The Price of Survival

Liza and Adam, my grandmother’s best friends and neighbors, used to tell a dramatic—if somewhat vague—story about their lives in World War II. In their telling, Adam jumped off a cattle car heading to Auschwitz in late 1944 and fought his way through great adversity to Vittel, France, to join Liza, who had been deported from their native Warsaw to an internment camp, where she later gave birth to their son, Michael. Shortly after the war they moved to the United States, where the family became very wealthy after Adam founded a paint and brush factory based in Long Island City, Queens.

My grandmother and her best friends made a strange contrast. She was born in the Bronx to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents and began working as a secretary at 16, a job she held in various iterations almost until her death. Quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and wildly well-read, she worked for many years as the personal secretary to Ted Thackrey of the New York Post, with whom she was rumored to have had one of her many affairs. 

By the time Liza and Adam moved into my grandparents’ building on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, they were already wealthy, but neither had any formal education past their early teens. Liza, who my grandmother said “fancied herself an intellectual” would read book reviews (just reviews, not the books) and then try to argue about them, which drove my grandmother nuts. My grandparents’ marriage ended in a messy and public divorce; Liza and Adam were devoted to each other and to their children, who were raised alongside my mother and her sister. My mother considered Adam to be more like her father than her actual father. Adam held my cousin at his bris.

Adam died when I was young, but Liza and Michael were there for all my family’s weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, birthday parties, and funerals. We would occasionally spend vacations together at one of their homes in the Hamptons or Palm Beach, and Michael let me stay in his penthouse apartment when a bedbug infestation forced me to evacuate my dorm in college. Much like actual family, we couldn’t stand them most of the time, but we loved them. Liza died in 2014, a year after my grandmother, and Michael followed soon after. In a bizarre coda to his life, he turned out to be one of New York City’s biggest tax cheats, owing almost $16 million when he died. Although we were friendly with his siblings and children, our families lost touch soon after their deaths.

Though Liza sometimes spoke of her time in Cuba, where she and Adam had emigrated before coming to the United States, she rarely mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto, where she’d lived for at least three years. That was unremarkable in itself; many of those who survived while the rest of their families perished in the Holocaust choose to leave their trauma in the past. Liza and Adam were capitalists, Americans, liberals. For them, it was better to forget; their life before New York City was one of poverty, despair, and oppression. Their entire family was dead.

But even though we were told very little about their earlier lives, we knew that Adam had left a memoir, narrated to a ghostwriter and set down in both Polish and English. It was supposed to be published after the couple’s death.

Before 1939, Warsaw was home to a Jewish population of almost half a million people, about 30 percent of the city’s residents. In 1940 they were forced into a ghetto, where nearly the entire community died, either inside the ghetto walls or in the death camps to which they were sent following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the spring of 1943. The number of escapees is unknown, but the Nazis were nothing if not thorough. In late 1943, after the liquidation of the Ghetto, they hatched a plot to lure the remaining Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw out of hiding. 

A number of Jewish agents provocateurs working for the Nazis were involved in what became known as the Hotel Polski affair, which ultimately sent almost 3,000 people to their deaths. The scheme worked like this: most of the 30,000 Jews remaining in Warsaw were wealthy people who’d bought their way out of the Ghetto and gone into hiding on the Aryan side. German agents and the Jewish spies working with them found those in hiding and offered them a deal: the chance to buy travel documents, passports and visas, issued in neutral countries, which would allow them to leave Warsaw by way of a special internment camp in the German-occupied French spa town of Vittel. There, arrangements would be made to exchange them for German prisoners of war held abroad. More than 2,000 people agreed, despite their mistrust of the Germans and the warnings of the Polish Resistance that the deal was likely a trap. They were housed at the Hotel Polski while arrangements were made.

Starting in May 1943 the refugees were sent from the Hotel Polski to Vittel and later to Bergen-Belsen to await their chance. A few hundred, who were holding travel documents from the British protectorate of Palestine, really were eventually exchanged for German prisoners. But for the rest, months later the Germans determined that nearly all their documents were fraudulent; they sent the Hotel Polski refugees in Vittel and Bergen-Belsen to Auschwitz. The remaining undocumented Jews in the hotel, some 450 people, were executed.

One of those transports from Vittel to Auschwitz was the train from which Adam jumped, working his way back to Vittel to be with Liza, until they were able to emigrate to Cuba.

About a year after Michael and Liza’s deaths, my aunt called me. My uncle, a World War II buff, had been reading a book that mentioned the Hotel Polski affair and recognized a familiar name: Adam’s. The book revealed that Adam himself had been the primary orchestrator of the Hotel Polski affair, and a collaborator with the infamous Żagiew group and Group 13, a network of Jewish Gestapo agents. In a paper published in Holocaust: Studies and Materials, scholar Agnieszka Haska writes, “in his memoirs, [Adam] portrays himself as a knight-hero figure, who had never tarnished his hands with collaboration, but played a game with the Germans (and with the Poles), aimed only at saving his own family.” 

In the memoir, which was ultimately self-published by his ghostwriter in 2016, Adam tells a truly incredible story: a prodigious teenage opera singer, he was admitted to the Catholic Warsaw Institute for Music as a high school student, even though he was Jewish. Using his student ID card to prove he was Catholic, he was able to live as an Aryan outside of the Ghetto, often visiting his impoverished girlfriend Liza. He hustled the residents of the Ghetto by selling and trading goods, which got him noticed by the Nazis. But, he promises, he was not a Jewish Gestapo agent; he was just pretending, in order to rescue people from the Ghetto. He obtained several guns from Christian friends in order to protect himself and his community, and he learned the brush-making skills that would later make him rich by selling brushes to the Wehrmacht. His daring escape from the train to Auschwitz appears to be true—even after he’d turned over thousands of people, the Nazis still tried to send him to his death.

In 1943, Adam was also sentenced to death by the Polish Jewish Underground, and according to both his memoirs and my family’s memories, the surviving members of the underground living in New York continued to harass him for the rest of his life, appearing in the lobby of my family’s building in the Bronx, at his residence in Manhattan, and probably even at his funeral. The memoir also reveals that most Jewish-owned companies refused to do business with him, and tells of the anonymous letters he and Liza received. He says that Liza experienced extreme despair at what she saw as a misunderstanding, of their inability to “ever live a normal life.” 

In the book’s climax, Adam narrates his appearance before a “Beit Din” (Jewish Rabbinic tribunal) in the 1950s, where, he claims, he was absolved of all crimes. He tells several touching stories about various people apologizing to him for their accusations of collaborationism that stretch the imagination. My aunt remembers this differently; she says that when Liza and Adam went again to the Rabbinate in the 1970s, they were denied forgiveness by the tribunal. 

I’ll admit that I only skimmed the memoir. The rest of my family refuses to read it. It’s too painful to consider the past that was kept from us, to try to piece together what my grandmother might have known, what Adam’s children were or were not told, and what we chose to ignore to maintain our friendships. 

It almost feels like the punchline to a bad joke or an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm; my very American grandmother knew only a few Holocaust survivors, and one of them turned out to be a collaborator. Still, I can’t imagine what it felt like for her, having lived in the United States through the Holocaust, to know the fate that could have been hers if her parents had made different choices only a few years before. I have to believe that despite all the evidence to the contrary, my grandmother chose to trust, to believe that Adam’s survival was proof enough of his goodness. 

When I interviewed her for this article, my aunt said that she still found it hard to judge, that what Adam did, “he did for survival.” He behaved foolishly at best, unbelievably selfishly and evilly at worst, but in one way, she’s right: he got out alive. His will to survive is the only truth we can know for sure.

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