Narrative of Anna Drabik
Shuffling Fear From Place to Place
It was August, 1938 and Anna Drabik was born to two young parents in the
Polish city of Plock. Immediately becoming the light in their lives, our little heroine
thrived in prewar Poland, showered with love, affection, and multitudes of expensive
toys and clothes. Her family was well off before the outbreak of the war, both parents
having a successful profession thorough their education. The pair met for the first
time in Prague when attending university. Anna‟s mother was studying to become a
pharmacist, while Anna‟s father was looking forward to becoming an accomplished
engineer. Then Hollywood stepped in: the two met, fell in love, married, and had a
beautiful bouncing baby girl.
Unfortunately, the Hollywood story could not last forever. In the midst of the
developing of the family, tragedy struck. The Drabiks just finished celebrating their
daughter‟s first birthday when the Germans marched into Poland and declared war
on the country. Already before the invasion, rumors had been circling about
treatment of Jews in Nazi hands. Terrified for their lives, hundreds of families fled
into hiding, the Drabiks being one of them. They were found two years later, when
Anna was but three. “For me to remember something so young,” Mrs. Drabik
frowned, looking into our eyes almost as if she were trying to communicate a
message without words, “it must have been very traumatizing.” On an unassuming
day, the child was playing in her room when, completely unexpectedly, an unknown
man barged into her room. Paralyzed with fear, all she could do was stare at the visitor. The Nazi soldier was tall and held in his hands a long, intimidating gun. From
her spot on the floor, Anna also noticed that his leather boots were very high, much
unlike those that her father wore.
The Nazi took one look at the toddler sitting wide-eyed on the floor before
rushing out the same way he came in, so quickly that a disoriented Anna was unsure
what to do. This entire incident became Anna‟s first memory. Years later, Mrs. Drabik
will ask her mother about the soldier. Her mother will admit that they spoke briefly as
he was coming downstairs. She angrily demanded him to tell her what he wanted in
her house. He spoke softly, as if trying to calm her down, and told her that her
daughter was unharmed. The Nazi explained that he did not kill Anna because he
had a daughter as well, and she was the same age. Around the same time as the
discovery of the mother-daughter hiding place, Anna‟s father was in German hands.
He fought for the Poles in the beginning of the war but was defeated and taken as a
prisoner of war (POW) along with a few others. Luckily, the young man was tall and
blond – known as “good looks” during the war - and he easily bribed his German
captors with a gold watch and a wedding ring to release three other prisoners and
himself.
Not counting on the possibility that the next soldier to find them will be as
considerate, Anna‟s mother made plans to move into the Lodz ghetto along with her
own mother. Soon the family was among thousands of other Jews, cramped in the
close quarters of the first ghetto created in Poland. Such overcrowding meant a
quicker spreading of disease, which eventually led to a polio epidemic. The Nazis did
not want anyone who was too ill to work, and began to rid the ghetto of those infected. During the polio epidemic, Anna was one of the children who was sick.
Anna‟s mother was absolutely terrified for the life of her daughter, and got in contact
with a family member who studied medicine. He smuggled the trio out of the Lodz
ghetto and transported them to Warsaw safely.
Once in Warsaw, the grandmother and the rest of her family in the city
decided to go into the Warsaw Ghetto, which was just being established. Despite her
family‟s attempts to convince her, Anna‟s mother was hesitant to imprison herself
and her daughter in the ghetto. Instead, she looked into going east toward the town
where her husband‟s family lived. She made her decision after hours of
contemplating, and convinced her mother to get in contact with one of her former
employees. The employee came as requested and helped the mother and daughter
go east to what is now Ukraine. While the three left the capital, the Warsaw Ghetto
was becoming more constricting and cruel. Anna‟s grandmother and the rest of her
family did not attempt to escape. Later on, during the liquidation, they were either
shot or boarded on trains to a concentration camp. Anna‟s aunt, her mother‟s nineyear-old sister, died in Treblinka Nazi concentration camp among thousands of
others.
