Regina of Warsaw

1909

Mokotów, Poland

Regina kissed her mother goodbye on the cheek, grabbed her bundle which held documents she had been translating from Russian into Yiddish, and walked out the door from her home in Mokotów, Poland to the Jewish Labor Bund offices several blocks to the business center.

She flicked an errant black hair off of her forehead and shrugged her shoulder strap back into place.

It had been three years ago that June since the 1906 Bialystok pogrom where she and her older sister, Chaja Fajga had planned to have a stroll down by the Bialy River and share some of their mother’s delicious pierogi in the warm June climate.

They never got to go on their picnic as the Russian soldiers stormed into the town, laying waste to anything or anyone they could find. Regina was waiting for her sister to finish work at her boarding house when she heard yelling, then saw the soldiers marching towards the boarding house. She quickly locked the door then scrambled up to the third floor and folded herself in the second shelf of the wardrobe, pushing shoes and scarves in front of her to try and camouflage herself as best she could. She was finally glad she was short and small rather than tall and willowy like Chaja Fajga.

Her sister was still at the textile mill where she had been working and had planned to leave work early and get Regina from the boarding house and walk to the river together.

She later told Regina that as soon as the owners became aware of the soldiers approaching the mill they locked and bolted the front doors and made everyone stay inside until the next day.

As soon as Regina and Chaja Fajga returned home to Mokotów, their parents forbade Chaja Fajga to return to work in the mill. She was to move home and live with the family again. It wasn’t safe, they said, for her to live in Bialystok any longer.

Ever since the Bialystok pogrom, Regina dedicated herself to fighting anti-Semitism and parlayed her translation skills with the local Bund office, a Jewish socialist party, to a full-time job. She became their on-site translator which was highly respected and allowed more people to be able to read about important issues of the day, especially anything to do with anti-Semitic activity. Regina became fluent in Russian as well as Yiddish as she asked to attend the Russian school. She wanted to be able to read the Russian newspapers. When that was accomplished, she asked her grandparents to teach her Yiddish so that she could read and write as there were so many Jewish Poles who only knew Yiddish and were left out of the news as most of the newspapers were only in Polish. They were prized skills and much appreciated by the party.

She remembered those family discussions about the pogrom at the time. Important decisions were often made at the dinner table. Regina’s mother, Lena Anuszewicz, the family matriarch sat at one end. She was a short, angular woman, with curly brown hair with bits of gray, pulled back into a bun and the family blue eyes. Yosef, her father, tall and broad with dark blonde hair and blue eyes, sat at the other end. As the matriarch and patriarch of the family, they held family court at such large and inclusive dinners where there was never a reason one could not attend. It was at such meals that decisions were discussed, and a resolution was declared by the parents.

When issues needed to be addressed, everyone was required to be at the dinner table. The children were Regina’s older sister, Chaja Fajga, the oldest at 18, Regina at 16, Zelman, at 14, Aleksander at 12, Dina age 10 and little Kejla who was only 7, gathered around the large wood table covered with a crochet tablecloth, made by their grandmother years earlier, but no one knew exactly when. Yet, it was the “official” table cover for all-inclusive family dinners, which was that night. Everyone had to be in attendance to talk about the pogrom in Bialystok, where Regina and Chaja Fajga could have died.

They had a similar meal just last night’s the meal consisted of stuffed cabbage, holishkez, stuffed with meatballs, and served with sweet and sour tomato gravy. Also served was gołąbki, made from sour cabbage, pickled whole, and stuffed with rice and minced meat, simmered or baked in a broth of varied flavors, and served with either tomato or mushroom gravy. Lena always made two cabbage heads for the meals. She peeled into separate leaves and stuffed them before simmering them not in sour rye borscht, as that would make them too sour, but in a delicate mushroom broth. She also served knishes—flour or potato dumplings stuffed with all kinds of different flavors and then baked in the oven until the skin became crunchy and brown. Most frequently, they were stuffed with onion, chopped liver, or cheese.

Yes, her mother was an excellent cook.

