My bookshelf and reading lists are filled with Holocaust memoirs. In part I read these books because I have an insatiable curiosity about World War Two survivor chronicles and in part because I seek to fill in the ellipses of my family’s own story of survival. While many are well written, they are very hard for me to read. I begin to worry about where I might hide or how I might provide for my family if presented with similar circumstances, and although rationally I can tell myself how unlikely those circumstances are, there are tragic modern examples of genocide to demonstrate that similar horrors are not beyond the realm of possibility. I can’t read camp survivor stories late in the evening – the chills and nightmares they give me are too real as my overactive imagination reflects on the fates that befell most of my family as well as countless others. But I continue to read them at other times, finding occasional nuggets of stories, information, or context that give me a better glimpse into my family’s story. I did get a small trove of personal history in the memoir my grandfather George hid in the trunk of his car before he died in 1992. Though the manuscript was an incredible, and personal historical account, I was still unable to find a reason- a person, a story, a turning point, about why they survived when so many did not. From what I have pieced together, they survived due to an unlikely, but powerful combination of factors, including a solid command of the Polish language (and particularly not having a strong Yiddish accent), bravado, and access to money. In the end, even with those advantages, they had to get lucky- my grandfather spent the latter part of the war in prison, with the Nazis possibly thinking he might be an agent of some sort rather than a Jew, and was in the process of being marched to a concentration camp when the war ended.
Though my father agrees with my theory as to why our family survived when so many did not, I was never able to check my hypothesis with another source until recently, when I read Gunnar S. Paulsson’s Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945. It’s easier to say what kind of book Secret City is not than to say to what it is. Partly that’s because it’s really unlike any other WWII book I’ve ever read. His book, based on his doctoral thesis, is not a memoir and is not a chronology or history of life in Warsaw during the war. Rather, it uses memoirs and draws upon testimonies and historical records to show how Jewish Poles were able to survive in the city of Warsaw (not the Ghetto) without much help from the Polish or Jewish underground. It is an in-depth examination that at times I found daunting. But I kept reading because within his anecdotes and statistics I saw more concrete outlines of my father’s story. By reading this book I finally felt like I had found an author whom if I said, “my father and his parents were Polish Jews who survived living on the Aryan side” would simply nod his head and know what I meant. I finally feel like I’ve found the book that not so much tells his story, but explains how it could happen.
There’s another reason I like Paulsson’s book quite a bit, and that’s because he addresses another part of my family’s story I have struggled to comprehend – the story of my great-grandfather’s decision to bundle up and hide his paintings, approximately 800 works, in and around Warsaw with “people he thought he could trust.” This phrase has become embedded in my telling the story of my journey of searching for the art in part because it’s part of my family’s story, but also because the choice to trust others always seemed like a unique component of my family’s tale. Imagine, then, my thrill to discover in Paulsson’s book a section titled “Other forms of Robbery and Exploitation,” about people who hid personal property with friends, hoping that they would care for it, protect it, and eventually return it when the war was over. He writes:
To avoid being left destitute by blackmailers, or to keep their property from being “Aryanized” by the Germans, many Jews left goods for safekeeping with friendly Poles, or signed assets over on the understanding that they would be returned after the war. But this left them open to more genteel forms of robbery. Many people who would never have dreamt of accosting anyone on the street and demanding money, let alone collaborating with the police, nevertheless found reasons why they should simply appropriate the property that had been left in their care. In most cases the rightful owners had perished in Treblinka, and the trustees could therefore help themselves with a relatively clear conscience. Who would know or care after all? And were they not entitled to some compensation for the inconvenience and the risks they had run? (page 152)
While this opening section suggests that there were those who did help themselves to the property when it did not seem that the original owners would return, Paulsson does not believe that robbery by ones friends or contacts was all that common. He concludes his three pages on the topic with the sentence, “Thus, the silence of most memoirs on the subject should be taken again as evidence that extreme behavior was the exception rather than the rule, that in most cases people whom Jews had chosen specifically because they believed them to be honest and decent behaved as one would expect, that is to say, honestly and decently.” Of course, with most of the Jews dead, and the remnants scattered, it’s very hard to say what happened in many cases. Clearly, life in the aftermath of the Second World War was complicated. Honestly, Warsaw was mostly destroyed in the war, and people were focused on finding their surviving families and rebuilding their lives. In my own case, it’s not clear how many of the bundles of my great-grandfather’s work survived, although given the numbers of paintings I know about, it had to be at least 3 or 4. Gathering up fine art and returning it to the Rynecki family would not have been easy nor would it have been anywhere near the top of people’s to-do-lists. I think the truth is complicated, so I approach my need to find my great-grandfather’s lost paintings in much the same way I approach my father’s story of survival. While I know I’ll never be able to collect all my great-grandfather’s work, I may be able to discover most of what was there.
Paulsson ends his book by noting the remarkable achievement involved in successfully hiding thousands of Jews in Warsaw between 1940 and 1945. He concludes that it “casts a welcome and entirely unfamiliar light on the Holocaust as a whole…” (page 248) which makes it worthy of further “reflection and study.” I wholeheartedly agree, not only because I think it will help to further elucidate how people like my father and his parents survived, but because it also reflects my thinking about the value of my quest for my great-grandfather’s missing paintings. Moshe Rynecki’s body of work is unique for its combination of artistic aesthetic and subject matter, but I search for more pieces not just because they survived, and not just to see more of Moshe’s work, but because his pieces tell a larger story of a world vanished under the weight of occupation and subsequent Holocaust. From my perspective, that too is worthy of further reflection and study.
