‘It Wasn’t Always a Place for Death’

Felicia Haberfeld, an 86-year-old woman living in the Fairfax district, wants to share her memories of a grand life in the small Polish city where she and her husband lived before World War II.

She dreams of restoring her late husband’s decaying 40-room ancestral home--claimed as war spoils by the Nazis and the Russians, then nationalized by the Poles. The 19th-century mansion, known as Haberfeld House, is more than just a place for her fond memories. It is a city symbol, emblazoned on old maps and still, by the mayor’s account, the town’s architectural jewel.

Haberfeld would like to turn the mansion into a Jewish learning center or youth hostel, a mission not dulled by the fact that the home lies in a city that has become synonymous with the greatest evil ever perpetrated on the Jewish and Polish peoples.

Haberfeld House is in Auschwitz. Felicia Haberfeld wants it back anyway.

“We want it to be a house for humanity, to show the world what was done there and what was there before,” said Haberfeld, a youthful-looking, elegantly dressed woman with an inviting smile who carefully ties her dark hair at the nape of her neck. “Auschwitz was a place that was full of life. It wasn’t always a place for death.”

City officials are amenable to her plan. To reclaim her home, however, she must buy it back and show proof that she will restore and maintain it to its former grandeur.

That would, by the mayor’s estimate, take several million dollars--the kind of money she and her husband, a liquor magnate, were forced to abandon when the war claimed all they owned.

Like thousands of others who are trying to regain property in Eastern Europe in the post-Communist era, Haberfeld has negotiated with Polish bureaucrats and sought desperately for a philanthropist or foundation to take up her cause. Now time is about to run out. Auschwitz officials say that unless she comes up with the money by Wednesday, her family will lose its priority and Haberfeld House will be auctioned to the highest bidder.

From her modest duplex, Haberfeld and her son, Stephen, 53, a former federal magistrate, worry, wait and tell old stories about a palatial home and a little blue-eyed girl named Franciszka who lived there so briefly.

A Town Where Jews, Gentiles Mixed

Family legend has it that the first Haberfeld came to Auschwitz in the mid-18th century. Later, his son, Jakob Haberfeld, opened a distillery and bottling company.

Bottles and labels bearing the Haberfeld name and the establishment year of 1804 still turn up in tourist markets in nearby Krakow.

By the 1930s, Auschwitz was a city of 12,000 people, more than half of whom were Jewish. Unlike in many other parts of Europe, Jews and Gentiles mixed well. The important men of town had a card club; their wives joined ranks as social workers.

Felicia Spirer of Krakow finished her master’s degree in German literature and in 1936 married Jakob Haberfeld’s grandson, Alfons, a rare Jewish recipient of Poland’s silver cross for public service. Felicia moved into her husband’s mansion, a massive creation of grand windows, parquet floors, ivory-colored walls, drawing rooms leading to parlor rooms and a huge backyard veranda, all of it separated from the distillery by a vast lawn. The nearby Haberfeld castle had been given to her new sister-in-law as a wedding gift from her parents.

The couple welcomed guests into a dining room that seated 24, went to balls, attended sporting events and frequented a bakery that Felicia Haberfeld still remembers for Napoleons that rivaled any she had eaten in Paris.

“It was a very special town. Most people have an idea that Jews from Poland come from little shtetls [villages] and that they were separated from the others by God knows what. It was not true for Auschwitz.”

The Haberfelds’ first child, Franciszka Henryka, was born on their first anniversary. Her mother doted on her, taking her for rides in the baby’s pony-driven carriage.

It was only at her husband’s insistence that Felicia agreed to leave her 23-month-old daughter with her mother and a baby nurse and join him at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where Alfons’ distillery had an exhibit.

After three weeks, the Haberfelds headed home with boxes of presents for Franciszka, including a brilliant blue dress that would have matched the little girl’s eyes.

Fifty-nine years later, Haberfeld still has the gifts she never was able to give her daughter.

News From Home, Then Nothing

Two days before the couple were to land, British navy officers boarded their ship and said they would not be returning home. Germany had invaded Poland.

“Women were in hysterics, they were falling on floors, they were fainting,” Haberfeld recalled. “I couldn’t move. I was like stone.”

