Róża Reibscheid Testimony (doc. 301/1713)
Original, manuscript, 2 pages, 210 x 295 mm, Polish language
Cracow
25 Starowiślna St.
Seamstress
Aryan papers
When Jews from neighboring small towns were being concentrated in Wawrzeńczyce, Nowe Brzesko 1Note 1: Correctly: the Miechów district district, Poles warned us there something was in the air, especially after word of the incidents in Tarnów reached Wawrzeńczyce. Wojciech Bartosik, a parish priest who was very kind to us, entrusted us to a squire from a neighboring estate, [named] Buchowski, who took my husband on as a mechanic for all farm machinery and for driving a tractor, and his wife recommended me as a seamstress in estates nearby. No one apart from them knew we were Jewish. My husband later became head of a co-op warehouse, which gave us a very convenient financial standing, but farmers from Wawrzeńczyce who knew us would come [to the warehouse].
Some Pole turned us in. The Germans were looking for us all around the neighborhood, they called by the community leader, the Buchowscy, they found out nothing; eventually, they came looking for us to Opatkowice. The community leader warned me, and at the same time sent his daughter to the warehouse where my husband was working to warn him. While the girl was in the warehouse, the Gestapo were already hovering about the yard. My husband mounted his bike and escaped, unnoticed by the Germans. Me and my son went to Buchowskis place, they let me out because the high road and the mid-field roads were all covered, and the train at the station was delayed 3 hours while all passengers were being searched. I took my son to the barber’s to shave his hair so that he wouldn’t be recognizable and I overheard the clients there saying a penal expedition had arrived and had searched through all the bushes by the Vistula [river]. Meanwhile, my husband had called by a priest he knew in Michałowice, who put him up overnight. I went to Proszowice to see priest Radosz and ask him for advice. He reproached me for not having told him before I was a Jew, he would have arranged a job for my husband in Radom, and he would send for horses for me now that would take me back to Michałowice. The day after a two-horse chaise arrived to collect me (I later learned
It was utter hell in Cracow. Some Poles we knew were afraid to take us on, we spent every night in a different place. Priest Machaj was very kind-hearted to us, he arranged for me to stay with the Norbertines for a few days in Salwator; he helped us out financially and recommended my husband for the position of a mechanic in the Olszanica estate, 7 km outside Cracow. When I left the nunnery I had nowhere to live and we decided to go to Warsaw, even though people scared us saying there were searches and lapankas on the trains.
We went without luggage, my husband was only wearing a working outfit. We knew no one in Warsaw. What were we to do? I recalled the name of our Wawrzenice2Note 2: Correctly: Wawrzeńczyce host’s daughter’s mother-in-law. I remembered she lived on Okopowa Street but I didn’t know the number. I went from house to house and finally found a door plate. I walked in and said I had some business to do in Warsaw, that my host from Wawrzenice sent his commends. She took me in a very friendly way. My husband met his friend, engineer Marian Pawełek, director of a railway production plant in Pruszków. He helped us financially. I turned to RGO for clothes for my husband. I told them a made-up story of how I’d come from Proszowice, where several families had been shot dead for allegedly helping the partisans, and since we had been friends with them we feared we would be finished off too and had come to Warsaw with just the clothes on our backs. They referred us to Ms Goetel. I dressed my son up as a girl, put a blonde wig with a fringe on his head and moved in with Goetel. The place was first-rate, and so was the board. Ms Goetel’s son-in-law, engineer Kulczycki offered my husband a job at his company, and Ms Goetel recommended me as a seamstress and gave me her sewing machine. She found out the truth about us from priest Machaj but it didn’t change her attitude to us in any way; actually, she was all the more kind. Two months later I got a flat from RGO in a building with apartments for the deported. I lived there until the uprising. That’s when me and my husband parted and I never saw him again.
[signature] Róża Reibscheid