Narrative Of Agata Boldok

Without Nostalgia

     “Agata Bołdok survived”: A statement so utterly simple and short that one would think that it meant nothing. It’s the duty of today’s generation to bring emotional chaos into the word “survived” so that people may finally understand that it is not just a two-syllable word. Instead this word represents the pivotal point of life and death, normality and reality. Agata works for an organization called “Children of the Holocaust”. She told us that the members of this organization had their childhoods stolen from them during World War II. Some had looked German with blue eyes and blond hair; other’s escaped to Russia and some survivors survived with luck. They have all been changed and deterred from what could have been. Some of them gained irrational obsessions caused by early life terrors; in Agata’s case she is incapable of being in small spaces or having relationships. She believes the relationships are unstable, that you can’t depend on them. Agata also believes that her story should be told so we may all learn from it ourselves.

     As a child, Agata lived in Warsaw with her family. She had both her parents, and a sister. They were a more modernized or assimilated Jewish family. At first, Agata and her younger sister didn’t realize that there was a “difference” between them and all the other children at school in the days before for the war when there were parks, trees, warm skies and ice cream cones. Soon after the Nazi invasion, the Warsaw Ghetto was set up where Agata and her family were sent to live. It was a crammed place. Seven people had to share the floor in a single small room, maybe even more were pushed in. Everyone at least had a square of space. On the streets the vendors sold dog meat and small candies at first. As supplies dwindled and food became scarce, the vendors converted their wares into roasted rat and rotten vegetables. There was no school to groan about or a park to play tag, no place for the adults to flock to for coffee and pleasant morning chatter. Life was a constant parade of a cold and depressing grey. Within the ghetto, Agata lived on the top floor of  a seven story building. She and her family would take the elevator  which extended only to the sixth floor and would come to a halt. One of the family members would slide open the gate and the group would head up the last flight of stairs after a long day. In the ghetto it was not uncommon for corpses to lie in the street. Most of the Jews died from disease or famine. Agata said that she didn’t remember what she ate while she was there, only that she was always hungry. As mentioned before food was scarce which meant that anyone would do anything for a little morsel of food. A prominent memory from Agata’s time there was when she was looking out through the apartment window and noticed an aging horse weakly sauntering down the street. A few seconds later a group of starving Jews attacked the horse and cut through its jocular vein. They cut the meat into pieces and took the segments home. Starvation was everywhere.

    Starvation wasn’t the only threat in the ghetto; the Nazi threat was continuously present. One day, Agata’s father and sister disappeared without a sign. After waiting for some time, she and her mother escaped through a small hole in the ghetto wall. Perhaps this is when Agata developed her fear of small spaces. The pair ran away from the Warsaw Ghetto to another town. Unfortunately this town had a ghetto there was well that was even smaller than the one that they were in before. As events unfolded, Agata was separated form her mother in a crowd that congregated during selection for concentration camps in the second ghetto. That moment was the last time she saw her.

     She was alone. After leaving the ghetto and drifting around from abandoned shack to haystack to hiding underneath a retirement home bed, Agata ended up at a police station where she was than taken to an orphanage run by Nuns. Later on a shipment of used children’s clothing was sent from the Nazis to the orphanage as a charitable act. The nuns told the orphans and Agata to go to the river and wash the clothes. All the clothes had one bullet hole and a dried blood stain encrusted around the opening. Patches had to be sewn on to cover the holes. There was no room to be picky, clothes and everything else were hard to come by. One day an SS officer in tall black boots and a sleek uniform came to the orphanage asking for Jewish children. A nun hurriedly led Agata down a corridor to the back door. The woman opened the door and told her to go and never come back. Go where? All Agata had were the clothes that she was wearing. She had no identity, no place to belong, no one to talk to and no nostalgic memories to reminisce over. She was fourteen years old.

     At our group’s interview, Agata sat across from us with her hands in her lap. It was quiet for a bit. A member of our group asked, “If you sat down with a Nazi after the war, what would you say?” The question hung in the air for three seconds. Agata said something in Polish which was quickly recounted to us by the translator.

“I don’t know.”

     Agata continued, stating she doesn’t hold hatred, but that doesn’t mean she thinks that the Nazis can go on without facing consequences. We continued on by asking about her opinion of the film Schindler’s List. She told us that opinions are very different from young people and adults. Those younger tend to depend more on emotion, while when you’re older you think more with facts. She also said that watching something is very different from experiencing it and included that she never wished to be reminded of everything that happened when she was a small girl. Agata said she used to hope that she would forget. As we kept on conversing, she talked about how war makes everything distorted with no right and wrong. She told us how the Polish Resistance shot a German soldier. The Nazis shot twenty Poles as retaliation. Remember when you were little and you would blow things up and kill bad guys as pretend? The reality is that everyone is a person. Yes, the Nazis completely dehumanised Jews, but that would be generalizing. Not every one person is alike, not every one Nazi was the same. Maybe the soldier that the Poles shot was contemplating an escape for a Jewish family. Maybe he was planning on which Jewish child to pour acid on. We don’t know. But generalising is dehumanising in itself. There are all these generalisations and stereotypes of people that we forget that they are, in fact, people. Can anything related to war really be justified? All that Agata Boldok wants is for history not to repeat itself.