Survivor remembers: Lost in rubble of Warsaw

WARSAW (AP) — The young boy emerged from the rubble of Warsaw, clinging to the skirt of a woman he knew only as Mrs. Wala. Then she turned and walked off, and 7-year-old Mieczyslaw Kenigswein was alone, lost in the Holocaust. It was 1944.

That little boy is now 78, an Israeli with a Hebrew name, Moshe Tirosh. During a recent visit to Warsaw, he recalled surviving the rest of the war not knowing if his parents were dead or alive — and how the kindness of strangers and random turns of fate saved his life.

Tirosh’s earliest memories are of the hunger, disease and misery of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Affectionately called Miecio as a boy, he was nearly 5 when his mother, Regina, gave birth to her third child under floorboards in the ghetto, biting her knuckles to keep from screaming during labor so the Germans would not discover the newborn.

With death all around, Tirosh said his parents made the excruciating decision to part with the infant to increase his chances of survival.

With the help of a young Pole, Zygmunt Pietak, his mother smuggled the newborn out of the ghetto and left him on a street corner with a card bearing the name “Stanislaw Pomorski” — a fake surname meant to hide his Jewish origins.

Soon a Polish policeman came along and took the baby to a home for abandoned children.

The next year was 1943, and Tirosh’s father, Samuel, was helping other Jews plan the uprising in the ghetto when he decided to try to flee with his family.

“He was told there was no way to escape,” Tirosh recalled. But his father was determined.

Now 6, Miecio and his 4-year-old sister, Stefania, were packed in rag-padded sacks and thrown over the high ghetto walls. The parents climbed over themselves, bribing Polish guards to turn the other way.

They first found shelter with a Polish family, the Raczeks, who took them in for money. There, the family would go into hiding behind the apartment walls or in closets during inspections by Germans or visits by the Raczeks’ friends or neighbors. The danger of being betrayed to the Nazis was high and the punishment for helping Jews was severe: death to any rescuer and their entire family.