She was 17 years old. “I cried when I wrote this solo. So much that I was choking”

In Kalisz I meet Mr. Mirosław Przędzik, son of Sabina Chmielewska – Sabcia. He will tell me the story of his mother’s tragic childhood acquaintance. I’m really looking forward to this meeting and I’m not disappointed. I meet a wise, good and sensitive man who understands what is most important and what is less important in life.

– I was once in Auschwitz, next door in Birkenau – he begins his story. – And there I remembered what my mother said in the park in the fall. I took a stone from there, put it here, and when I wrote this piece about Fleid, it was here.

Mr. Mirosław worked at the Kalisz Philharmonic all his adult life. However, once he accidentally fell while riding a bicycle and since then his hand has been no longer suitable for playing the instrument.

“I haven’t played for fifteen years,” he says. – The violin is still there. I reach for it sometimes, but if I don’t practice, it’s sad to hear it. That’s why I devoted myself to writing. I’ve already recorded myself.

In 2008, the first performance of the musical poem “Fleida”, which he wrote in honor of his mother’s Jewish friend Sabina, took place. The symphony orchestra played it in the concert hall of the State Music School. Henryk Melcer in Kalisz. Not by accident. This is where the headquarters of the Kalisz Musical Society was located. Sabina and Frania loved listening to the music that resounded within these walls and escaped outside. Later, Sabina enrolled her son in a music school. Mr. Mirosław sits down in front of the computer and selects the appropriate file.

“When I wrote the solo about Fleid, I cried,” he says. – But if you can’t do it with words, you can do it with music.

And you can already hear delicate sounds from the speakers. I’m already in the world before World War II.

– Sewing machine, this is how it begins – Mr. Mirosław guides me through his work with words, which we listen to together on a cold January evening. – And here comes the electronics. It’s getting dark. We are in the Kalisz park. This machine sews every now and then. Do you hear that? Taralira. Taralira. She lived next to this music school, there are also the sounds of the school there. Still monotonous, but the murmurs of future misfortune can already be heard.

And suddenly I hear familiar sounds.

– Chopin, do you hear me? Music school, children practice, play Chopin. The machine… taralira. Children are playing in the yard. Vivaldi concert. Once, as a child, I played it at a music school. This is where the boy made a mistake and is coming back. He corrected the sounds, the birds helped and we moved on. The machine again. Fleida continues to sew. Taralira.

Bells in Saint Joseph. Christmas. New year. Jews having fun. Mr. Mirosław turns up the music and continues:

– They’re bantering. Now Poles. They’ve already had a drink here. Bustle. Panic. And that persistent question: “Why?” There you can hear a Jew playing the xylophone, I wanted to give dulcimer, but it’s hard to find dulcimer players, and he’s a symbolic figure. There is Noah Zaludkowski’s Hymn and “Dąbrowski’s Mazurek”. And again the bells ring in Józef: don, don, don…

Mr. Mirosław’s musical story finally goes to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It was here that the Germans finally brought Fleida. You can hear running around and feel fear. Ironically, the camp orchestra plays to welcome the convicts. And all the time this question is asked by a Jewish woman from Kalisz: “Why?” And her heartbeat.

– Yes, Fleida’s heart is still beating – says Mr. Mirosław quietly. – But they already told her to donate blood. She can’t understand why this is happening. “Where are you, Lord?!” He prays, we hear his frightened heart still beating. It’s a violin. The heartbeat is getting weaker. But she wants to live!

At the end of the last breath prayer, he remembers the song that Poles and Jews sang together, because it does not feature the figure of Jesus.

God, who has surrounded Poland with the glow of power and glory for so many centuries,

Something protected her with the shield of his care / From the misfortunes that were supposed to depress her.

I pray before Your altars: Give us back a free homeland, Lord!

Abraham appears, a solo cello, and reprimands Fleida: “You cannot doubt the existence of the Lord!” – continues Mr. Mirosław. – And this Abraham in Birkenau is stupid, standing in the field in front of the barbed wire and cursing this very young, dying girl. And she seems to know more about life than he does. He still stood up. And what? And he doubted himself. At the very end we hear Fleida from the afterlife. “Why?” And one last bar, the accent of the Jewish nation.

We are silent. Fleida leaves me speechless. I’m trying to control my emotions. Fortunately, Mr. Mirosław starts talking further:

– Picolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two French horns, one trumpet, I gave three trombones: one, two, three. Yes, three kettledrums, a xylophone, bells, bells and all these different pops. Viola, double bass. This is what it looks like.

I start to breathe.

– The fragment when Fleida dies can be made an octave lower and the singer will sing calmly. After all, Fleida was 17 years old. I cried when I wrote this solo. So hard I was choking. The process itself is a terrible job. Sometimes I got up three times at night. It was in my mind all the time. And every time I corrected it, I came back.

