Saved from the Nazis by a Dying Man
By the time Sheila Bernard was six years old, she had taken cover from bombs at the start of World War II and hidden for short periods in a closet, the roof of a stable, bushes in a field, and the attic of the building where her mother was forced to labor in German-occupied Poland.
She also saw her father, Isaac, for the last time. He and other men left their home in Chełm for Soviet-occupied Poland, believing the Nazis would target only Jewish men. “I was sitting up in a window. I was about five then, watching my father kissing my mother and saying goodbye,” Sheila (born Sala Perec) recounted in a 2007 interview. She would later learn that Isaac was killed while trying to return to Chełm after hearing women and children were also in danger.
Sheila next witnessed German authorities kill her aunt and some of the children her aunt was babysitting in the Chełm ghetto, only narrowly escaping being murdered herself. “‘We’ve killed enough Jews for the day. Let them go,’” the men said, as Sheila recalled in her 1990 oral history. Sheila and her mother, Bela, needed a long-term place to hide.
Food was scarce in the ghetto. Bela tried to make money to afford it and was jailed for selling flour. A family friend, a Polish Catholic policeman who had known Sheila’s grandfather, got Bela released. Later, the policeman, Grzegorz Czyżyk, warned Bela that the ghetto was to be liquidated. He offered to hide Bela and Sheila on his property. In November 1942, Jews remaining in the ghetto were killed or deported, many to the Sobibor killing center.
Grzegorz had cancer. “He knew he was going to die soon, and he wanted to do something good before he died,” Sheila said. “He said he did so many bad things already, and he was a religious Catholic. … he decided to save us, though his family, his wife, and his children … [were] against it” because they could be killed for harboring Jews.
Sheila and Bela hid inside his house for a brief time, then in an underground space for storing potatoes that was too small to stand in, and finally in a shack used to house chickens and store wood. Grzegorz would bring them bread and water.
For nearly two years while hiding in the shack, Sheila did not go outside at all. Her mother would not let her. Bela only went outside at night to clean their waste pot. With little else to occupy her time, Sheila played with the straw and wood on the ground and looked out through the slats at passersby and nature. Gone were the toys that had amused her in the happy days before the war — a sled, a ball, and a doll. “I remember it was very boring sitting there day after day … It was like a prison for me.”
Looking back, Sheila said it was lucky that Grzegorz did not die before Soviet forces liberated them in Chełm in July 1944. If he had, she feels certain his wife and children would have sent Bela and Sheila away or reported them. “They just didn’t want anything to do with us.”
Grzegorz’s wife left her husband a few weeks before liberation. Bela cared for Grzegorz at the end of his life when he was too ill to go to work. He died about two weeks after liberation.
Sheila, by this time eight years old, and her mother continued to live in Chełm for several months until Bela died in early 1945 of a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot, leaving Sheila an orphan. Malnutrition may have contributed to her death. Bela had given Sheila the addresses of her uncles who had immigrated before the war to the United States and Mandatory Palestine.
While living at a children’s home in Dornstadt, in the American Zone of Germany, over about two years, Sheila wrote to her uncles and they started efforts to help her emigrate. “I wanted to go [to Palestine] where … I wouldn’t hear anybody call me żydowska [Jewish] anymore. I wanted to be free without being afraid.”
But first, she had to gain weight. “I was very, very weak and skinny, so they fattened us up for the trip.” Then, at age 11 in 1947, she immigrated to British-controlled Palestine.
Sheila lived with her uncle for a time, then on a kibbutz, a collectivist agricultural community, then in a children’s home where she finished her schooling with other European children who had endured similar circumstances. The State of Israel was established in 1948.
After nursing school, Sheila served in the Israeli military for a year. It was then that she met her husband, who also had survived the Holocaust. They had a daughter in 1958, Nira, and immigrated to the United States in 1963.
Sheila has some good memories from her time in Israel and even a few from before she left Europe, though she had continued to encounter antisemitism there. She was “afraid to sleep at night” at first, and found it difficult for decades to talk about her experiences, even with her family.
Sheila began sharing her story publicly, including as a volunteer with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in 2004. “I want my children and grandchildren to know what happened to their grandparents, and to me, and the family, and to have some memories of them and to know where they come from, what their past was, so they know what to expect from the future.”
Less than three months before Sheila died in 2007, speaking at the Museum, she said: “Once we are gone … there won’t be anybody to speak about what happened … I want people and the world to know what happened to all of us during the war — to all the Jews and everybody.”
After Sheila’s death, Nira continued her mother’s efforts to have Grzegorz Czyżyk recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor given to non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust without expecting payment or reward, protecting them when hostility and indifference prevailed. Czyżyk was granted that status in 2013.
Learn more about the plight of children during the Holocaust, including experiences in hiding, in this Holocaust Encyclopedia series.
