Stanisław Fiszhaut and Helena Lejman

They were brother and sister — two of the six children of Jakub and Salomea Fiszhaut. He — a dental surgeon, senior assistant to Poland's most celebrated professor of that specialty, owner of one of the most sought-after practices in Warsaw. She — also a dentist, wife of a cinema owner, mother of Jurek. They lived together at 9 Złota Street, in apartment number 6. The war divided their fates as it divided the fate of the whole family: one of them survived a leap from a train bound for Treblinka and a year of hiding in a bathtub opposite the Gestapo headquarters; the other left home on 8 May 1943 and never returned.

This account gathers everything that is known about them. Every fact comes from a source: from the house's residence register, from the notices of the pre-war press, from court records and registers of victims, from the catalogues of the Institute of National Remembrance, from a letter of a Jewish relief organisation — and from the memoir written years later by Iza Fiszhaut-Laponce, Stanisław's adopted daughter, given to us together with the photographs by Dr Mark Fishaut, nephew of the heroes of this story.

I. 16 Freta Street — Roots

The Fiszhauts came from Lublin. The father of the family, Jakub (Jankiel) Fiszhaut, was a prosperous Warsaw merchant — owner of a warehouse of ladies' coats and of the tenement house at 16 Freta Street in the New Town. There, in the family home on Freta, the youngest of his children was born. The mother, Salomea (Sura) née Czapek, came from a family whose support would prove priceless: when Jakub died in 1912, the widow and her six children were taken into financial care by her brother, "Uncle Max" Czapek.

It was a home of the Polonised Jewish intelligentsia — and a home in which medicine became the family vocation. The eldest of the brothers, Józef, born in 1893, became a master of pharmacy. Helena, born on 10 July 1900, and the youngest, Stanisław, born on 14 April 1906 — dentists. Henryk, properly Salomon Henryk, born on 27 August 1903 — a pulmonologist. Ludmiła, called Lola in the family, born in 1905 — a neurologist (from 1932 the wife of the psychiatrist Henio Zeldowicz). The list of heirs to the house at 16 Freta Street names beside them also Leon Fiszhaut, who ran the father's ladies' coat warehouse at 11 Miodowa Street, and the physician Rudolf Fiszhaut of 22 Leszno Street — a trace of the wider family; it was probably the sons of one of them who were the nephews Jasio (Jean) and Romuś, whom the whole family used to visit. The family memories preserved the image of Stanisław as a child gifted with an extraordinary ease of winning people over; Iza would record years later the French saying that fitted him all his life: "il était bien dans sa peau" — he was at ease in his own skin.

Stanisław first attended Stanisław Kopczyński's school (1911–1915), then the mathematics-and-science gymnasium of Tomasz Niklewski, where Heniek had gone before him. He passed his school-leaving examination in 1924. Medical studies then required Latin, which his school had not taught — he made it up in half a year, and for pleasure added Greek, which he recited to the end of his life.

II. 1928 — the Academy of Stomatology

In 1928 he graduated from the Warsaw State Dental Institute — the later Academy of Stomatology — and left for specialist training in Germany, then the most advanced country in the field. He returned as an assistant, and soon senior assistant, to Professor Alfred Meissner, a maxillofacial surgeon of world renown. Around 1930 he took charge of the Academy's surgical department; together with Meissner he published papers on operations for cleft palate and lip in infants. The 1939 register of scientific workers notes him briefly: "dental surgeon, senior assistant of the surgical clinic of the Academy of Stomatology, Złota 9".

III. 31 July 1935 — the Disaster on Freta Street

The family tenement at 16 Freta Street — with Jan Gąssowski's pharmacy and the "Moro" photographic studio on the ground floor — which the heirs had managed since Jakub's death, was struck by tragedy in 1935. On 31 July, at half past four in the morning, the superstructure and the third floor of the four-storey annexe collapsed; the fallen section comprised five apartments with thirty-four residents. The living and the dead were dug out from under the rubble; the building's administrator was arrested, and the co-owners — among them Józef and Stanisław Fiszhaut — were interrogated. Part of the press of the day reported the disaster in an openly antisemitic tone, blaming the "Jewish landlords" in advance.

IV. October 1937 — 9 Złota Street

In the autumn of 1937 Stanisław moved from the family home at 16 Freta Street to apartment number 6 at 9 Złota Street — the house's residence register, kept from that year and preserved in full, records his registration on 30 October 1937.

At 9 Złota Street he simultaneously ran one of the busiest private practices in the city. The family remembered his waiting room as a place where millionaires sat beside labourers: he took no money from patients of modest means — the rich, as he used to say, "subsidised" the poor.

