A Murder in Poland

I was digging in a field in Poland hoping to solve a 75-year-old murder mystery. It had rained the day before our arrival, so the mud was thick, wet, heavy; the temperature hovered over freezing. Two archaeologists surveyed the land with a magnetometer and found two areas with suspicious anomalies. A third marked the areas with wooden pegs and string.

In the 1970s, someone found the remains, stuck his pinkie through the skull’s bullet hole, and reburied the bones. I was optimistic they were still here. The field was huge, stretching in a green expanse for about half a kilometer. But the witness testimony had been specific. This should have been the place. I dug faster.

The mystery of who murdered Josef Kopf, my husband’s cousin, piqued my interest after a trip to the Kopfs’ ancestral town of Turobin in eastern Poland, three and a half years ago. We were welcomed like long lost relatives by various descendants of Antoni Tetlak, the Polish man who risked his life to save Josef’s younger sister, Genia, during the Shoah. She was 15 when she entombed herself in a hiding place in his barn, not high enough for her to sit up, just to lie down, legs folded. A year and nine months later when she emerged, her first steps were like a toddler’s and it took her time to adjust to the light.

Her brother, Josef Kopf, escaped from a death camp in a daring feat depicted in the 1987 British film Escape from Sobibor. Josef’s breakout anticipated by more than two months the great Sobibor revolt, the largest escape from a German concentration camp. Most of the nearly 300 prisoners who escaped were killed by landmines, gunfire or during the ensuing manhunt. Only 58 survived.

After his escape, Josef spent a year hiding in the judenrein countryside, until the Russian army liberated eastern Poland in July 1944. He surfaced in Lublin and tracked down Toivy Blatt, a Sobibor escapee working in a bike shop.

“One day Josef showed up,” Blatt recalled, speaking from his home in California. Blatt, who wrote two books about Sobibor, remembered Josef as a tall man who wore tall boots. “He asked to borrow one of the bicycles. He wanted to ride out to his hometown to pick up something he had hidden before being taken to Sobibor. He put air in the tires, left, and never returned.”

Once home, Josef’s luck ran out. He was shot in the back of his head in broad daylight. No one was charged. His place of burial was unknown. One online historical archive notes that Josef Kopf was murdered in August 1944 by Polish anti-Semites, with no further information.

The story of the two siblings—one rescued, one murdered—in a small Polish town, brings into sharp focus the debate about Polish complicity and resistance during the Holocaust. The controversy’s most recent iteration is a libel trial in Warsaw’s district court against two renown Holocaust scholars, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, for a scholarly examination of Polish behavior toward Jews during the war. The outcome of the case this week is expected to determine the fate of independent Holocaust research under Poland’s nationalist government.

Who killed Josef Kopf? I couldn’t let it go.

Sobibor was concealed by pine forests in a sparsely populated area in the Lublin district. It was the second of three death camps, including Belzec and Treblinka, constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi conspiracy to annihilate Europe’s Jews. Starting in May 1942, between 175,000 and 300,000 Jews were killed at the camp.

Every day at 11 o’clock, the 40 slave laborers of the Waldkommando (forest brigade), whose job it was to fell pine trees, were given a short break for bread and water. Two Jewish prisoners guarded by two armed Ukrainians would go to the nearby village of Zlobek to bring buckets of water for the workers. Ten months earlier, the Germans had decided to burn rather than bury the murdered bodies, hence the need for a daily supply of firewood.

On this particular day, July 27, 1943, only one Ukrainian guard, nicknamed “Marmoladnik,” accompanied the two prisoners. Josef Kopf had arrived in one of the earlier transports, while the second prisoner, Shlomo Podchlebnik, had clocked 52 days. Podchlebnik was first assigned to sort hair shorn from the heads of the murdered women, pulling the hairpins for a separate pile. According to his testimony after the war, he couldn’t bear the emotional toll of his assignment, and maneuvered to be transferred to the Waldkommando.

With only one guard to overpower, Kopf and Podchlebnik decided to make a break for freedom.

“In Zlobek, we bought vodka and got the Ukrainian drunk. On the way back I told the guard who was walking behind us that I had a diamond in my pocket. The Ukrainian then came and stood beside me, whereupon Josef grabbed him by the throat and pushed him to the ground,” Podchlebnik said.

