In Gone to Pitchipoi, the author vividly recalls his experience growing up in the turmoil of World War 2, and his extraordinary escape from the constant threats of Nazi occupied Poland. Born in 1931 in the picturesque countryside of Ostrowiec wherein more than a third of the population was Jewish, Katz experienced a constant juxtaposition of traditional ways of life with the tragedies of those years. Deemed unfit for labor camps, Katz was marked for certain death and forced to live on the run in a daily quest for food, shelter, and friendship. He eventually reunited with his sister, Fela, together encountering a series of narrow escapes and forging on to see the day of liberation. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the fate of Jews in small Polish towns during the Second World War.
Excerpt:
This vivid and moving memoir, like a number of other accounts which have appeared in recent years,1 describes the survival of a Jewish child in the hell of Nazi-occupied Poland. Its author, Rubin Katz, was born in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyskie in 1931. This town, located in the picturesque countryside of central Poland 42 miles south of Radom, had in 1931 a population of nearly 30,000 people, of whom more than a third were Jews. In the nineteenth century a local Jewish entrepreneur, Leopold Frankel, had established a metallurgical works making use of the iron ore in the surrounding hills, and by the end of the century this factory had become the second largest in Congress Poland, the area whose autonomy, granted at the Congress of Vienna, was almost entirely done away with after the unsuccessful 1863 revolt against tsarist Russia. Modern politics had penetrated the town, and during the revolution of 1905-07 it was the scene of considerable unrest and strikes.
Nevertheless, Ostrowiec Świętokrzyskie retained many of the characteristics of the traditional Polish market town—the Jewish shtetl— that was still a major focus of Jewish life in the interwar period. In these towns, the social hierarchy was very different from that in the big towns, or in the country as a whole. Here the Jews constituted a significant part of the social and economic elite, and the non-Jewish inhabitants were, to a considerable degree, their clients or employees. Most Jews lived in the centre of the town, around the market-place, often in quite poor conditions, while non-Jews lived in the outskirts. These towns were also linked with the surrounding countryside. The two populations lived in what has been described as a “pattern of ‘distant proximity“ based on continued economic exchange and mutual disdain. Most Jews were economic middlemen—‘pariah capitalists’ filling a necessary but unpopular position between what had been the two major strata in the Polish lands, the peasantry and the landowners.2 Jews and peasants mostly interacted in the economic sphere. On market days in the shtetlakh, and during the week as travellers in the countryside, Jews purchased agricultural produce from peasants and sold them goods produced in the towns. The weekly market in Ostrowiec is vividly described in the following pages. There were also closer contacts, with country people working as servants in Jewish homes and consulting Jews on medical matters. The folk music of the two groups also reflected their mutual interaction.
At the same time, the views which the two groups held of each other were marked by deeply entrenched prejudices. The peasants and the Gentile populations of these smaller towns despised the Jews for their lack of connection to the land, and distrusted them as cunning and untrustworthy trading partners, although their business skills were sometimes admired. The attitude of the Jews toward their Christian neighbours was equally contemptuous. In their eyes, the peasants were uncivilized and uncultured. This contempt was mitigaged by a feeling of pity resulting from their awareness that the peasants were even poorer than they were themselves.
The religious divide reinforced the wide gap between the two groups. The peasants saw the Jews as adherents of a religion which was not only false but deicidal, and found Jewish religious practices bizarre and incomprehensible. To the Jews, Christianity was both idolatrous and hypocritical, since in their eyes it combined a call to “turn the other cheek” with encouragement of violent antisemitism. The relationship between the two groups was also at odds with the larger political environment, in which the Jews were at best second-class citizens. The two groups had very few close social relations: as Rubin points out, he had virtually no non-Jewish friends.