As she shifted her thoughts to the issues of the day, she realized that every day, there was another anti-Semitic event somewhere in the region of Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, and of course Russia. Some events were just name-calling, but more and more were violent attacks of Jews leaving synagogue or neighbors suddenly ganging up on one family, trying to get them to leave their homes.

Too often, over dinner, Regina would share the news of the growing attacks with her family and tried to get them to consider moving away from Poland and possibly to Europe or even America.

When the family would object, again, she reminded them that Yosef had run into an anti-Semitic issue right where he worked at the leather factory. His co-workers, Darko and Lech, tried to get him fired by damaging his work products. It was a very difficult couple of weeks as they got fired, but Yosef and his boss worried about violent reprisal attacks. The good news is that the owner, while Christian, recognized Yosef’s superior skills and wanted to keep him in his business. He also realized that Darko and Lech would blame him for taking sides with the Jew and want to get back at him as well. It was a miserable situation, but the owner enlisted his son to find friends to walk both of them to and from the store from the train for several weeks, hoping after a while tempers would calm down.

As she turned onto Rakowiecka Street, she reflected again that it didn’t feel like three years had passed, but here she was walking to the Bund in the mild June weather in 1909, no longer a student, but a working woman.

She was often one of the first people to arrive at the small office that was fifteen minutes from her home at the corner of Rakowiecka and Kazimierzowska Streets.

Her life was getting a bit more exciting at the small Bund office where she was doing translation work. Leopold Frenk, a twenty-two-year-old man from Warsaw, tall and fit with deep brown eyes and wavy brown hair, had been working in the Jewish Labor Bund office in Moscow for two years after he finished his advanced training by the Bund. He was just back in Warsaw, after a three-year assignment in Belorussia and Lithuania.

Leopold had been in Lithuania the past week, so she didn’t expect to see him that day, but there he was at his desk.

Regina felt her cheeks flush as soon as she opened the door. No matter how hard she tried to act casual around him, her heart was always beating faster in his presence.

Aside from her political passion, Regina recognized she was finding herself very attracted to Leopold. He was so passionate and knowledgeable about everything. He was pleasant-looking, but it was his intensity that made her want to be around him and to follow him anywhere. It was so exciting to hear him talk, and she trusted what he said. He felt like a real mensch to her.

Chapter 2

The next morning, sitting at the kitchen table, Regina contemplated the waves of anti-Semitism sweeping the country. It was not just Poles who feared the Russians would come through their country, but Lithuania and Belarus as well. The news was troubling. The Russian soldiers’ rampaging through Jewish villages, killing, burning down stores and homes, and raping the women young and old, was becoming too prevalent.

Regina feared that if these events grew more frequent, the family would need to make some serious decisions about how to stay safe. She saw what the soldiers did to people who they caught. It was unimaginable to even think what they would do to her family.

Just then, Yosef kissed Lena on the cheek, something he rarely did any longer, as life was stressful and the fears had taken their toll. “I’m heading to the leather shop. I’ll be home before nightfall, of course,” Yosef said with a tinge of sadness.

Lena and Yosef had several discussions about the children’s futures and education. While Yosef was a skilled and talented leatherworker, he wanted something more for his sons. He and Lena were also paying attention to opportunities for their daughters to have a skill that would bring in money for the family as well.

The education in Poland was steeped in Catholicism and had originally been designed to educate those who would eventually enter the clergy. For others, higher education included a “secondary” status for those who could continue school past the seventh grade. And the advanced year was only for the wealthy and elite members of society and normally very restricted to Jews. For some of the wealthy Jews, separate educational opportunities were available through the synagogue for those who passed a test and demonstrated special abilities. Boys could spend time studying the Torah and hone skills that would support the family.

The house became quiet as the children left for work and to one of the few schools to continue their studies, as limited as education was for Jews. Much of their education was at home, reading from the classics at the time, the Torah and Yosef teaching them mathematics. Regina sat quietly in a corner chair with her head in her hands for a few brief moments away from the daily tasks from the cooking, mending, and cleaning that took up her sisters’ and brothers’ chores to help their mother. The past two days had changed everything the family used to take for granted as easy days where everything they knew and trusted was stripped away.

