From a Child’s Eyes, Part One

By Sherri Stewart

A few months ago, I joined Zofia Zsibinski for lunch in Tecumseh, Michigan. This petite 84-year-old woman captivated me for the next five hours with her story.  Zosia, as she was called, was only three when the Nazis showed up at her family’s small farmhouse in Poland and gave them fifteen minutes to gather their belongings. Since Zofia was only three, many of her memories come from her older sister Marysia, who was eight at the time. Most of the holocaust stories we’ve heard over the years focus on the six-million Jews who were killed or persecuted between 1939 and 1945, and rightly so,  but this is the story of a Catholic family, seen from the children’s eyes.

Zofia was born on March 16, 1940. Three days later the Nazis took over the local church and rectory. Since the newborn hadn’t been christened, Zofia’s mother scrambled to find godparents then raced to the church to have her daughter baptized before the priest was arrested. Later that day, hours after the baptism, the priest was taken away and died at Dachau. Zofia’s father was forced to work for the Germans at a mill during the day, but he was often gone at night. The family later learned that he was a member of the underground in Poland. It was when his group was sent on a raid to blow up the railroad tracks that all were killed except Zofia’s father. Later that night the Nazis took Zofia’s family captive.

The whole family—Zofia’s parents, older sisters, Marysia and Hela, Zofia, and elderly, crippled Aunt Apollonio were forced to walk three days and three nights to a barb-wired fabric factory in Lodz where they were forced to stand in place for a week. There was no food, water, or bathroom. The Jews had to wear the star of David, and the Poles had to wear a P on their clothing and hats. Relatives who lived in the area would sneak food and fluids to Zofia’s mother, which she would conceal in her bra. If she didn’t hide them, the ravenous people around them would have surely attacked her.

 

When the Nazis forced the captives onto a train headed to Germany, Zofia’s father pushed his family forward to reach the window, where they would breathe fresh air, and he’d be able to hold his girls out the window to do their business. They were on that train for over a week. From the window, they saw captured soldiers working on the bombed tracks of the railroad—thin men with barely any clothes on their backs. Citizens of the villages both in Poland and Germany would sneak bread through the window at night. Zofia’s father would throw some toward the prisoners outside. The prisoners would cover the bread with sand until the Gestapo were out of sight, then they’d dig it up to eat it.  One prisoner wasn’t so lucky. When he was caught, the Gestapo used him for target practice. If anyone looked on, they were chopped up with the Gestapo’s shovels.

When the train finally stopped, a third of the people inside the train were dead. Nobody knew because they were still standing shoulder to shoulder. The German soldiers piled the cadavers onto wagons and carted them away. They used whips to herd the living to a tent refugee camp. Each day they received a can of soup and a loaf of bread per tent. One day Zofia’s father was pouring soup when a finger fell out of the can. Zofia never ate soup again during the war.

 

One day a voice over a loudspeaker announced that everyone needed to take a shower. They were told to bring all of their belongings and line up. Once inside a large building, they were told to take off all their clothes and pile them by the door. The officers separated men and boys from the group, and sent the females and small children into a large room with showerheads and pipes. Before they were separated, her mother and father slipped their wedding rings into their mouths. Once everyone was inside, the doors shut. Zofia’s mother hurried her children toward the showerheads, and there they stood for two hours. Nothing happened. They would later discover that the Brits had bombed the rails so the gas couldn’t reach the tent camp. It seemed God still had plans for them.

When the doors opened, they were surprised to see the tent city gone and their belongings all mixed up. All the shoes were gone. Apparently the war was over, but the Gestapo didn’t know what to do with the refugees, so they had them sit on the ground for a day and a night.

 

Part 2 of Zofia’s story next month—the post-war years.

Selah Award finalist Sherri Stewart loves a clean novel, sprinkled with romance and a strong message that challenges her faith. She spends her working hours with books—either editing others’ manuscripts or writing her own. Her passions are traveling to the settings of her books and sampling the food. She traveled to Paris for this book, and she works daily on her French and German although she doesn’t need to since everyone speaks English. A widow, Sherri lives in Orlando with her lazy dog, Lily. She shares recipes, tidbits of the book’s locations, and other authors' books in her newsletter.