“I cut off his head with a sharp knife. We took his carbine and fled. We found a barn and lay down underneath the grain until 10 that evening. Then we went on.”

When Marmoladnik failed to return with the two prisoners, the Germans dispatched another guard to search. The 38 remaining Jewish prisoners, half Dutch, half Polish, waited anxiously fearing reprisals. In the commotion that broke out when the second Ukrainian returned with the news, most of the Polish prisoners ran into the woods.

The Dutch Jews, knowing they had no chance to survive in the Polish countryside, remained rooted in place, hands on their heads. Five of the escapees would survive the war while 11 were captured and forced to crawl back to the camp on elbows and knees. They were executed by a firing squad. One shouted in Yiddish, “Avenge us!” It was Podchlebnik’s uncle, the group’s foreman.

For Kopf and Podchlebnik, survival in the countryside was nearly impossible. Danger stalked them each time they knocked on a door or hid in a barn. “Sometimes we had to obtain food using force,” Podchlebnik said.

With money and gold taken from the stores in Sobibor before their escape, they were able to pay farmers to hide them for weeks at a time. One farmer, who Podchlebnik knew, “was glad to see them, kissed them and let them stay in the barn. On the third day he told them he was afraid to keep them at his place and fixed a hideout for them in a hollowed-out space in the hay. He gave them food twice a day, but the place was cramped and stifling, and it was impossible to sit or lie down,” Podchlebnik testified. Moving on, they encountered Chaim Kornfeld, another escapee from the Waldkommando. All three would survive until the Red Army marched in.

In early August, about two weeks after liberation, Josef pedaled 53 kilometers to Turobin with the bike he had borrowed from Toive. He had plans for the future, but first, he had to get his gold.

He must have been stunned to find his little sister, Genia, at the Tetlak’s house. Her family had been rounded up in the last aktion in Turobin, taken by wagons to the town of Izbica and crowded into a synagogue to await transport to Belzec. Genia slipped out, threw herself on the ground and pretended to be dead. Through a crack in her eyes she saw her family and neighbors lining up in rows marching to the train station. By the end of the day, they would all be dead.

She slipped through the barbed wire fence and walked 38 kilometers through the night to Turobin. At dawn, she tiptoed into Antony Tetlak’s barn. That day the Germans had declared Turobin judenrein.

When Tetlak went to feed his horse the next morning, he found Genia. She was up in the gallery covered with straw. Afraid to make a sound, she took off a shoe and dropped it.

“Dear God, what will be with you?” he asked.

She began crying. “Why did I run away? What have I to live for? Kill me. Please, kill me.”

“I will not kill you,” he said. “Only He who gave you your soul can take your soul.”

The previous night Germans searched Tetlak’s house for Jews. He dug a hole on the side of the barn and covered it with straw. Soon, when temperatures dropped below freezing, he brought the feather blanket her family had left behind.

Genia cried constantly, silently. She envied the barking dogs running free. Was it day or night? She dreamed a lot of her mother. She hoped to fall asleep and never wake up. A year passed by.

To keep her spirits up, Tetlak would say: “You’ll see. The war will end. I don’t know about the others, but you will live.”

In July 1944, the Russian army liberated Turobin. Two weeks later, Genia’s brother showed up.

One can imagine the jolt of joy that coursed through Genia’s body when she saw Josef, a feeling akin to a castaway catching sight of a ship on the horizon steaming towards him. Josef, her older brother, was alive. She was no longer alone in the world. The next day, the two survivors from a family of eight brothers and sisters would leave Turobin forever.

They sat down and talked. He said something about having escaped from a death camp called Sobibor. Tetlak offered Josef a meal after his long bike ride from Lublin. Josef told them he was going to visit Polish friends to take back property he had left for safekeeping. He’d sleep in a friend’s house and return the next day. Tetlak warned him not to go.

“Josef, don’t go, they will kill you,” he said. But Josef laughed off the warning.

“My brother was very rich, he had a hardware store before the war,” Genia later told an interviewer. “When he saw that the situation was bad, he distributed his fortune among some goyim.”

“The next day he was supposed to return. One day. Another day. Three days. He didn’t come. Tetlak already knew that my brother was murdered but didn’t have the heart to tell me,” Genia said.

Although 75 years had passed since Kopf’s murder, I had hoped that enough people were still around in Turobin who had heard whispers, who knew things. A body needed to be disposed of—where was it buried?