The windows of apartment number 6 looked out just above the neon sign of the "Palladium" — one of the most famous cinemas of pre-war Warsaw, operating within the Złota 7/9 complex. In 1938 Stanisław appears — alongside his sister Helena, then still living on Freta — on the electoral roll of the District Council of the Chamber of Dental Surgeons in Warsaw ("Monitor Polski", 1 September 1938).

V. August 1939 — "I must stay"

On 27 August 1939 there was a knock at Stanisław's door: his patient and friend — the ambassador of Italy. The embassy was evacuating; the diplomat begged Stanisław to pack a suitcase at once: a visa was waiting, a place on the train with the embassy staff, and a hiding place on the family estate in the south of Italy. Stanisław refused with words the family remembered forever: "I cannot. If war comes, I must stay and defend the country."

On 1 September Józef and Stanisław were mobilised to the same military hospital and within a few days found themselves in the retreat eastwards. After 17 September, to their stupefaction, they stood face to face with the Red Army — and fell into Soviet captivity. Stanisław urged his elder brother to escape from the transport; Józef, an officer, refused, invoking the honour of the uniform. At a small station Stanisław simply stepped off the platform. On foot, by side roads, given lifts on peasant carts, he reached Warsaw at the end of October 1939. He never saw his brother again.

VI. November 1939 — the Baptism

From the first weeks of the occupation comes one of the most piercing traces in the house's residence register. Stanisław appears on the card of apartment number 6 twice. The first entry, with the Mosaic faith, was closed on 14 November 1939 with an annotation referring to a new entry — under which the same man, with the same date of birth, already figures as a Roman Catholic. In the remarks column the clerk noted the basis: a certificate of baptism issued on 8 November 1939 (act no. 424) by a Warsaw Roman Catholic parish.

Stanisław, whom the family remembered as a non-believer, was baptised in the second month of the occupation — like many assimilated Warsaw Jews, he tried to save himself this way. In vain. For the occupier it was not faith that counted but the racist Nuremberg criteria: "origin" was determined by the grandparents' records, not by a certificate of baptism. The converts went behind the walls together with everyone else — inside the ghetto there even operated the All Saints parish on Grzybowski Square, gathering baptised Jews. Helena did not change her faith. The dates in the register form a bitter bracket: on 14 November 1939 Stanisław was entered as a Catholic — and on 14 November 1940, exactly a year later, the same office deregistered him into the ghetto.

VII. The Year 1940 — the Noose Tightens

On the night of 18 January 1940 the Gestapo came for Stanisław at 9 Złota Street. Chance saved him: he was staying overnight with friends, because the curfew had not allowed him to return after supper. Instead of him the Germans took his guest — the barrister Natan Bialer, a childhood friend to whom Stanisław, when Bialer lost his apartment in the bombing, had given a room in his own. Bialer, together with several hundred hostages from among the Polish and Jewish intelligentsia detained in the so-called Kott affair, was soon murdered. His young wife, Zofia née Bałaban, did not know for more than a year that she was a widow. Stanisław looked after her as best he could.

In March 1940 his elder sister moved into the apartment on Złota. The residence register records her as "Lejman née Fiszhaut, Helena, dr of dentistry", at her brother's; she came from the family home at 16 Freta Street (apartment 34). Helena was the wife of Szymon Lejman, owner of a Warsaw cinema, and the mother of Jerzy — Jurek, but the register at Złota records neither husband nor son: Helena figures here alone, and we do not know where Szymon and Jurek lived in those months.

Their brother Józef perished in the spring of 1940 — one of the nearly twenty-two thousand victims of the Katyń massacre, murdered under the decision of the Soviet authorities of 5 March 1940. The prisoners of the Starobielsk camp, some three thousand eight hundred men, were shot in the NKVD headquarters in Kharkov and buried at Piatykhatky. When in 1946 his sister filed a petition in a Warsaw court to have Józef declared dead, she could only write that he "had been in the camp at Katyń" — the truth about the place of execution was revealed only by the documents handed over to Poland after 1990. Today Józef Fiszhaut appears in the Institute of National Remembrance's database of victims of the Katyń massacre.

In May 1940 a German officer-dentist requisitioned the apartment, the practice and the modern equipment brought from Berlin.

The third of the brothers, Henryk, made his way to Lithuania in September 1939 — and his road turned out to be one of the most extraordinary roads to survival of that war. In Kaunas the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, against instructions from Tokyo, was issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees from Poland in the summer of 1940 — more than two thousand documents that saved some six thousand people. With such a visa Henryk and his wife Pola crossed Siberia, sailed to Japan and in May 1941 reached Vancouver.

