“Warsaw, 7 May 1943
I am Calek Perechodnik, an engineer of agronomy, a Jew of average intelligence... This is not a literary work; I have neither the ability nor the ambition to attempt one. It is not a history of Polish Jewry. It is a memoir of a Jew and his family. To be exact, this is a confession about my lifetime, a sincere and true confession. Alas, I don't believe in divine absolution, and as far as others are concerned, only my wife could – although she shouldn't – absolve me. However, she is no longer among the living… Please consider this memoir to be my deathbed confession. I harbor no illusions. I know that sooner or later I will share the fate of all the Jews of Poland.” Calek Perechodnik
The Perchodniks were a wealthy Jewish family from Otwock, a small town near Warsaw, Poland. The father of the family, Oszer, established and ran a successful millinery factory. His sons, Pesach and Calek, were trained as engineers at the University of Toulouse in France. In 1938 Calek married Ana-Chana (Anka) (née Nusfeld), whose family owned the local Oaza Cinema. Their only daughter Athalie (Otuszka) was born in 1940. After the German occupation, Calek initially refused to join the Judenrat apparatus. Later, in order to avoid deportation to a labor camp, he joined the Jewish police in the ghetto. Calek organized a hiding place for his two-year-old daughter, but delayed moving her there. According to the messages he received, he believed his family would be protected by his position.
The chronicle, diary and will are rare documents that reflect the tragedy of the Jewish individual during the Holocaust:
26-year-old Calek considered himself responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter, a loss he claimed to have taken place “as a result of German barbarity, and, to a considerable extent, on account of my recklessness.”
During the Aktion of August 1942, Anka and Otuszka, as well as Calek's sister Rachel Frojnd (née Perechodnik) were deported to Treblinka, where they were murdered.
In December 1942, Calek went into hiding with his parents. Their hideout was located in the Polish quarters of Warsaw, outside of the ghetto. Oszer Perechodnik, whose appearance matched the stereotyped "Aryan" features, lived openly under a false identity in order to provide for his wife Sarah and son Calek (Calek's older brother Pesach had fled to the USSR). Oszer was captured and murdered in September 1943. Sarah and Calek remained in hiding in Warsaw, but were both killed during the German suppression of the Polish uprising, in October 1944, shortly before liberation. The exact circumstances of their deaths are still unknown.
The chronicle presents Calek’s account of life in the Otwock ghetto and its liquidation. It was written in hindsight, from his hiding place in Warsaw, between May and August 1943, and entrusted to a Polish lawyer who assisted the family. Calek subsequently resumed his writing and kept a diary, in which, during the following year, he documented his life in hiding on an ongoing basis. Shortly before his death, he gave the diary to a Polish woman who had worked in the family home before the war, together with his will. The will survived her journey to the labor camps in Germany and back to Poland, and thus came into the hands of Calek’s older brother Pesach, the only member of the immediate family who survived the war. It was Pesach who, upon this discovery, took steps to trace and retrieve Calek’s accounts of his experiences, and, as early as the 1940s, undertook the task of fulfilling his brother’s legacy and having them published as a book. The book was finally published in Israel and abroad during the 1990s, bearing the title The Sad Task of Documentation: A Diary in Hiding (in Hebrew) or Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman (in English).
If the chronicle is a monument to Anka and Otuszka Perechodnik – sealed symbolically on 19 August, the anniversary of their deportation – the will, documents and photographs recently added to this collection constitute this monument’s foundations.
They place the collection within context: the documentation of the prewar life and the last wishes of a young Jew who felt his chances of survival diminishing. Asher Reshef, the son of Pesach Perhodnik who submitted the material to Yad Vashem, expressed his gratitude that "all the documents are now together. I knew where everything was: Calek’s diary and his will.
"My father was a practical person: Having the diary published was crucial to him. He really wanted us to know [what went on there]. As far as I am concerned, this is my history."
Since the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign began over a decade ago, 14,850 people have donated some 338,600 items, including 198,500 documents, more than 129,100 photographs, 5,885 artifacts, 800 works of art and some 210 original films. Even during the pandemic, representatives of Yad Vashem continue visiting Holocaust survivors or their family members in their homes in accordance with Health Ministry directives, in order to gather Holocaust-era personal items. To schedule a meeting in Israel: +972-2-644-3888 or collect@yadvashem.org.il.
Yad Vashem runs the “Gathering the Fragments” campaign with the support of Israel’s Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage.
The author is a researcher in the Collections and Registration Section, Archives Division.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 97.
