I was five years old when my grandfather, Eugeniusz Piksa, told me about his father. I sat cross-legged on the living room floor, my grandfather sitting in front of me on his divan bed. Above him hung a wooden cross with a silver figure of Jesus and the letters “INRI” (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). I didn’t know anything about the Second World War, the Nazis or my family history, except that my great-grandfather had been a musician. His portrait hung in the bar my father opened in 1998, in place of the restaurant our family once ran. I don’t remember what my grandfather said to me, but I remember his tears as he spoke. It was the only time I ever saw him cry.
My great-grandfather, Michał Piksa, was arrested by the Gestapo in Łącko, Poland, on 28 February 1941. An agent had infiltrated the resistance group against the Nazi occupation Michał led, which had its headquarters in the family restaurant on the ground floor of their home. What the Gestapo did not know was that two Jewish women were hidden in secret rooms concealed behind wooden panelling in the attic, waiting to be smuggled over the border to Slovakia. Michał was then 57 years old and married with six children. He was not himself Jewish, but he could not sit idly by as Polish Jews, some of them his friends and neighbours, were persecuted. So from 1939 he led a network of anti-Nazi conspirators, who continued to aid the Polish army until 1945 – and helped Jewish families escape the Nazis in the dead of night, hidden under blankets in horse-drawn carts.
According to the eyewitness statement of a member of the resistance group, the chief of the Gestapo in the region – Heinrich Hamann, dubbed the “executioner of Nowy Sącz” – recognised my great-grandfather as he was brought in for questioning. He greeted him by name: “Herr Piksa, ist da” – Mr Piksa, it’s you. Michał and Eugeniusz, then aged 20, were put on trial for conspiring against the Nazis. After two weeks Eugeniusz was released without charge, but Michał was condemned to Auschwitz. Allowed briefly to return home to prepare for the 108-mile journey by cart from Łącko to the camp, he collected his accordion, and a box of ivy leaves – an unusual folk instrument, symbolic of the Polish Highlands region.
My great-grandfather was always referred to with affection by my family and those who knew him, including a multifaith community in Bosnia where he lived for a handful of years before the First World War. His wedding, which took place on 19 November 1906, is amusingly recounted in his diary: he describes a wedding party, including 17 best men, that was attended by the entire village. Together they drank 250 litres of vodka, 80 litres of rum and slightly more than 54 half pints of beer.
When my great-grandfather arrived at Auschwitz, he was allowed to keep his accordion. (This will surprise anyone familiar with the piles of belongings at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.) Jan Krokowski, a fellow prisoner in Block 22, later recalled Michał in his 1965 essay, “Wspomnienia z lat Okupacji” (“Reflections of the Occupation Years”), as “a highlander of enormous size, with a kind, gentle face… a well-known figure in the camp”. On Sunday afternoons he would “play his unforgettable masterful melodies from Łącko and Podhale to his companions in misery. They reminded us of good moments and the views of these parts that were already foggy with time.”
By the time my great-grandfather was born in 1883, it had been 88 years since Poland had last existed as a sovereign state. Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria carved up the Polish territories between them in a series of partitions. The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, where my family lived, was at that time part of Austria. After decades of anti-Polish policies, the use of the Polish language was strictly forbidden, and Polish customs and culture were demonised. Schooling was conducted in German.
A career in folk music was not an obvious choice for my great-grandfather, who was the eldest son born to a peasant family. Even so, he felt the pull of an art form which was banned and suppressed in most parts of the former country. As a boy minding the cows, he learned to play traditional songs on an ivy leaf: the leaf is folded and blown into, as if the player were trying to hum. The sound that is produced is difficult to describe; it buzzes and squeaks. Later he learned to play the trumpet, then the accordion. In his diary, he wrote how music helped him through the First World War, when he served as a battalion bugler in the Austro-Hungarian Galician Infantry. Playing the accordion for officers earned him extra food rations. He was discharged on account of his father’s failing health, shortly before the borders of modern-day Poland were confirmed at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
After an appearance on Polish Radio in Kraków on 19 December 1931 and an interview in the widely read Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier), Michał’s music career took off. Between 1933 and 1939 he toured eastern Europe, performing in Lviv and Sniatyn in Ukraine, Vilnius in Lithuania, and even Hamburg in 1938. He also formed a folk band, which according to one biography managed the “first popularisation of Polish folklore of this scale”. A tour to Chicago was planned for 1939. But Michał never made the trip.
The Germans arrived in Łącko on 5 September 1939 at around 2am. My great-grandfather was prepared for this moment. He was the leader of a diversion group of amateur fighters the Border Protection Corps had given some training to a few weeks earlier; machine guns and rifles were deposited in a safe house in a village nearby. But the German forces advanced so fast his group didn’t have time to respond.
Instead, they turned to more underground means of resistance. Polish soldiers were secretly moving to Hungary, where the army was regrouping, and Łącko was on their route. The Piksa family restaurant became the meeting point for those who wanted to cross the border to join them. My great-grandfather hid his radio from the German forces, despite the severe punishment he risked. He and his fellow conspirators used it to spy on the local German forces in the area through radio waves. My grandfather, aged 19, also joined the resistance movement: through his job in local government, he was able to issue forged documents, allowing Jewish families to escape across the border.
