What’s in a Name?
I was born Samuel Winecier. A fine name, a name to be proud of, a name to be recognised by and a name that identified who I was.
In 1942, the Germans took away my pride, my recognition and my identification, because they took away my name.
I lived in Warsaw with my parents and five siblings. When war broke out in 1940, four of my brothers escaped to Russia but I was sent with my parents and younger brother to the ghetto in Plats Muranowski. Within 3 months, my parents had died and, at the age of 14, I found myself responsible for the survival of my brother and myself.
Each day a tram to the outside world would pass through our ghetto. Many people would sneak onto the tram in a bid to escape the harshness and starvation that living in the ghetto brought. One day I made the decision to try to escape.
~One day I made the decision to escape.~
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The tram was stopped at the ghetto border and all males were ordered to get off. We were put into trucks and taken to an identification station and interviewed. I knew if I didn’t get rid of my Jewish identification papers before the German police saw them I would have no chance of survival. Luckily, one of the policemen doing the interviews recognised me as we had both lived in the same suburb. He pulled me aside and told me that were I to be identified as a Jew I would be shot. He gave me a false identification paper that stated my name was Zigmund Kowalski, a very common Polish name.
This name saved my life.
I was sent to a forced labour camp in Germany and worked until the war ended. All this time I lived as Zigmund Kowalski and hid my true identity.
In 1951 I immigrated to New Zealand as a displaced person and it wasn’t until then that I finally felt safe enough to reveal my true name.
With the aid of the Red Cross I located two surviving brothers and stayed in contact with them until their deaths.
Who would have imagined that there would be a time when a name could mean life or death? Zigmund Kowalski saved my life and made it possible for Samuel Winecier to be a survivor.
Sam dedicates his story to the memory of his late family who perished in the holocaust.
