Narrative of Teresa Wieczorek

Saved By Sacrifice

“I consider myself to have good luck”, said Holocaust survivor Teresa Wieczorek, when we interviewed her on March 22, 2011. As an infant, Mrs. Wieczorek’s father snuck her out of the Warsaw Ghetto, through a sewer, in a cardboard suitcase. A Polish family adopted her, temporarily at first, and hid her so that she survived the Second World War without the Nazis uncovering her true ethnicity. Being a Polish citizen did not prevent her from experiencing the hardship of the war. In 1944, the Nazis sent her along with many other Varsovians to Offenbach, a German f orced labor camp, after the Warsaw Uprising. She was one of only three children to survive the camp. This is the story of Teresa Wieczorek

Teresa’s birth father was Ludwig Juliusz Gołt, a renowned urologist who worked at the Omega clinic, a well-known children’s hospital in Warsaw’s city center. He was also the founder of the Polish Urological Society. He was an assimilated Jew like many members of Polish society. As a of the Polish intelligentsia, Ludwig Juliusz Gołt died from torture in Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak prison. Teresa’s mother, Rahel Gołt, an aspiring actress, was also Jewish and died in Pawiak as well.

Because the Gołts were Jewish, the Nazis forced them to move into the Warsaw ghetto after conquering Poland. At the time of the ghetto’s creation, Rahel Gołt was pregnant, giving birth to Teresa inside the Ghetto. Teresa does not have a birth certificate. She is one of many children born during, or just before the Second World War, who does not have one. The war’s destruction, attempts to hide Jewish ethnicity as well as social disruption are just a few of the contributing factors that made this common.

Friends of her family estimated her birth date as the 31 of December, 1939. This estimation is inconsistent with her story because the Warsaw Ghetto came into existence only in October, 1940 and is an excellent example of confusion of information caused from the extreme situation in which the Jewish and Polish populations found themselves. Teresa recalls that friends told her that her father snuck her out of the Ghetto intending to come for her when he and his wife could escape. Unfortunately, Teresa’s parents never had the chance. Her temporary foster parents ‘adopted’ her in the early 1940s. She lived in Warsaw until the Warsaw Uprising broke out. The Nazis evicted Warsaw’s citizens to work camps after suppressing the Uprising. Teresa’s stepfather died, shot by the Nazis, in the basement of a demolished building in Warsaw, because his injury prevented him from working in the labor camp.

Teresa was one of 19 children in Offenbach. According to stories, she was very amiable so one of the guards at the camp took her to his home and offered Teresa one doll from a room filled with them. Teresa’s earliest memory came on the day before the liberation of Offenbach, in 1945, when she saw large bombers that, at the time, looked like flying Christmas trees, dropping phosphorous bombs on Frankfurt. Her foster mother, the Gołts’ illiterate former housekeeper, survived Offenbach with Teresa and permanently took her in.

In order not to alert the Nazis to her true ethnicity, Teresa began learning the Christian faith as a very young child. She learned that she was Jewish in 1948 when an old Jewish family friend revealed the information, also offering to take her with them to Israel. Teresa elected to stay with her foster mother in Poland. The family friend also revealed to her that the Wieczoreks had received a large bar of gold to accept her. However, to this day Teresa’s foster mom maintains, “I never took anything and still brought you up.” This issue is an indication of the complex family and social relations that exist in Poland.

Even today Teresa stills suffers from the Second World War. Because of calcium deprivation, Teresa contracted a severe form of scoliosis. She is 10 cm shorter than she would have been if she would have eaten better as an infant. Teresa also has psychological trauma, most notably post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, in 1970 she fainted after seeing an East German border guard. She has night terrors and nightmares about Offenbach and gets anxious when people raise their voices for no reason. Teresa’s extended family appears to have been destroyed during the Second World War. Even after 36 years of searching, Teresa’s efforts in finding other Gołts has been fruitless. In the concluding minutes of Group 13’s interview with Mrs. Wieczorek she told us that “she wonders how her life would have been different if there was no Second World War, and that she is pleased that younger generations are taking an interest.”