Posted on 02/12/2004 3:09:26 PM PST by Carthago delenda est
In his Grand Rapids home, Jan Cydzik sat on a sofa facing the grandfather clock, his only compensation for the forced labor, hunger and beatings he suffered as a child.
In no way does it make up for the misery, but the money he paid for the clock was part of the $1,500 he received from the German government for all he endured at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
"Three years of slave labor," he said, his voice tinged with the Old World. "All that I earned for it is right here. Better than nothing. Better than kick in the ass. I said, 'I should buy something to remember.' "
He has nothing to show for the time he spent in a Siberian labor camp after the war, nothing for the stolen childhood, for the boy he never was.
"A hard life, hard suffering," he said. "That's 11 years wasted life, completely wasted."
He remembers clearly the day the soldiers came for him and almost nothing before that. He was 6 years old.
His family lived on a farm in eastern Poland, an area alternately occupied by the Russians and the Germans and now part of Belarus. During the German occupation, the family sheltered two Jewish brothers -- Schashko and Moushko, friends of his oldest brother -- and allowed them to hide in a crawl space beneath the floor.
By the time the German soldiers came, Jan's father, Kazimierz, a Polish soldier captured by the Russians, had been in a concentration camp in Siberia for some time. On that day -- in March 1942 -- Jan's mother saw them coming and knew she and her family would be taken away.
The soldiers searched in vain for Schashko and Moushko and gave the family an hour to pack their things.
"It was a terrible, terrible moment in the house," recalled Jan, now nearly 68. (His name is pronounced Yon, although his American friends call him John.)
"Everybody was running. Everybody was crying. I wasn't scared. I was little kid. I cried because everybody else cried."
He was excited at the prospect of riding in a truck. He'd never before seen a truck or a car. As a soldier lifted him into the back of the truck, Jan looked at another soldier.
"I never forget that," he said. "I remember it just like it was today. The one soldier was standing on the side, and there was tears in his eyes. Never forget it in my life -- never."
At a train station in nearby Hrodna, they and hundreds of other refugees were loaded into cattle cars. The cars were cold and crowded, and they were given little to eat but bread and water.
For days, the train rolled across Poland, finally pulling into Auschwitz, where many people were taken off. Jan and his family -- his mother Amilia, older sister, Zosia, and older brothers, Frank, Anthony and Henry -- remained in the cattle cars and continued into Germany. Along the way, the train stopped, and Jan's brothers and sisters were removed.
Near Gunzburg, the train again stopped, and the adults were ordered out, leaving only the youngest boys, including Jan. His mother cried, clung to him, begged the soldiers to let her youngest son come with her.
"Oh, my God, everybody crying," Jan said. Another prisoner grabbed his mother and, fearing she would be shot, begged her to let the boy go.
"They took my mother away from me, my sister away from me, my brothers away from me," Jan said. "This was scariest thing I live through in my life."
The train continued on.
At a fenced camp in a forest, hundreds of boys -- the youngest perhaps 5, the oldest 11 or 12 -- were unloaded. They were fed nothing but water and bread with a little lard spread on it. They slept on the ground.
When a boy would cry, the others would comfort him. "The kids explain, 'Nothing you can do. Stop crying. Your mom's not going to be here.' It was terrible, terrible, terrible."
Every morning, farmers lined up at the gate and took boys to live and work on the farms. Some took more boys than they needed, apparently, Jan believes, to spare them the inevitable.
Every morning, a truck arrived to take away the bodies of children.
After three days that seemed like an eternity, Jan heard his name called. "Janek! Janek!" He recognized his mother's voice and ran toward the gate, and other boys ran with him.
When they were separated, his mother had been taken to a farm, where she was to work. But for three days, she had cried until the farmer finally brought her to the camp to look for Jan. They didn't know where his sister and brothers were, but "Oh, my God," Jan said, "I was back with her."
He still chokes up at the long-repressed memory. He composed himself. "I can go on," he said.
They would spend the next three years working for nothing on a farm.