VIII. November 1940 — Behind the Walls

In the autumn of 1940 the Germans created the ghetto — a "Jewish quarter" enclosed by a wall, in which more than four hundred thousand people were crowded onto an area of less than four square kilometres.

The walls divided the siblings from Złota already at the level of registration. On 31 October 1940 Helena was deregistered "to 17 Sienna St., apt. 27" — to the address where, as the family recalls, their sister Ludmiła had secured two rooms. Two weeks later, on 14 November — two days before the final sealing of the walls — Stanisław ended up at 38 Sienna Street, where he lived in two rooms shared with the entire Bałaban family.

IX. The Ghetto, 1941–1942

Zofia's father was Professor Majer Bałaban — the great historian of Polish Jewry, honorary rabbi of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie. In the ghetto Stanisław worked without pay in a dental outpatient clinic: it brought a bowl of watery soup a day and momentary protection from deportation to the labour camps, while hunger and typhus killed, by the summer of 1942, about a hundred thousand inhabitants of the sealed district.

On 22 July 1942 the Germans began the "Great Deportation" — round-ups to the Umschlagplatz and onwards, to the gas chambers of Treblinka. By mid-September about three hundred thousand people had been deported. A work card in a German "shop" became, for a short while, a pass to life; Stanisław obtained in a single day, for ten thousand złoty, a card at the K.G. Schultz works on Ogrodowa Street. Zofia was not protected by a card — marriage protected her. That same day they were married, the ceremony performed by the bride's father: Professor Bałaban did nothing else that whole week but perform weddings, because a wedding could save a life. In September, during the "cauldron on Miła Street", the two of them did not report for the selection and survived in hiding, passing into the "wild", illegal population of the ghetto. In the autumn they moved in with the Bałabans at 42 Muranowska Street. In December 1942 the professor died of heart failure; the Jewish Council still managed to give him a funeral and a separate, marked grave, which survived the war.

X. 18 January 1943 — the Siblings' Night

On 18 January 1943 the Germans entered the ghetto without warning to complete its liquidation. For the first time they met the armed resistance of the fighters of the Jewish Combat Organisation — and yet in four days they deported to Treblinka and Majdanek some five to six thousand people, and shot more than a thousand on the spot. The bunker in which Stanisław, Zofia and her mother were hiding was discovered. Beaten, they were driven to the Umschlagplatz and loaded into a cattle car.

For months Stanisław had never parted with a strong file. Still on the ramp he bribed the guard watching the roof of the train to "look the other way". In the moving train he sawed through the wire in the car's little window. About twenty kilometres beyond Warsaw, Zofia jumped first. Her mother, older and terrified, caught her coat on a nail and hung outside the window. Stanisław, holding the frame with one hand, gripped the collar of her coat with his teeth and so — with his teeth and one free hand — positioned her for a safe jump, and then jumped himself. Battered but alive, they walked back to Warsaw by night along the tracks; on the way they were taken in for a few days, at the risk of his life, by the Polish caretaker of the former Jewish sanatorium "Brijus" in Otwock, whom Stanisław had known before the war. The destination of the train they escaped they learned later: Treblinka II, the extermination camp operating from 23 July 1942, in which about nine hundred thousand people were murdered.

That same January night also inscribed itself forever in the fate of Ludmiła. Since September 1939, when her husband's unit withdrew before the Germans, Lola had had no word from him and considered herself a widow; in the ghetto she worked as a physician of the Schultz works. On 18 January 1943 — the same day on which her brother was sawing the wire in the car window — she entered the ghetto on a special pass, summoned to a gravely ill child. The unexpected blockade of the district cut off her way back: for four days she hid in a cellar bunker together with Stanisław Adler, a lawyer and former officer of the Order Service who in July 1942 had demonstratively resigned from it, and with the physician Julian Lewinson and his mother, amid the sounds, reaching them from outside, of the ghetto's first armed resistance.

At the beginning of February 1943 they escaped in a way no screenwriter would have invented: on the horse-drawn hearse that carried the dead out of the ghetto every day. Adler in a gravedigger's cap, Ludmiła — in a doctor's coat, with her pass in her pocket. When at the checkpoint the gendarmes, weapons at the ready, moved towards the wagon, the driver shouted in broken German: "Alle Tote, alles kaputt!" — all dead — and whipped up the horses. On the "Aryan side" they hid first with the writer Zenon Skierski in Saska Kępa, then — until the autumn of 1944 — in a villa in Anin belonging to the Jaśkiewicz family, Ludmiła's former patients. Behind the wall of the hiding place they slept in shifts, guarding each other against snoring; they rationed water by sips. Freedom came with the entry of the Red Army onto the Praga bank.

