My name is Chris Tanz. I was born Krystyna Maria Szwienczicka on September 27, 1944, in Warsaw, Poland[1]. My parents were born in Krakow; my father, Henry Tanz, in 1911, my mother, Regina Wiernicka, in 1913. Krakow was a large and cosmopolitan city. While Jews lived mostly in their own district, Kazymiersz, named after the king who had opened Poland’s doors to them in 1492, there was a degree of integration between Jews and non-Jews, at least in comparison with other pockets of Eastern Europe. Although there were Jewish  quotas at the university, my father was able to attend the law school there. His older brother, who wanted to study medicine, was excluded by the quota and had to go to Prague instead.

      On September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, my father went west to join his army regiment, moving against a tide of people streaming east, away from the front. When he got there he discovered the regiment had been disbanded. He returned home and on September 4, my parents got married. This was the first time. By the time the war was over, they would have been married four times (and never divorced).

      Three months later, the decrees against Jews began. When I assumed Power-of-Attorney for my father, I found some handwritten notes among his records. In December 1939, Jews were required to wear an armband with a star. Gold and silver were confiscated. They were ordered to register for work. In January 1940, the edict was announced that they were not allowed to change their residence or ride on trains.

      Sometime in 1940, my parents were required to move to the ghetto. They were given no choice, but initially it was also presented as a privilege. My mother, father and my mother’s sister, Gustawa, were sent to the ghetto. They were all of working age. My mother’s parents and her youngest brother, Jozef, who was only 16, were sent to a suburb.

      Eventually, all the Jews of Krakow were herded into the one ghetto. My mother’s parents and her brother had to come in from the suburbs. My father’s father joined them too. For a brief period they were all together – all those remaining. (Of my mother’s two other brothers, one had already been killed and one had fled to the USSR. My father’s brother was still in Prague.)

      At first, the ghetto seemed to be a safe haven, relatively speaking. To be caught outside without proper authorization, such as a work permit, was to be subject to immediate arrest and deportation, or to be shot in the street. One day, my mother looked out the window of their ghetto apartment  and saw an old woman getting shot, her brain and eye spattering against the brick wall of the adjacent house.

      Sometime after this my parents took the first of many steps that preserved their lives. They decided to leave the ghetto. My father managed to forge false I.D. papers. (Actually he prepared some for every member of the family.) My father became Jan Wojtas. My mother remained Regina Wiernicka. That name was sufficiently Polish (i.e. not Jewish) to be usable. They got married again in order to have a wedding certificate that matched their current identities.

      My parents took the train to Warsaw. They sat in the same railroad car, but didn’t sit together. In fact, they sat at opposite ends. They maintained this stratagem for the duration of the war. They never walked together. They reasoned that each one of them individually could pass as a non-Jew. But the data of their two physiognomies combined, along with subtle impressions about how they communicated, might yield too many clues. They would be more likely to fall under suspicion.

      In Warsaw, my parents rented a room. They tried to make a living and they tried to stay alive. At first, they survived on a small sum of money they brought with them. Eventually, their money ran out. My father came up with a scheme to sell paper supplies. He was familiar with the paper industry in Krakow, but couldn’t go there in person to transact any business because he would be recognized. He sent my mother’s brother who was just a kid and not known in the community, to various manufacturers to buy cigarette paper, writing paper, postcards, greeting cards. Usually Jozef was able to come back with the merchandise, and he and my father would sell it to shops in Warsaw.

      The danger of being discovered was constant. It came from the Gestapo, from the Polish police, and from civilian informers. Once, a man stopped my father on the street. “I know you” he said, “You’re a Jew”. My father drew back his fist and punched him – knocking him to the ground. A crowd gathered. My father, “irate”, told them, with disgust: “He said I was a Jew!” and walked away.

