The Scroll of Esther

Irene Gottdenker Weinberg

Esther bat Nachman v Hinda

For her grandchildren, Danit, Adi, and Eran

     In every age, the Jewish people saw the echo of the Scroll of Esther and the Festival of Purim in their struggle to survive. Out of the darkness, "Layehudim Hayetah Orah v Simchah" for the Jews, there shone light and joy. For my mother, out of the darkness, there came the light and joy of not only surviving, but of creating new life.

      Purim provides the metaphor for my mother.

      You see, my mother Irene Weinberg, Irka as she was nicknamed, was in Hebrew, Esther.

      Esther was the name of public record for Hadassah. Esther was the name Hadassah used to save herself and her people. In the ancient languages of the Middle East, Esther was a pagan goddess, the morning star, Ishtar, Venus - but in Hebrew, Esther was derived from "nistar" [or] "Hidden" [in English].

By hiding her identity as a Jew and pretending to be a pagan on the outside, Hadassah, Esther becomes the Queen and saves not only herself but her people. In later Jewish lore, she is publicly the Queen, but in truth she is married to her uncle, Mordecai, the political figure and advisor.      You see, my mother, Irene-Esther, saved herself and others by hiding in plain sight.      Irene was the older child of Norbert Gottdenker and Helena Iger, born on January 25, 1922. A year later, her younger brother Karol was born. Even the city she was born in had many identities. Just four years earlier, it had been Lemberg, Galicia in the province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time of her birth it was Lwow, Poland, and now L'viv, Ukraine. It was a city of 110,000 Jews out of a population of some 300,000, the rest being Polish or Ukrainian.                                                     Karol Gottdenker (Irene's brother), date unknown
Helene (Hinda) was daughter of Nissin (Nathan) and Chaya Sas Iger; his great-grandfather was the leading rabbinic scholar of his day, Rabbi Akiva Eger (Iger). Norbert (Nachman), son of Koppel Gottdenker and Sossia Zarwanitzer, could trace his family line through his grandmother to the Kahana's of Sighet and a long line of rabbis through the Middle Ages. He was also cousin to William Weinberg of Dolina (then in Galicia and now in Dolynia, Ukraine- ed.), later to be the Mordecai to Esther, and marry my father. Norbert had been a soldier in the Austrian army in the Great War, as it was called, and had been captured by the Russians. Helen was from the border town of Podwolochisk, and was among those who volunteered to be allowed to look after fellow Jews who were ill or injured; that is how they met.                                                                                   Helena Gottdenker, date unknown

      Norbert brought her to Lwow where he worked as a supervisor for a lumber company's rail transportation system, owned by his maternal grandfather Moses Zarwantizer and his son Judah. At some point, he brought the family to Bolechów, a city adjacent to Dolina.

      A family acquaintance, Jack Greene (Grundschlag) knew them and wrote this:
      "The Family Gottdenker lived in our neighborhood. First in an apartment of Martin Bilinski in Dolinska street, and then up three doors up in a nice garden cottage.

      All of them were brunettes and good-looking. Irene's brother Karolcio commercial attended high school in Stryl in the 1937-1938 school year. Mother was a pleasant good-looking lady. Irene was a tall beautiful young lass, very long pleats."

      He added further identification of photographs in my mother's possession:
      "We lived in the same neighborhood as the Gottdenkers. At the age of ten to twelve years, we used to play together with Carol in the neighborhood and then in the school year 1937-1938, I attended together with Carol, a commercial high school in Stryl, traveling daily to the Stryl and back. Occasionally we used to do our homework together. Thank you for the photos you enclosed - it is of Carol after 1938. In the other picture, on the right-hand side of the photo is Irene and the girl on the left, her name was Ella Heftman. I was told she survived the war in Russia and visited Bolechów in 1990 for two days [and] then returned to Russia. The boy in the back of the photo, looks to be her brother Vovke. As I mentioned before, the Gottdenkers were all brunettes of happy disposition, and all Yiddish-speaking was the mother Gottdenker."

      "I remember Nachman as a tall, very thin man. I remember participating also in his funeral on a summer's day, I was at the time ten years old. I went to high school for one year from 1937 to 1938 with Carol before they moved back to Lwow." (Jack Greene plays a major role in the book "The Lost" by Daniel Mendelsohn [about] the Jews of Bolechów).

      His business travels often brought him to Vienna, Austria, where often he visited his relatives, the Weinbergs, who had settled [there] during the war. On at least one trip, he brought the family along, and the ten-year-old Irene met her older cousins, Benjamin and William, then in their early thirties.

From left: William Weinberg (Irene’s husband), Jonah Gelernter and Benjamin Weinberg on vacation before the war.

