Aisner, Ida Lubieniecki and Chayt, Sofia Lubieniecki

Child Survivors

Zlatoust, Russia; Nasielsk, Warsaw, Srudborów, Praga, Poland

Ida Lubieniecki Aisner and Sofia Lubieniecki Chayt were born in a labor camp in Zlatoust by the city of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains in Siberia. Ida was born on September 12, 1941, and Sofia was born on April 22, 1943. Their parents were Miriam Wlosko Lubieniecki and Andrzej (Avraham Moshe) Lubieniecki and they have a younger brother Arie Lubieniecki, born in April 1945. 

Ida and Sofia share their family story, often finishing each other’s sentences, as well as their own journeys.

“My parents were Polish Jews. Mother came from the city of Nasielsk, approximately fifty kilometers north of Warsaw, and Father was born in the city of Zakroczym but then the family moved to Nasielsk. They met as youngsters in school…. Mother’s parents had five kids. Mother was the oldest; there were four more children. Three brothers and one more girl…. Father’s parents had seven and he was the second from the youngest.

“When the Germans started World War II and occupied Warsaw, Father was in defense of Warsaw on the barricades for six days and they lost the fight. He was captured as a prisoner and moved to Prussia which was a part of Germany. He was there for approximately two months and he overheard the guards since he understood a little bit of German because of his Yiddish that he knew well. He understood that they were going to fence in the camp. So, he said to his friend, who was a Pole and not a Jewish fellow, ‘If we’re thinking of running away and escaping the camp here, we have to do it tonight because tomorrow morning, they’re fencing us in and we won’t be able to get out.’ So, they broke out at night and got in the very first train that was coming from Germany and moving troops and armor to Poland. 

“They came back home, and my mother’s family was already in the ghetto in Nasielsk, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The Germans had congregated all the Jewish population and put them up in the synagogue of the city. And the Germans moved into the city and took over the properties. Took over the houses. Took over everything. You couldn’t really say that they were prisoners, but there were guards. They were there for a relatively short time, and then they were moved into the Warsaw ghetto…. A third of the population of Nasielsk was probably Jewish. And they were of all kinds of professions. Our grandfather, for example, did a lot of business out of Poland into England and Europe. He was an owner of a grain facility. They were buying grains from the farmers and it was sent out to Europe. By profession he was a maker of handmade, expensive, quality furniture. He became a businessperson because even before the war there was family in England and because of that connection, they were trading. 

“Our maternal grandfather, Ichak Wlosko, was a partner in a button factory in Nasielsk, the only button factory that they had, and they were even trading buttons to the United States before the war. He was really, really a businessman, and extremely well to-do.

“In 1941-2, there was a political situation between Hitler and Stalin, when they wrote a pact of non-invasion, which obviously the Germans broke. My father came to the ghetto and my parents decided to get married and go to Russia. Because things were very, very complicated, my mother’s grandfather said, ‘You’re not taking my granddaughter just as a girlfriend. You have to get married and then you can go.’ He actually married them, with two Jewish witnesses, even though he wasn’t a rabbi for a profession.

“They left for Russia, across the Bug River, and worked on a farm. In 1940, after Hitler invaded Russia. the Russian government decided whoever wants to go back to Poland can if they want to, the Jews. But whoever wants to stay in Russia, they have to move into Russia, deep into Russia, wherever they decide to send you to. They had no choice. They were moved into Lichocielce and then to the Ural Mountains. In the middle of nowhere in the woods, they built the camp that they lived in. with a whole bunch of Polish Jews that escaped on the same transport. Dad didn’t talk much about it but I’m assuming that they would actually log the woods and build some facilities so they could stay there.”

They came back to Poland in 1946, so don’t remember anything about Russia, except for Ida who remembers: “When the Germans occupied the place that we lived and were prisoners already, through the window we were seeing the Russians marching the Germans that were already captured.” Sofia adds: “The Russians were the ones that liberated Poland in 1945. The Americans never came to Poland. The war switched and turned around after the Stalingrad battle and the Germans started actually losing. But they were still progressing deep into Russia. So, there were transports. When dad was drafted into the Russian army, they were exploding the railroads so that the Germans couldn’t move everything in. 