No longer did Regina trust her intuition that life in Warsaw would remain peaceable. Her heart fluttered at the reality that she could have lost her sister as well as fallen victim herself. Her heart began beating even faster, and her forehead broke out in a sweat. She wheezed, stood, and grabbed the back of a chair. Her family was in danger anywhere outside of Warsaw. Her determination to keep them close was mandatory. Only when they lived under one roof could Regina be sure of everyone’s safety.

She decided she would make the family more aware of what she was receiving at the Bund. Maybe they would take her announcements more seriously when she told them about the notices that came in, and she would bring them home and show them and they would see she was not just paranoid for no reason. She would wait for another family dinner and suggest to her father and mother that the family make some new rules to keep each other safe and work or go to school in Warsaw.

Regina’s family, the Anuszewiczs, lived in Mokotów, a quiet residential section of Warsaw south of the city center where they had a close and wide variety of friends. People knew the Anuszewiczs. Her parents had Christian and Polish Lipkas or Kipka Tatars friends. Lipkas were Tatars who settled in Lithuania and tried to preserve their shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. The Anuszewiczs’ friends, the Ratkewitchs, emigrated from what was then Polish Lithuania and were an integrated part of Poland. They had many Muslim friends who lived in the same neighborhood as them. They traded together on the market square. The Jewish Ratkewitchs bought their meat from Bashar’s meat grocery, where each month the Muslim owner invited both the Jewish shochet, who examined the cleanliness and made sure the kosher rules were observed and the Islamic imam to examine for cleanliness and to be sure that the very similar halal rules were also followed. Their Tatar neighbors, the Bogdanowitzs always shopped at the local Jewish-owned fresh vegetable stand where Lena also got her fresh carrots and cabbage.

Regina reflected that the Tatar Lipka community celebrated certain holidays under the Lunar calendar, such as Ramadan and the adoption of birthdays, which were not a common recognition, but several Lipka Tatar adopted it so their children didn’t feel left out. The community at large observed each other’s celebrations such as weddings, christenings, anniversaries, graduations, and birthdays together. They ate at each other’s homes. Yes, this is where they had to stay together. Close. The Jews were as an integrated part of Poland as any other religion.

Regina was sure that living in Warsaw was the safest place to be in Poland. If one had to be in Poland.

Regina pulled on a shall to accompany her mother to walk the several kilometers to the greengrocer for fresh vegetables, carrots, and potatoes for that evening’s meal. Lena pulled on her shawl to cover her arms, their boots were at the door to walk outside on the dirt streets, and Regina carried her mother’s bundle to carry home her purchases.

It had been an exhausting two days. As Regina prepared for her shopping, she saw her mother let out a breath and sit down. She put her head in her hands.

“Mother? Are you all right?”

Lena sunk down in a chair. “I’m just very tired. What if I didn’t shop today? What if we just have leftovers from yesterday’s meal? Surely, we have leftovers and some extra vegetables we could put together for tonight?”

Regina stood over her mother with her hand outstretched to take her mother’s bundle to carry groceries. “I can go for you. Just tell me what you want me to buy.”

“I’m too tired, Regina, to even do that. Just stay home with me. That is all I need,” Lena sighed. She removed her shawl and put down her bundle.

As Lena sat with Regina and they held each other, there was a knock on her door, then a voice said, “Lena, are you there? It’s Sonya. Lena?”

The words of her mother’s friends were welcoming. Regina was sure her mother’s friends were coming to see her mother to see if she needed something that was warm and comforting.

“Yes, Sonya, I’m here,” Lena answered as she went to the door. Sonya, a diminutive birdlike woman with large brown eyes and straight brown hair she wore pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. While her physical stature was small, she had a large presence in her warmth and caring for her friends and family.

“I just heard about the pogrom in Bialystok and thought of Chaja Fajga! Is she all right? Is she here?” she asked with a sense of urgency.

Regina went to the door and invited Sonya in. “Yes, yes