Who better to do some sleuthing than Turobin’s postman, Krzysztof Tutko, whose job it is to make the rounds in a small town where he knows everyone by name? He is the grandnephew of the man who saved Genia.

It didn’t take him long. A few weeks later he had a name, Zdybel, and said the killer’s nephew is willing to talk.

It was time to return to Poland.

I went with Genia’s daughter, Lea Hirsch, in the summer of 2018, to meet the Zdybel family. A desire to know more about her history had taken a passionate hold in Hirsch’s mind during our trip the previous year.

Lea got in touch with Yoram Haimi, the Israeli archaeologist who has been digging in Sobibor for the past 12 years. After the great escape, the Germans dismantled the camp, demolished the structures, exhumed and then burned the bodies from the mass graves. They planted pine saplings to cover up their crimes.

What the Nazis tried to hide, Haimi and his Polish partner, Wojciech Mazurek, have been uncovering, one shovelful at a time. The pair have unearthed 70,000 artifacts, including wedding bands, suitcase keys, coins, shoes, purses, teeth, bones and ashes. Using aerial and 3D images, they’ve pinpointed much of the camp’s structure; the exact locations of the eight gas chambers, 21 burial pits and nine open crematoria, in addition to the Himmelstrasse, or pathway to heaven, along which the victims were hurried toward the gas chambers.

Anything pertaining to Sobibor was of keen interest for them, including finding the remains of Josef Kopf, buried 130 kilometers away from the site.

“It’s an important part of the Sobibor story,” said Mazurek, who accompanied us to the home of Janusz Kula. As I’d learned before I’d returned to Poland, it was Kula’s uncle who’d shot Kopf.

“The most important thing is to find the bones and have respect for this history. Josef trusted these people and he gave them his money,” Mazurek said. “He was happy to have survived and wanted to start a new life after liberation. He was a neighbor of these people.”

The Kula’s one-story house in Gozuwka Kolonia is set in a bucolic landscape where things haven’t changed much from the time that nearby Turobin was 75% Jewish. Ducks and geese wandered in the yard, cherries that fell off the tree littered the ground, garlands of garlic hung to dry near the door post. A plate of raspberries, freshly picked, was set for us on the wooden table outside where we sat in the summer sun with Janusz and Maria Kula and heard about the cold-blooded murder of Josef Kopf. Lea and Janusz sat across from one another. His uncle murdered hers.

“When I came here as a young bride and went to pick beets in the field behind the house, neighbors warned me not to go near the far-right corner. That’s where the Jew was killed. His ghost will get you,” said Maria, a short, plump woman with cropped brown hair and a friendly, open face. She did most of the talking in a raspy voice. Her husband listened attentively and nodded in agreement.

“Several years back during a big storm, lightning struck the place where he was killed, ripping out a tree,” she said. “People were screaming and running for cover. People said his soul was making a sign.”

To understand the Kula’s willingness to speak freely on a topic that doesn’t bring honor to the family name is to compare their house to that of their cousins next door—a farmstead compared to a mansion. When in 2006 Poland’s premier, Jaroslaw Kaczyinski, paid an official visit to Turobin, he lunched at the home of their cousins. It would seem that Josef Kopf’s gold went a long way and was not shared equally.

Josef distributed his property among three friends. The first friend, Tomaszik, had died during the war and when Josef returned that fateful day, he found only the widow, Anna. The widow’s farmhand, a man named Franek, accompanied Josef to his next stop a few hundred meters away, the home of Jan Zdybel, 22 at the time.

The Kulas told the story.

Zdybel was surprised and inconvenienced to see Josef. He was sure Josef had died along with the rest of Turobin’s Jews and that the gold was his to keep. Perhaps he thought it was a cruel twist of fate that it was Josef who had survived. It was whispered that Turek, the neighbor just 400 meters away with whom Josef had also left gold, had killed a Jewish family of three who were hiding in his house. It might have occurred to Zdybel that he could do the same.

“His mother overheard him whispering with the farmhand, Franek, about killing Josef and said: ‘Don’t do it here in the house, not in front of the children. Take him out to the back behind the barn,’” said the nephew, Janusz Kula, about his grandmother.