“We were still in Russia when the war ended in May of 1945 and by the time the Russians got organized and started transporting the Jews back to Poland because at that point when Poland was kind of liberated, the Russians were still dictating who did what and where…. Some of the Polish Jews stayed in Russia and didn’t come back at that time. But a lot of them were going home. They wanted to see if there was anything left. If there was any family left to go back to. They didn’t know about Auschwitz and Majdanek and the camps. Nobody knew about it. They wanted to go home.

“On our way back on the transport from the Ukraine to go back to Poland, most of those Jews ended up in Silesia that was part of Germany. Ida came down with scarlet fever. They stopped the train and threw us out by the city of Poznan in a part of Poland that was known before the war of being very antisemitic. They stopped the train and threw the whole family out. Scarlet fever, there was no penicillin. There was nothing. They didn’t know what to do. They were afraid that the whole train was going to get sick. 

“And smarts of my father, a young man in his twenties, where do you go with a few packages and three small children. The youngest was eight months old. They went to the church in a little town of Krotoszyn by the city of Poznan. A very bad part for the Jews before the war in Poland. And that’s where we ended up. Ida was in the hospital. Two weeks later Sofia got scarlet fever and she was in the hospital. We stayed there for over two months in the church and the church took care of us…. When I hear some Jews talking about the bad Polaks, not all of the Polaks were bad. Some of them were helping the Jews. The church had a nunnery and the nuns worked for the hospital. So, we were well taken care of…. And this is why we didn’t end up with most of the Jews that came from Russia into Silesia. 

“First, my father decided to go to the city where my mother was from, the city of Nasielsk. And they came over there. There were two big houses in that little village like my mother’s, the house was leveled. The Germans had the gestapo headquarters in my mother’s house. And everybody from the Polaks in the neighborhood stole whatever they could. They took the house apart looking for gold, US dollars, and British pounds. The city knew that they were wealthy people because everybody knew them. Everybody knew what they were doing. So, they thought there was wealth and the Poles destroyed the house looking for stuff. 

“They stayed there maybe two or three weeks and father started hearing that in Warsaw they are organizing a Jewish community center over there for the Jews that maybe survived. So, one of the days he bought a ticket and went to Warsaw to find out what was happening, spoke to some of the committee people and told them, ‘I’m here with my wife and three children and we’re staying in the little barn belonging to my mother’s girlfriend from high school.’ And they told him, ‘Here are a few zlotys, you go straight back and get the family out. You’re not staying in a little village because who knows what’s going to happen to you. They would kill you there. Here’s a few zlotys for the tickets, go over there, bring the wife and the children and we’ll make arrangements in the barracks for you.’ 

“Warsaw was in ruins. There was not one building standing really. It was totally destroyed. There were no skeletons of buildings. There was nothing. It was just mountains of rubble…. That was already in ‘46 and ‘47. There was a lot of help coming from the United States and they took over a military garrison, the barracks, and that’s where we were housed. We had three, four families in one room. 

“Eventually, dad found two brothers that survived. One survived Auschwitz and one survived with the partisans in the Polish woods. But he lost his family. When the war broke out, he already had a wife and two children. And some Poles hid them. He went into the woods with the partisans, with the Polish resistance, and the wife and the two children stayed with the farmer. Somebody pointed out there’s Jews living there, and they killed the whole family. Once in two weeks he came out and visited the wife and the children for a few months. And one of the days he came there and the house was burned to the ground. 

“All Father’s sisters were married with children. They were all murdered. The grandparents were gone too. Everybody was gone…. Mother lost the whole family that was at the time living in Poland. She had a younger brother, Yossi, who left Poland for Argentina in 1937. And it just didn’t work out. They didn’t get the papers. I don’t know why but they never left. 

“So, our family and six other families were living in the barracks in Warsaw. There was a life there… The Jewish community, supported by the Joint Distribution Committee, helped us out so much. They gave us the housing. They gave us some kind of monetary… Mother already had family in the United States that left before the war, Isidore Popofsky and Gladys Popofsky. That family in New York actually helped us tremendously because they sent money, they sent packages of clothing, they even sent packages with food. Later, her son sponsored Ida to come from Israel to the U.S.

