She lived to be 95. In 2005, she published her memoirs in New York, titled "Gutta: Memories from a Lost World."
Her hometown was Warsaw, where she was born on January 22, 1917. She came from a wealthy Jewish family. Her grandfather, Reb Berel Gefen, had moved from his native Białystok to the capital. They had been trading leather for generations, and Warsaw was an important center of the tanning industry.
Grandpa Berel bought leather from the Russians. He also made shoe soles. He and his wife, Malka, had a brood of children. The eldest was Sara, Gutta's mother. She was intellectually gifted and took private lessons. Her talent for learning was inherited by her only daughter, the heroine of our story. Sara married Jeszue Eisenzweig, with whom she had Gutta and a younger son, Jankiel. They lived on Franciszkańska Street in Warsaw.
Yiddish was very important to the entire family, and all the relatives used it in their daily lives. They celebrated the Sabbath with great solemnity. Gutta's grandfather even paid local Jewish shopkeepers not to have to open their shops on the holiday.
At the age of six, Gutta began attending public school, where she had weekly Jewish religious education classes. In seventh grade, her parents transferred her to the Bais Yaakov School for Girls in Warsaw. She later continued her education at a religious girls' high school. Chavatzelet was known for its very high academic standards. The students studied Torah for an hour every day. Gutta stood out among them for her intellect and character. She was very intellectually receptive, attending meetings of both Zionists and Communists "for intellectual stimulation and lively discussion."
Seventeen-year-old Gutta spent her afternoons teaching Jewish religion and culture to children from poor families. This was a very intense period in her life, as she was attending middle school and preparing intensely for her final exams. Simply passing this exam was rare for Jewish girls, as it automatically reduced their chances on the marriage market. Gutta's grandfather and father also shared these concerns, forbidding her from taking it.
Gutta rebelled, however, and passed her high school leaving examination with high marks. She then moved to Kraków, where she studied at the Bais Yaakov Seminary for a year and a half. There, she was strongly influenced by her teacher Hanka Grossfield and Rabbi Yehuda Leib Orlean. Thanks to the latter, her knowledge of Yiddish culture deepened significantly. After graduating from the seminary, she taught for six months as part of her teaching internship at a girls' elementary school in the town of Stopnica, near Kraków.
But the ambitious girl wanted to further her education. In 1937, she returned to her native Warsaw and began studies at the University of Warsaw. However, anti-Semitism and the "ghetto benches" were obstacles. Gutta was active in the Institute of Jewish Studies.
In 1939, Gutta completed her master's degree and dreamed of a doctorate. During the summer, through a friend, she met Jewish businessman Eli Sternbuch, who lived permanently in Switzerland. However, her educational and personal plans were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. At the very beginning, her brother Jankiel died of typhus. In the winter of 1941, Gutta's father was sent to the Bełżec extermination camp. Gutta herself illegally opened a Bais Yaakov school for girls in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she taught and served as principal. She also worked as a journalist, writing articles for the Jewish Newspaper. In the summer of 1941, she began working at an orphanage run by Janusz Korczak. She gathered material for her doctorate, deciding to write about the mental health of children in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Her lover, Eli Sternbuch, sent food parcels from Switzerland, which proved invaluable. One of them contained an even greater treasure – a Paraguayan passport. Her mother received a second such document. In mid-July 1942, two hundred of the passport holders were summoned to Pawiak Prison, where they were imprisoned. Crammed into a small space, they suffered hunger and other hardships. Many were then murdered by the Germans. Gutta and her mother's six-month imprisonment ended on January 18, 1943. At night, they were taken with a larger group to a train that took them to the Vittel internment camp in France. There, they were to be exchanged for German prisoners. Gutta and her mother settled in the comfortable Hotel Providence. There, they were treated well by German guards. The Red Cross provided food, clothing, and medicine. Around three thousand internees were imprisoned in Vittel. Not all were of Jewish descent. A large group consisted of English, French, and American prisoners of war. During her internment, Gutta taught Hebrew and Yiddish culture to Jewish children. She also kept in touch by letter with her beloved Eli, who asked for her hand in marriage.
But the situation for Gutta and her mother worsened in December 1943, when Paraguay and other South American countries refused to honor the internees' passports. Attempts by Swiss and British Jewish organizations to intervene also proved ineffective. The internees were sent to the Hotel Beau Site, which was surrounded by barbed wire. They were also subjected to a curfew. On the morning of April 19, 1944, SS men entered Gutta and her mother's room and announced their deportation to the Treblinka concentration camp. They hid in the basement. They managed to avoid deportation. But Gutta, in a state of utter terror, mistook bottles for liquids. Instead of water, she drank cleaning fluid. Miraculously, she survived, but was unconscious for many days. Fortunately, she and her mother were admitted to the hospital. However, the hospital was regularly checked by the Germans, who immediately deported those who recovered to extermination camps. Then Gutta and her mother hid for many weeks, constantly changing their places of stay.
After the end of World War II, Eli Sternbuch's fiancé worked for the Red Cross. In France, he reunited Jewish families previously separated by the war. There were also many Jewish orphans who needed special care. He and Gutta were reunited after years of wartime separation in Aix-les-Bains. She assisted her fiancé in his work for the Red Cross.
In 1944, Gutta married Eli. They settled in Switzerland, where they opened a shelter for Jewish refugees in their home. In the following years, they ran a Jewish school for boys. They were a happy couple, with six children. They spent the rest of their lives in Zurich. Gutta died on August 30, 2012, in New York.
Agata Olenderek, Julia Michalska
For centuries, Polish Jewish women lived on the border between two worlds, yet were not fully-fledged citizens in either. Jewish traditions bound them by a series of sometimes rigorous regulations regulating all, even the most intimate, spheres of life, while simultaneously limiting access to education. The Polish community viewed them ambivalently, as evidenced by the story of King Casimir and Esterka – they were often orientalized and sexualized through the prism of their cultural distinctiveness. Yet, they served as liaisons between the Polish and Jewish worlds. They established contacts with Polish neighbors more often than men – primarily through trade or other economic activities – and demonstrated a better command of the Polish language, even during the Holocaust. They participated in various areas of social life – education, science, and the arts, contributing a significant component to Polish cultural heritage.
Twice forgotten and censored – as women and Jews, as a doubly alien element, as the ultimate Other in the imaginarium of male-dominated Polish culture.
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum wants to help remember them – to bring back from oblivion figures and stories of significant Polish Jewish women and their cultural influences. We present a new series of columns devoted to Polish Jewish women – women of art, cinema, and literature; writers, translators, actresses, and all those who co-created Polish culture.
