowackis hid with their protectors in the basement of the apartment building during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when Polish insurgents hoping in vain for support from Russian troops just outside the city rose up against the Germans. The Russians did not come, and the movement was crushed, laying waste to most of Warsaw. "When we walked out the building was a pile of rubble," Nowacki said. "There was not a building standing."
Then the two families traveled together to the countryside, facing danger equally because the Christians faced being shot if caught protecting Jews. They slept in barns until they found a farmer who hid them until the war's end. Food was scarce, but for Nowacki it was the beginning of a new life. For the first time in years, "I saw the sunlight, I saw nature, trees and fields," he said. "It was such a chaotic period that somehow we were not afraid anymore."
After the war the families lost touch. The Kwiecinskas returned to Warsaw and Nowacki and his mother settled in the Polish city of Lodz. They emigrated to Palestine five years later, when Nowacki was 14. Nowacki eventually moved to North America, graduating from college in Montreal, where he met his wife.
The next few decades Nowacki, who worked as a food chemist, spent in pursuit "of every American's dream," he said.
To this day Nowacki does not know how the Kwiecinska family found the courage to put their lives on the line for him and other Jewish strangers they hid.
"I don't know if there was a way to rationalize if you were ready to die for a person," he said. "I really don't know if I would take such a risk. Until you are tested, as they were, you cannot know."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
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