 | Edward Stankiewicz |
"The beating seemed to go on interminably. At one point they hit me on the head, and I began to scream with all my might as if I had gone crazy. My screams might have confused them because they stopped. Anyway, they had plenty of time to call me back, and I knew that they were not done with me. After the beating they threw me into a cell where I could neither sit nor lie. My body was lacerated and bloody and I could only stand. Shaken and depressed, I wished I were dead. Then I recalled that I had concealed a razor blade in my trousers. ... I was going to cut my veins. I was tired, and cutting the veins with a dull razor blade was strenuous work. My left wrist stills bears the marks of my botched attempt. Feeling the first drops of blood and depressed from the effort, I stopped. I thought, 'Why bother? Let the Gestapo finish the job.'"
-- From "My War: Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet"
However, Stankiewicz desperately wanted to live, "to do something useful" with his life, he recalled in an interview.
His new book, "My War: Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet," tells of his experience as the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust.
Until his book's publication by the University of Syracuse Press, only a few intimates knew of Stankiewicz's ordeal during the war; his own children hadn't even heard the details of his survival. Long curious about her father's history, Barbara Handler finally asked Stankiewicz to recount his wartime experiences. "My War" grew out of that conversation. The Jewish Press called the book "a simple, unpretentious recitation of [Stankiewicz's] past that lays bare the unfathomable cruelty of the Holocaust and the central importance that chance and hair-trigger timing played in his survival."
Stankiewicz had just graduated from high school in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, where he lived in Warsaw with his parents, brother and two sisters. Until then, he had passed his days in "relative contentment," he says, despite suffering discrimination because he was a Jew. "We were reminded of it in the streets, in the parks, on our trips, and by the very segregation of our schools," he writes.
Studious in high school, where he was the "official school poet," Stankiewicz loved the classics and dreamed of becoming a Latin teacher, poet and painter. He had the opportunity to attend lectures at Warsaw University, whose faculty included the famed classical philologist Tadeusz Zielinski.
After the Germans bombed Warsaw, Stankiewicz's parents arranged for him to flee -- alone -- to Russian-occupied Lwów to continue his studies. He had no idea then that he would never see his mother or siblings again.
In Lwów, Stankiewicz earned money by painting portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, then "a lucrative business" in the Soviet Union, he recalls in his memoir. Eventually admitted to the university there, he began writing Yiddish poetry and joined a group for Jewish literati called the Writers' Club.
The German bombing of Lwów in 1941 put an end to Stankiewicz' scholarly pursuits. During the Nazis' first pogrom there, Stankiewicz was rounded up with other Jews in a large military barrack, where the sight of pigeons living freely on a rooftop filled him with envy. Eventually released, he began life on the run, earning money by painting signs, license plates and radio towers, and by peeling potatoes in a restaurant.
One day he was approached by a stranger on the street, who gave him a paper indicating that Stankiewicz was an employee of the Lwów Judenrat, the Jewish community center and the Jewish police, "whose major task was to keep up the lists of Jewish inhabitants and to provide the quotas of people for labor or for 'resettling' -- that is, for the camps," the Yale scholar writes. The job had been arranged by a secret committee attempting to save Jewish intellectuals, and Stankiewicz's affiliation with the Writer's Club had brought him to their attention.
Stankiewicz recalls that he was unable to carry out the police duties connected with his new job: During one raid of a Jewish home, he desperately exhorted the family to hide.
Later confined to the Jewish ghetto, Stankiewicz found work in a leather factory while he secretly forged working papers, birth certificates and other documents for Jews. Paid well for this work, Stankiewicz questioned his survival when people all around him were vanishing. He writes: "Miracle was the name I gave to my dumb luck, for without a belief in miracles, how was I to explain my survival amidst the relentless and devastating slaughter? What right did I have to live in a sea teeming with sharks? Was I in any way better than my neighbors and brothers?"
After two years in the ghetto, Stankiewicz escaped to Dniepropetrovsk, living for months "like a hunted animal," he remembers. After being caught and beaten by the Gestapo, he was transported to Buchenwald in the summer of 1943, remaining there until the camp's liberation 20 months later.
Stankiewicz never expected to leave Buchenwald alive, he recalls. The camp had some 30,000 prisoners when he arrived, but only a remnant of Jews remained. There, aided by a former Jewish leader of Communist youth in Leipzig, he was able to survive in the camp as a Christian Pole.
Stankiewicz writes of the hunger, disease and hopelessness in Buchenwald, his work in its hospital, the kindnesses of people who helped him and the solace he found by sneaking at night into Block 22, where some 200 German Jews were housed. "They had been hounded and beaten more than all the other prisoners put together, yet I never heard them utter a word of complaint," he writes. "After years of unspeakable misery and pain, they were holding out like shipwrecks in a stormy and shark-infested sea. ... In their company I could afford to let down my guard and shake off my obsessive persecutional angst." He also took comfort in writing poetry and a play.
Watching the approach of American army tanks through the barbed wire of the camp on April 11, 1945 was, writes Stankiewicz, "the most memorable sight" of his life.
After the war, Stankiewicz worked as an interpreter for the American army and then studied in Rome. He emigrated to the United States in 1949, earning advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard University before joining the Yale faculty in 1971.
Stankiewicz said his goal in "My War" was to present an "unsentimental" account of his survival.
"A friend of mine once credited my ingenuity for my survival," he said. "I possessed two abilities -- I could write poetry and I could paint -- and these certainly helped me at times. But so many outstanding writers, poets and painters died. Four million Polish Jews died and about 20 million Russians, maybe more. I am alive because of luck -- bloody luck."
T H I S
Stankiewicz tells tale of survival in WWII
During the Holocaust, Edward Stankiewicz's fate hung on a razor's edge. He knew death could be his destiny at any moment, and even attempted to commit suicide to deprive the Gestapo of the pleasure of killing him.
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