Holocaust Remembrance
Paula Lenchner was born Pesha Greenspan in 1932 in Lublin, Poland, a vibrant, developing city with a large Jewish population. She was in first grade when Poland was invaded by Germany.
When the Nazis first entered Lublin, Paula’s father Moshe was among several Jewish men arrested and held for ransom. His best friend, a German man named Mr. Bus with whom he had studied in Vienna, helped secure his release. Mr. Bus later joined the Gestapo.
About a year later, in 1940, Paula’s grandmother and younger brother were killed by the Nazis. In the early days of the war, it was common for the oldest and youngest members of Jewish families to be targeted first. Paula’s family fled Lublin for a nearby village where many refugees from other parts of Poland and Germany had gone. Life there was unbearable for Jews; they were frequently beaten and robbed at night by the Polish villagers. As the situation deteriorated, Paula’s parents made the extremely difficult decision to split up their family to maximize their chances of survival. Paula went into hiding with her father, and her older sister Liba returned to the Lublin Ghetto with her mother Chaya, aunts, and cousins. The last thing Paula remembers her mother saying to her was “Go, my child. Maybe someone will survive, and there will be a continuation of our family.”
A Polish man named Zhyviatz agreed to hide Paula and her father under the floorboards of his barn. Their hiding spot had a blanket, a pillow, and a pipe in the corner to supply them with air. They were only able to go to the bathroom when they could sneak out at night, and they had to be extremely careful not to get caught or leave any evidence of their presence. Zhyviatz brought them food when he was able to conceal his actions from the rest of his family, who were unaware that he was risking their lives by hiding Jews.
Paula and her father stayed hidden for four months. During this time, her dad taught her Catholic prayers and other ways to pretend she wasn’t Jewish. At one point she got very sick with rheumatic fever. She somehow recovered, without doctors or medication, but in early spring her father decided to send Paula away from their hiding spot to protect her health. He instructed her to pretend to be a peasant looking for a job and a place to stay. Finally, a woman agreed to take her in, giving her food and a place to sleep. The next morning, the woman told Paula she knew she was Jewish and wouldn’t be able to hide her. The woman advised her to go far away, because there were “no good people” where they were, and to change her clothing, which was from her old life in the city and would give her identity away. She warned Paula not to tell anyone that she had helped her. Paula wandered for a day or two, sleeping in the woods and trying to stay away from wild animals. She returned to her father’s hiding spot, using a special signal they had agreed upon to let him know she was there. She got new clothing from Zhyviatz and several weeks later, set out in a different direction. For the next few days, she met a handful of people who gave her food and a place to rest, but they always sent her away to protect themselves and their neighbors. She slept in the woods and was chased and beaten by other children. Eventually, Paula was taken in by a family who allowed her to live with them in exchange for working on their farm. She pretended to be Catholic and attended church. Paula was never certain if the family knew she was Jewish. By this time, Paula’s father had left his hiding spot and joined the Partisans, the underground resistance movement attempting to fight the Germans. At night he would visit Paula at the farm, using their code to signal to her that he was there, but they never saw each other face-to-face. Eventually, a neighbor became suspicious of Paula and threatened to tell other people that the family was hiding a Jewish child, so she had to run away.
Paula was around 13 years old when the war ended. But even though they were free from the Germans, Jews were still not safe in Poland. She was eventually reunited with her father, though she was unable to remember the details of how they found each other. A short time later, her father went out to search for survivors from their family and was shot and killed by a Polish person. Paula never found out what happened to her mother and sister, but she believed they were killed in the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin.
One of her mother’s cousins found out that Paula had survived the war and brought her to live with him. Paula did not want to go. She wanted to forget that she was Jewish. She didn’t know Yiddish anymore. She felt lost and wanted to sever all connections to her past. Eventually she moved to a children’s home for around a year. In 1947 she went to Germany, and in 1948 she moved to Israel.
During the war, Paula’s will to live was so strong that she did everything she could to survive. When it was over, and she was the only one left of her family, she felt hopeless and didn’t want to go on. But she always remembered her mother’s last words to her and felt a duty and obligation to continue. She also found her way back to Judaism. In Israel, Paula married Abraham Lenchner, also a Holocaust survivor, and they had two children: Chaya and Ari. In 1961 they moved to Brooklyn, NY. Paula had two granddaughters, Bree and Sarit, and five great grandchildren: Abe, Zoe, Jack, Eli, and Jane, who was born after Paula passed away and is named after her [middle name]. Her family was everything to her; her greatest accomplishment, a fulfilment of her mother’s dream.