“It was amazing, what [the employee] did,” Mrs. Drabik shook her head. “He
carried me, on his shoulders, all the way from Warsaw to Zdolbunow.” Over 450
kilometers, Anna‟s grandmother‟s employee carried a toddler across Poland. When
the group arrived, they were ecstatic to find that Anna‟s father was alive and waiting
for them there. For a short while, everything seemed to get better. They were a
family again and the future looked promising. But once again their contentment was short-termed. The Soviets were advancing west and as they passed through
Zdolbunow, they recruited all healthy young men to fight against Germany. Anna‟s
father had to leave his family yet again as he went to fight with the Red Army against
the Nazis. Not long after, Anna contracted typhoid and became weak and bedridden.
Despite her best attempts, her mother realized only a doctor would be able to help
her. Around the same time, Soviets were “evacuating” all educated or influential
people from Poland. Being a pharmacist, Anna‟s mother knew quite a bit about
medicine. She was one of those called away by Soviets. “It was a little pink sheet,”
Mrs. Drabik‟s voice broke as she spoke, “and it said my mother was going to
Kazakhstan, and if she decided not to go, she would be shot.”
With deep reluctance, Anna‟s mother packed and left for the east, leaving her
daughter in the care of her husband‟s family. Someone found out that Anna was
Jewish and the husband‟s family only had a short time to give her away before they
were executed. Unfortunately, the trail of bad luck continued and the doctor who took
in Anna had to give her up before she even became accustomed to her new home.
Anna was put under the care of a Ukrainian woman who had eleven other children in
her home. “I don‟t think she knew I was Jewish,” Anna chuckled and shook her head.
“I don‟t remember her face; all I remember is that she wore this long, stereotypical
Russian scarf around her head and back. And I know she was Ukrainian because I
learned Ukrainian.” Conditions were poor; each child had a task to fulfill in order to
keep the household in working order. Little Anna‟s task was to collect cow pies so
that the fire could be kept burning. Despite having a condition in her legs that left her
barely capable of standing on two feet at four years old (she would later receive
three surgeries to fix her movement deficiency), she would walk up and down the fields looking for cow pies. To eat, the children were given cooked potato peels and
now Mrs. Drabik suspects the Ukrainian woman worked as a potato peeler. Anna
was no longer sick with typhoid at this time; however, to be safe the Ukrainian
woman let her sleep in the spot right above the fireplace to keep warm, a luxury that
only she received.
Finally, when the war ended, Anna‟s father came back to Zdolbunow looking
for his family members. Once he reached the town, he heard terrible stories of their
execution and death. Yet, despite the all the horrible news, there was a rumor
circulating that his child survived. Determined, Anna‟s father searched the whole
town until he arrived in the home of the Ukrainian woman. All that he knew about his
daughter was her hair color, name, and inability to walk. People told him that there
was a girl of that name that had trouble walking in this home, but she was not blond.
She was a brunette. Anna‟s father decided to look and indeed found his daughter,
whose hair color darkened over time, in the home of the Ukrainian woman.
To his utter horror, Anna did not remember her father. He tried various
methods to make her trust him, such as giving her a candy or apple, but she did not
know what these things were. Finally, he took a picture of her at one-and-a-half from
his breast pocket. “„Where did you get that?‟ I asked him, and he smiled and said
that it is a picture of his daughter,” Mrs. Drabik laughed fondly. “That was when I
knew he was really my father.” So, little Anna went willingly with her father and
began to heal the emotional and physical ailments that she acquired over the years
without her parents.While father and daughter bonded, Anna‟s mother was still in Kazakhstan.
Since Anna‟s father was in an organization of Polish patriots, in 1946 he managed to
free his wife and have her return to Zdolbunow. However, Poland‟s borders were
changing and what was previously Poland became Ukraine. All Poles were being
deported out of Ukraine under punishment of death. The trio caught the last train
from Zdolbunow into Poland. In Warsaw, the family rebuilt its life and tried to put the
tragedies it lived through behind it.
Years later, Anna Drabik is living in Poland with her husband. She did not go
to the United States in 1968, as did hundreds of other Holocaust survivors. Instead,
the pair stayed in its home country. In 1991, Anna established a group of people with
similar stories to her own, Jews who were only children during the World War II.
Therefore, the organization came to be called the Children of the Holocaust. Soon it
had over 700 members and many accomplishments to speak of. At the end of the
interview, Mrs. Drabik told us gravely, “You are very lucky to hear these stories. The
children in ten years will be hearing much less of the Children of the Holocaust.
Cherish these memories in your heart because they are special.”