After weeks of being held on the ship, while the British authorities decided what to do with the foreigners, the Haberfelds were placed with kind Jewish strangers in England. They were out of money; the tourists had been allowed to take only a limited amount of cash out of Poland.

They sold Felicia’s jewelry and other belongings to raise passage back to the United States. Four months later, when they had finally arranged their fare, there was still no word from Poland.

It was not until the Haberfelds landed at Ellis Island and were taken in by a relative of one of their Polish employees were they able to communicate with Felicia’s family. Strict censorship made postcards the only method of correspondence. The couple followed their family’s fate in dribs and drabs.

Felicia’s mother and daughter had been staying in Auschwitz. When news of the invasion filtered in, the older woman took the baby and rushed to her home in Krakow.

Soon the Germans literally beat Felicia’s father, Leon Spierer, out of his home so it could be turned over to a non-Jew. A Polish friend wrote that Franciszka and her grandparents, with no rights to their own car or possessions, had been seen fleeing to the countryside on a wagon.

Soon they were rounded up and sent to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, Podgorze, where 16,000 people were forced into 320 buildings. In New York, Felicia tried to get help for them, to no avail.

In 1940, the Haberfelds headed to Baltimore for a job opportunity.

Felicia cried when she heard what her brewing scion husband would be doing. “Rolling barrels,” she said, still humiliated by the memory. “He used to say, ‘Don’t worry, I just want to put my foot into the business I know.’ ”

Letters from Poland became more desperate.

“My father wrote about saving the baby, if possible,” Felicia said. “They wanted us to have a plan.”

Pasted to one postcard was a picture of a little girl with pigtail braids whom Felicia barely knew. Franciszka, probably about 4, looked into the camera with an impish grin, her white dress and socks belying her life in the ghetto.

The Haberfelds sent every cent they could to the Polish relatives via an underground run by a Jew in Portugal. Felicia revisited every U.S. agency she could find. Every time, officials took down her information and said they would do their best to help. She never heard back.

She last heard from her father in 1942. Later, she learned of the clearing of the ghettos. Soon thereafter, their Portuguese connection told them not to send any more money.

“Then we knew,” she said.

In 1944, just after Stephen was born, she found out what happened from witnesses and secondhand reports in the United States.

Her father and her mother’s brother were taken in the first wave of ghetto evacuations and were sent to their eventual deaths at Mauthausen. Felicia’s brother soon followed them there. Her cousin, a pediatrician who was engaged to be married and had looked after Franciszka, had gone with her own mother to the Belzec extermination camp.

Somebody found a piece of paper Felicia’s cousin had thrown out of the train that took her to the camp.

“I am so young,” Helena Czapnicka wrote. “And I am going to my death.”

Felicia’s mother was shipped off in the last wave. She had been tipped off about the roundup and had carefully hidden Franciszka in a cellar. But the girl began to cry, and the Germans took both of them to their deaths at Belzec.

Concentration Camp in Auschwitz

In Auschwitz, the Germans built a concentration camp in an old Austrian army barracks across the river Sola from the city center.

Originally, the site was set up as a detention center for political prisoners, then as a work camp. It outgrew itself, and a second camp was set up nearby at Birkenau.

By 1942, the Germans began using Birkenau, and, to a lesser extent Auschwitz, as centers of mass murder.

The victims arrived by train--on a spur built by Alfons Haberfeld to transport river gravel--for the infamous selection, in which about 10% of the strongest were chosen for slave labor.

The others were ordered to strip and crowd into chambers where they expected delousing showers. Instead, they were gassed to death within minutes, then shoveled into ovens that consumed up to 9,000 bodies a day.

Very few prisoners survived Auschwitz, but only Jews were selected for immediate death. The others succumbed to disease, starvation and exhaustion within months of their confinement.

Roughly 2 million Jews--about a third of European Jewry--and 2 million non-Jews perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By the end of the war, the town of Auschwitz was cleansed of its 8,000 Jews; their synagogue was burned and Christians occupied their homes. Alfons Haberfeld was the last president of the city’s Jewish community.

Creating a Life in the U.S.

Felicia, Alfons and Stephen moved to Los Angeles in 1948, in hopes of easing the 4-year-old boy’s asthma. Alfons worked as a receiving clerk at a distillery. Felicia sold women’s undergarments.

