Another September 1: Long Ago and Far Away...

So much better, here today:

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When [Leon] Ginsburg recalls his life before Sept. 1, 1939 - when 1.8 million German troops invaded Poland - his memories are happy ones.

He had many friends, a brother who was two years older, a sister who was four years older and a close-knit extended family. His mother ran a fabric store, and his grandparents were in the shoe business.

The young boy had his first real inkling that his world was being upended in the summer of 1941, when the German army marched into Maciejow, which had been under Soviet occupation. Within a few days of their arrival, the Germans ordered all men between the ages of 16 and 60 to report to the center of town.

Curious, Ginsburg went to see what would happen. "I noticed one of my parents' friends. His face was so scared - white like lime. When I saw his face, I got scared and got away from there. Then I heard shots coming from that area, and I saw Ukrainian men with shovels going in that direction."
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In September of 1942, word spread that the Germans were killing Jews in a town near Maciejow. "We knew that we were going to be next," Ginsburg says.

The family retreated to a cousin's basement that was serving as a hideout for roughly 50 people. "Hiding was a way to survive when something lasted a week or so," Ginsburg says. "But here, this was the end game."

The Germans were aided greatly by the local Ukrainian population. "The situation was so vicious," Ginsburg says. "It was not just the German SS after you. The local population was also against you, and without local people helping you, you cannot survive."

A Ukrainian policeman discovered the group in the basement and ordered everyone out.

Ginsburg's mother hid him behind a boarded-up area, and the young boy grasped two protruding nails to hold the board against him, while his mother dove between a mattress and some bedding. That's where she was discovered. Ginsburg never saw her, or his sister, again.
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But, with the Nazis and their collaborators on his heels, Ginsburg was able to figure out move after move - from basement to attic, from town to village, from forest to farm, hiding wherever it took to stay alive, moving on whenever necessary.

"He knew his town, he knew the people, he knew who he could trust," Gatens says. "He learned very quickly all these different jobs that he could do, and people gave him a chance to do them."

He found work, for example, pasturing cows for a Polish Catholic family. And one of his employers, a farmer, arranged for official papers that gave him a new name and a new religion: Stanislaw Kwiatkowski, a Catholic.

In the summer of 1944, Russia liberated the area of Poland where Ginsburg was living. He spent the next 2 1/2 years in a displaced persons camp in the American zone of Germany.

He emigrated to the States as part of a transport of orphans in December 1946 and went to live with a great aunt in Brooklyn. A graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from City College of New York and developed equipment for dental labs.

Ginsburg married a fellow Holocaust survivor, and they moved to Florida six years ago. One of his daughters is a psychiatrist in New York; another is a Web designer in San Francisco. His son works in finance in London.

The boy, who was alone during so much of the war, is now grandfather to seven.