Two Russian men, Bill and Wolfka, and a Polish woman, Ann, also were forced to work on the farm. Jan's job, at the age of 6, was to tend the cows, making sure they didn't wander off. The farm dog, a mongrel named Rex, became his companion.
"Was wonderful dog. He love me. I love him," Jan said. "I pet him all the time. I talk to him. I sing to him. I cry to him, everything. He was my best friend, my only friend. He help me through. He comfort me. I talk to him just like I talk to a person, and sometimes I think he understand me."
The farmer, named Max, was a leader among the area's farmers. They called him "obermaster bower." He called Jan "shwina Johan" -- pig Jan -- and sometimes beat him for no reason.
"I was a kid," Jan said. "Call me anything. Just give me food."
He dug potatoes and carrots in the field and ate them, covering the holes, knowing he'd be beaten if caught. One day he ate a cabbage and stuffed two more under his shirt for his mother. As he walked toward the shack where he and his mother lived, he saw the farmer, panicked and dropped the cabbages.
The farmer laid the boy on the ground and began beating him with a belt. Wolfka ran from the barn and threw his body over the boy. The farmer picked up a chain and beat the Russian man until he passed out, threw water on him to revive him, then beat him again. Jan slid from under his protector and ran to his mother.
Wolfka was sent to work on another farm.
Eventually, whispers began spreading among the refugees -- "The Americans are coming. We gonna be free." -- and the farmer began giving the workers more food and making sure their wood stove was working properly.
"He never do that before," Jan said.
In late April 1945, the area was liberated, and two American soldiers brought Wolfka back to the farm and handed him a gun. In the farmhouse kitchen, Wolfka pointed the gun at the farmer. "I'm going to kill you," he said. The farmer sat at the table crying. Jan stood in a hallway and watched.
Wolfka began to cry. He dropped the gun and walked out. The soldiers took the farmer away.
In a refugee camp, Jan and his mother were reunited with Zosia, Frank and Anthony. They never found the oldest son, Henry, but heard he had escaped from the Nazis three times. The fourth time he escaped, they were told, the Nazis shot him.
The surviving family members returned to their farm in eastern Poland, which under the terms of the peace settlement, was then part of the Soviet Union.
A letter arrived from Schashko and Moushko in Israel, thanking the family for saving their lives. Jan's mother never responded, unable to forget the price her family had paid. The war had taken nearly everything from them: the sheep, the pigs, the horses, the milk cow. They struggled to eke enough from the little farm to feed themselves. Some years, the potatoes and wheat barely lasted until spring.
Periodically, Russian soldiers would come and ask Jan's mother where her husband was. "I don't know where he is," she'd say. The family didn't know if he was alive or dead.
In 1947, a package arrived filled with nuts, rice, raisins and other goodies. Jan's father had mailed it from Turkey during the war. It was their first indication he had survived at least that long. During the war, the Russians had freed him to fight Germany under British command.
The family later learned he was living in Manchester, England. Jan's mother wrote and asked him to come home. He declined. The Russians had sent him to a concentration camp before, he said, and likely would again.
Many times Jan watched as his mother, while cooking, stared into the fire, tears streaming down her face. He pretended not to notice but knew she was thinking about his father.
In June 1948, when Jan was 12, the soldiers came again and gave the family an hour to pack their things, told them they were to be resettled. "Bring warm clothing," they said.
"I know where you're taking us," Jan's mother said.
In Hrodna, they and others again were loaded into cattle cars. They began the long, slow trek across the Soviet Union to Siberia. They arrived in December and were put up in barracks, where three or four families shared a kitchen.
In the winter, the temperature dropped to 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
"Even the trees put their heads down, not happy," Jan said. "It's hard to describe. It's a terrible place to be. I don't wish nobody to be there."
Even in the summer, the sun barely breached the horizon before setting again.
Jan's mother was forced to work in a gold mine, Zosia and Frank in a sawmill. The authorities sent Anthony to an orphanage, and Jan would have been, too, but his aunt and uncle back near Hrodna offered to take him.
After six months, he made the long trip back across the Soviet Union. He didn't see his mother, brothers and sister again for five years until 1953, when, following the death of the tyrant Joseph Stalin, the government declared an amnesty, allowing the Polish refugees to return home.
