The Buzz ON THE BAY

Author Interview

A journalist’s search for a relative who escaped the Holocaust unearths a secret some want to forget

By Lynn Arditi

Hena Rozenka was 16 when gunmen burst into the farmhouse in Poland where she and her family had been hiding from the Nazis. On this night in 1944, the men carrying long guns murdered them all – except for Hena, who escaped. Journalist Judy Rakowsky deploys the investigative skills she honed during her years at The Providence Journal and The Boston Globe to uncover the secrets about what happened to the Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Rakowsky spoke with The Public’s Radio Reporter Lynn Arditi about her new book: Jews In The Garden – A Holocaust Survivor, The Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II

LYNN ARDITI: So Judy, as an experienced journalist you came to this project with a lot of skills and digging up court records and filing public records requests and finding people. How was the search for Hena di erent?

JUDY RAKOWSKY: Well, records aren’t really so accessible in Poland, even after things were much more open after the fall of Communism. But what I did activate was sort of a network of advocates and people that are, you know, working with academics…and eventually, I got this gigantic court file about what happened to this other family of cousins, the Dulas – it might be the best documented case of this kind. And it showed that 20-odd gunmen of various battalions in the underground staged this attack on this farm and executed these five people who were hiding under a barn for 18 months.

ARDITI: You and your cousin Sam ran up against a lot of reluctance from people he’d grown up with in Poland to talk about what had happened in their own village, at the hands of Polish so-called partisans during the Holocaust. Can you describe how that played out during your reporting?

RAKOWSKY: Yeah, so what was really confusing and challenging was that we were welcomed into homes of people Sam knew.

You know, people served us these incredible multicourse meals and they were so friendly. But then when the conversation turned to elaborating on this tip about Hena, people stared at their plates. People that Sam knew, you know, that were really close to when he was young. It was almost like there was something that they could not go near.

ARDITI: A lot has been written about the Polish resistance during the Holocaust. When you first started researching this book, did you find much that was documented about this dark side of the role of Polish partisans during the German occupation?

RAKOWSKY: No. And I also understood the very strong feelings that Poles have about their very proud tradition of helping the allies. You know, the Poles were the home army, they were heroes in many ways. And I want to be clear that I’m not painting this with a broad brush. But there were some groups and there was an umbrella of many, almost everyone was a partisan…It’s like you can’t find anyone who says they weren’t, you know, somehow helping the underground. Also, Poles saved more Jews than any other nation or any other group…There are more Poles honored at Yad Vashem than anywhere else… Yad Vashem is the Holocaust memorial in Israel where, you know, people are, they actually have to have very vetted curated examples of what they did to save Jews…But there was also this dark history.

ARDITI: So now that the book is out what’s the chance of somebody who lives in Poland now actually reading your book?

RAKOWSKY: Well, they can read it in English published in the US. And it’s going to be translated to Russian, Spanish, and Italian. But no Polish publisher has asked for the foreign rights yet.

The interview transcript has been edited. This article was originally posted on July 10, 2023. Lynn Arditi can be reached at LArditi@RIPR.org.