This is a deeply personal, moving memoir excerpt from Krystyna Rozental, later known as Zielińska-Zarzycka, detailing her childhood in pre-war Warsaw.
English translation from Polish:
Krystyna Rozental Zielińska-Zarzycka: Memories from Twarda 3
Born in Warsaw in 1924. I was supposed to be a boy…
My ten-year-old sister Sabina was already in the world, and my second sister, Lunia, was six. My parents wanted a boy, so they tried one more time… and I came into the world. My father, upon hearing the news, simply fled the clinic. He’d had enough of this "female army" at home!
At the Jewish community office, they didn't want to give me the name Krystyna. They said, "It can be Krajndla," but for a five-zloty bribe, they agreed. So I never changed my first name throughout my life, but my surname—about a hundred times. I was counting backwards: Krystyna Zielińska, before that Krystyna Dąbrowa, before that Aleksandra Mlonka, Krystyna Wierzbołowicz. When the "March events" began here, and filling out personal questionnaires with a "previous surname" box became very important, I had plenty to write. I never got around to Krystyna Rozental.
I was a nice, healthy child, unfortunately, a little plump and not very agile. Mama enrolled me in Tacjanna Wysocka's ballet school, but I somehow gave up on a dancer's career. Then began ice skating at the Rau Garden rink. There was music and eleven- or twelve-year-old boys who, looking at my pink cheeks and snow-white sweater, for some reason started shouting: "Polished with Radion." Radion was a laundry detergent, and its advertisement was visible on the wall surrounding the rink. That white sweater and those blushes made me look like a living advertisement.
My parents tried hard for me to be a "young lady from a good home," although we weren't really wealthy. So I wasn't allowed to play in the yard with the other children, which was my unattainable dream. I would go out onto the first-floor balcony, throw out various cut-outs and toys, shouting: "Children, have these!" My peers really liked this, but it must have puzzled them a bit, because they wrote in chalk on the staircase: "Krysia Rozental is crazy!"
The Tenement at 3 Twarda Street in Warsaw.
A few words about our tenement house, Twarda 3. It had three courtyards and was located right next to All Saints' Church and Grzybowski Square. In the front annexes lived doctors and so-called better tenants; in the side ones: on the left side, Hasidic families, and on the right – all kinds of human misery.
I remember a shoemaker with five children. He made shoes (navy blue pumps for a zloty each), and still couldn't afford to pay the rent. So they unceremoniously threw him out into the courtyard, and he sat outside with his machine, still making those shoes.
There were many children in the Hasidic families. I remember a mother in a wig who had a two-year-old baby, and her daughter with a son the same age. During holidays, sukkahs (booths) were set up in the spacious courtyard, and for a week, men held prayers there. The women left the food prepared for Shabbat at a nearby baker's.
But on other days, the courtyard belonged to the children. The main "decorative" element was a large garbage bin, surrounded by cobblestones. There was no question of any plants or a patch of green. The only greenery in this "first courtyard" was the always-flowering balcony of the Rozentals, which my mother, Helena, took care of. Around this bin, the children from the yard danced and sang. I remember one fragment from their repertoire: "Because we are young and that is our power. Nothing will stop us, we sing day and night. Because the whole world belongs to us. The world of youth, the world of youth. And whoever doesn't believe us – can lie there like a log!!!"
The rent was very high. I remember we paid over 128 zlotys for three rooms. There were ordinary tiled stoves, coal was in the basement, we put the bathtub in the kitchen, but the boiler was in the toilet. During the hostilities in September 1939, this bathtub was filled with water, covered with boards, and my uncle Maks Feldberg, who had taken shelter with us during the bombings, fell into the water in his sleep. For some reason, he then said with resentment to my father, "Antisemites."
On the ground floor of my annex lived a paramedic named Wiewiórka (Squirrel), who was everything to everyone. He applied cupping glasses (I hated him for that) and unfailingly made diagnoses for adults and children.
Twelve-year-old Henio was allowed to visit me for social purposes, along with his two-year-old brother Bobuś. Bobuś had a head full of golden-blond curls and looked like an angel from my notebooks (because back then we wrote in ink with a regular pen, so blotting paper with a ribbon and an angel picture was necessary). The older Henio reasoned, "You, Krysia, will die first, because you are the oldest. Then me, and Bobuś last." This logical prediction of human fates did not come true. Both boys were gassed in Treblinka, and only I – the oldest – miraculously remained among the living.
