‘If you show fear, you’re done for’

Bronislaw Erlich, born in Warsaw in 1923, now lives in the Swiss capital Bern. Annette Boutellier

Bronislaw Erlich survived the Nazi regime by posing as a Polish farmhand – on a German farm. His passport still shows the wrong date of birth.   

Bronislaw has not worn his fur hat with the large earflaps for a long time. But he is about to be photographed outdoors, sitting on a garden bench at a nursing home in Bern city, and it is November. He scrutinises the hat from every angle, tries it on, takes it off, and then puts it on again. “Now I look like a Russian,” he laughs. 

His story is one of true and false identity, one he took on to survive. During the war, Bronislaw says he hated Nazi perpetrators “like the plague… But when the first American tanks rolled into our village, all that loathing somehow fell away.”  

The only emotion he felt when he was liberated was overwhelming joy: “I’m alive!” Not long after, he was collecting food thrown away by the Americans and giving it to German women, who were rummaging around for leftovers in the rubbish. 

His memories arc far back, to the kitchen of his parents – master tailor Nachum Erlich and his wife Brandel – at 34 Nalewki Street, Warsaw, Poland. Their four-room flat was always bustling. There were four children in the family. Bronislaw, born in 1923, was the second youngest. Customers mingled with the family, coming to try on clothes in the kitchen, where two sewing machines took pride of place. 

To this day Bronislaw is haunted by the question of what happened to his family. He thinks about it at night as he lies awake in the nursing home. Annette Boutellier

Bronislaw’s childhood ended abruptly on September 1, 1939, when the German Wehrmacht [Armed Forces of the Third Reich] invaded Poland. The streets of the Polish capital emptied, grocery shops closed, long queues formed in front of bakeries and air-raid sirens wailed. He had to break off the apprenticeship he had begun in a graphics company in 1937. A bomb fell on the house opposite them. By the end of the month, there was no water, no electricity and no gas.  

A last letter 

His older brother Moshe was the first to leave. He headed east to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. At nighttime, Bronislaw could hear his mother crying. On December 2, 1939, Bronislaw, 16, and his sister Bracha also fled. A neighbour took them in his cart to Warsaw East railway station. They were already on the train when they heard harsh yelling. A German soldier was shouting at the top of his lungs: “Jews out!” Bracha and Bronislaw sat motionless until the train left. On the platform, their mother fought to keep up with the moving train. She ran, “slowed down”, and then disappeared completely.  

Bronislaw often lies awake at night in his room in the nursing home. Before his eyes he can still see his mother on that day. She did not wave goodbye, in order not to draw attention to her children in the presence of the Gestapo [Nazi Germany’s Secret State Police]. It was the last time he ever saw her. 

He arrived with his sister in the town of Vaukavysk, which is now in Belarus. They remained there until spring 1940, when Bracha was deported to a forced labour camp for women in Siberia.  

“My whole world fell apart,” he says. “She was everything to me – mother, aunt and sister, my only kin in a foreign land. She was also the only person who knew who he really was, from whom he did not have to hide.” 

As he talks about Vaukavysk, another painful memory returns. Bronislaw had collected food – eight kilograms of pasta, cereal and butter – and sent the parcel to the Warsaw ghetto. His parents wrote back saying how happy they were to receive it, and later sent another letter, this time with a photo. It showed his younger brother Jakob, his mother and his father – three figures with emaciated faces. Bronislaw ran into the fields with the picture in his hand, threw himself on the ground and cried.  

He later tore up that photo. “I had to destroy everything that could have identified me as a Jew,” Bronislaw explains. The letter with the picture was the last sign of life from his parents. 

False birth certificate 

On June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, and on June 28 troops pushed forward to Vaukavysk. Life under German occupation began once more for Bronislaw. He found work as a labourer for a farmer called Karol Urbanowicz.  

There he stayed until November 1942, when the Jewish population of Vaukavysk was rounded up on the grounds of the former cavalry barracks. “Like animals into a hole in the ground,” men, women and children were crammed into a kind of pit, eight metres wide and 25 metres long, then covered by a wooden roof. 

When a soldier on the other side of the barbed wire fence called for volunteers for a work assignment outside the camp, Bronislaw stepped forward at once. Little did he know that the “work” meant sorting through the clothes of deported Jews.  

Here Bronislaw’s narrative falters. It trips over the suits, skirts, trousers, blouses, shirts and shoes of the Jews of Vaukavysk. The members of his work gang collected the clothes from their flats and loaded them onto horse-drawn carts for German winter aid. Bronislaw falls silent, and then says, “A person in danger of death is not a hero; he just does everything in order to survive.” Whenever he found something to eat in the deportees’ pantries, he took it. 

That was a time when he had new shoes and trousers, and a warm sheepskin jacket. The men in the work gang were taken back to the camp in the evenings. The guards keeping watch over them during the daytime were less strict. By chance, one afternoon Bronislaw ran into farmer Karol Urbanowicz’s brother-in-law, a lawyer, who invited him to his home.  

The lawyer searched through his files and found the birth certificate of a woman, Bronislawa Karkos, born in 1912. Thanks to his graphics training, Bronislaw was able to scrape off the final “a” of Bronislawa with a razor blade without leaving a trace. He also changed the date to “1920” – his actual birth year, 1923, would have been more difficult to insert. 

Now equipped with a false birth certificate and a new identity, Bronislaw decided to flee. Shortly before the guard came to take him to the camp for the night, he hid. At nightfall he started to walk. 

In December 1942, a farmer took him on as a labourer near Bialystok. He worked there for three months, until a Polish soldier returned to the village on home leave. The soldier had been a German prisoner of war for two years before being sent to work on a farm. Now he had had enough and did not want to go back to Germany. The villagers also wanted him to stay, so Bronislaw, the farmhand who had arrived recently, was sent to Illeben in Thuringia, Germany, in his place. He arrived at farmer Schönau’s farm on April 1, 1943. 

Eyes betray fear 

In early summer 2019, Bronislaw talked for nearly three hours without stopping. Was he tired? “No,” he says. Survival was also a tremendous feat of strength. He had to be always on his guard. If a single Yiddish word slipped out in a German sentence, he would have been found out: “Some people suspected me,” he recalls.  

Was he afraid? He would not let himself be. “Fear shows through your eyes,” he stresses. “If you’re afraid then you’re done for.” 

There are images that keep coming back to him, scenes that are imprinted in his memory. Once, when he was eating, a potato fell to the floor. The farmer’s wife watched him like a hawk. He bent down, wiped the potato off and put it back on his plate. The woman declared triumphantly: “You wouldn’t have done that if you were a Jew!” A Jew, she explained, would no longer have eaten the potato. 

To this day he is haunted by the question of what happened to his family. He thinks about it at night as he lies awake in the nursing home. What did his parents, and Jakob, his little brother, go through? When did they die, and how? So many answerless questions, which have lost none of their urgency. 

His passport still shows the wrong birth date. He managed to correct the name on it but does not know exactly why the date was forgotten. Probably “because there were other problems at the time,” he says.  

One July 14, the mayor of Belp municipality in canton Bern, where he was living, stopped by with a bouquet of flowers to congratulate him on a milestone birthday – on the wrong day and three years too early. “We laughed and drank a glass of vodka together,” he recalls.  

Translated from German by Julia Bassam