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A Song for Her Enemies

Tamar Kaplan is a budding soprano with the Harlaam Opera company. Her future looks bright, despite the presence of the German soldiers guarding the Harlaam. But when Nazi soldiers close down the opera company, families start disappearing in the middle of the night, and Jews are stripped of their freedoms, Tamar realizes her brother Seth was right about her naiveté. She joins the resistance, her blond hair and light features making it easy for her come and go under the watchful eyes of the German guards. Tamar becomes Dr. Daniel Feldman’s assistant, as they visit families hiding out in forests and hovels, tending to their sickness. But when she returns home to find her parents gone and the family store looted, she and Daniel must go into hiding.  As they cling to the walls of an alley, Tamar recognizes a familiar face—that of Corrie ten Boom, the neighbor, who beckons to them to follow her. Can she trust this Gentile woman who talks about God as if he’s standing next to her? https://bit.ly/40Yucjv

Tadeusz Kościuszko, Romantic Hero

by Kit Hawthorne

Readers of historical fiction—and of history—are familiar with the plight of members of European gentry and nobility who have fallen on hard times. We have all read about poor but worthy gentlemen who earn their bread through military service, church work, or educating the children of the upper classes. Any other form of work was considered a degradation for the gently born. Tutors and governesses were in a particularly sad state, isolated both from the laboring staff of the household and from their employers.

Such was the case with Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the youngest son in a noble Polish family, who ultimately fought on the Patriot side in the American Revolutionary War. Kosciuszko’s family was at the lower economic end of the szlachta, a broad class of Polish nobility. In my last month’s post, I wrote about how his education at a military academy prepared him for a distinguished career in the fledgling United States. Under the guidance of the academy’s superintendent, the Oxford-trained Englishman John Lind, Kosciuszko not only learned the art of war, but was exposed to Enlightenment teaching that emphasized democratic ideals and personal freedom.

While the storm of war rose in the American colonies, Poland was experiencing its own political turmoil, which culminated in the nation’s being carved up by the stronger European powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Polish people, chafing under this humiliation, found common cause with the colonists in their struggle against British Imperialism. They applauded the brave protests of the Sons of Liberty, whose exploits across the Atlantic were written about in Polish press reports.

But there was another pivotal experience of Kosciuszko’s that set him on the road to the New World, and that one concerned his love life.

Engraving by Josef Grassi

In 1774, after finishing his studies in France, Kosciuszko returned home to find that his older brother’s profligacy had nearly bankrupted the family’s estate. According to Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, “Kosciuszko’s bleak future seemed to be that of half of Poland’s nearly landless noblemen, who, owning no serfs, plodded into the fields to do the farm labor themselves, often hanging their sword on a tree while plowing and harvesting. As a partitioned Poland fell into a deep slough, only a sense of class superiority based on birth, equestrian skills, and physical bravery remained for such impecunious gentry” (Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull).

Like many an impoverished romantic hero, Kosciuszko took a job as a tutor. His employer was Józef Sylwester Sosnowski, a member of the high-ranking magnate class of Polish-Lithuanian nobility, and the wealthiest man in Poland. Kosciuszko went to work teaching Sosnowski’s daughters…and soon fell in love with one of them.

Portrait by Josef Grassi

Eighteen-year-old Ludwika Sosnowska was no mean scholar herself. While under Kosciuszko’s tutelage, she and her sister made the first ever French-to-Polish translation of La Physiocratie, a comprehensive treatise by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours on physiocracy, an economic theory that emphasized the role of agricultural production in national prosperity. Ludowika’s father refused Kosciuszko’s request for her hand, telling him that “ringdoves are not for sparrows, and the daughters of magnates are not for the sons of the szlachta.” Undeterred, Kosciuszko and Ludwika planned to elope, but they were found out. Sosnowski had Kosciuszko beaten and driven from his estate under threat of death. Living on borrowed funds, Kosciuszko left Poland in search of a new livelihood.

His travels ultimately led him to the United States, where he enjoyed a brilliant career fighting valiantly on the Patriot side. Later, after the end of the Revolutionary War, he returned to Poland and continued to contend for the cause of liberty in the uprising that bears his name.

Ludwika ultimately married Prince Józef Aleksander Lubomirski, a member of the magnate class, at her father’s behest. In 1788, she used her influence as a Polish princess to try to get Kosciuszko an appointment in the Polish army, but was unsuccessful. (Six years later, he rose to prominence as the leader of Kosciuszko’s Uprising.)

Kosciuszko himself never married. To the end of his days, he carried a lock of Ludwika’s hair and kept it close to his heart.