Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
GHETTO UPRISING - 75 YEARS ON ere built.. we didn’t understand en we realised we were in a trap
e trapped with us.” On July 22, 1942, extermination of the Jews of Poland an. People would line up and join the ns “headed East” because they ved they were going to work, or had n promised a loaf of bread.
Nobody could imagine that you were g straight into a gas chamber,” na says. “People would pack all their ngings, and promise to write to you. of course, you never heard from m again. ome people who had escaped linka came to the ghetto and tried warn us, but nobody believed their es – how could they believe them?” hrough July and August, 6,000 people e sent to Treblinka each day. hen in the winter of 1942 the day came where Janina was supposed to board a train.
Her neighbours, aunt and uncle and friends had already been taken and now she and her parents were among those marched to a large square in front of the station
“We knew it was going to be the end,” she says. Fearing they would be shot, her father, a member of the Jewish police set up by the Germans, made his family turn back. He decided Janina must be smuggled out to save her life and so he organised for her to pose as the daughter of a woman officially allowed to leave to clear rubble from streets.
She fled on a truck to another part of the city. As it slowed and stopped her father lifted her out and put her on the street. “We just looked at each other and then the lorry drove off,” she says. “That was the last time I saw him.” Janina lived in hiding just streets away from the ghetto for several months. But as Gestapo searched for surviving Jews, a family friend was forced to send her to a convent for her safety. Then as another uprising rocked the city in 1944, she hid with nuns in a basement. A group of 120 girls, around 25 of them believed to be Jews, were led to safety from the violence by an unsuspecting German officer.
“He walked us two-by-two through the city with bombs and violence all around him,” Janina says. “He even carried a baby himself. We clambered into large goods wagons which were covered in straw and fell immediately to sleep.”
But the train which took Janina to safety was not all it appeared.
She remembers looking at names carved into the bottom of the wooden carriage. “It was only later that I realised that we were escaping in the same wagons that brought so many Jews from all over Europe to Poland, to concentration camps and to their deaths.” Later, to her relief, she found out her father had been liberated from the Majdanek extermination camp. “I know that he didn’t die at the hands of the Germans. He died free,” she says. Yet to this day she still she does not know her mother’s fate.
Janina moved to Australia and qualified as a social worker. She moved to London in 1958 and has lived here since. She is the author of multiple short stories, novels and a three-volume autobiography A Square of Sky, A Touch of Earth and Light over the Water.
For her the horrors of war are gone but will never be forgotten. And, despairingly, the fight against prejudice still rages as strong as ever.