“Before the war, father was in the theatre. There was no Yiddish Theatre yet. He actually ended up working for the Jewish Community Center in Warsaw. None of the Jews lived in Warsaw. There was no housing. They did not allow Jews. In Poland, you have to register and be allowed to move to the city of Warsaw. You have to have permission to rent an apartment and live there. The Jews decided to create a community center there anyway because that was the capital of the country and whatever help was coming from the United States came there…. The Joint was very, very active and they were trying to find work for those people, whatever they could do… And they were still looking for survivors. 

“After maybe after a year or so, we moved out of the barracks to a little suburb outside of Warsaw, Srudborów, which was really a resort place for people that were actively affected with TB, tuberculosis. So, we rented a little apartment over there from a very friendly Pole. And we lived there for two or three years. Then my parents were able to illegally buy an apartment in Warsaw. If you had some money, you could do it. There was a black market for everything. My parents got the money from my aunt in Brooklyn. In every letter, there were a few dollars. And dollars in Poland, it was illegal to own dollars. But this bought everything. And the uncle that lived in London helped tremendously. 

“By the age of seven in Poland, you have to go to first grade in public school. Ida started with Yiddish school. The school had twelve pupils; how can you keep up a school with twelve children? So, it closed after six months and there was no more Yiddish school. So, we went to a normal public school…. We were too little to understand any antisemitism; we didn’t know and parents didn’t talk about it…. We were rather popular kids, very involved in everything. Personally, I never had any run-ins with any other kids that were hating me or trying to beat me up or do something bad to me. We were just like everybody else. And we were always well dressed, nicer than anybody else. And mother was very charitable. We helped because we were able to. So, mother gave things away to other children and things like that. So, it helped. 

“We didn’t have to buy clothing. We got packages from Gladys every month; money came in and packages. We found out later that she went through her own neighborhood and said, ‘I’m sending packages to my poor relatives in Poland, can you donate.’ The family in New York owned a cleaner. So, whatever was left at the cleaners that people didn’t pick up went to Poland. And that’s how we really survived. 

“Warsaw is divided into two parts. One is Warsaw proper and the other one is Praga. And the Vistula River goes in the middle. So, we ended up in Praga. Not in major Warsaw because it was bombed out and a lot of Praga was still standing, Dad ended up buying an apartment with the money from Brooklyn.

“The synagogue that is still existing is in Warsaw, and the Germans used it as a stable for horses. The Germans weren’t nice. And that part we already remember because we are already six, seven, eight years old and you have memories of things. We go to school already and you know what’s happening. 

“Berel Marks, was head of the Jewish community in Warsaw. He started The Historical Institute of Warsaw. We ended up going to school with his daughter. He adopted a Jewish girl from the ghetto that survived. She didn’t even know her name. Didn’t even know where she came from, a Jewish child. And since Ida was the best pupil in that school, she was the one that took care of her. She didn’t speak. She didn’t write. By the age of eight or nine she didn’t know aleph-bet, nothing. So, she was very often in our house and Ida taught her. 

“We had Jewish friends but we also had Polish friends and neighbors and we really weren’t persecuted when we came back to Warsaw. Everybody knew that we were Jewish. They knew that father was the Culture Director of the Jewish Center in Warsaw…. The Yiddish Theatre started in Breslau (Wroclaw) and father didn’t want to move. He said I’m from Warsaw; I’m staying here. So, when they finally moved to Warsaw, he quit the Jewish Center and since he was an actor and Yiddish was his language, he decided to join them. They had a beautiful theatre; the government made propaganda, look what we are doing for the Jews that came back. They were feeling very guilty because they participated actively in the destruction of the Jewish community. 

“Polish was the language. At the time we spoke Russian because we came back from Russia. By the fifth grade you were forced to take Russian if you want to or not. It was mandatory, in the fifth grade until you finished high school you had to have the use of Russian at least twice a week. My parents tried very hard from the beginning. We spoke Polish. We understood Yiddish. My parents spoke between themselves Yiddish. But to us they spoke Polish. So, we spoke Polish. Absolutely no schooling of Hebrew.

“My parents decided to leave very early, probably 1950, 1951. The Polish government wouldn’t issue us passports and that was done deliberately. They wanted to keep the Jews in Poland, at that time. So, we couldn’t leave. In 1956, after the Sinai campaign in Israel, Golda Meir came to Poland to talk to President Gomulka of Poland. President Gomulka had a Jewish wife and was very sympathetic to the Jews. So, Golda Meir said to him, ‘I want you to let the Jews go if they want to. You don’t want them here. You don’t like them. Let them go.’ So, there was an agreement made between Golda and Gomulka that the Jews that wanted to leave could go. But we could only go to Israel. You get a passport but only for the way out and you cannot think of coming back. So, we left in 1957. 

