The Warsaw Uprising and Beyond

 

 

The outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on 1 September 1944 shuttered Anek’s routine. Like many Jews living under false identity on the “Aryan” side, he must have felt that for a young man it was impossible not to join the combat without drawing attention and suspicion from the general public. To Alexander Wasserman, a friend from Kalisz, whom he met by chance at the beginning of September, he recommended to join a unit affiliated with the Polish Socialist Party (WO PPS).[30] In a 1946 CV Anek mentioned that he fought with the group “Zywiciel” in the Warsaw neighborhood of Zoliborz where he was wounded on 16 September 1944 and, after the capitulation of the Uprising, evacuated to a hospital in Radomsko, where he was hospitalized until December 1944.[31] Irena, who lost contact with Anek after the outbreak of the Uprising, somehow heard about his hospitalization and decided to visit him. In a 2015 testimony she said:

 

There [in the Radomsko hospital] everybody of course knew him. Such a handsome man, very well educated. Fluent in three languages, French, English and German, he was of much assistance to them because then many foreigners moved via Poland and he was always ready to help. All the girls were in love with him. And they told me how to find him. As it turned out he was staying as a tutor on a country estate close to the border with the Reich.

 

After much ado, Irena was able to reach the place.

 

The kitchen was enormous, like in the movies. In the middle, an oven, and female cooks all around, a lot of light, then there was black-out outside but inside there was a lot of light. I tell them that I am looking for mister Jan Maslowski, my cousin. They called him in. When Anek entered the kitchen he became totally stupefied. But anyhow there was a lot of fun. We spent the entire night with a bottle of plum liquor which we totally emptied. In the morning I went back home.[32]

 

Soon afterwards, on 26 January 1945, Kalisz was liberated by the Red Army and Anek and Pola returned to their town. Also Anek’s cousin, Irena Majorek came back to Kalisz with her fiancé, Edward Malinowski. Although Irena met Edward in a remote village in eastern Poland, he was a natural born US citizen and once the American embassy in Warsaw reopened he obtained a passport and traveled to his native Chicago and Irena joined him there before long.