‘I was strong and unafraid’

Holocaust survivor, East Meadow resident recalls seeing Israel for the first time

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Surrounded by over a thousand tanks and rows of fellow infantrymen, Alex Konstantyn listened to a speech given by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, in 1958. Ten years after Israel was declared an independent state, Konstantyn joined the Israel Defense Forces army, he said, feeling like Superman.

“I was strong and unafraid,” noted Konstantyn, who is now 80 and lives in East Meadow. By that time, he explained, his nightmares of the Holocaust had ended. Up until then, he would close his eyes and find himself in a Polish prison, running from attack dogs or the bullets of German soldiers.

Konstantyn was 3 when he, his mother, Hannah, and his father, Baruch, fled their home in Varenz, Poland, to avoid being killed by the Nazi troops that had invaded their country. He shared his story with the Herald at the East Meadow Jewish Center during its celebration of the 70th Yom Haatzmaut, or Israel Independence Day. The following evening, he shared it again, this time at the Merrick Golf Clubhouse, as part of the Town of Hempstead’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Konstantyn’s survival began with a bag of gold coins. Before the war broke out, his father, a grain merchant, traded whatever money he made for gold, because he believed the Polish currency was weak. The three of them left their home in 1941, posing as Polish refugees, and knocked on the door of a farmer’s house to ask for shelter. The stranger was about to turn them away, but changed his mind when Baruch offered him some coins. “Polish peasants didn’t usually see gold,” Konstantyn said.

Their stay at the farmer’s home lasted 10 days, until their host brought home a blueberry pie and, Konstantyn recounted, “He was acting a little drunk.” Alex and his mother took small bites, but Baruch dug into the dessert. But he stopped eating when he saw his wife and son start to vomit.

“The man must have realized that we were Jewish,” Konstantyn said. “So he tried to get rid of us in the quietest way possible” — by poisoning them.

Hannah tried to put a finger down her husband’s throat, but his jaw had clenched shut. Alex thought his father was unconscious or sleeping, because, he said, his mother “lowered herself to the ground, put his head in her hands and rocked him back and forth.” But Baruch was dead.

So Hannah and Alex were on the run again, living on the streets and begging for food. Hannah would send her son door to door, believing that people would be sympathetic toward a child. He was successful most of the time, but not enough to alleviate their devastating hunger. Sometimes the pair resorted to digging through the garbage, and on one occasion, he recalled, they found a bag of frozen potatoes. His mother thawed them and ground them up in her mouth, and he ate the pulp.

One day, he said, he and his mother were lying on the ground, “waiting to die,” when a woman invited them into her home, fed them and let them stay with her. Konstantyn described her as “an angel of mercy.”

Their solace in her home lasted only a few days, until the woman insisted that the two take a bath. But Hannah feared that if her son undressed, the woman would see his circumcised penis and realize that he was Jewish. She tried to shield him with her body while he bathed, but the woman must have noticed, Konstantyn said, because she left the room and came back, minutes later, with the Polish police.

“Here is a woman who, yesterday, saved our lives and today was sentencing us to die,” Konstantyn said.

The police took them to an overcrowded prison cell, where Hannah told two lies in the effort to keep them alive. The first was that she didn’t speak German, and the second was that she knew how to cook. The officers let her cook for them in exchange for food, and eventually she heard them talking about their plans to “get rid” of more and more prisoners. So she planned an escape.

Hannah found a broken window in the prison, and through it she spotted a bar outside that kept an adjacent door locked. She looped a piece of wire around the bar, pulled it to open the door, and she and her son ran toward nearby woods that were on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Without hesitating, Hannah pulled the barbed wire open, lacerating her hands, letting Alex crawl out first. She followed and the two escaped, covered in cuts and scratches.

Instead of trying to brave the streets again, they headed back toward Varenz, and Hannah sought the help of their “last hope,” Konstantyn said: a man named Burka who used to do business with his father. When they arrived at his house in 1943, Hannah handed him the last of their gold and told them what had happened. He immediately agreed to let them stay in a cellar in which he stored moonshine.

Their stay lasted almost two years, and ended with liberation. Toward the end of 1944, Russian and German soldiers fought outside the cellar, and when the fighting stopped, the Russian soldiers entered the cellar and greeted Hannah and her son.

They stayed in Poland until 1950, moving to the industrial town of Lodz. Alex attended a school for Jewish youth and befriended many of his fellow students. “But in the street, it was rough,” he said. “I was victimized and beaten up by Polish gangs because I was Jewish.”

Hannah eventually married a man who had lost his wife and two children to the Holocaust. He had relatives in Israel, and invited Hannah and Alex to move in with him. They settled in the port of Jaffa, where the weather was tropical, the food was plentiful and “nobody bothered me — nobody beat me up because I was Jewish,” Konstantyn said. “It was like stepping into paradise.”

After serving in the IDF, he immigrated to the United States with his parents, and studied Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Pace University. He became a school principal at the King’s Park Jewish Center, and met his wife, Susan, in 1969. The couple moved to East Meadow in 1983 and became active members of the East Meadow Jewish Center. Today they have two grown children and eight grandchildren, one of whom is a 19-year old IDF soldier named Racheli Konstantyn.