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Introduction

In 1995, Emanuel Tanay, a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Psychiatry, proposed to set up a newsletter featuring articles by the survivors who had studied at Munich University and other German universities after the war. He invited them to send in news and memories from their postwar years as students in Munich. 

The newsletter, titled I remember…, would reflect on experiences from more than fifty years earlier. 

 

My father, Adolek, responded by sending the following article, summarising his student years after the war. In it, he also recounts the remarkable story of a precious letter written by his sister in 1945 to an uncle in London. The letter never reached the uncle and unexpectedly found its way back to dad fifty years later.

 

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Written by Adolek Kohn

Melbourne, 1995

 

Dear Emek,

 

Your newsletter is a wonderful idea. It expresses the struggle, joy and achievements of men and women who came out of hell fifty years ago. 

 

In your Legacy of Friendship you write, very rightly: 

 

'After the war we had no families, no homes, but we did have each other. The Verband* was a bridge between the dreadful past and the uncertain future.’ 

 

I was the first Jewish student to have a child born in 1947. The Verband wanted to help me because they knew how difficult it would be to raise a baby under such circumstances.

that I would be struggling in trying to bring up that child. 

They registered our little daughter, Celina, as a student so that she could receive an extra food parcel from the American Joint Distribution Committee. In this way, she became the world’s youngest university student.

 

 This support was a great help to us. I was able to sell the cigarettes included in the parcels and use the money to employ a German nun to care for Celina while Marysia and I worked or studied.

 

This brief introduction leads me to reflect on the conditions we faced as young survivors.

We emerged from an existence that resembled Dante's Inferno, with almost no experience of life itself. We were young and needed the advice of family, the wisdom of elders, but we had none. We had lost our families, our homes and the foundations that usually shape a young person’s future.

 

 It was natural for us, coming from a shared background of suffering and loss, to get together and create new connections and support each other. It was a difficult time, a time of great danger, where the formation of a young person's character depended so much on prevailing conditions. The support we offered one another during those years shaped the people we became.

 

As I write these words, I reflect my own marriage and the factors that influenced it. Like so many others, we longed for the warmth of family and a sense of belonging. After the destruction of so many social and moral structures, we were at a crossroad, confronted with the danger of choosing the wrong road ahead. A single unexpected event could alter the course of a life forever.

 

On the first day after liberation by the Red Army, I found my sister, Madzia, not knowing whether she had survived. She introduced me to her closest friend from the labour camp, Marysia, who later became my wife. Immediately we travelled to Lodz in search of surviving family members. 

 

After five days in Lodz, I found my brother, Staziek, a hero of the Treblinka uprising, who had arrived there in February 1945 as an officer with the Red Army. Marysia found her auntie. My cousin, Janek Faitlowitz — my mentor and constant companion throughout the concentration camps — found no one. 

 

Two hours before our departure from Łódź in November 1945, Marysia’s aunt insisted that we marry. Marysia was twenty years old and I was twenty-three. We left Poland disguised as “Greek refugees returning to Greece”. We were a group of shipwrecked young people facing an unknown destiny as we arrived in Munich.

 

In Munich, I enrolled in the faculty of Architecture at the Technische Hochschule. Because we had no parents or in-laws, we had to support ourselves and our baby. Engineer Piekarczyk offered me part-time work as secretary of the “Union of Jewish Engineers with Degrees” in the American Occupation Zone of Germany. This meant we would receive another parcel with cigarettes. 

 

While we were still in Lodz, we knew that we had an uncle in London named Leon Kohn, but we did not know his address. My sister Madzia wrote him a letter and simply addressed it to ‘London’, hoping that it might reach the Red Cross and eventually find him. We never heard back and guessed the letter had been lost forever.

 We left Lodz to settle and study in Munich. 

 

The chain of events that followed led to an unbelievable coincidence many years later. 

The son of a friend of mine in Melbourne was a stamp dealer. In 1992, while attending a stamp auction in London, he purchased a collection of old letters along with some stamps. Because the letters were written in Polish, Yiddish and Russian, he gave them to his father in Melbourne to read. 

