Nobody told me my grandmother was a Holocaust heroine

Luc Albinski – who had been raised as a Catholic – was shocked when in his twenties he found out that he was a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Until then he knew nothing of his Jewish heritage.

He was on a family holiday, meeting his American cousins for the first time, when they told him the story of his grandmother Dr Halina Rotstein, and his mother, Wanda Helena Albińska, who is now 88 years old.

“It was a big shock to the system for me, and obviously I spent time going through it all with my therapist. I had to come to terms with all the dimensions of my family history that had been hidden from me,” he says. “But then it was a wonderful discovery.”

It was around that time that Albinski heard that his parents didn’t tell him of his Jewish heritage to protect him from the confusion of being both Catholic and Jewish.

His mother, Albińska, explained that growing up, she never thought of herself as being Jewish. “I was treated like a Polish girl,” she said.

And until the meeting of the cousins, all Albinski knew was that “My Polish Catholic grandfather was picked up by the SS during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and sent to Auschwitz. He was there in September 1944 and then in October 1944, as a Polish Catholic, he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died on 28 December 1944. But I never knew about Halina and the Jewish part.”

However, once he knew the story of his grandmother, he believed he needed to tell the world about it. “Halina’s story is an incredible story of heroism under the direst circumstances. She was someone who dedicated her life to her patients and sacrificed the opportunity to escape and to be with her children. She decided that her duty lay in staying with the patients and going with them to her certain death. There are a few doctors who did this, and Halina was one of them. It’s an incredible story of heroism, and it needs to be told.”

Albinski is still telling this story 35 years later. He’s made a documentary called Nobody Told Me, which will be shown at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, 23 April, and in Jerusalem on 24 April to commemorate Yom Hashoah.

His discovery also culminated in him writing The Varsovian Covenants, a book which has been translated into Polish. Albinski explained to the SA Jewish Report that it was so important to make the film and write the book while his mother is still around and “for future generations, and in particular for my children so that they also know this history”.

His documentary has also been presented at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC), the Jewish Historical Institute, the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

His mother explained that she gave testimony for the documentary because “I find that my mother was the one who epitomises for me the most important thing in life. Courage, selflessness, and goodness. And I feel this is the greatest thing someone can do in their life, giving their life to others. For this reason, I say so, because I know that nobody knows about her heroism, in Poland or anywhere else.”

In the documentary, Albinski and his mother, JHGC Director Tali Nates, and executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, Dr Stephen Smith, tell the story of Rotstein and how she risked her life to save her patients as one of an estimated 1 000 doctors in the ghetto.

When the war started, Rotstein went to the hospital to take care of all the people injured by the Germans.

Wanda says that, “I remember she took all the wraps and everything from the house and cut them off to have bandages for the people. And when the Germans came, they threw us out of our house. Then they ordered us to put the yellow star on the person, and after that, everybody was supposed to go to the ghetto.”

Rotstein, who was pregnant at the time, had been working outside of the ghetto. She was forced to move into the ghetto with Albińska and her other two children as well as her parents and in-laws. The family lived in the basement of the hospital.

By 1941, a typhus epidemic was spreading in the ghetto, and doctors like Rotstein were working around the clock, while Albińska and her siblings were in the basement where their mother was working. They were living in impossible conditions and were malnourished and covered in lice and boils. They were also living in darkness and would see sunshine only when they went out to play in the yard.

“We were supposed to get out, but that wasn’t clean either,” said Albińska “The air wasn’t clean, but full of smell, a horrible smell, because the children used the toilet everywhere.”

Between 1941 and the mass deportations of July 1942, 100 000 Jews died in the ghetto from what they called hunger disease, otherwise known as starvation. Due to her commitment to the hospital and her patients, Rotstein would barely spend any time with her children. After her mother died from typhus, she decided she had to get her children out of the ghetto or they would die.

In September 1942, Albińska and her brothers were smuggled out of the ghetto with the help of the underground. They were taken to a friend of her mother, Dr Andrzej Trojanowski, on the Aryan side of Warsaw. While living with Trojanowski and his wife, Albińska and her brothers were baptised and given false papers.

In July 1942, the Grossaktion began. Between 265 000 and 300 000 Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, where most were killed on arrival. When it came to the doctors, they were provided a “life ticket” that enabled them to avoid deportation. However, Rotstein gave her life ticket to a nurse who worked with her. Rotstein was then deported to Treblinka with her patients when she was only 35 years old. Albińska would never see her mother again.

Albińska grew up in the home of Trojanowski and went on to study chemistry at university. She soon met her husband, Wojtek Albiński. They had an adventurous life, living in Iraq, Paris, Switzerland, Botswana, and South Africa.

Albinski explained that the process of making the documentary with his mother, and writing The Varsovian Covenants and translating it into Polish, had been most rewarding. “It’s very moving. I get a bit teary every time I watch it, and I’ve watched it like a hundred times. It just really pulls at my heartstrings.”