As Hitler was gaining power in Germany, my mother's father, Fishel, stated prophetically: "A Holocaust is looming, and the second tragedy will be that it will be the Russian who will save us..."
His prophecy was correct, although even he could not have imagined the magnitude of destruction which would be inflicted by the Nazis on European Jewry. In Poland, as in other Eastern European countries, it was indeed the Russians - the Soviet armies under Stalin - who liberated them. Poland, having been liberated by the Soviets, quickly became a puppet state of Russia, with a Soviet style government beholden to the Russians. At least there were none of the religious observance restrictions there, as experienced by the people of Soviet Russia. After all, Poland was a very Catholic country, and the religious freedom granted by the Soviets extended to the Jewry.
So far Stalin's infamous purges of all groups of people, including the mass deportations of ethnic communities of the Soviet Union had not included the Jews as a group. In the early 1950s that was set to change: A trumped up charge of conspiracy was launched against a group of Jewish doctors by Stalin's number one henchman, Lavrenti Beria. This was the beginning of what would be known as "The Doctors' Plot" This would be the beginning of a purge launched specifically against the Jews, possibly having them join the tens of millions of people already murdered by the paranoid and homicidal Stalin and his very willing helpers. As a five year old I heard my parents discussing the situation in hushed tones. This may have been the beginning of my Holocaust - the Holocaust I feared would eventually befall me.
It was a few months later, in 1953, that I listened in fascination to what was a regular programme on the radio, the "Moskwa - Warszawa" (Moscow - Warsaw) news chat programme. This particular edition was of a sombre nature - it was a broadcast from Stalin's death-bed. The evil dictator had suffered a stroke, and doctors were milling around, with any signs of life or otherwise being faithfully reported on the radio. Eventually Stalin was pronounced dead.
With Stalin dead, the incoming Soviet leader, Khrushchev, immediately executed his adversary Beria, and the Doctors' Plot was over before it had time to develop into the expected purge of the Jews. Had it succeeded, it is very likely neither I nor my parents would have survived it.
It was once again on the "Moskwa Warszawa" programme soon after that I heard how Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes. Khrushchev's "enlightenment" did not, however, extend to granting freedom to Russia's satellite puppet regimes. It was under Khrushschev that Soviet troops and tanks were soon on the move, mercilessly crushing the Hungarian uprising.
It was also at about that time, in 1956, that another uprising - much smaller than that in Hungary, took place in the Polish city of Poznan. My father was there at the time, attending an annual trade fair. My mother and I waited anxiously as rumours of an imminent Soviet intervention abounded. My father was lucky to get home in one piece, catching the last train out of Poznan just before the railway tracks were torn up by the rioters.
Khrushschev told the Polish premier to "fix it", or the Russian army will step in. The Polish army did "fix it", with, as I found decades later, many arrests and executions of the leaders of the uprising.