As their lot improved, the family bought a house in Sherman Oaks. Stephen attended UCLA, Princeton’s school of public affairs and Harvard Law School; Felicia earned a master’s degree in library science from USC.

From the day they left Poland, Alfons kept a packed suitcase by his bedside. It was a symbol, he told his son, of his readiness to return home.

It was 1967 before he and Felicia were able to go back to visit. When their former chauffeur drove them up to what used to be the entranceway, now a parking lot, the Haberfelds saw that their beautiful home was even worse than they had expected.

The exterior, surrounded by scaffolding, was crumbling. The floors were covered; the walls were gray and dingy. Franciszka’s room was stripped of any suggestion that it had once been a nursery. Her balcony--the only one on the building--had long since fallen away.

Haberfeld House had seen the Nazis, Russians and Poles occupy its stately rooms and opulent halls--and make off with its treasures.

Throughout, their onetime driver, Pawel Kotulek, had stayed in residence as the Haberfeld factory’s manager, doing his best to safeguard the home. Until the day Alfons died in 1970, Kotulek wrote the family about his attempts to hang on to what he could.

The only contents the Haberfelds could claim were the items too heavy for the home’s many occupants to cart away: a chest from Felicia’s parents and two 8-foot-tall china cabinets that now dwarf her small dining room in Los Angeles.

When an emotionally devastated Alfons died at 66, he left his family a book of liquor recipes, culled from his memory and faithfully recorded. Felicia had offers from potential buyers, but she refused; the formulas were among the few Haberfeld treasures her husband was able to bequeath.

In the late 1980s, Felicia saw some hope for reclaiming what her husband could not. Communism was officially dying in Poland.

In 1991, a cousin who had grown up in Haberfeld House casually mentioned in a letter that the building, its factory and grounds were about to be sold.

Stephen Haberfeld, a private judge, a former Watergate prosecutor and a former U.S. magistrate for Ventura, was on the next plane to Poland.

When he entered City Hall and gave his name, he said, everyone in the room went slack-jawed. Older citizens still remembered the family.

“It is still called Haberfeld House,” said the current mayor, Jozef Krawczyk, in an interview. “It’s still considered the most beautiful building in town.”

Stephen--who stubbornly refers to the city by its Polish name, Oswiecim, rather than the tainted German appellation--prevailed upon the kindness of the local officials and persuaded them to halt the sale to an unidentified bidder.

But now, the mayor says, the city must proceed before the entire structure collapses.

Krawczyk acknowledged that there are those in town who might not welcome a new Jewish presence.

The population has ballooned to 60,000, most of whom came after the war. Newcomers never knew the Haberfelds as anything more than a name on a house and castle. The citizens who knew the family are dying off.

Property claims--which from Jews alone number in the thousands in Poland, according to the World Jewish Congress--are sensitive issues under the best circumstances because of ambivalence about selling off what many citizens see as their cultural and national treasures.

In Auschwitz, the situation is more prickly because of the city’s complicated relationship with the death camp, said Oxford University professor Jonathan Webber, a founding member of the International Council of the Auschwitz State Museum.

“They’d like to feel they live in a normal town. They don’t want to keep being reminded that it has this ghastly place right across the river,” he said.

“At the same time, there is very little to keep tourists in town. They visit the museum and leave,” Webber said. “If the Jews were to come and put in a center, there would be some advantage.”

Mayor Krawczyk said he would welcome a Jewish presence as an opportunity for Polish Jews and Polish Christians to get to know one another again. Like the Haberfelds, he harks back to he two groups’ relationship before the war.

That Auschwitz gave the family priority in a sale is a gift in itself. Because Poland has no national policy regarding restitution of nationalized properties, all such decisions rest with the municipality.

Stephen mentions the Jewish cemetery when he talks about wanting to reclaim Haberfeld House, and the scores of graves that bear his family name.

“These are the kinds of ties that bind a family to the soil, to the city, to the country, to the idea of Poland,” Stephen said. “The house is the physical symbol of what the Haberfeld family was and what some sliver of Jewish life was before World War II.”

The death camp, he said, gives them an even better reason.

“People who come to see the death across the river should be able to see the life that once was there,” he said. “I just hope we can show them.”