      Another time in Warsaw my mother was at the train station, waiting for her brother to arrive. Suddenly, several men materialized and surrounded her. My father was there too, at his usual distance of fifty feet. In this case their stratagem gave him a chance to observe first. He approached the knot of people, offered a bribe and whisked her away. My father said there were always informers and denouncers. Some were motivated by hatred, but others were just trying to make a profit. A bribe could sometimes get rid of the latter. But you never knew if they would come back later. Every time they had a threatening encounter, my parents would move again. They never allowed themselves to rest in the mere hope of being secure.

      When my parents moved to Warsaw, the rest of their families stayed behind in Krakow. My father had prepared false documents for them too, and they agonized about trying to make the move. But for the older people, the perils of leaving seemed too enormous and so they lingered.

      My relative’s apartment overlooked an entrance to the ghetto. Not long before he died, my uncle Jozef told me how one night at 2 a.m., they heard the tramp of marching boots. Peering through the window they could make out the preparations for an “Aktion”, a brutal roundup of Jews for arrest and deportation. My uncle had built a false ceiling under the roof, a place where they could hide. There they kept water and bread and pillows. His parents and sister retreated into the hiding place. But he, a fleet 18 year old, accustomed to leaving the ghetto “officially” for a job at the post office outside, and even to sneaking out through barbed wire and broken glass to see a movie, managed to slip away. When he came back to reconnoiter in the afternoon of the same day, he was elated. Usually, an “Aktion” lasted for several days, but this time the Germans were already gone. He rushed eagerly to the apartment. There was nobody there. He never saw them again. My mother and father had never told me this story. My uncle continued, “They took my parents 28 October 1942”. I had no idea that anyone knew the date. After a short interval, my Uncle Jozef fled to Warsaw, joined my parents, and remained with them for the rest of the war.

      One evening in Warsaw, six Polish police officers appeared at the door of my parents’ apartment. They said they were looking for a Jew. They’d been told there was one living there. My father told them he was not a Jew. “Not only am I not a Jew” he said, “I am with the underground army”. “I am an officer”, he continued, returning their threat. They asked for his documents. “Why do you want to see my documents? Anybody can have fake documents! Just take a look inside my pants”.

      In Poland at that time, every Jew was circumcised, and no non-Jew. Neither a false ID, nor Aryan looks, nor standard Polish spoken without any accent, nor all three combined, could counter the evidence of circumcision, so the bluff seems totally reckless, except for an astonishing fact. Sometime during the war, my father had had a surgical procedure performed, an operation to disguise the fact that he was circumcised.

      After the incident with the Polish officers, my parents felt they could no longer remain in their apartment. They didn’t feel safe staying in Warsaw. They announced to their landlady that with the weather so unbearably hot, they would be going on a short vacation in the country. They acted as though they were leaving for just a while and would be back soon. They made their way across the Vistula River to Otwock on the other side and rented a room from a farmer.

      In August 1944, while they were on “vacation”, the Warsaw Uprising erupted, the revolt of the Polish resistance against the German army. Living as a Pole with a Polish I.D. ceased to be protection. There were Nazi roundups and shipments of Poles. Hundreds of thousands of them were deported and killed. Warsaw was leveled. From their safe vantage in Otwock across the river, my parents could see the smoke rising. The visit by the six police officers had turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

      My mother had already been pregnant twice during the war, but survival seemed impossible with a baby. Both times she had an abortion. Then she became pregnant again, this time with me. My parents liked to tell me that right away they began deliberating about what to do. They listened to a contraband radio and took out contraband maps. They drew the positions of the fronts and tracked the advancing Russian army. My uncle recalled that my father declared, “This baby will be born in freedom”. He was not entirely right, but remarkably close. The war wasn’t over, but they had managed to get outside the zone of German occupation.

      When my mother went into labor, my parents set out for help. They were on foot, stumbling through potato fields in the no-man’s land between German-occupied Warsaw and the Russian lines on the east side of the river outside the city. Shells were flying overhead. The Russian army stayed put throughout the insurrection to let the Germans and the Poles fight it out, reducing the numbers of both the German Wehrmacht and the Polish Resistance with whom they would have to contend later.

