The Gorniak Family

About three weeks after the German arrival, all Jews over the age of ten were ordered to wear white arm bands with a blue Star of David. We cut up sheets and white tablecloths for the arm bands and usually used blue writing ink to draw the stars. This shocking sign reinforced that we were going to be singled out at all times, never allowed to forget how much we were hated. Ukrainians, who detested Jews, suddenly began to act superior whenever they encountered a Jew with an arm band in the street. And when German soldiers were passed, anything from a tug of the beard to a kick in the kidneys was possible.

The contrast then was tremendous when Jan Gorniak, a Polish farmer with whom my family had done business over the years and whose mother, Tatyana, had gone to school with my mother, arrived at our doorstep at six o'clock with a sack of a hundred kilos of flour.

"I don't know what will be," Jan said to us. "I don't know if the Germans will let me into the ghetto again. Take this flour. It will help you in the days to come."

We thanked Jan profusely since we too did not know what the future would bring and how much more restricted our access of food would become under German rule.

On Tuesday, July 13, after three days of walking through fields and forests, much of the time in the rain, I arrived at the Gorniak farm. It was already late in the evening and I walked through the backyard, passing a large vegetable garden beside the house. Since it was summer, the garden was filled with tomatoes and cucumbers, beets and potatoes, delicious vegetables I had not seen or eaten in a very long time. When I walked a little closer, I could see Jan Gorniak, bless his memory, standing in the front yard. I knew Jan well, not only because he was a good friend of my older brother, Avrum Chaim, but because we had done business together before the war. My father often hired the Gorniaks to transport wheat from our store to the train. In addition, his mother, Tatyana, had gone to school with my mother. The families had known each other for quite some time.

I approached the house cautiously. Jan saw me. He held up his hand as if to say, "Don't talk." He pointed to the barn and indicated that I should go up into the hayloft. I was a little suspicious, considering all I had witnessede. Not surprisingly, I trusted no one.

"Hurry, into the hayloft," he said.

I obeyed. From the urgency and care in his voice, I knew I was in safe hands. Above the horses and cows, I scampered up a narrow ladder and in the dark buried myself in the fresh, sweet-smelling hay. It had been sixteen months since I had slept on anything soft. I didn't care about my hunger or about how long they would let me stay. I was dry and about fall into a deep sleep. "Aah, this is wonderful," I moaned to myself when suddenly a hand grabbed my arm. Oh G-d, I thought. A trap. I should not have trusted Jan. I will be turned over to the Germans and then shot. I was about to begin saying the Shma Yisrael when I opened my eyes.

"Who's this?" a voice asked. It was so dark I could see only the outline of a face, but the voice! The voice I knew so well was music to my ears.

"Arie," I cried. "It's me, it's me."

"Shmerele," answered the beloved voice of my brother.

Without discussing where we would go after escaping into the fields surrounding Kamionka, both Arie and I had decided not only to return to the Chorostkow area but to the Gorniaks. I grabbed him in my arms, and he held me; we cried with joy and relief.

"If G-d spared us," I said to Arie, "and we lived through the atrocities at Kamionka, and now, without discussing our intentions, we both made it here to the Gorniak's and are now together again, I hope to G-d that we will make it through this war." We dried our tears and settled into the luxurious hay.

Tatyana Gorniak, bless her memory, came up the stairs to the hayloft. Tears were pouring down her soft face. She sat before us and spoke.

"Thank G-d you children are here," she said, taking our hands in hers. "Last night your mother came to me in a dream and asked me to save you. I promised her I would. Thank G-d you came here. I will do all I can to fulfill her wish and my promise."

Only then did Arie understand why Jan had asked that morning, "Where is your brother?" when he arrived in the yard. Arie had answered that he didn't know where I was but that we had both run away from the Aktion at the camp. That is why Jan was standing outside his house that evening: he was waiting for me. Tatyana cried some more; Arie and I choked back tears. Who could understand the workings of the world, why we had come together at this merciful house, and how our mother, G-d rest her soul, had visited Tatyana with a request, knowing her sons were on their way.

When I arrived at the Gorniak doorstep, I expected that if I were lucky, this good family might hide me for a day or two. Or, I thought, they might give me bread but tell me to keep moving. Or, considering the risk to their own lives and their children, they might refuse to help at all and just order me off the property. In the Netherlands, Belgium, and France when Jews were found hiding in Gentile homes, the Jews were killed and the Gentiles beaten, but in Poland, sheltering Jews was dealt with much more severely. The Jews were killed as well as the Gentile family, and the house and farm were then burned to the ground. The law requiring this awful punishment was put into effect in Poland because while the Germans considered Western European citizens human, they deemed Poles less than humans, not just above Jews who were considered subhuman.

Josefa, Jan's wife, and the younger brother, Michael, came to greet Arie and me. The entire family hugged and kissed us. After two and a half years of being called animals and treated sadistically by Germans and Ukrainians, the affection of these Gentiles was incredibly moving. With these simple acts they invited Arie and me back into the brotherhood of man, into the human race. When they embraced us, I knew we were among a family of angels.

