Baba Strzelecki

Europe » Poland
April 4th 2007

Published: April 4th 2007

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Mel and Gareth

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

Poland is a country that opens your eyes and pulls at your heartstrings. It's war-torn past is full of stories, some horrifying, others uplifting.

We arrived in Warsaw (on Gareth's birthday) after a less than pleasant 10 hour overnight bus ride from Lithuania. Our hosts in the Polish capital were Jerzy Strzelecki, a 52 year old, bearded, Varsovian international aquisitions consultant, his wife Magda and daughters Zosia and Marisa. On the second day of our stay, Jerzy told us the following story...

During World War II the centre of Warsaw was converted into a ghetto where the Jewish population of the city was imprisoned. Many were deported to concentration or death camps, many others died in the terrible conditions in the ghetto. Baba Strzelecki (Jerzy's mother) was friends with a family who were sent to the ghetto, but who managed to successfully smuggle out their young daughter. She hid the 7 year old for the remainder of the war, at great risk to her own life. Some time later, the father of this small family hatched a plan to escape. He and a friend systematically blocked many of the ghetto toilets with fragments of brick. The

Auschwitz II - Birkenau Death Camp

sewers didn't discriminate and with the Nazi officers afraid of catching typhoid and dysentery, the father and his friend posed as plumbers and offered their services. Once in the underground sewage network they used their tools to cut through their shackles and escaped. The family was eventually reunited after the girl's mother also escaped. They fled to the far away land of South America.

The young girl is now in her 70s and still living in Argentina. Baba Strzelecki is 90 and was honoured by Jewish people with the planting of a commemorative tree in Israel.

It was facinating to hear Jerzy speak of these times in very recent history, just before his birth. After Warsaw we travelled to Krakow, and the Nazi camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. One of the most horrifying thoughts you get walking through this massive death camp is just how recently it all happened. Original buildings still stand, once-electrified barbed wire is everywhere. We walked through one of the gas chambers used to exterminate tens of thousands of Jews (up to 2000 in 15 minutes!) for no reason other than their heritage. Despite the time that has passed and wrongs that

Auschwitz

have - if not been righted - at least been acknowledged, it is scary to realise that it all happened in the time of our grandparents.

We don't want to change the tone of this entry but it is important to write that Poland was a country that we also managed to appreciate very much for what it is today. Gareth's birthday morning was spent at a reclaimed tip, now an artificial ski slope and the site of Marisa's slalom competition (she came third). We then took a lovely stroll around the reconstructed Old Town and enjoyed top notch Polish birthday cake huddled around the enormous T-Rex that takes pride of place on the Strzelecki dining table. We rounded off our time in Warsaw with a trip to the opera for a wonderful performance (in Italian, with Polish text and our 13 year old English translator - Zosia) for Verdi's Nabucco.

Then south to beautiful Krakow. This town was mostly spared of bombings during the war and has a lovely feel to it, especially in Europe's largest (and very busy) Old Town square. On our usual endless city stroll, we encountered people laying candles everywhere, occasionally

Ubiquitous barbed wire, Auschwitz

crying and often bowing their heads in prayer. We were puzzled, until we stumbled upon a few enormous posters of John Paul II and realised that it was the anniversary of his death. The crowds of people were quite a moving site.

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