Film Collection
Excerpts from an interview with Wanda Nelken-Załuska
Transkrypcja
After the Uprising I was hiding in Cracow. It was an idiotic thing to do to hide there, because everybody knew me. But it was the only place, a shelter given by friends, the only place where I could hide. In Cracow, in this small, bourgeois town, there were few people who agreed to hide Jews with fake identity papers. So in my fake documents I was called Zakrzewska-Nadolska, but surely everybody knew me in Cracow as I had graduated from the Jagiellonian University, so everyone knew that my real name was Nelken. It was due to my youthful irresponsibility to hide in this particular place where everyone knew me since I was a baby. (...) From the very beginning I tried as much as I could to save as many people as possible by organizing [fake documents]. You want to know how we got the documents. I was affiliated with the Polish Socialist Party and there was a unit which issued IDs. I was supposed to give the IDs to these people. I was more like a postman or a distributor than a person who bestows citizenships; we tried to evacuate these people, but sometimes it was impossible. (...) I started teaching religion so that the Rescued knew how to say a prayer if somebody asked them. I wasn’t a part of the Jewish community as such. I had to give the Rescued some kind of a weapon, thus the fake documents and the knowledge of [the Christian] religion and liturgy… (...) I can’t recall it today, but then, the most painful thing was to see the helplessness of the children, the helplessness of parents and the mothers who had to leave their dearest children in hands of this inexperienced girl I was at the time. It doesn’t matter whether you did right or wrong, you will always remember the eyes of that mother.