“Around 1950, father discovered he had a brother that survived Auschwitz and is in Israel. This was very accidental too. One of his friends went on a trip to visit Israel, where he met somebody on the street in Tel Aviv that looked exactly like my father. There were three brothers, and they looked a copy of each other. The three brothers looked like father’s face. So, he started speaking to him. Everybody in Israel had lost a lot of family and they were looking. He said, ‘Oh you look so familiar. I know your brother, Shimon Lubieniecki, and he was taken to Auschwitz at the age of thirteen without his family. He was five years in Auschwitz and survived by working in the kitchen doing whatever they needed.’ He was liberated after Auschwitz was liberated. Came to Cyprus on the way to Israel on the Exodus and was in the 1948 Independence War in Israel…. When I think back about certain things I think how lucky can you get after so many years discovering that somebody actually survived and that you actually were able to connect with those people. 

“After Israel became a state, when they came out with reparations for the Jews that survived all the camps, the Israeli government called Shimon in and he filled out all the papers and they give him whatever they felt was the right amount, $50 a month. And he said, ‘What, I was thirteen when I was taken to Auschwitz, I never had any schooling. I had to survive. I wasn’t hungry because I worked in the kitchen and nobody killed me. I’m not agreeing, I’m not accepting $50 a month. I’m going to Germany. I’m going to sue them.’ He went to Dusseldorf and took the government to court and won. He made them pay for his education. He went to college and got a degree in antiquities. He already had a wife and three kids, finished his degree, and made a very nice life for himself in Germany. 

“We came to Israel in 1957 and got a little place on the way from Tel Aviv towards Beersheva in the Negev Desert. That’s what the government provided us. For the newcomers from Poland, they built those little houses for us. When Shimon came back from Miluim, we moved to his house in Ness Ziona, and we stayed there and then we went to Tel Aviv and connected with the theatre and everything else. The family in England helped a lot. They sent money for the apartment…. In the meantime, the government sponsored the three children in Gomulka’s Aliyah to go to a kibbutz. We were there for almost a year…. This was the starting point. As bad as certain things were, we’re very lucky that we ended up where we ended up.”

After the kibbutz, Ida went to nursing school, Beit Holim Kaplan in Rehovot. She spent four years there and after another three years of schooling, received a special degree in operating rooms. Ida married Alexander Aisner in Israel. Her husband applied for a visa to the U.S. and got his papers in three months. It took Ida a year of waiting because of the quota. They came to Detroit where her husband had uncles. One of the uncles, Philip Aisner, even changed the spelling of Aisner from the Polish Ajzner. They have two children, David and Arthur Aisner.

Sofia stayed in Israel and married Wolf Schickler Chayt when she was nineteen. A year later, she and her husband visited Uncle Shimon in Dusseldorf and stayed for five years. She got her license as a beautician doing skincare. They decided to leave and go to Australia, but discovered she was pregnant and decided to go home to mother in Israel. After the baby was born, they decided to go to the United States. Ida wasn’t a citizen yet, so couldn’t sponsor them to come to the States. But Canada welcomed them because of her husband’s profession; he was an engineer in plastics. They lived in Windsor, Ontario across the border from Detroit, where Ida was living. They have a son and a daughter, Michael Chayt and Deborah Bragman.

Much later their parents came to Canada and Sofia sponsored them, 

Ida and Sofia agree that “the United States is still the best country in the world to live in. Americans don’t even know what it means to become an American to come here, to live here. How free you are. How independent you are. You’re your own boss. If you work you can achieve anything that you can dream of. And the freedoms that you have here, nobody else gives it to you but the Americans.” They want their grandchildren to know that “we should try to be as free as possible and achieve the freedom that we can. And it doesn’t matter who you are. It should be equality to everyone. And America is the first step forward toward it.”

 

Date of Interview: June 27, 2024

Length of Interview: 57 minutes

Interview & Synopsis by: Zieva Konvisser, Zekelman Holocaust Center 

Videographer: Mark Einhaus