XI. Spring 1943 — Helena and Jurek

In the spring of 1943, after obtaining false papers, Stanisław separated from his wife and mother-in-law — his "Semitic" looks, about which he himself joked bitterly, endangered everyone around him. The women found paid shelter; he chose life "in the wild": the cellars of burnt-out tenements, hiding places changed every week, food scavenged by night. In those same weeks the fate of his elder sister was being fulfilled.

Of Helena's fate behind the walls we know less — and every word comes from a source. Her husband Szymon, before the war the owner of a Warsaw cinema, perished in the ghetto. According to the family's account, it was in the days of the ghetto uprising — which broke out on 19 April 1943, when the Germans set about the final liquidation of the district — that Helena and Jurek got outside the walls, seeking rescue on the "Aryan side". They were caught by the Gestapo and shot.

A surviving court document dryly records the last certain trace: Helena "left home on 8 May 1943 and was arrested by the Gestapo". It was the day on which, in the bunker at 18 Miła Street, the staff of the uprising perished together with Mordechaj Anielewicz; a week later Jürgen Stroop ordered the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie blown up as a sign that "the Jewish quarter in Warsaw has ceased to exist".

XII. A Year in a Bathtub

In the autumn of 1943 word reached Stanisław that Zofia and her mother had been denounced and murdered. He never learned the circumstances of the denunciation.

After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August 1944 the Germans began methodically burning and blowing up the city. As the ring tightened, Stanisław and two companions decided on a desperate step: they fought their way thirty blocks to a tenement burnt out back in 1939 — standing directly opposite the Gestapo headquarters, and therefore, as he reasoned, long since searched and of interest to no one. On the fourth floor a fragment of a bathroom had survived: two walls, a piece of roof, a bathtub and — because the Germans across the street had not had their water cut off — a working tap. For nearly four months the three men lay motionless by day in the bathtub covered with a dark sheet, living off a sack of flour and whatever could be caught in the ruins. In mid-January 1945, half dead from hunger and convinced that the Germans had won the war, they went downstairs to be done with hiding — and walked straight into a dumbfounded Red Army patrol. The Russian doctors, themselves former prisoners, knew that feeding an extremely starved man his fill kills — and that night they saved them a second time, rationing food by the spoonful. In the ruins of left-bank Warsaw, destroyed in more than eighty per cent, hundreds of such people in hiding lived to see the liberation — they were later called the "Robinsons of Warsaw".

XIII. 1945–1948 — Return to Life

In the winter of 1945, already in uniform, Ludmiła took charge of the neurology ward of the Lublin military hospital — and it was on her ward that her utterly exhausted brother came to. Soon afterwards the Red Cross notice boards, posted all over Europe for families searching for one another, brought unbelievable news: someone had seen Henio Zeldowicz in Palestine, in the uniform of the British army. The husband who had thought her dead was alive — he had passed the trail of Anders' Army, including the Italian campaign at Monte Cassino.

For half a year Ludmiła mercilessly drove her brother through rehabilitation until his strength returned. Both returned to Warsaw still in 1945: she to organise the neurological clinic of the reviving medical faculty, he — as Professor Meissner's closest collaborator — to rebuild the ruined Academy of Stomatology, carting surviving equipment from the Recovered Territories and working as a dentist, among others in the departmental health service.

Ludmiła was closing in that time the matters no one else could settle any more. In 1946 she filed petitions in a Warsaw court to have her siblings — Józef and Helena — declared dead. On 4 May 1946 she left Warsaw for Prague to meet her recovered husband, carrying in her luggage the typescripts entrusted to her by Adler — the chronicle of the ghetto written in hiding. Adler himself stayed in Poland; shaken by the wave of post-war antisemitism, he took his own life on 11 July 1946.

In Gdańsk, where he had gone to fetch equipment for the Academy, Stanisław met Helena Longina "Lena" née Milewicz-Rygalska — a soldier of the Home Army, the widow of an executed Home Army man. During the occupation Lena and her family had hidden a Jewish girl brought out of the ghetto — Iza. In 1946 Stanisław and Lena married; in 1948 they formally adopted Iza. It is she who, as Iza Fiszhaut-Laponce, would write down years later the history of the family to which this account owes so much.

