Marek Edelman - SKIF: Friendship with Stasia (17/145)

To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marek Edelman - Recollecting my parents (1...   Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: So this was SKIF. That's where I met Stasia. She was the most important person there, supposedly responsible for teaching and all those other things, and she told me once to do something, we were preparing some sort of exhibition, and she told me to take charge of organising this exhibition, and so that's how I made friends with her or rather she with me because I was a snotty-nosed kid compared with her, she was an important person. She was terribly poor, too. She'd graduated from the School of Fine Arts but there was no work, nothing to live on. There were four children there and they had to be provided for so she painted umbrella handles. I've already told you this before so why do you need to hear it again? You're bored by this. Then, when umbrellas became too expensive, her sister used to sew, she used to do alterations, a so-called 'patchworker' who used to sew patches onto garments, and so the two of them did this together. Then I joined them and I would unpick coats. The hardest part was unpicking sleeves because there was always a button on the sleeve, the shoulder was there and it was all filthy, black but I couldn't cut through the fabric because we needed patches so I'd use a razor blade to unpick all of this. I never went on to any older organisation because through the whole time, I was an instructor there so I was never in Zukunft. Theoretically, I was old enough to join that youth organisation but because I was involved in working with the children at Annopol, that's where I stayed. Today you'd call it a youth activist but then it was referred to as a representative, I was a representative in Annopol. That's what my activity involved. However, there are almost no friends left from those times other than Stasia because all of my friends were also in SKIF but after the war they all went their separate ways. Besides, the others were from wealthier families, for example, Majus had a bicycle, the only one in our class, that was something wonderful. And he had a telephone. We'd smoke one cigarette between four of us on his fifth floor balcony when we were in the fourth year. His mother was a teacher and during the war, she ran a children's charity called Centos, she was very active there together with a Zionist who was a really decent, nice guy. They took her from there and deported her. By chance, I was in their house at the time and from the balcony I saw them being led away. I don't know how it happened that I could see this. So that's the prewar era spent in this children's organisation and really all I have left of it is Stasia because all those friends of mine escaped, they left for the east when the war started. There's nothing more I can say.