Then Arie told us about what had happened to him as he made his way through the fields and villages. Two days earlier, on Sunday, he was passing through the village of Welawcze. He had left the fields for a while and was walking down the main street of the village when he saw a group of Ukrainian policemen standing around talking. He knew that he walked by, they would immediately notice him. Gaunt, dirty, and unkempt, his appearance betrayed his identity as a Jew or someone right out of a concentration camp. If they caught him, they would no doubt kill him themselves or happily turn him over to the Gestapo. He might then be killed or sent to Auschwitz or one of the other large death factories still in operation.

He stopped in his tracks, not knowing what to do. He was reluctant to turn back, for he was only about two hundred feet away, and he suspected that one or two of them might already have noticed him. Turning around and walking quickly in the other direction might arouse suspicion.

While trying to decide what to do, Arie noticed a Ukrainian priest coming down the street. He went over to the priest and, as was the custom in those days, took the priest's hand and kissed it. Then he looked straight into his eyes and asked, "Can you tell me where I might find the road to Trembowla?"

The priest looked at Arie, knowing right away that this dishelveled young man was a Jew, and they linked arms. The two men walked together, arm in arm, through the town, past the policemen. When they reached the outskirts, the priest unlinked his arm and said to Arie, "Go with G-d."

There were Ukrainians and Poles who risked their lives to save Jews, and there were others, like the Ukrainian neighbor who betrayed my wife's cousin although they had known each other their whole lives. Thank G-d the Gorniaks were righteous, G-d-fearing people who, like the priest, made the moral choice to try to save two Jewish brothers from certain death.

Twice a day, early in the morning and once in the evening, Tatyana or some other member of the family would bring a covered pail of food into the barn. She made it look a little sloppy so none of the neighbors would suspect that the mess was for humans. She wanted them to think the pail contained table scraps for pigs.

Michael Gorniak, who was fourteen at the time, also slept with us in the hayloft. We were forever insisting that he return to the house.

"Go," I would say to him almost daily. "You have a nice bed in the house. It's warm there, not too hot or cold like here. It's too unpleasant for a boy your age. Go."

We tried to convince him that we had endured much worse at Kamionka and that compared with the camp, the hayloft was heaven, but he would not be dissuaded. He always responded to our entreaties by saying, "If you can sleep here, I can sleep here."

Hungry for news from the front, one of the family members would make the eight kilometer trip into the city every day to buy newspapers. Sometimes there were no Polish papers available, only German ones. Most people considered buying the German papers too dangerous since everyone knew that the average Pole understood no German, unlike many Jews. So if a Pole bought a German paper, he was practically announcing that he was hiding Jews. Jan didn't care, however. He wanted us to keep up with the news so badly that when he had no choice, he would buy the German papers. Arie and I would pore over them for hours, analyzing, often by what was not said, how the war was going.

Another time, a command was issued from the German government that all farmers had to give one sack of grain to the army for every acre of land they owned. The problem was that Jan did not have enough grain. When we discussed the decree, he said he didn't know what to do.

"If you don't give the proper amount of grain, they're going to come looking for it. Then they'll find us," I said. "Go to your neighbors, borrow some, and tell them you'll return it later at harvest time."

Jan agreed and borrowed grain from his neighbors, but we found out, in time thank G-d, that the Germans were coming to inspect the barn anyway. That morning Arie and I ran off to Father Lubovich's barn. He was the Ukrainian priest, the father of my school friend, Piotr, with whom I had once done a great deal of business. The priest did not see us, but we knew exactly where he stored his many sacks of grain, and among them Arie and I sat for hours. We knew we could trust the priest since Tatyana had confessed to him that she was hiding the Halpern boys.

"Don't tell anyone else," he counseled her. "And if you're ever in trouble or they are, if you don't have enough food for them, send them to my house."

We knew the priest was a righteous man, a good friend, a G-d-fearing Christian. Thank G-d for these people. They saved our lives and those of a handful of Poland's three million Jews. After dark, when we knew the Germans must have completed the inspection, we crept out of the storehouse and quietly made our way back to Gorniak's barn.

Some Polish and Ukrainian families saved Jewish lives for money. It was a business transaction: so much money for so much time, so much money for so much water and food. But this was not the case with us and the Gorniaks. They saved our lives out of friendship rather than monetary compensation. The Gorniaks were wonderful, brave people.

In January 1944, about two months before our liberation, a group of Ukrainian ultra-nationlists came to the Gorniak farm, and for no reason other than that the family was Polish, they murdered Piotr Gorniak, Tatyana's husband, and her deaf-mute brother. The Ukrainians were simply bloodthirsty. In the beginning of the German occupation, Ukrainians had been recruited by the occupying army as important aides in transporting and eventually annihilating Jews. Now that there were no more Jews in the region, these same men decided to focus their attention on the Poles, whom they hated as well. They chose the Gorniak farm to vent their venom. That night they descended like a plague, and a wonderful family lost two men to the Ukrainian thugs.