      Irene was skinny and a picky eater, which frustrated her mother. Next door there lived a large Polish family, so she had Irene sit with the neighbors' children; the neighbor fed each child a spoonful of porridge, and Irene opened her mouth to be like the others and ate.

      My mother had a little dog. One day it was very cold and she took pity on the dog, so she put him in the oven door. It was an old coal-burning oven and it was still warm from the previous night's cooking. She forgot about him. Later on, her mother went to the kitchen stove and lit the stove on the bottom. Soon, they heard a "pip pip" - it was the dog getting hot - and they pulled him out before it was too late.
 

      Her first tragedy struck with the death of her father, Norbert, in 1935 or 1936 from complications as a result of stomach surgery, apparently to treat cancer; he was just in his forties when she was just only twelve. He was the first of the key people in her life that she lost.
 

      In this parable of the Purim story, Hitler is obviously the stand-in for Haman; Ahashverosh in this account is represented by all the government officials of Germany and the conquered lands who let Hitler call the shots under the veneer of law.

      In September of 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and thereupon began the official start of WWII.

     Bombs fell on Lwow. Irene refused to go to the bomb shelter, a bomb hit the house but did not explode, while another bomb hit and exploded on the shelter. "Father is protecting me," she felt.

     As agreed upon with the Soviets, the Germans took over the western half of Poland and the Soviets took over the eastern half, supposedly as the protectors of the Poles. Lwow fell under the Soviets. Irene had to interrupt her studies and found work as a bookkeeper in "Trust", the largest department store In Lwow. She now added Russian to her trove of languages.

      Shortly thereafter, her second cousins came to stay, having fled from Austria on their way to the Soviet Union. It is here that William played the Mordecai to Esther, because from him and his brother, Benjamin, she learned first-hand what had happened to Jews in Germany, then Austria and Czechoslovakia, since Hitler took power. She understood that she would need to be prepared to use her wits to survive and, as in the original Megillah, never to reveal who she was.
 

      In 1941, the Germans invaded the eastern part of Poland and occupied Lwow.

      The victorious Germans marched in with bands and leaflets about liberating Poland from the Soviets and Stalin. Everyone went out to greet them, since the Russians had made themselves unloved by their harsh rule over the Poles and the Ukrainians. Jews too went out to the streets to greet them, because they thought naively that anything could be better than the Soviet occupation. Nobody wanted to believe the reports about what the Germans were doing to Jews; These were "fairy tales".

      The "fairy tales" turned out to be nightmares.

      Germans used the locals, especially the Ukrainians, who saw them erroneously as their allies, and called upon these former neighbors, friends and classmates to find the Jews they knew, pull them out of the crowds and deliver them to the Nazis or wreck havoc on them.

      Helena was caught in the dragnet and into a school building; the Nazis and their quislings set attack dogs on them who mauled the people inside. She was saved by a Ukrainian friend who risked his life to enter the building and pull her out (there were among the Poles and Ukrainians Righteous Gentiles who saved Jewish lives). Some 4,000 Jews were killed in pogroms at this time and 2,000 more shortly thereafter.

      The German regime was forcibly segregated all Jews. Irene immediately lost her job and her family was forcibly removed from their home at 12 Grundwalska without being able to take any of their possessions.

      Her mother was again caught and sent into the Janowska labor camp. Helena was executed by machine-gunning in a mass killing at the Piaski (sandy hills) outside Lwow; she was made to fall into her own grave. (This was reported to my mother by connections she had with people in the underground.)

      Irene was able to hide out in the dark and dank cellar of the house while the friend secretly brought her food to sustain herself with. By the summer of 1942, she had to vacate the cellar, as the Germans were beginning to hunt down Jews by use of tracking dogs.

      Survival now depended upon having a piece of paper that proved that the bearer was a Pole or a Ukrainian, not of Jewish ancestry. Among the false names she used was "Pilsudskowa", similar to the name of Poland's first President, Pilsudski. Later, she would use her jobs in various government agencies to get access to government stamps and forms, and with her art school training, was able to make the false papers look authentic.

      What she was able to do herself, she also did to help others survive.
 

Dora Iger, Irene Weinberg’s aunt, on the porch with her neighbor. Bolechów, mid-1930s.

Her brother Karol escaped with false papers to Buczacz to the east, and lived there with a Polish family. Local underground helped him and he brought food to the partisans. In the last days of the war, the Nazis rounded up every available man among the Poles to draft in to their defenses. At the checkpoint, they must have discovered he was circumcised and they killed him. (My mother for many years had hopes of finding her brother. This fact was reported to Tanta Dora to her contacts, and she never told my mother what she had known. Irene only found [out] about it in a letter she found among Dora's papers after she passed away thirty years later.)