Although it remained a stronghold of tradition, the Jewish small town was not unaffected by developments in the country as a whole, and this was certainly the case in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski. The traditional communal institutions—the town rabbinate, the burial society, the bes medresh (prayer hall) and the mikve—remained the focus of communal life. The persistence of traditional ways of life and the importance of the local hasidic rebbe in Ostrowiec, Yechiel-Meier (Halevi) Halsztok, as well as the introduction of such modernities as bubble gum, are effectively described in this memoir. So too are the deep political divisions between the Orthodox Jews, the Zionists, and the socialist Bund members. Ostrowiec seems to have been less affected by anti-Jewish violence after 1935 than some other towns of the Kielce province, such as Przytyk and Odrzywół. Rubin describes his childhood as “idyllic.” His family was traditional — his father was a supporter of the religious Zionist grouping Mizrachi—and prosperous. His mother’s family had long been confectioners, and in the 1930s their sweet factory, located on the outskirts of the town, was the third-largest in Poland. Rubin’s family lived on the fringe of the city, where he developed a strong feeling for nature and a solitary temperament. His main companion was his beloved dog Dynguś. The youngest of six children, he grew up in a loving and protected environment. Like his siblings, he began to adopt the Polish language and not only attended a heder but also completed the first year of Polish primary school, which he describes in somewhat equivocal terms. Although Jewish children felt their isolation, they were able to defend themselves and, in Rubin’s view, were viewed with some sympathy by their female fellow students.
This secure and happy childhood was brutally interrupted by the Nazi occupation of western and central Poland.The Germans entered Ostrowiec on September 7, 1939, and almost immediately began to persecute the local Jewish population, demanding a “contribution” of 200,000 zloty and killing ten Jews. Forced labour was imposed on the Jewish male population, at the end of September a Judenrat was established to facilitate German control, and by the end of the year Jews were required to wear an armband with a Star of David. Jewish property, including the Katz family’s factory, was confiscated, and the factory was placed under two Treuhänder, Volksdeutsche from Poznań. In April 1941, a ghetto was established. Its population, swelled by refugees from nearby towns, numbered nearly 16,000. It was unfenced, and although the penalty for leaving it was death, a number of Jews were able to find shelter outside. Many of those confined in the ghetto worked in nearby labour camps or armament factories. The first deportation of Jews from the ghetto began on October 10, 1942, and resulted in ten to twelve thousand Jews being sent to their deaths in Treblinka. Some of those who had found hiding places were induced to come into the open with the promise of work in the armaments factory of Starachowice, but these were also then murdered. A second deportation began on January 10, 1943, following which only about 1,000 Jews were left in Ostrowiec. Some of thems were able to join the local Home Army (Armia Krajowa) detachment, but others were murdered by their supposed colleagues when they tried to enter this force. Among those who died in this way was Rubin’s cousin Meier Berman, along with a number of his friends. The ghetto was fully liquidated at the end of March 1943, with most of its remaining inhabitants murdered, while around a thousand were sent to a forced labour camp in town. The labour camp, to which people were also sent from Piotrków Trybunalski, Starachowice, and Płaszów, was liquidated in August 1944.
Initially the impact of the war on the Katz family was relatively limited, but soon it was forced to move to the ghetto, and as conditions worsened Rubin’s father, a very enterprising and dynamic individual, was able to obtain false papers for his wife, for Rubin’s sister Fela, who used them to flee to Warsaw, where she would pass for a Gentile, and for Rubin. During the October 1942 deportation, five members of the family, including Rubin, hid in a bunker that had been prepared earlier. Rubin’s two eldest brothers, Moniek and Izak, who had earlier decided to stay with the family rather than flee to the Soviet Union, remained in the ghetto to provide them with food. The hiding place was discovered by German troops, but miraculously the fugitives were not executed. Eventually, they were returned to the small ghetto which was created after the deportation. Moniek, however, now contracted a blood disorder and died. As the situation declined further, and Rubin, as a young child, was in increasing danger, his brother Leizer arranged for him to shelter with a Polish acquaintance, an engine driver named Radzik. When Rubin arrived, however, Radzik’s wife would not take the risk. Willing though she was to risk herself in assisting the Katz family through its ordeal—as she would continue to do later—she could not endanger the safety of her own child, and Rubin was forced to return to the ghetto.