      My parents met a man with a horse and buggy. He agreed to give them a ride to a little hospital, a TB sanatorium in the tiny hamlet of Sródborów  (In-the-Woods) that had been converted into a Russian field hospital. A military doctor delivered me without incident. My skin was very dark when I was born. My parents used to tell me that the nurses all came in to admire my coloring. But it wouldn’t have been the right complexion for a Polish baby. The date was September 27, 1944. The doctor asked my parents if they knew what day it was. They didn’t. He told them it was Yom Kippur. In addition to the relief of a safe birth, there was the extraordinary sensation of having been recognized without an immediate threat implied. The doctor was a Russian Jew.

      When the war ended, my parents made their way to Gdansk. My father had the prospect of becoming the representative of a pen factory there and of working for the government to begin the reconstruction of industry in the northern sector of Poland. In the meantime, he took over an old flour mill and began to use it to produce varnish. My parents prospered. My first memories are set in Gdansk. We had a house on a hill. We had a goat. I had a buggy and a sled. My brother, Mark, was born. We have photographs from those years, taken with a newly acquired camera, recording the beginnings of the new life. Images of the old life had of course all disappeared. In the photographs we look radiant.

      But even so, there was continuing insecurity. My parents were budding entrepreneurs with a communist regime consolidating itself around them, and Jews in an environment that was still hostile to Jews. In 1946, there was a pogrom in Kielce. Although the war was over, my father and uncle were still Szwienczicki and Sczigielski. And so they remained for the rest of their time in Poland. My parents didn’t want my brother and me to grow up not knowing we were Jewish and absorbing the ambient anti-Semitism only to discover later that in fact we were.

      My parents managed to leave Poland and we went to France, settling first in Paris, and then Enghiens-les-Bains, a suburb known for its gambling casino. We lived on money my parents brought from Poland in the upholstery of a chair. It was very fortunate for us that that crate of furniture arrived. The money gave my father some time to learn the language, but even after he could speak passably, he had a hard time finding a job. It was easier to learn French than to get a French work permit. Although he was not by temperament a gambler, he began occasionally to go to the casino and somehow managed to extract an income from it that allowed us to get by a little longer.

      However, as the Korean War intensified, my father thought that the Soviet Union might invade Western Europe, and began to cast about for yet another refuge. My parents wanted to come to the US but couldn’t get visas. However, Australia was willing to take us. My parents were reluctant to go to “the other side of the world”. but since no alternative presented itself, they decided to go ahead, and they shipped all their belongings down under. Then, suddenly, the US visas came through. In October of 1951, we boarded a ship called the Liberté and set out for New York.

      I actually remember arriving in New York at the age of seven, looking through a porthole at the grey November sky and sea, and seeing the Statue of Liberty (also grey). New York was a struggle for all of us. My father found a job for one dollar an hour and had to commute an hour each way. For me New York was walls – the incredibly high walls of the buildings, and the wall of incomprehension that surrounded me at school.

      Not long after our arrival, at the advanced age of four years, my brother was circumcised. It was part of my family’s reclaiming of our identity as Jews. I was seven years old. My parents didn’t change my name.

      Lured by better job prospects, after less than a year we moved to Chicago. We lived near the University, and when the time came for me to go to high school, my father persuaded me that I would love to go to the Lab School there. And he was right!  He also persuaded them to give me a scholarship. It was an extraordinary educational experience and in turn led to going to Harvard/Radcliffe for college. They were just starting a new program of “freshman seminars”, providing opportunities for young students to study in small classes with illustrious professors. I had a seminar with Erik Erikson. There I was, experiencing my “identity crisis” with the man who had invented the concept. This formative experience contributed to my eventual choice of a career in the field of developmental psychology.