At home, however, I was the youngest, which sincerely pained me. We sat in the dining room, my mother divided the chicken: first she gave a leg to my father, which I really wanted to get, the second was for the oldest sister, Sabina, the breast for Lunia… and I, the leftover, only got the wings. I was convinced that my parents didn't love me, that they preferred my older sisters, and I spent many moments shedding tears in the toilet.
Unfortunately, I wasn't alone there. In those days, live chickens were bought, and before they turned into broth and meat, they were kept on a string in the toilet. There, in the presence of the disgusting bird, I spun dreams: I will die, I will have a solemn funeral, my parents will walk behind the coffin, crying desperately. I'll show them for those wings, for not letting me out into the yard, for being supposedly so healthy, strong, and chubby! Such thoughts were prompted by reading a book for young people titled Jur. There were two brothers: one was Tadzik, who was weak, sickly, and constantly in need of care. The older brother, Jur, was quite the opposite. He was the picture of health. Well, who died? Jur, of course!
Mama took great care of my health, however. She bathed me in salt water, walked me to the cauldrons where pitch was heated, because it helped with whooping cough. And worst of all, she constantly took me to the Saxon Garden so I could breathe fresh air. I went to school at eleven, but even before eight (before school), my grandfather Alfred Rozental would appear and take me to the garden.
Here, early in the morning, all the Jewish tailors met; there were hundreds of them in pre-war Warsaw. In the Literary Alley (near the sundial), they held their meetings because they had many common issues. My grandfather, Alfred Rozental, was quite a tailor: he also lectured at the trade school for Jewish youth on Grzybowska Street, and he had his own workshop at Marszałkowska 139.
He mostly sewed military uniforms. In the street-facing window on Marszałkowska, there were tiny mannequins in clothes sewn by my grandfather. It's also worth adding that districts mattered a lot in pre-war Warsaw. To be a tailor on Nalewki, Franciszkańska, or Nowolipki—that was common, but Marszałkowska—oh, that was France-elegance.
All three of us attended the same primary school on Śliska 14, and the same gymnasium (high school) on Prosta 8. Mama was involved in the parent committee, and it was likely thanks to her that I was accepted into the first grade at the age of six. For breakfast in my basket, I took a pastry, a "grzybek" (little mushroom), because I couldn't manage sandwiches very well. I also had trouble buttoning my underwear. They had white linen buttons attached to the bodice, and it wasn't easy at all, so Marysia Brodecka helped me. "Litvaks" – my mother called her parents, and I sensed it was a pejorative term.
From an early age, I performed in school plays, and my sincere wish was to play the title roles. I was supposed to be a cornflower in some group scene, and Anulka Rawet was a poppy. Only she was placed in front of me. There was no use: they kept moving me back to the second row; I gave in at the dress rehearsal, but at the performance I pushed my way to the front again!
I remember a childhood that was ultimately idyllic, angelic: I am a slightly overgrown child of the Holocaust, but because I lived a little longer than those unfortunate children born just before or during the war, I took a piece of that world with me.
When children of the Holocaust, born in 1940 or 1942, speak during psychotherapy sessions in Śródborów, the same motif repeats over and over: they have sons and daughters, they are caring parents, but they couldn't pass on tenderness to their children because they themselves never experienced it.
Sixty-year-old Marysia cries today, telling this story. Jurek writes poems. His mother died when he was two years old, and his father raised him the best he could, but never told his son before his death that he was Jewish and that his post-war wife was not Jurek's mother.
I, a girl older than them, who stopped being a child at the age of fourteen, supported the household in the ghetto, and even before it was closed. I smuggled food, sold Polonia–Luksusowe razor blades on the street and in shops (Krystyna's brother-in-law, "Pan Misza" Wasserman Wróblewski, received a whole batch of these razor blades before the owners, his friends, left Warsaw). I bought a red rickshaw that my closest relatives rode, dropping off earned zlotys to me every now and then. I was subsequently a waitress in a café at Sienna 16. The café "Na Siennej" was run by Tatiana Epstein. Dressed in a black dress and a wide plastic black belt, I sold apple pie and cheesecake, and I could even take home the so-called edges from the baking trays. In the same building was Janusz Korczak's Orphanage, where Krystyna's brother-in-law, "Pan Misza" - Wasserman Wróblewski, worked.