I want to ask from a lump in my throat why he wrote this, but fortunately Mr. Mirosław says it himself:

– She is a symbol of those young girls who donated blood for German soldiers at the front. There was no Jewish blood, but you can go to the front. The guide was talking about this in Auschwitz and it reminded me of Frania. I came home, I had to digest, survive. But the thought had already occurred to me. – And he adds: – Fleida is becoming a symbol of this Jewish Kalisz. I wanted to bow to all the Jews of Kalisz, all the Jewish women. But I can’t handle them all. So at least one.

SUMMER 1943. EXPERIMENTS IN AUSCHWITZ

I’m trying to find more information about Fleida Kubiak. I am writing to the Auschwitz Museum to see if such a girl was registered as a prisoner. The answer is negative. I’m not surprised, because I got similar answers when I wrote “Girls from Gross-Rosen”, my last book. Not all women who stayed in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau were included in the records. They became prisoners only when they were sent to various branches of KL Gross-Rosen. So it may be the same with Fleida. But she doesn’t go to Gross-Rosen… or any other camp.

The friend with whom she went to Langenbielau told Sabina after the war that Fleida had large amounts of blood taken and that it killed her. The woman, who was brought to Birkenau after escaping as a punishment, saw Frania once. Then she said that she had been forced to donate blood to the German front and that she had died. Just enough.

But Dr. Wojciech Płosa, head of the archives at the Auschwitz Museum, who responds to my e-mail, gives me one more clue: “The description of the cause of this girl’s death can, to some extent, be related to mentions in the accounts and memories of children who were victims of the doctor’s pseudo-medical experiments. Mengele, which emphasize that Mengele repeatedly ordered large amounts of blood from these children,” he writes. “This may have contributed to the significant weakening of the already exhausted bodies of some of these children and, as a result, to their death.”

So I start looking for testimonies of Auschwitz prisoners who mentioned Mengele after the war. One of the first stories I come across is about Lidia Maksymowicz. In 1943, when she was sent to KL Auschwitz together with her mother Anna and grandparents, she was only three years old, her name was Luda Boczarowa and she came from Minsk. Her mother drilled this into her head constantly. Especially when the camp was about to be evacuated. And rightly so, because thanks to this, the women were reunited 17 years after these events – like people whose bonds had been severed. In January 1945, Anna went on a death march, and little Luda stayed in Auschwitz. She had no parents, so a Polish Catholic family took care of her. She was sure her biological mother was dead, so she didn’t even look for her. Meanwhile, the mother, who survived the death march and Bergen-Belsen, learned that the children from Auschwitz were taken to orphanages in the USSR. So she was looking for her daughter there. She traveled all over Russia. With no effect. Years later, when she was starting to lose hope, the Red Cross brought them together. In 2021, the world heard about Lidia Maksymowicz again when, during an audience with Pope Francis, he unexpectedly kissed her camp number tattooed on her hand. Little Luba experienced exactly what Fleida did. It ended up in the hands of Mengele, who drained blood from it for German soldiers. When the mother saw the child after this act of brutality, it was transparent. But her strong body endured, and from then on the girl hid from the doctors in the camp.

Lidia Maksymowicz and Arnold Schwarzenegger during his visit to the Jewish Museum in Oświęcim in 2022 Photo Jakub Porzycki / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

(…)

I check the website of the National Blood Center. Up to 450 ml is taken at a time without any harm to the body. But donations cannot be made by a person weighing less than 50 kilograms, “because it could cause undesirable effects in people weighing less. A person with a lower weight also has a smaller volume of blood in their body. 450 ml in such a case constitutes more than 8-10% of the circulating blood. blood in the body.” Therefore, children and people under 18 years of age cannot donate blood. The frequency of downloads is also determined in detail.

The National Blood Center states that blood can be donated with an eight-week break between donations. Blood samples can be collected six times a year from men and four times a year from women. “On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we went to the analytical laboratory,” said Eva Mozes Kor, a victim of Mengele’s experiments who was in Auschwitz with her sister Miriam, after the war. “Miriam and I were sitting on a bench with a pair of other twins. Someone was tying thin rubber tubes around the upper parts of our left and right arms. Two people were attending to me at the same time. One was inserting a needle into my left arm to draw blood. After filling one tube, she performed another injection. “I saw hands taking away bright red vials of my blood. I remember wondering how much blood I could lose and still live.”

Eva and her sister survived. They were 10-11 years old when the samples were taken. Fleida Kubiak was 17 years old. Why was she chosen? Maybe the key was her red hair, which inspired some madman in an SS uniform?

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