 

As he was looking through them, his father noticed the name ‘Adolek’ in one of the Polish letters. He knew an Adolek (not a very common name) living in Melbourne, and immediately rang him and asked if he had a sister named Madzia. 

 

'Of course, Adolek replied. ‘She lives in Israel.’ 

 

'I have her letter’ he said. ‘A letter written in Lodz in 1945’.

 

He was in tears because, in that letter, he got a sense of what happened to the Jewish people in Europe.

 

Nearly fifty years after it had been written, the letter returned to us in Australia — to a country where, at the time it was written, none of us could ever have imagined we would one day be living. 

Madzia studied at Munich University. In 1946, she left Munich on the ship ‘Exodus’ with other students heading to Palestine. She arrived during the War of Independence, joined the Haganah * and, after being wounded, spent a year in hospital. There she met her future husband, who had also been injured during the war. 

 

She later had two children, Anat, married to Rami, and Igal, and grandchildren, Guy and Yoav. Igal served as an officer in an elite paratrooper unit and fought in two Israeli wars.

 

Janek Faitlowitz left Munich in 1949 and soon after married Sabina, a well-known artist. They had no children, but they did have two beautiful dogs. Janek died in Israel around 1990. 

 

Staziek Kohn died in Israel in 1993. A surviving hero of the Treblinka uprising, he left behind a son, Dovi, married to Gilana, a granddaughter, Sharon, married to Paul, and great-grandchildren Tom and Amy. Dovi also served in two Israeli wars, and later retired as an officer of the Israeli Air Force.

 

Marysia, baby Celina and I left Munich in 1948 and sailed to Australia on the ship, the Eridan. I was unable continue my architectural studies and had to begin again from the start. This was the law in Australia. And so, I became a manufacturer. 

 

Today I have two daughters, Celina and Jane, six grandchildren — Anton, Justine, Yaakov, Sunny, Yasmin and Gil, and six great-grandchildren, Mia, Evie, Ben, Alma, Eitan and Yonatan.

 

Adam (Adolek) Kohn

Melbourne, Australia

 

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** The Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organisation in Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, before the establishment of the Israel Defence Forces.

 

 

* The Verband, or Association of Jewish Communities in North West Germany, helped Holocaust survivors rebuild their lives after the war. Supported by the American Joint Distribution Committee, it distributed food parcels, clothing and other essentials to displaced Jews in postwar Germany.

 

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Here is a copy of the letter and its English translation.

 

Translated from Polish

Lodz 29 VIII.1945

 

Dear unknown Uncle,

 

Although we do not know each other personally, you are still my dear uncle. After such an evil war, even an acquaintance becomes precious. You will no doubt be surprised to receive this letter from me. 

Uncle! It is true that you do not know me, but you are my father’s brother, and as someone so close to our family, I felt it important to let you know that I exist.

 

I am one of the fortunate few who survived the war. We have lost so many beloved family members. Of our large family, I have found only two brothers: Adolek and Stashek. Two other brothers died in the Łódź Ghetto from starvation and terrible conditions. One was killed in the Warsaw Uprising. Zygmunt was shot by the Gestapo. His wife, Carolla, and their three-year-old son, Dudush, survived by a miracle. We do not know what became of Ignas.

 

We have lived through hell. The six years of war were one long nightmare. Among many horrors, I spent five weeks in Auschwitz. I hope you know something of the hell of those death camps. I was there alone, separated from my mother and family. They were all taken away to be murdered. It is truly a miracle that, after such suffering, some of us are still alive.

 

 

We are free now and alive to see the moment of liberation we waited for so long, doubting it would ever come. We don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to begin our life again.

 

At the moment I am with Adolek, Staziek and his wife, Franka. Staziek married shortly after the liberation of Łódź. We must leave this country. 

 

Dear Uncle! If it is at all possible, I beg you to help bring us to your country. I would be very grateful if you could do this for us. I beg you again to take any steps you can, because we have no future here and no possibility of a normal life. 

 

With whole-hearted greetings from all of us, 

 

Your niece,

 

Madzia (Madja) Konowna (Kohn).