Narrative
A Tribute to Endurance
Endurance. In our privileged world, few know what this truly means. However, Ms. Anna Drabik, a survivor of the Holocaust, is one whose childhood was snatched away by the war. Faced by death, disease, and danger at every corner, she withstood all the horror and atrocities of the Holocaust and built herself a life of purpose from the ashes that remained after the war. This is her incredible story.
Born in 1938, Ms. Drabik was merely a year old when the war began. In the confusion following the start of the Holocaust, she and her mother were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto while her father somehow escaped to Russia and was forcibly recruited into the Red Army. Filthy and unclean, the conditions in the ghetto led to a horrible polio epidemic which, as a vulnerable infant, Anna immediately caught. As Mrs. Drabik described, “[The] sickness paralysed my body and I could not walk properly for many years of my life.” After some time in the Lodz Ghetto, Anna and her mother decided to move to Warsaw since most of their family lived there. They were transported to the city separately; Ms. Drabik’s mother walked most of the journey while Anna travelled in a putrid garbage truck. Upon arrival, the mother and daughter found a safe place to hide until Anna could recover from her polio. However things often don’t go the way one plans them. One day, Anna and her mother were surprised when they heard footsteps in their house. There, silhouetted in the doorway, stood a German officer! Feverish and trembling under the blankets, Anna remembers her own terror and her mother’s eyes full of tears as they both stared apprehensively at this man. His expression softened as he looked at the sick child on the bed, and he told Anna’s mother, “I have also left a child like this at home.” Turning on his heel, he stomped out.
Anna and her mother decided that although they might have been granted their freedom once, their hiding place was not secure anymore. They moved to Bialystok for no clear reason, where Anna’s mother unexpectedly caught typhus. The Nazis, of course, picked up on this misfortune, and deported her to Kazakhstan. Torn from her daughter, Mrs. Drabik regretfully left Anna in the hands of a relative from Mr. Drabik’s side of the family. With both her parents in the Soviet Union, Anna was left more or less on her own in Poland. Soon after her mother left, the Nazis murdered her father’s family. This little girl, who was very prone to disease, had caught typhus and only foggily remembers being passed from person to person until she ended up with a Ukrainian woman who was taking care of eleven other children. Ms. Drabik recalls, cringing, “The conditions in that hut were very poor. We were always starving, and had to sleep on the hard ground.” Usually people hate being sick but, for Anna, it was a luxury since she was allowed to sleep on top of a white oven, the only warm place in the house. Like every other child in the household, Anna had to do chores every day. Her job was to collect the cow dung from some fields to burn in the furnace. The journey was long and the work strenuous for the poor girl. With her legs still recovering from polio, Anna could barely manage.
One day, when the war was just over, a stranger appeared in the doorway of the hut. Beaming at Anna, he beckoned, “Come with me. I am your father.”
Terrified, Anna hid in the corner of the hut. She had no memory of her father. Ms. Drabik remembers, “I wanted to stay in that hut. In those times my fear of the unknown was even greater than that of starvation.”
The stranger offered Anna candy, but, in her wretched life, she had never eaten or even seen anything like it. Finally, in a desperate attempt for Anna to believe him, the man took a photograph of Anna from his left shirt pocket which was “right above his heart,” Ms. Drabik told us, gesturing towards her own heart.
Anna tentatively moved closer to the man. “Mister,” she asked. “Why do you have a picture of me?”
“I am not a mister,” replied the man. “I am your father.”
Anna finally believed him, for who else would carry a picture of her so close to the heart? At seven years old, it was the first time she had met her father. This moment was so emotionally stirring that Ms. Drabik had tears in her eyes while remembering it.
The war was finally over for Anna in two senses; the first, literally, since the Germans had been defeated, and the second because she was reunited with the father she had never known. However, she had one more surprise in store for her. One night, when Anna and her father were sleeping in their house, their friend rushed in, explaining that there was a woman outside claiming to be Mr. Drabik’s wife. Bemused and sleep-deprived, Anna’s father replied that he did not have a wife. Ms. Drabik recalls, “My father was so caught up with the false life he had created for himself to escape the Nazis and the memory of the war that he had forgotten his marriage.” Fortunately, Mr. Drabik remembered his wife just in time as she was about to be shot by his friend for “lying”.
Reunited with her parents and free from the threat of persecution, Anna was able to have a proper education. After a long search, her parents found a doctor to operate on her legs to get rid of the remaining deformity. At home, the war was a taboo subject, with neither mother nor father ever mentioning it. Anna tried to forget the heinous and gruesome past as well, but the memories of the Holocaust had scarred her forever. Even now, she wakes up in the middle of the night with nightmares that nobody should ever have to go through: nightmares of “babies’ heads being cracked on walls and infants being thrown alive into flames with their own mothers bearing witness,” Ms. Drabik explained.
For obvious reasons, Ms. Drabik stubbornly tried to forget the past until she found a book called The Dictionary of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto. On these pages, she read the history of her family, and realized that however uncomfortable it may be, the past needs to be heard. History does not disappear if one merely doesn’t think about it. Instead, one must strive to remember so that it is never repeated again. Together with her “cousin of whose existence I had learnt from The Dictionary of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto,” Ms. Drabik told us, “I wrote four volumes on the Second World War. I immersed myself in family history.” Anna visited family graves, went to Treblinka where her grandfather was murdered, and visited the ghetto where her grandmother was shot. Anna tried to imagine what her grandparents must have felt in their last moments. Meeting with other survivors of the Holocaust, Ms. Drabik began to realise that many people had stories similar to her own. Her sense of loneliness began to dissipate.
While our group was discussing the Nazis in black and white, Anna mentioned, “Some people hate the German nation as a whole for what just a few of them caused during World War II. This is wrong. Not all of them were cruel.” It was incredible to witness someone who had lived through the Holocaust be so forgiving.
When asked about the terrible events that were occurring in the modern world, like the crisis in Syria, Ms. Drabik replied, “To the children of the Holocaust, all of these horrible happenings relate back to one thing: World War II.” For example, when she visited Saudi Arabia a few years ago, and saw many children starving on the streets, her first thought was not “I feel so sorry for them.” It was, “I must help these children because I remember my own starvation and suffering during the war.”
Before ending the interview, Ms. Drabik was asked if she had any advice for the future generation, to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust would ever happen again. She told us, speaking with conviction, “Don’t forget the Holocaust. Those events couldn’t have happened only to be forgotten. Pass on these stories to the next generation. Remember, everyone’s suffering is equal, no matter who they are or where they come from. Make sure the victims of the Holocaust didn’t die in vain. Do not forget the history.”