Zdybel told Josef he would accompany him to the home of Turek, the third friend with whom he left property. Zdybel’s farmhand, Mietek Saja, also joined the group. They began walking, Josef, Zdybel and the two farmhands. The wheat had just been harvested, the earth was soft and they stepped on stray stalks. Zdybel put his arm on Josef’s shoulder, a gesture of friendship and reassurance.

“At this point Josef must have felt something was wrong because he kept looking around nervously, turning his head,” said Maria.

When they got to the halfway point between Zdybel’s house and the next destination, Franek came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head.

Weeks earlier during the last battle between the Red Army and the retreating Germans, a stray bomb fell in the wheat field, ripping open a crater and revealing a sand pit. It was easier to dig there, so they dragged Josef’s body 100 meters to the sand.

“I heard he was still alive when they were dragging him,” said Maria.

Several sources said Franek, the farmhand, left the area shortly after the murder and was killed in a shootout with police in a town called Jelena Gura. Inquiries in Jelena Gura failed to confirm that information.

Josef’s remains were disturbed in the 1970s when Janusz Kula’s father and older brother dug in the sand pit and the bones spilled out. The brother put his finger through the hole in the skull. They reburied the bones.

I asked Janusz Kula how he knew about the murder.

“My grandmother told me, my mother. Everybody knows about it,” he said.

His mother, Stefania Kula, was still alive.

“Kopf, Kopf, Kopf. Yes, I remember. He had a hardware store,” she said when I talked to her in an upstairs bedroom where, neglected and unkempt, she was confined to a chair.

She didn’t recall the murder, or didn’t want to.

“When I was small, the Jews were better than the Poles. They always gave,” she said. “A good-looking Jew taught me at school. He had red hair. The Germans killed him.”

Her brother sat on the loot for several decades, afraid to flaunt any sign of wealth in communist Poland. About 30 years ago the Zdybels built their grand home and had enough money left over to buy an apartment in Lublin, says the nephew.

All three of Josef’s “friends” had done well for themselves.

The Tureks built a beautiful, two-story house, one of the nicest in Turobin, near the church. According to locals, the widow bought an apartment in Lublin, several cars, and had 20,000 zloti to pay off a girl who got pregnant by her grandson. “It was a fortune at the time,” said Maria Kula. “Where would a widow have so much money?”

Before we left Turobin we again visited the empty lot where Antoni Tetlak’s wooden, one-story house and barn once stood. Lea stood in silent meditation over the spot where her mother was buried alive for almost two years. I picked cherries from a tree at the front of the property for Lea, thinking that her mother may have eaten cherries from the same tree.

The following year, Lea, her son, Amit, and I went back in Turobin to find Josef Kopf’s remains. We stayed with the relatives of Genia’s savior, the Tutkos, who have become like family.

“I want those bones out of there. It’s unpleasant to think about the murdered Jew lying in my field,” said Maria, still friendly and happy to see us. She noted cynically that the other half of the family got the gold while all they got are the bones.

The field is huge, stretching about 500 meters from the house to the end of the property, but the area for the search was narrowed down to the slight depression in the topography where the sand pit used to be. Lea and I picked up spare shovels and dug alongside the team. It was a good way to keep warm. I was certain we would find the bones. By the end of the third and final day, I was still certain the bones were there, but, unfortunately, not where we dug. Maybe if we had dug one meter to the right, or half a meter to the left we would have found them. We were disappointed.

“It’s difficult to find on the first try,” said the archaeologist, Mazurek. “This is not the end of the Kopf story. We will find his remains. And people will start to talk. They have seen that we are digging. Nobody thought someone would come looking for Josef Kopf. I think it’s not easy to live with this dirty gold. It was 75 years ago but it will never give anyone happiness.”

Another goal was to get Turobin, a town of about 1,000, to put up a memorial plaque for the town’s Jews. There is nothing to indicate that Jews once constituted the vast majority of the town’s population. The synagogue was replaced by a small, ugly shopping center. Tombstones were used by the Germans as sidewalks. Krzysztof Tutko recalls that as a child he walked to church on Sundays stepping on matzevas with Hebrew letters. Even those are gone. The Jewish dead lie in an unmarked field covered by wheat in summer and a blanket of snow in winter. There is no marker to indicate that it is a cemetery.

We had hoped to return last summer to continue the dig but had to postpone due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Perhaps we will be able to continue this summer. August will mark 77 years since the day that Josef Kopf, a man with razor-sharp intuition, let his guard down and walked his last steps to an unmarked grave.