XIV. 4 January 1949 — the "Batory"

The decision to leave ripened as the Stalinist noose tightened. On 3 January 1949 the Warsaw office of the Joint wrote to the New York organisation for aid to immigrants: Dr Fiszhaut of Warsaw, "one of the best dentists in Poland", sails the next day from Gdynia aboard the "Batory" via New York — carrying twelve tons of luggage: dental equipment. At the end of January 1949 Stanisław, Lena and Iza stepped off the train in Vancouver, where Henryk and Pola were already waiting, along with Ludmiła and her husband — the psychiatrist Henio Zeldowicz, a physician of Anders' Army and a veteran of the Italian campaign.

XV. Vancouver

Canada did not recognise his diploma. The man who had taught Warsaw students root canal treatment and operated on cleft palates in newborns had to sit down at the desks again from the beginning. Only Tufts University in Boston appreciated his qualifications, crediting him with half the course. When the Jewish charitable organisations refused to help, the loan for his studies was granted by Vancouver's poor Polish community; he repaid it to the last penny within two years of his diploma. Lena in that time, not knowing a word of English, cleaned hotel rooms to keep the household.

In 1952 he obtained his American diploma, passed the examinations of the province of British Columbia and opened a practice in Vancouver to which the "new Canadians" flocked — Polish, Italian, Ukrainian, Russian and German immigrants, with whom he could speak in their own languages. His home became the heart of Polish social life in the city. Around 1954 his daughter Ewa was born. Around 1958 Stanisław noticed in himself a small, disquieting symptom; the diagnosis was made by his neurologist sister: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. For seven more years he worked and — as Iza remembered — never once complained. He died on 27 October 1965 in Vancouver; he rests in the cemetery in New Westminster.

Henryk practised in Vancouver as a pulmonologist into late old age; he died in October 1989. His son Mark — born in America shortly before his uncle's arrival — has been a paediatrician for nearly fifty years; it is to him that we owe the family photographs, documents and Iza's memoir. Ludmiła and Henio Zeldowicz practised in Vancouver for decades as neurologist and psychiatrist; both lectured at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia, and in 1976 Ludmiła co-created Vancouver's first symposium on the Holocaust for school youth. It was in Vancouver, too, that she closed an obligation from years before: she brought about the translation and publication of Adler's memoirs, "In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940–1943" (Yad Vashem, 1982) — handing a copy to the psychiatrist Robert Krell, she said: "Robert, this is my story too." She died in 1991; a university research prize today bears her and her husband's name. Lena, who nursed her husband to his last breath, outlived him by six years.

XVI. Remembrance

They moved out of 9 Złota Street under compulsion in November 1940 — and never returned here. On 21 August 2026 the Stones of Remembrance of Stanisław Fiszhaut and Helena Lejman née Fiszhaut will be set before the house at Złota 7/9. Passing them, it is worth remembering that a whole epoch lived at one address: a doctor who accepted baptism in the vain hope of rescue, and in January 1943 tore himself, his wife and her mother out of a transport to Treblinka; his sister, who left home on 8 May 1943 and did not return; a brother murdered with a shot to the back of the head in Kharkov; a brother saved by the signature of a Japanese consul; and a sister who, in a Lublin hospital, set one of the last Robinsons of Warsaw back on his feet.

Timeline

A Note on Sources

This account is based exclusively on sources: the residence register of the house at 9 Złota Street from 1937–1940 (State Archive in Warsaw); the family memoir of Iza (Fiszhaut) Laponce and the accounts of Dr Mark Fishaut; the notices of "Dobry Wieczór! Kurier Czerwony" (1938) and the "Gazeta Żydowska" (1940); the "Gazeta Lwowska" of 1 August 1935 and the photographs of the National Digital Archives from the disaster at 16 Freta Street; "Monitor Polski" no. 62 of 15 July 1946 (files Zg. 302–306/46 of the Municipal Court in Warsaw) and the register of cases for declaration of death (USHMM RG-15.270); the Institute of National Remembrance's database of victims of the Katyń massacre; the IPN catalogues; the memoirs of Stanisław Adler, "In the Warsaw Ghetto 1940–1943" (Yad Vashem 1982), and of Helena Szereszewska, "Krzyż i mezuza"; the getto.pl database; the accounts of Betty Keller and the note on Ludmiła Zeldowicz at abcbookworld.com; the AJDC letter of 3 January 1949; "The Boston Sunday Globe" of 10 June 1951; and the documentation of Henryk Fiszhaut's refugee road (including "Flight and Rescue", USHMM). Family photographs — from the Fishaut family collection, by courtesy of Dr Mark Fishaut.

Opracowanie w ramach projektu upamiętnienia mieszkańców kamienicy — prepared as part of the project commemorating the residents of the building at 7 and 9 Złota Street in Warsaw · www.zlota7-9.com