By then, the Cydzics' property had become a collective farm. Jan finished high school and got a degree in accounting from a college in Hrodna. He, his mother and sister applied to immigrate to Poland, but three times the Russian government turned them down.
In 1956, Jan was sent to work on a collective farm in Kazakhstan, but after six months he escaped and returned home. A friend, a member of the local police force, warned him the authorities were looking for him, so Jan voluntarily went to Siberia, where he worked in a sawmill.
"People laugh at me, 'How you get here? You come on your own?' " he recalled. "I tell them, 'I probably be here anyway, but I be in prison.' "
A joke went around: In Siberia, there are only nine months of winter, and the rest are all summer.
When Jan came home, his mother was ill. She died Oct. 5, 1957. The day after the funeral, Jan was inducted into the Russian Army. And there he remained for two years, rising to the rank of sergeant, but always wishing to leave Russia.
His captain offered to write a letter for him to Soviet leader Nikita Khurshchev. Not many months later, Jan received a telegram from his sister, Zosia: "I will call you tomorrow night. Our papers have come."
In the fall of 1959, Jan, Zosia and her daughter, Mary, immigrated to western Poland, settling in the small town of Bytom-Odrzaski. He found them a small apartment with a bathtub and hot and cold running water. "I never had that before in my life," he said. "I never have a life."
He took a job in the stockroom of a local factory and worked his way up to production manager. Though still living under a Communist regime, his life was 100 percent better than in Russia.
One day in June 1960, his niece came to the factory. "Ja Ja has come," she said.
Her grandpa, Jan's father, by then living in Grand Rapids, had arrived for a visit. Jan had no memory of his father and harbored some resentment that he had abandoned them.
On the way home, "I sat down about three times," Jan said. "I just wasn't ready. I didn't know what I should do. Should I cry? Should I laugh? Finally I said, 'What the Hell, what happens happens.' "
When he walked in, his father, white-haired and diminutive, stood to greet him.
"My son," he said, "you are twice as big as I am."
"Ya," Jan said. "I'm like those trees in Siberia. They grow tall toward the sky."
"How are you?" his father asked.
Jan answered: "Dad, where do I start?"
Two months later, Jan and his girlfriend, Janina, were married, and his father urged them to come to Grand Rapids. In the autumn of 1964, they did.
Jan took a job at John Widdicomb finishing furniture, studied English at night, became a U.S. citizen, moved on to other furniture companies, sometimes working two jobs at a time, always bettering himself. Their family grew to five children, the last two twins.
"When they started coming two at a time," Jan said, "we decided that was enough."
In 1996, he retired from Steelcase.
June 7, 1997, he suffered a stroke, paralyzing his right side. A doctor told his family he'd probably never walk again. But the doctor didn't know he was dealing with a man who had twice been to Hell and survived.
"I said, 'You tell that SOB I going to walk out of this hospital,' " Jan said.
At Mary Free Bed Hospital, he lay in bed, exercising his muscles, and his therapists worried he was working too hard. On the day he was discharged, they wheeled him to the hospital door, and he said, "Stop right here."
He stood and walked through the door and to the car.
He's since recovered most of his strength. He and Janina live in Northeast Grand Rapids, with their children and grandchildren nearby.
His father died in 1974, his brother Frank in 1999. His sister, Zosia, still lives in Poland and his brother, Anthony, in Belarus.
These days Jan seldom talks about the abuse he endured, and there are some things he still won't discuss.
"I guess I just want it out of my chest," he said, "to tell somebody besides my family what happen to me, to tell somebody who believe me. I spent all those miserable years over there. All my youth go right down the drain, and nothing to show for it."
Nothing but the grandfather clock in the living room.
"I feel great," Jan said. "I love this country. I love this country more than anything else in the world. I do what I want to do. I go where I want to go. I have a dollar in my pocket and a smile on my face, and nobody stand behind me and say it's his.
"A lot of people don't know what freedom means. I do."
This is the kind of article that makes you want to kiss the American soil at your feet, in gratitude.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.