As usual, we were in the hayloft and heard the Ukrainians enter the yard. We were very frightened, thinking that somehow they had found out about us and come to kill us, but they entered the house rather than the barn. Then we heard screaming and Piotr Gorniak, Jan's father, begging for his life and that of his brother-in-law. Then shots rang out.

I cannot find words to describe how terrible I felt. Even today I feel the pain of that moment, the helplessness and rage. It was like hearing my own family being killed. I wanted to run out of the barn and strangle the Ukrainians with my own hands. I wanted to grab a rifle and shoot them. But could do nothing. If we were all going to remain alive, I had to stay still. It was the worst feeling in the world to sit there quietly, hearing butchers slaughter good, innocent people.

After the shooting, Tatyana came up to the hayloft. She had been crying, and we didn't know what to say to her. I half expected her to say something like, "See, I'm saving Jewish lives, I'm trying to do the right thing, and they're killing us." Instead, she looked lovingly at Arie and me and said: "Thanks to you, my son Michael is alive." She paused. "If he had been in the house, they would have killed him as well. Thank G-d you are here, and he sleeps with you."

Had Jan not been away from the house that night on some farm business, he too would have been killed.

A few days later, distaster struck again. The Germans had posted notices all over the district offering a reward of five kilos of sugar for anyone who revealed where Jews were hiding. On January 4, Tatyana came into the barn wringing her hands and crying, "Oh, oh, terrible things have happened. Eight people have been killed, betrayed by Anna Bartestka for sugar."

All eight people were members of my family who had been hiding nearby: Aunt Sheindel and her two children, Herzele and Pepa; my cousin Moshele Wolfson and his two children; and my cousin Naftali Krautshtick and his daughter. They had been living in a field of potatoes. There, farmers had dug enormous ditches used as storage bins. These fields were far from the village and considered relatively safe. My cousins would spend a day in the fields and at night sleep in the storage bins.

Once or twice a week, one of the local farmers dropped off bread and milk. My family had survived until two months before liberation with the help of Ukrainian and Polish farmers. Mrs. Balutchka, one of the farmers who delivered food every week, had been a school friend of my cousin's and was committed to saving her, her children, and the other members of the family who had gone into hiding with her. All eight were executed by the Gestapo.

We were shocked by this horrible tragedy, the loss of eight lives for about ten pounds of sugar, and tried to be even more careful, knowing that there could be many others in the area looking for a way to claim the German reward.

Sixteen young Jewish boys were also being hidden in the nearby village of Wigdorowka. They had also managed to survive through the worst of the war years until they, too, were discovered by the Gestapo in early March 1944, just weeks before the Russians took possession of the region again.

We had just finished reading the main news item [in the newspaper] about how much territory had fallen into Russian hands and how the front along the border had been pushed westward. We were smiling and slapping each other on the backs when all of a sudden we heard Marisha, Jan's three-year-old daughter, call into the barn.

"Tato, policeman. Tato, policeman."

She was only three years old but knew that a policeman on the family property was not good news.

Jan threw the barn doors closed, which gave us a couple of minutes to scramble up to the hayloft. Once Arie and I were safely hidden, Jan opened the doors. There stood a local Ukrainian policeman. Jan looked as if he were grooming a horse and in a casual, friendly voice called to the policeman, "How are you?"

The policeman stepped into the barn, "Fine, fine, and you, how are you, Gorniak?"

"Wonderful," Jan said. "My horse is in good health this season, and the cows are giving excellent milk. What can more can I ask for?" He patted his horse on the nose and then said, "Come inside. Let's have a drink," and he led the policeman out of the barn. As they walked toward the house, Jan yelled to his wife, "Go prepare a nice lunch for the officer."

"Of course I'll take you," he said. "But before we go, you have to eat and drink in my house."

They went into the house, and Gorniak opened a bottle of vodka and after an hour of eating and drinking heavily, he took the policeman ten kilometers to another village. In this way, Jan not only made sure the officer would not be back soon to snoop around the farm, he made the officer feel that Jan was a friend.

That afternoon we owed our lives to little Marisha. Her cleverness had saved us. Sweetly, innocently, she had called out to her father as if to tell him that a friendly visitor had just arrived. But with that one word, "policeman," she had given us the time to hide, which was why we are alive today.

Unfortunately, Marisha is no longer alive. Thank God, however, she had two lovely children, whom I visit whenever I am in Poland. I am privileged to be able to help them. The Gorniaks saved my life. They treated me like a member of their own family. Until today, all their children and grandchildren call Arie and me "Uncle" and Gladys and Eva "Auntie."

from: "Darkness and Hope," by Sam Halpern, Shengold Publishers, Inc., New York, 1996

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