Lena Goldstein hid under German uniforms and used her wits to survive the Holocaust in the Warsaw ghetto. Photo / Supplied, Sydney Jewish Museum
When the Nazi soldiers came to take her away to Treblinka camp and be gassed, Lena Goldstein managed to hide under a pile of German uniforms in a laundry.
It wasn't the first or last time Lena had tricked the Nazis or watched them take someone she loved off to the extermination camps.
But the day remains seared in her mind, and as she tells her story, having just celebrated her 100th birthday in Sydney, it is with a freshness and an urgency to ensure the atrocities are not forgotten.
In the early 1940s in the Warsaw ghetto, Lena — then known as Lena Midler — was in her early 20s, and her family had been uprooted by the rise of Hitler.
Lena's mother and banker father had been forced to run a laundry for the German war machine, washing soldiers' uniforms.
Lena had been illegally in the ghetto and secretly helping her parents who earned no money, just one bowl of cabbage soup apiece every 24 hours.
Lena remembers the soldiers' sinister arrival in the ghetto for the mass deportations they called "Aktions" that were "always on a Jewish holiday".
On this occasion, Lena and an old Jewish man, who was also illegally in the ghetto, hid under the uniforms.
The Nazis rounded up a group of Jews and split them into two groups.
Lena's parents, Usher and Gitla Midler, were ordered into different groups.
"My mother was sent to the left, my father on the right," Lena says. "My mother was taken away.
"She was gone. I took over my mother's job."
Lena's parents had been caring for the old Jewish man they hid, her father dividing their meagre rations of two bowls of soup — "if you were lucky, a cabbage leaf, if you were extremely lucky, a piece of potato" — into three portions.
But on the next "action", on the eve of Passover, the Nazis came again, and her father was sent to the left and Lena to the right.
Lena knew what that meant and ran after her father but was stopped by a soldier with a whip.
"I didn't want to live without my parents," she says.
"I was beaten up and dragged back to the laundry. My father was gone and the old man was gone."
By that stage, a handful of Jewish deportees had managed to escape Treblinka, and the ghetto knew it for the notorious death camp it was — not a "work camp" as portrayed by Hitler's army.
As she tells her story, from the comfort of an aged home in Sydney's eastern suburbs, Lena muses on "how you never know … why am I alive today when they are all gone?"
But as her story emerges, it becomes clear that a little luck and a lot of quick-wittedness saved Lena Midler from extermination.
The Midlers had been a comfortably-off family in the Polish city of Lublin when — before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 — the Polish government had begun enacting official anti-Semitism.
From 1935, Jews were limited from professions such as medicine, banking and journalism.
Lena managed to enter legal studies at university, but when the Polish authorities began segregating Jewish students, violence broke out in the lecture halls.
Lena's boyfriend, Simon Rosenkranz, went to France to study engineering, and she was accepted in 1939 to study in Brussels.
"But in 1939, Hitler had different plans for me," she says.
After war broke out, Lena's brother Matys went to Brest, just over the border between Poland and Russia.
She later found out Matys married, had a 2-day-old daughter and had paid a man to smuggle his young family from the Brest ghetto to safety.
"The smuggler killed all three of them in the forest," she says.
In Warsaw, Lena's boyfriend Simon returned and "got a very nice job in a factory making weapon parts".
"They only accepted engineers and watchmakers," Lena says.
Simon asked Lena's parents for her hand in marriage, an act she said "was not only a mater of love, it was a matter of keeping someone safe".
"My parents were very happy, except I did not agree with it," she says.
"My sister had gone to Russian-occupied Poland. My brothers were gone. I said no."
It was a fateful decision.
In one of the Nazi's "Aktions", the entire workforce of the weapons factory was sent off to Treblinka, and Lena never saw Simon again.
Lena was recruited by the resistance movement in the Warsaw ghetto to fight against the Germans and assisted fellow Jews in the struggle for survival.
She stole uniforms and light bulbs, which were filled with kerosene and used as molotov cocktails against German troops.
But after her mother and then her father were taken from her, and with the Warsaw ghetto more than decimated from 450,000 people to 35,000, Lena decided death would be okay.
"I thought if I have to die, tomorrow is Passover. I got myself dressed and went for a walk," Lena says.
Passage to and from the ghetto was not permitted and punishable by death.
"You were shot dead, no questions asked. I just wanted to go to be killed by them," Lena says.
Instead, a series of extraordinary events happened.
As Lena walked past two German guards, they called her over and offered her a cigarette and then a packet to give to her boyfriend.
When Lena told the guards her boyfriend was no longer alive, the soldiers told her to come back in a few days with her hair bleached so she didn't look so Jewish, and they would let her through.
Lena was full of admiration for the soldiers but wondered: "Why should they take chances and risk their lives for me? … I haven't got any money."
When she returned home, a slip of paper was under the door with a note from the relatives of the old man her father had hidden and fed in the laundry.
The note suggested her father could come and join them in a hiding place they had for four people, with one space spare.
Lena decided she should seek out her other remaining brother who was hiding in another part of the Warsaw ghetto.
She wanted to tell him about "something unheard of" — the German guards' offer to help her, even though she had decided not to take up their offer.
