I still think about the fact that at least three of my cousins (including Witold Andrulewicz) risked their lives at Augustów knowing that they would probably never get the recognition that they deserved. Just a few years before, another one of our relatives (Aleksander the son of Jerzy and Wiktoria Staskielówna Andrulewicz of Bosse) was betrayed by maternal cousins (whom changed their name to “Shackel”) in Chicago (They knew exactly why he tried to hide that we’re Jewish, and their outing of him got him persecuted by the Chicago Railroad Board. “44–JEW” clearly read in the “Payroll” section of his employment card, and his employment was connected directly to his naturalization).
Witold and the two other cousins who I have in mind (Franciszek and Janina) died during the Augustów “Roundup” (which was really the mass kidnapping and murder by the Soviets at Augustów), and Franciszek and Janina (both from Bosse) lost their own parents during the German Part of the Holocaust. Franciszek and Janina also followed in the footsteps of their parents, Wincenty and Marianna Sawicka Andrulewicz, both of whom were part of the Resistance whom fought against the Nazis. Part of the reason that I get angry about Holocaust denial regarding the Russian part of the Holocaust is because the Stalinists were as intent on Antisemitic ethnocide as the Nazis were; and entire lines of my family were unjustly and unfairly cut off (Neither Franciszek nor Janina had the opportunity to have families of their own, and Witold was murdered right where he grew up in Posejanka.)
While Poland also possesses flaws regarding its treatment of the Jewish community in Poland, none of Poland’s flaws stopped my cousins from risking their lives to stop the Stalinists from continuing the Russian part of the Holocaust—and my cousins were acutely aware that Poles as well as fellow Jews of ours were under the same threat from the Stalinists that the Nazis perpetrated. As one of our other cousins (Binyamin “Bolesław” Andrulewicz) put it in a letter to one of his brothers, “the Russian front” was as “horrible [of a] storm” as “Germany[, which, as he sardonically put it,] hosted [them] well for five years, so that [they] could not walk”.
Bolesław and his side of the family needed to hide on their own farm (in Orlinek) just to avoid the Nazis, and five of our other relatives are known to have died fighting against both the Germans and the Russians—and Bolesław made a point to distinguish us from “Poles” and “the Poles” without blaming them for the Antisemitism that Germany and Russia brought into פולין (“פה לין”), which means “here, dwell” in English.



