Lost and Found

During a time of war and a place of horror, a time and a place we consider unrelated to our own, friendship flourished between two young men wooing two Jewish sisters. One of the men was a Polish Catholic, the other, a Polish Jew. The Catholic youth became a smuggler. When Warsaw’s Jews were walled into their ghetto, Janek’s business activities allowed him daily access to the girl he loved. Unknown even to the members of his immediate family, he had joined the Underground.

Janek Bartczak was generally perceived as a dandy. His brother-in-law, a policeman who patrolled outside the Ghetto gates, dismissed him as a spiritual lightweight. He strutted through the streets of the Ghetto in knee-high black-leather boots, a black leather coat, and a Tyrolean-type hat. His hair was flaxen and his features, Slavic-sharp. His intimidating appearance made a powerful impression on his Jewish friend’s teen-age sister Renata. His phantom would swagger through the back alleys of her memory for the next fifty years. Trying to transmit his image as vividly as she could, Renata would come to call her ghost “Richard Widmark.”

During the height of the deportations in the summer of 1942, Renata was arrested by Janek’s brother-in-law at the Ghetto gates. The arrest had been pre-arranged. Pawel Golombek used his position to lead out to safety the Jews he was supposed to be shutting in. His apartment had become a safehouse. He and his family supported not only themselves, but also the escapees he sheltered, by the smuggling activities of his wife’s two brothers, and by selling the moonshine manufactured in the kitchen, as well as his policeman’s salary. An unquestioned arrest, a child snatched from Umschlagplatz, hidden under his coat, and delivered to the sanctuary presided over by his wife and mother-in-law–he committed these acts of breathtaking heroism under the noses of the Germans and his anti-Semitic neighbors, acts which, had they been discovered, would have led not only to his execution, but to the execution of his entire family.

As of September 1, 1942, there were two Jewish girls sheltered by the Golombeks. There was the dark-haired, dark-eyed, ten-year-old Isabella whom Golombek’s sister-in-law claimed to neighbors, to be her illegitimate daughter by a Gypsy. There was the blue-eyed Renata, whose chestnut hair had been bleached blond by her brother. Renata had come from a wealthy family, and had grown up on fashionable Krolewska Street. She’d been pampered and perhaps, a touch spoiled. Three years earlier, she’d been setting the table for her mother’s birthday breakfast when the roar of the Luftwaffe signaled the invasion of Poland.