Narrative

Gentle War

The year was 1939 when Tomasz Prot turned 9 on March 23rd just 162 days before the break out of the II World War. Mr. Tomasz was born into a Jewish family that changed their religion and citizenship to Polish Catholics, yet Tomasz knew that he was a Jewish boy and wasn’t ashamed of it. He first understood during the war being a Jew was a con. In the month of September 1939 a lot changed in the Prot family. After a bombing of their close families house where they were situated at the moment the father left to work as a munition factory director in Great Britain and Tomasz stayed with his mother and older sister. Today he says that he now understands and is glad that Mrs. Prot decided to hide in their apartment located in Bielany, Warsaw instead of moving to the ghettos. 

Not long after that, the Prot family caught a lot of their neighbours attention and they decided to move to a institute for blind people in Laski, because attention was dangerous. The travel to Laski was short since it’s a small town located on the borders of the Polish capital. In the institute, Tomasz and his family weren’t the only Jews, they found out that four nuns with   Jewish roots worked in the institute. After an incident of Tomasz and his mother being spied by blackmailer, the institute got a lot of attention. Due to the danger of having at least seven Jewish people in the institute, Tomasz’s family and the nuns moved out. Mister Tomasz explains that after that event the family split up and his sister was hiding from house to house of people she knew. This continued until she was taken in by the Kielany family, a close friend of Jana.

“During that time my mother and I stayed at her friends place, of course she knew we were Jewish so that was a time when I was hiding from the world” says Mr. Prot. Whenever someone came in to the apartment he hid in an isolated room and wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment at any circumstances.  Living and hiding in Żoliborz couldn’t last long, because there was simply no conditions for that. Luckily because of Tomasz’s mothers efforts the boy was accepted to a RGO boarding school for military family kids. It was the only non-church helping organization that was tolerated by the Germans. Tomasz was the only boy in the whole boarding organization that didn’t go to school after an incident when one of the teachers called him a Jew on the welcoming day. Due to the fact that the atmosphere around the camp was getting dangerous, he believed that his friends knew that he was Jewish but were just pretending as if they didn’t Mr. Prot was forced to move again. Even though a German spy who was surrounding the camp was shot by a Polish underground organization Mr. Prot’s mother didn’t want to risk it and he was moved to another, more powerful RGO boarding school in Józefów outside of Warsaw. “I stayed in that school for a year. But then a ground of normal polish criminals started attacking and raping our teachers so the building had to be shut down and we were forced to move out” explains Mr. Prot with condole.

The boys were separated and sent off to different schools around Poland. Mr. Tomasz was sent to another RGO school near Konstancin. Tomasz was there very shortly since he didn’t feel welcome as he explains. He says that it was probably his Jewish looks that the Ppolish didn’t like. This dislike changed into detest and led to a situation where Tomasz and another Jewish boy were taken out of the school by one of the teachers and brought to the RGO headquarters in Warsaw. There the teachers asked the organization to take the boys away from them but to Tomasz’s luck the organization disagreed and said there is nothing they can do. Later on much less on Mr. Prot’s behalf the teacher left the two young boys on a train station in the middle of Warsaw and told them to return home on their own. To a huge surprise the boys arrived at the RGO building in the evening after a terrifying train ride of Tomasz covering his more Jewish looking friend.

The situation of being forced out of the RGO school caused Mr. Prot so much stress that he got extremely sick and isolated from the rest. Luckily this chain of events caused that his mother came and visited him where she saw that he cannot longer stay there. Mrs. Prot has arranged for him to return to the first boarding school on Czarneckiego street where he felt happy and welcome. He returned to Czarneckiego in late Spring 1944. By July 1944 every Pole in Warsaw knew about the upcoming Uprising. Mr. Prot was taught to be patriotic and because of this he insisted that he must stay in Warsaw while his peers were sent off to a camp outside of Warsaw. During that time Tomasz was 14 which disallowed him from joining the AK. In order to somehow help Mr. Prot and his mother joined work in a kitchen that was preparing to work during the Uprising distributing food for the soldiers. As a preparation for the 1st of August Tomasz’s team cooked huge bowls of a typical polish soup which sadly couldn’t be given out because of the location of the kitchen. It was located on the corner of Aleja Niepodległości and Różana street which was a problem since the Polish forces occupied one of the streets and the German forces occupied the other. The kitchen had to be shut down.

After the Uprising Mr. Prot found another RGO boarding school which wasn’t evacuated. He enrolled in that school and with that RGO organization he finished through the Uprising. After being sent to an after Uprising camp Tomasz, his school was sent to a town called Bochnia under Kraków where they waited for the war to pass. Due to Tomasz’s amazement after the war him and Mrs. Prot moved to live in Wrocław where they found Tomasz’s sister. Mr. Tomasz’s father stayed and passed away in England. “That war passed through my life quite gently” Tomasz offers his life to the silence of Poles that risked their own lives to protect his and many other Jewish people. “I learned that you can never call a group good or bad, everyone is different…”.