Narratives

The Reluctant Hero

Anna Pliszka did not live a privileged life. She never got to know her father, nor was she able to go outside and make friends. She lived a life of hardship and despair. By the time she was four her mother jumped off a bridge with Anna in her arms, lived in a ghetto, and survived World War II. But her hardships did not end there. She was rejected from jobs even after the war because of her religious background. Anna Pliszka was hesitant to even tell us her story. She thinks that all stories need heroes and that she didn’t belong to this category, but she was just another person who managed to survive. What she doesn’t acknowledge is that being a survivor is being a hero.                 

Anna was very young when the Warsaw Ghetto was established in 1940. Luckily,  the apartment her family owned was already in the ghetto. After a few months of living in the apartment, Anna and her family were kicked out because they could not pay a bribe to German officers. Homeless and poor, her parents decided the only way to end their misery was to end their lives. Anna’s mother decided that they would jump off of a bridge into the Vistula River running through Warsaw, but, because her father was a strong swimmer, he chose to end his life another way. Anna and her mother’s attempted suicide was thwarted and men working on the river saved the pair and  were saved and brought them to safety where an organization known as Żegota helped them. Żegota was an organization that helped the Jews during the Holocaust. Not long after the suicide attempt, at the age two, Anna and her mother managed to escape the ghetto but they never found or heard from her father again. The thing is she does not remember any of this part of her personal history; as an adult, she read it all from a book titled  Zaklęta Lata, or Enchanted Years, by Władysław Smólski. When asked her mother about what had happened during the war years, her mother admitted to everything, confessing that she had not told Anna sooner because her mother did not like talking about the war.

Even though Anna was extremely young while she was in the ghetto, she still remembers a few things, such as always feeling lonely. Her father was a doctor so everyday he would leave the ghetto to go to work, and her mother would leave the house to do work of her own, leaving Anna all alone. Sometimes her mother would bring Anna to work because she felt guilty for leaving Anna all alone, but most of the time Anna had to sit at home waiting for her parents to return. Another thing Anna remembers was how she always feared having to go fetch milk for her family because she was afraid of being shot by Nazi soldiers. In all of the depressing things that were going on, Anna has one distinct memory when she has was extremely joyful. She was walking home from the store and a Soviet man gave her a loaf of bread to bring home with her. This bread helped Anna and her family survive.

Once the war ended, Anna still lived a life of pain. She and her mother continued to live together as her mother worked as a scientist and Anna attended college for agriculture. Even though she attended college, she was rejected from several agricultural jobs because she came from a family of Orthodox Jews. To this day the most distressful thing to her is not knowing how her father died when she was a little girl, but one ecstatic thing about her father is that twelve years ago she saw what her father looked like for the first time in her life, having seen a photo taken in the office where he worked. She rarely goes back to visit the Warsaw Ghetto because it brings back so many depressing memories and thoughts.

Anna Pliszka may not think of herself as a hero. She assumes that she was just another person who was able to survive this horrible event in history, but we would disagree with her. After all the things she went through during her life, even though she did nothing heroic, she still managed to come to our school and share her amazing story with us. She had considered not coming in at all because she felt like she had nothing to tell, and that her story was unimportant, but after hearing what she had to go through to get to where she is today, we think it would be inconceivable not to consider her a hero.