Narrative of Aleksandra Kapustynska
The Childhood of a World War II Survivor
This is the story of a brave survivor of World War II named Aleksandra Kapustynska. When World War II started, Ms Kapustynska was two years old with blond hair and blue eyes. Her mother had a Jewish background, her father was Polish and, together with her nine-year-old brother, they lived in a nice quarter of Warsaw. After the war began, Ms Kapustynska’s mother taught young Aleksandra her address, in case the family was ever separated. She remembers it to this day. Unfortunately, this knowledge was unhelpful because even though Ms Kapustynska’s mother changed her religion and became Catholic to marry her husband, the family was ordered to go to the ghetto. Ms Kapustynska’s parents decided to take their children and escape Warsaw.
The Kapustynski family chose to move to a small village that was a hundred kilometres south of Warsaw. The village was surrounded by a forest that was occupied by anti-Nazi groups, and they were prepared to escape again at any moment. Ms Kapustynska and her family lived under a different name. In the village, her father found work as the manager of the mill, though mills were forbidden. In this village a tragedy occurred. On the night of February 24, 1942, one of the employees of Ms Kapustynska’s father asked her father to go to the mill with him. The employee was a young man, in his mid-twenties, and from that night, he was a murderer: when the pair entered the mill, he brutally pushed her father into the machinery, killing him. Ms Kapustynska now believes that he found out about the family’s Jewish roots and was trying to blackmail her father.
After her father’s death, a young Aleksandra was moved into a convent. She lived there with Hanna Kral, who would later become a famous writer. After a few months, one of her father’s friends invited the family to go to their farm. However, there were Nazis at the farm and the family had to escape once again. Looking back, Ms Kapustynska remembers those times as a terrible experience. After they escaped, they moved back to Warsaw where they found out yet another tragedy; Ms Kapustynska’s grandmother had also been viciously murdered for her difficulty in walking. A woman, discovering that the grandmother was dead, took one of the photographs belonging to Ms Kapustynska’s grandmother and gave it to the young girl’s mother. Ms Kapustynska now owns this photograph and says that it is splattered with the blood of her grandmother. One of the most vivid memories that she has of this time is of going to the ghetto wall with her uncle. She remembers that her uncle began to cry, but she was so young, she didn’t know why.
Ms Kapustynska’s mother decided to follow the Russian army to find a better place to live. The family shared an apartment with an elderly German woman. Unfortunately, on the second night, the Russian military police wanted to throw them out, but Ms Kapustynska’s mother spoke to them in Russian and told the police that the family wouldn’t leave. However, she was so frightened she decided to go to the Polish police. The police searched the apartment, and found pictures of a man in a Gestapo uniform and, upon finding out that this was the elderly woman’s son, the Polish police wanted to kill her because one of the policemen said that the man in the photograph killed his family. Ms Kapustynska’s mother stopped them, but the elderly woman escaped soon after, and the family never saw her again.
Ms Kapustynska’s family decided to move back to Warsaw in 1950. The family changed their family name was Bednarski, from her mother’s fear of the possibility that people would want to kill Jewish people again. Ms Kapustynska never thought that she was partly Jewish because of her Aryan appearance and only found out of her Jewish roots on her mother’s deathbed. Tragically, within eight months of her mother’s death, her older brother also died. After their deaths, Ms Kapustynska has begun searching for her roots. She is not ashamed of her Jewish background, in fact, she is proud of it. Though Ms Kapustynska has suffered many horrible tragedies in her life, she has been very brave. She is an inspiration for everyone.