      Her aunt Dora got false papers and found refuge with Irene in an apartment building. One day, Nazis came in a massive roundup of Jews to that is a building. They found a hiding space in one apartment, and the tenant's son came to the door when the Nazis knocked. They asked if there were any Jews inside. He said, "No Jews here" and the Nazis went away. They came back with police dogs, but instead of looking in the apartment, they searched the basement and then the Nazis left for good.

      Irene got false papers from someone who also got her a job; the connection was a German officer from Czechoslovakia, who was secretly a Jew who had passed himself off as Aryan to save his wife and brother-in-law after his own parents had been killed, and [he] used his position to help other Jews. She started as a nanny is a German family and then worked in a personnel department in a lumber office.
 

      At the same time, she was Identified and stopped on the street by a Jewish woman who blackmailed her. "I know you, your mother, I know where you live." Irene continued walking alongside the woman, and spoke softly and calmly to avoid drawing attention. She agreed to pay and had her walk in the direction of a building where some Ukrainian trusted friends lived. "Stay outside, and I will bring you your money," she told the blackmailer. She made sure that the blackmailer could not see who she went to for the money. She came back out, gave money to the other woman, but Irene knew she would continue to follow her, so again, she continued to walk alongside the woman till she came to a building she was familiar with. Again, she asked her to wait outside, while she picked up some personal items. This time, she slipped through a back passage to the adjacent street, escaping the blackmailer.

      She obtained new papers, kept her name Irene, changed the last name, and her birthplace as listed, and she knew that village had been destroyed completely in the fighting. One of her papers had her listed as a male, which she could not change, so she folded and refolded the paper until the crease of the fold was just over the word "male". A little bit of dirt and spit, and the paper looked frayed, and naturally torn just as that word.

      On the same day that she was blackmailed, Lwow was bombed.

      It was impossible to know the real progress of the war. It now became a day-to-day existence. Irene just lived with hope, therefore she survived. She told herself, "God forbid, if something happens tomorrow, I think I will still survive."

      She took the first train out of Lwow. The conductor of the train was the father of the same boy sent away the Nazis when they carried out their first round-up of Jews. She saw that he recognized [her], and she knew she could not take a chance. She got off at Krakow to the west, and began to search for information on a man (a half-Jew) in Warsaw who had promised to help her. She found the man's contact in Krakow, gave him an excuse about her story of why she was going to Warsaw. Even though his contact was half-Jewish also, for security [reasons] no one revealed key facts to anyone else.
 

      Was it easier to survive as a woman? "Yes, soldiers are always susceptible to a smile."

      One time she obtained residence in an apartment building used by German army officers in exchange for taking care of the apartment. Occupants were regular army officers supposedly but my mother knew that they secretly belonged to the Secret Police; They did not know she was Jewish, nor did they realize that she knew who they were. She was able to get Dora in, got her a fake ID (with Irene's picture on it) and fake employment papers in addition. She hid her aunt, Dora, in a closet in her own room, inside the apartment of the Nazi officers and she could only go out of the closet when the apartment was empty. However, they were at all times true "officers and gentlemen" and never touched Irene or went into her room.

      Even times of persecution had lighter moments.

      Once, my mother came back to the apartment, and could not find her aunt. She was in a panic, and searched high and low, and then went to the closet. As she was going through the clothes, a hand touched her from behind. My mother's heart dropped - it was Dora, playing a prank on her.
 

      As she fled towards Germany to get away from the fighting on the Russian front, she was caught, this time as a Volks Deutsch Field. Since she spoke German. Ukrainian and Russian, they put to work in a vinegar factory, part-time in [an] office, part-time in the factory washing bottles. Also she was put to work in a labor camp three times a week near the Oder-Niesse line to dig anti-tank trenches, to stop the Russians, first in Miszkowa, then Gleiwitz, Ober-Silesia. The tank traps failed, as the Russians circled from behind. Germanyss Wehrwolf (seniors drafted into the army) fled and fell into their own trenches.
 

      After war's end, she stayed in Poland for about a year. When the massacre of Jews at Kielce took place, she decided to head to Palestine (now Israel) and joined the Bricha (the movement to bring Jews into Palestine from the refugee camps at that time). The agents responsible for ferrying Jews had trouble believing that the beautiful Pole was truly a Jew; she had to prove what she remembered from her Bais Yaakov days, her Shema and other prayers. She made it over the mountains and across borders, pretending to be "Greek". When border guards stopped them, they would speak to each other in Hebrew, claiming they were talking Greek; the guards believed them and let them through.

Irene with friends after liberation, 1945.