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Health & Fitness

CONFESSIONS OF THE HOPE STREET STALKER

My wife and I made a quick trip to Los Angeles last week. We have a son and grandchildren in Huntington Beach, near LA, but the reason for this trip, at this time was to meet with my cousin Monika who was there from her home in Chile to visit with her son, a film editor. Like me, Monika is from Poland, Jewish, a Holocaust survivor and a memoirist. Except that, while my experience was escaping the Holocaust, hers was hiding from it right there in Poland. And her story is even more incredible than mine. Monika’s father was my mother’s brother, my Uncle Paul, and I remember attending his wedding in Lodz to a woman named Eda. Eda is actually the name Edward with a feminine ending on the end and pretty characteristically a Jewish name. Baby Monika was born in 1937 or 1938. Then the war began and, while my mother and I, living in Warsaw where the bombing was heaviest, fled to a farm in what, two weeks later, would become the Soviet-occupied zone, Monika, her parents, and our joint grandmother stayed in Lodz. And when the fighting for Poland was over, a month later, and the Nazis occupied Lodz, they arrested Monika’s father, as they did many Jews, and executed him. So Eda and Grandmother made a survival plan. With her hair dyed blond, Eda didn’t look Jewish, and Grandmother didn’t, either, but our family was well known in Lodz, and trying to pass for Christian would not have been possible, especially when you consider the virulent anti-Semitism of many Poles. But if they hitchhiked to Warsaw, where nobody knew them…… There was, just one problem. Baby Monika looked Jewish. In Poland, where most Christians are blond, blue-eyed, and high cheekboned, Jewish facial features can be quite distinctive. Eda made an arrangement with the peasant woman who had been Monika’s nanny before the war. For a price, this young Christian woman, Pola, would take Monika home to her farm and pass her off as her own, illegitimate daughter. And, for the next two or three years, little Monika lived on the farm as Pola’s shy daughter, keeping her face down, as she had been trained to do. Then Pola fell in love with a German soldier, admitted to him that Monika was not her daughter, and Monika, who had bonded with Pola by now, was sent to Warsaw to be with her real mother. Having changed her Jewish name, Eda, to Christine, Monika’s mother was now renting a room in the apartment of a countess and going to work every day to operate a sewing machine in some factory. Monika had to be slipped into her room in the dead of night, so that no one would be aware of her presence. And, when her mother went to work in the morning, little Monika had to sit under a table behind a tablecloth that reached the floor. She was equipped with a potty and some toys, and told not to make a sound. Somehow this four-year-old managed it, and spent the remainder of the war passing her days under that table and never making a sound that could be heard outside her mother’s room. When the war ended, my mother, who had, by now, acquired some very influential friends, was able to get Monika, Christine, and Grandmother out of Communist Poland and into England. Christine remarried while Monika was sent to boarding school. Remarkably, Monika seemed to have escaped without any emotional scars. Except that. having successfully defied the Gestapo, she could never take boarding school discipline very seriously. But that’s another story.

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