In 1940 a group of soldiers and civilians being smuggled out of Poland was intercepted by the gendarmes in Slovakia and returned to the Gestapo in Nowy Sącz. After a brutal interrogation, my great-grandfather’s part in the resistance was revealed to the Gestapo. He was arrested for the first time along with seven others on 30 March that year, but was released after two weeks due to lack of evidence. He continued leading the group until an agent infiltrated a conspirator meeting, posing as a cousin of the village doctor in possession of anti-Nazi pamphlets. Michał was re-arrested, and sent to Auschwitz in 1941.
My great-grandfather’s letters from the camp have acquired an almost mythological quality among my family over the years. I was born in Łącko 59 years after his arrest. When Michał’s former home was sold in 2009, the letters were hastily packed up with the rest of his possessions and the boxes divided between various family members, spread across Poland from Lesser Poland to Silesia. When I visited in the summer of 2023, I began to look through some of them. Tucked unceremoniously between black-and-white photos of unfamiliar faces, I found ten letters from Auschwitz, eight of which were written by my great-grandfather, the other two by members of his resistance group who were condemned to Auschwitz when he was first arrested. It looks like the families of those sent to Auschwitz from Łącko exchanged these letters between themselves. In another box were letters from Jewish families thanking my family for all their help.
My great-grandfather regularly wrote to his wife, Aniela, during his imprisonment. Just those eight letters survive with my family: others were lost in the multiple deadly floods in the region at the turn of the century, others donated to museums and the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. Reading them, I imagine him sitting in the long, narrow, wooden cabin, the other prisoners lying on spartan bunk beds around him, as he hurriedly fills out two sides of A5 in pencil. The yellowed pages bear a red or purple Deutsches Reich stamp featuring Hitler in profile in the top right-hand corner, and Michał’s prisoner number at the bottom – twin to the one that was tattooed on his forearm. My family crowded around me in sombre silence to look at them. Later, my cousin told me she had no idea that they existed, hidden under their stairs for 14 years.
I’ve kept those letters with me for two years, able to understand snippets with my rudimentary German, but I put off having them translated. I knew they were heavily censored, so I wouldn’t find a real description of the awful years he spent in the camps – though that wasn’t what I feared. When I finally sent the letters off for translation, I realised I had resisted doing so for so long because I was afraid of finding them full of hope.
“4 October 1942
My dear Aniela and children!
I received your letter of 27.IX just at the last moment and that is why I was forced to change the content. The bride and groom Janka [his youngest daughter] and Leszek, the future couple, gave me real joy and I am very pleased that I am still alive to give them my fatherly blessing, which I give from the bottom of my heart. So, cheers, the young couple, and cheers again. Thank you very much for your wishes on my name day, thank you to my friends and relatives. It is very good that I received the message from you from Gienek [the diminutive nickname for my grandfather], as I was worried about what was going on with him. As for the purchase of the Meletz property, I would be happy if you did as your son-in-law Radomski advised you. Your last letter was a real joy for me. Write everything to me from home, regardless of whether it is good or bad. Everything that comes to me from you is good. What is being said in Łącko and the surrounding area? Once again, my best and warmest congratulations to Janka and Leszek. I send you my kisses and warmest regards,
yours, Michał.”
My great-grandfather never implies that he will be able to congratulate his daughter in person. He seems to hand family responsibilities over to his son-in-law. His silence about his own well-being and his life in the camp is stark. He sounds as if he doesn’t expect to ever escape Auschwitz.
There are 519 miles separating Dachau and Auschwitz: the distance prisoners had to cover by foot and cattle car during the “death marches” of the final months of the Second World War, as Nazis evacuated prisoners from Auschwitz while Soviet forces advanced. On 2 December 1944, my great-grandfather embarked on one of these marches. The journey took ten days. Many did not survive it, dying from the lack of food, the extreme cold or at the hands of the Nazis. But my great-grandfather did.
He died in Dachau on 10 February 1945 of typhoid fever, just 78 days before the camp was liberated. He was cremated and though his ashes were never returned home, his accordion was.
In the months after the liberation of Auschwitz, civilians flocked to the camp: perhaps out of morbid curiosity, perhaps to pay respects to lost relatives, or perhaps hoping to find something valuable. There, one such civilian found an accordion, and – thanks to the Nazis’ regimented documentation – remembered a man who gave a second life to regional folk music; a man who was ready to fight to defend the borders of a country he never knew. At some point before my great-grandmother’s death in 1954, the accordion made the 108-mile journey back home.
The shadow of my great-grandfather’s resistance efforts against the Nazi occupation was long. My grandfather’s two suspended death sentences, acquired nearing the end of the war for his involvement with the Home Army, were only pardoned in July 1997, three years before I was born. After he told me about his father, sitting on the divan bed in the house my family had occupied for 79 years, he took me to the library in the attic, where two Jewish women had been secreted away from the Gestapo. The sun was shining through a balcony door, open to the town square below. My grandfather placed his father’s accordion in my lap and showed me which buttons to press to change the sounds it made. Next to me were my great-grandfather’s highlander shoes, kierpce, and his ornate leather belt.
Unbeknown to me, somewhere in a box or a drawer in that library were ten letters from Auschwitz, waiting to be read.
[See also: The West is bored to death]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025