4 North Shore Towers Courier n November 2015 DIANA ALBERT: When you meet this smiling, petite woman in Building One you would never guess she spent her childhood years scrounging for food scraps to eat and rags to warm her bare feet. As a child of the Shoah her story, sadly, is not unique—except for the fact that she always thought when she reached the United States she wanted to honor the family that saved her life. And what a life it has been! Do you remember your early years? My birth certificate was destroyed, but I was born in Serock, Poland, in approximately 1932 with the name Doba Drezner. The Nazis invaded my hometown and we escaped to the town of Legionowo where my mother died in its ghetto. I was then sent by my father to Warsaw were I became imprisoned in the infamous ghetto and escaped under the sewer walls back to Legionowo where my brother Alter was later killed by a firing squad after being taken for work by the Nazis. Small but agile at the age of ten, my father decided that I must escape the ghetto in late 1942. He more than likely died later in Treblinka. I wondered around the countryside at great risk for almost a year pretending to be Catholic seeking shelter wherever I could. Finally, I found refuge with a wonderful Polish-Catholic family, the Gasiorowskis, in the small village of Nuna, who took me in despite the threat of the death penalty for those helping Jews. They treated me as their own. Thanks to having a “good appearance” (which meant I didn’t look Jewish) I didn’t have to stay in hiding anymore, I could pass as their farmhand. What was life like with this adopted family? The father, Lucjan, was an extremely kind man and although his wife did not want me to stay, for fear of being caught, she gave into his wish. They had four sons and my job was to take the cows out to pasture and do chores around the house. I went to church with them every Sunday, as a cover, and ate whatever leftovers they had despite the lack of food for all. My one pair of shoes had fallen apart and I was going through the garbage to find rags to bind my feet so as not to freeze. Lucjan was a protector and I have always thought of him as my “angel” sent from heaven. I realized how dangerous it was for him to put his wife, four children, and his farm in jeopardy but he always protected me. When bloody German/Russian battles in front of the farm ended with the defeat of the Nazis, I left the family to try to look for my father. I hitched a ride to town and found work washing dishes in a restaurant. From there I made my way to the Jewish Committee in Warsaw. Where did you live at that time? The Committee placed me in an orphanage in Czestochowa, and when that closed in 1948, I was placed in another orphanage in Krakow. I realized Poland was a dangerous place, even after the war. I knew I had four paternal uncles living in New York. With the help of a Jewish agency I contacted them. Eventually they were able to arrange passage for me to come to America. I was enrolled in a New York City high school and met my future husband at a dance. He miraculously had survived five concentration camps and was liberated by General Patton’s army while on a death march to Dachau. We had three wonderful children but never told them much about our part in the Holocaust. When the children were older I went back to school and earned a college degree. Years later, my daughter, Helen, found a collection of letters I had written decades earlier to Lucjan’s family but never sent because I had no address for them. Piecing these letters, together with documents from my husband, she donated them, along with our family and war-related artifacts, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. How did your granddaughter play a part in your returning to Poland after a 65-year absence? As part of her Bat Mitzvah community requirement, Hannah wanted to fund the restoration of the cemetery where generations of my family were buried and where we hid when the Nazis came to round us up. It had been desecrated by the Germans; the tombstones destroyed. Together with other funding sources the cemetery was restored and a rededication planned. Hannah was invited to speak at the reopening. Helen and my son, Dr. David Albert, were going and they insisted I join them. At the same time my daughter had reached out to many groups in an effort to locate what remained of Lucjan’s family. As part of our return, we visited Nuna where I was sheltered. To my shock and delight, we met Stanislaw, one of Lucjan’s sons, who still worked the farm he inherited later from his father’s estate. We had an amazing and warm reunion recalling our shared childhood. His memories coincided with mine and he treasured my unsent letters. How did you succeed in honoring your “adopted” family? A curator at the new Jewish Museum in Warsaw followed up on my story and induced me to apply to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I was so pleased and proud of the announcement I received this past July that reads: The Commission for Designation of the Righteous has decided to award the title of the “Righteous among Nations” to Lucjan and Anna Gasiorowski. Their names will be added on the Righteous Honor Wall at Yad Vashem. As I told my children, “We have a duty to remember.” She found the family that saved her life Dianna Albert reunited with the son of the family that saved her
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