No one was allowed out on the street, so Lena had to reach her brother through a series of cellars and attics.
Her brother told her to take up the guards' offer.
"He said, 'I can't help you, and you can't help me. Everybody here will probably disappear. There won't be anyone to confirm what went on here. We are needed as eyewitnesses'," Lena says.
"He convinced me that was what I can do for all the people who perish.
"I came back and waited for the day for me to cross to the Aryan side and join [the old Jewish man's family]."
For the next 18 months, Lena and three others lived in a tiny bathroom, hiding in one of Warsaw's richest suburbs.
A non-Jewish caretaker of an apartment building allowed them to hide as they paid him with money and cash one of them had found abandoned in a ruined building.
When the Germans came periodically to inspect the building, the caretaker would press a buzzer that sounded in the bathroom and the four would have to hide in an even smaller cupboard with a false door.
One of Lena's bathroom companions had been taken to Treblinka after his wife and daughter had been taken there and gassed.
He escaped, but suffered nightmares when he slept.
Lena and the two others had to pull him awake with a string around his wrist to prevent the sound of his screaming from alerting residents of the apartment building.
Their tenure in the bathroom came to an end with the Warsaw Uprising from July 31, 1944, led by the Polish resistance to take advantage of the German retreat as the Russian army advanced.
Lena and her bathroom cohorts had some luck.
They met a Polish peasant who showed them a bunker, "a hole in the earth" the size of a small dining room for nine of them to share.
Lena's diary from the time records the men built a mezzanine for five people to sleep on hay beds, and Lena and her companions slept on old car seats downstairs.
Two bricks formed a stove, and a hole with a bucket was the toilet.
"There was not room to walk. We were confined to sitting or lying," Lena says.
The Polish Uprising was meant to last a few days, with the Soviet army bolstering the Polish forces, but they did not arrive.
The Polish resistance was forced into an intense two months of street fighting with the Germans who defeated them and then razed Warsaw in reprisal.
Initial jubilation gave way to food shortages and starvation. Lena and her bunker mates, like many in the city, lived on barley from Warsaw's abandoned breweries.
In the bunker, conditions became unbearable.
"We were not allowed to wash. We didn't even have a curtain," Lena says.
"We were all trying not to go to the toilet. As a result, most of us got haemorrhoids.
"The situation was very bad. Six months of this."
After a while the upstairs people on the mezzanine, Lena says, felt they would rather die than live like that and were at risk of disclosing their secret bunker to the enemy.
"We didn't know what to do to keep them quiet, so I started writing 'Bunker Weekly', a satirical newspaper."
A page from the first edition of Bunker Weekly, translated from Lena's original Polish and dated November 7, 1944, says the newspaper cost "1 cigarette".
It reads, "We present to you dear readers the first edition of our bunker newspaper.
"Our task will be to inform you about all events of interest to the citizens of our small but stormy country.
"As our paper progresses we shall also introduce an advertisement section.
"Even now our [newspaper] looks very promising as it has the distinction of being the only newspaper in the world read by all citizens, without exception, irrespective of religion, gender, nationality age and education.
"The only temporary problem is the chronic shortage of paper, which has a negative influence on the aesthetics of its external appearance …"
Lena's humour worked. Even in the straitened circumstance of the bunker, with the resistance and the Germans warring outside, peace returned.
"Instead of them being angry, when I read it they were laughing and they stopped threatening us," Lena says.
The end of World War II was still nine months away, but Warsaw was almost completely destroyed by the time the Germans were forced to flee in January 1945.
The destruction of the Polish capital had been an edict of Hitler's since before the war.
Almost 10,500 buildings — including churches. schools and libraries — and the personal possessions of a million inhabitants had been destroyed, not to mention the lives lost in the Holocaust.
Lena had a sister, Fela, still alive somewhere in Russia, but she didn't know where, but a few more miracles remained for her family.
Fela had gone to Russia to search for her husband and had found him at a train station where he was searching for her.
Lena was working for the committee formed to help post-war repatriation and met a Russian soldier who was returning home and needed help with writing a letter.
Lena wrote the letter, and even though that was part of her job, the grateful soldier offered to help her and carried a letter back to Russia he promised to show wherever he stopped.
The letter had the names of Lena's sister and her husband and, at the first place he stopped, someone knew of them.
After the war, Lena met a Jewish man who had been separated in the death camps from his wife and daughter.
He had survived three camps, not knowing if they had lived, with no shirt and no shoes, just newspapers on his feet, wearing trousers made from sugar bags, and a swollen, infected face.
Alex Goldstein and Lena Midler liked each other, but he was respectful and patient of his wife's potential to have lived through the Holocaust.
"It was very decent of him. Probably she was killed," Lena says.
"If she had survived, I would have her on my list."
Lena and Alex married once in Poland, under a different name because "Goldstein was not very popular then", and again after the emigrated to Australia in 1949.
Lena's sister and her husband came to Australia too, and both sisters had children and settled in Sydney.
Lena's story bears witness to what happened in World War II and forms part of a book by Barbara Miller, If I Survive.
The 'Dictator Approved' artwork shows a gold hand crushing the Statue of Liberty's crown.