From Kraków to Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto and to Warszawa - Julek and Hania.

Thanks to Stefania Sępołowska, Hania Fiszgrund (Helenka Falkowska according to her new aryan documents) is placed in the "Nasz Dom" children's home run by Maryna Falska in Bielany. Nasz Dom was earlier run by Maryna Falska and Janusz Korczak. Hanna stayed there for 2.5 years. Due to her pronounced Semitic appearance, she does not go to school, which raises of course suspicions among the children and staff of the Nasz Dom Orphanage.

When World War II broke out, Salo Fiszgrund made it as many other Jews to the other side of the German/USSR border and thought that, as a Bund member, would be welcome there. He was wrong, Russians arrested him and took him to Minsk prison. He was, however, released in the Summer of 1942 by the Germans when Barbarossa started.

So suddenly, the father of the Fiszgrund family, Salo Fiszgrund was in a Russian prison, and his wife Malka stayed alone with two children, Julek and Hania, in Krakow occupied by Germans. Julek was born in 1923 and Hania in 1929.

The German army occupied Krakow in the first week of September 1939. Krakow was by Germans designated as the capital of the General Government. The German authorities initiated immediate measures aimed at isolating, exploiting, and persecuting the Jews of the city.

Since October 1939, the German occupation authorities required Jews in the city of Krakow and the surrounding areas to report for forced labor and also since December 1939 to carry a white armband with a blue Star of David. In May 1940, the Germans began to expel Jews from Krakow to the neighboring countryside.

As the situation in Krakow and the speed and degree of the anti-Jewish measures were much more drastic than in other cities in the General Government, friends of Salo Fiszgrund, the imprisoned in Soviet member of the Bund party, decided to move his family to a small city, Piotrków Trybunalski where Bund had a strong position prior WWII and also in the Judenrat after the city was occupied by Germans.

There was a ghetto in Piotrków as well but persecution of Jews was not to be compared with the big cities like Warszawa or Kraków. So, Salo Fiszgrund's wife with two children, Julek and Hania, moved from Krakow to Piotrków Trybunalski. Actually, also their Polish home-made, Anielcia, moved together with them. Bund in Piotrków arranged for them a place to live and fixed the work for Julek in one of the Judenrat offices. Besides his work at Judenrat, Julek continued his education at the gymnasium level at the underground courses. Sometimes his little sister Hania joined them. When Piotrków's open ghetto became in 1941 a closed ghetto Anielcia left them and moved back to Kraków. The family was surviving thanks to the financial support of Bund from Warszawa.

When Germans arrested Zalma Tenenberg and eleven other members of Judenrat in mid-1941, the situation in the Piotrków ghetto drastically changed. Julek started new work at the Bugaj wood factory where military provisional houses, almost tents, were produced for Wehrmacht needs. During the summer/autumn of 1942, the family Fiszgrund got the info that Salo Fiszgrund was released from the prison in Minsk and is now in Warszawa. However, at that time started in Warszawas ghetto Great Action, the deportation to the death camp Treblinka. After that, it was clear that sooner or later the deportation program to the death camp would also reach the Piotrków ghetto. Julek wants to send away his mother and sister and arrange false documents. His mother refused, however, to leave the ghetto. Julek succeeded in sending his sister, little Hania 12 years old back to Kraków to Anielka, their´s former housemaid. Bolek (Bolesław Smyk), a Polish friend of Julek escorted her at the beginning of October 1942. When Bolek returned to eventually transport the children's mother the big deportation was over and 20 000 Jews from Piotrków were sent and murdered in Treblinka. On the first day of the deportation, Julek and his mother were taken to and separated there. Julek was trying to follow his mother to Treblinka but was stopped by a German soldier. After the selection a big group was sent to the Bugaj factory and Julek was among them. However, he was thereafter sent to the Kara window glass factory. Among Polish workers, he sees one day Bolek who tells him that the transfer of his sister was successful and that Hania is hidden now in the cellar in the building where Fiszgrunds and Anielka lived before WWII. Julek starts to think about the escape to Warszawa.

Bolek, Boleslaw) Smyk*, the third name from the top, worked at the glass factory as a free worker. Here he meets Julek Fiszgrund (ghetto worker) again and tells him that the transfer of his sister to Kraków was successful and that Hania is hidden now in the cellar of the building where Fiszgrunds and Anielka lived before WWII. Suorce: APPT, Huta Szkła  "Kara" w Piotrkowie.

Meanwhile, Aniela Krzysztonek, a former housemaid of the Fiszgrund family, works in Kraków, having previously been with them in Piotrków. When Bolek arrives with little Hanna, she hides Hania in the basement using all the money she earns. However, after being exposed, they both set out on a train journey that lasts for several weeks. They finally arrive in Warsaw. At the railway station, Polish szmalcowniks catch them and lead them to the Polish Blue Police station. The beaten Aniela and the frazzled Hania are finally released. New Polish szmalcowniks met them on the street. This time the new ones were dressed elegantly, in boots with uppers. But the new ones were all about money. They followed Aniela and Hania to the Zoliborz area. New szmalcowniks reappeared at night after information from the hotel where they were staying. They robbed and beat them! Hanna and Aniela run away. Hanna had the address of her father's liaison officer in Warsaw, Krystyna Mucznik. She finds her father and lives locked in his room on Senatorska Street for some time. The place is dangerous, father is active in the underground.