      My wandering childhood also had a role in my career direction within the academic framework. Polish was my first language, but I started school in France, without speaking any French. At the age of seven, I went into second grade in New York, without speaking any English. Continuing through high school, college, and even into graduate school, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, other than “stay in school”, but the field that finally captured my imagination was the study of how children learn to talk. I got my Ph.D. in psychology, specializing in “developmental psycholinguistics”.

      That’s how I came to Tucson. In 1975, I got a job as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department of the University of Arizona and drove out from Chicago, arriving on a suffocating summer night in August. I didn’t know anybody in town.

      Soon, I was busy teaching. And working on getting books published. I did one book about children’s language based on my dissertation, with the somewhat forbidding title of Studies in the Acquisition of Deictic Terms, published by Cambridge University Press in 1980, and another book, this one for children and with the friendlier title, An Egg is to Sit On, published in 1978.

      Beyond the boundaries of the Psychology Department I worked with students and other faculty members in Linguistics, and Education, and the Women’s Studies program that was just getting started. Through friends in Linguistics and Philosophy I met a wonderful man, Jean-Paul Bierny. We got married in 1979.

      My husband shares with me certain aspects of my background. He was born and raised in Belgium and grew up speaking French. He has memories of the war that are more direct than mine, having been old enough to experience the Nazi occupation, the deportation of his Jewish pediatrician, food shortages, and the bombing of a neighbor’s home. He came to the United States after finishing medical school in Brussels and working as a doctor for three years in Algeria and Kenya. We are both naturalized citizens.

      We’ve shared a beautiful life in Tucson. Until his retirement, Jean-Paul was busy as a doctor, practicing radiology. On the side he served as president of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music for 35 years, bringing wonderful musicians to town from all over the world, and starting a festival and a commissioning program that are now known internationally. It gave us great joy to hear the music – and to feed the musicians!  We also both love to travel – and to explore our natural surroundings right here where we live.

      In 1983 our son, Philippe, was born. Jean-Paul always spoke French to him and he grew up bilingual. Going through the magnet schools in Tucson, he also learned Spanish. After high school he spent a year in Belgium and then in Peru and Ecuador, solidifying his French and his Spanish. Then he went to Brown for college and studied Chinese. After that he went to China and taught English at a University for three years. After that he came to the realization that his experiences around the world had taught him how important good medical care was to the happiness of people everywhere. He decided to go to Med School. Last year he graduated – after having done a hospital rotation in Mauritania. Through his entire medical education and now during his residency in family medicine, he has regularly been called upon to help communicate with many patients who don’t speak English. He addresses them with sympathy and sensitivity in French or Spanish or Chinese. So, this Belgian-Polish couple meets in Tucson and produces a native Tucsonan who becomes a citizen of the world.

      The year our son was born, my job at the University also ended. When he started school, I cast about to find a new direction. I was fascinated by public art and decided to try to do it myself. Here I was helped by my parents’ example in starting new lives. I was helped by my husband’s enthusiastic support. I was helped by a wonderful feature of American culture:  its receptiveness to people re-inventing themselves.

      I was also helped by my young son! Through his friendship with a little girl in his pre-school class, I became friends with her mother, who was a budding architect. I asked her if she would like to join me in entering a public art competition together. She agreed. Then her boss joined us. We won the competition and built our first project!  And our careers in public art were launched. Eventually, I continued on my own

      My projects are site-specific monuments in public spaces; works that tell stories about the landscape and the community, the people who once lived here and the people who live here now, the creatures, real and imaginary, the rocks, the light. It has been profoundly gratifying for me to produce these celebrations of place for my community. It has helped me, after being uprooted so often in my early years, to come to feel so deeply rooted in my adopted home.[2]

[1]  This story is an excerpt from Hiding in the Open, a chapter in Born into a World at War, a collection of personal narratives edited by Maria Tymoczko and Nancy Blackmun, U. of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 

[2]  Chris Tanz Design LLC. See her website at www.christanz.com