Thanks to Stefania Sępołowska, Hania Fiszgrund (Helenka Falkowska according to her new documents) is placed in the "Nasz Dom" children's home run by Maryna Falska in Bielany. Nasz Dom was earlier run by Maryna Falska and Janusz Korczak. Hania stayed there for 2.5 years. Due to her pronounced Semitic appearance, she does not go to school, which raises of course suspicions. But the staff knows its origin and hides her during frequent German checks. Another hidden Jewish girl, Irena Jakubowicz, as well as a Jewish boy, Rysiek Próchnik normally attends a Polish school. Hania is being taught by Irena Dębska, an accountant in our house, but the girl in stress and depression can't think of much. There is no news about her mother, Aniela, or her brother Julek. She also worries about her father, who sometimes visits her. At one visit, she sees that someone is following her father, she is terrified that her father (pretending to be an uncle) will come in 2 weeks. Throughout his stay in our home, he does not go outside. He loves the night in our house. She believes that no one can recognize that she is Jewish in the great hall for girls... One of the tutors, Cesia Kosobucka, would often sit by Hania's bed at night to cheer her up. When the Gestapo came to our house, she was locked in a separate room with the inscription Typhus on the door.

The older girls in Our Home are teasing Hania more and more. They make her show her hands and they say that only a Jewish woman can have such hands. One day, Maryna Falska comes to the bedroom of these older girls in the evening and says: You are killing your friend! She's not Jewish! Her late mother was French and therefore Hania/Helenka cannot go to school and this explains why she has such features and dark hair. When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out in April 1943, everyone knew about it in Warszawa and the neighborhood. Lunas and smoke were also seen from the orphanage Our house. One night, when Hanna goes to the Orphanage roof/terrace that connects the front part of the house with the back part, she sees Maryna Falska, the director of the orphanage dressed in black, standing there. He looks at the burning Ghetto and is loudly crying!

During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the building housed an insurgent hospital. Hania volunteered to help and wash the bandages of the wounded insurgents. After the capitulation, the order to evacuate came, Maryna Falska died of a heart attack. The children were first deported to Pruszków, outside Warszawa, and later to Sokolniki in the Łódź Voivodeship. They lived there in school buildings and suffered from hunger. The children used to go to the village to beg, but Hania was not allowed. She stayed in Sokolniki until the end of the war. Krystyna Mucznik, a Bund liaison, came to pick her up and took her to Warsaw to her home. Hania went thereafter from Warsaw to her brother Julek in Lodz. The brother, however, is building his future and he doesn't have much time for his sister who, despite great shortcomings, is starting the 1st grade of middle school. After a year, Hanna's father places her in a Jewish orphanage in Zakopane. After the pogrom there she moves back to Warsaw again. The main part of the children from the Jewish orphanage in Zakopane escape Poland with Lena Küchler**. They reach Israel after being in for two years in France.

After the war, Hania and Anielcia became a family. They emigrated together from Poland to Israel in 1969. Anielcia Krzysztonek died in Israel at an advanced age and is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Jaffa. Hanna Fiszgrund lives in Tel Aviv (September 2023). Julek stayed in Poland.

Hania Fiszgrund

Hania Fiszgrund together with Lena Küchler's* children. The photo was taken in 1946 at Zakopane in Poland.

Hania Fiszgrund together with her daughter before leaving Poland in 1969.

* Bolek, Boleslaw) Smyk, adress was: 33 Ziem Wschodnich (it was changed during WWII from former "Piłsudskiego". Now it is called Wojska Polskiego.

** Lena Küchler, Kuechler - Silberman (in English-language publications: Lena Kuchler) was born in January 1910 in Wieliczka near Krakow. She attended a Hebrew-language gymnasium (academic secondary school) and graduated in Philosophy at the university in Krakow, majoring in Psychology and Education. Before the war, she was a teacher in a Jewish school in Bielsko and also taught in a teacher training seminary. During the war, with an assumed "Aryan" identity, she rescued orphans from the Warsaw ghetto and placed them in a Catholic institution. After the war, she gathered sick and orphaned Jewish children ages 3 to 15, initially in cooperation with the Central Jewish Committee in Krakow, and established a residential facility, school, and sanatorium for them in Zakopane and Rabka. These facilities operated in the spirit of Janusz Korczak's legacy.
In March 1946 she succeeded in getting her charges and staff out of Poland awash with antisemitism. They eventually reached France via Czechoslovakia, and from France emigrated to Israel in early 1949. The children went to Kvutzat Shiller and were adopted there.
Lena Kuechler–Silberman relocated to Tel Aviv, studied psychology in a seminary for kindergarten and schoolteachers, worked as an educational Superintendent, and later set up an educational psychology services center in Givatayim for kindergartens and schools. She retired in 1972.