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    Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939
    Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939
    Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939
    Ebook409 pages8 hours

    Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939

    By Julian Padowicz

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    "In 1939," Julian Padowicz says, "I was a Polish Jew-hater. Under different circumstances my story might have been one of denouncing Jews to the Gestapo. As it happened, I was a Jew myself, and I was seven years old." Julian's mother was a Warsaw socialite who had no interest in child-rearing. She turned her son over completely to his governess, a good Catholic, named Kiki, whom he loved with all his heart. Kiki was deeply worried about Julian's immortal soul, explaining that he could go to Heaven only if he became a Catholic. When bombs began to fall on Warsaw, Julian's world crumbled. His beloved Kiki returned to her family in Lodz; Julian's stepfather joined the Polish army, and the grief-stricken boy was left with the mother whom he hardly knew. Resourceful and determinded, his mother did whatever was necessary to provide for herself and her son: she brazenly cut into food lines and befriended Russian officers to get extra rations of food and fuel. But brought up by Kiki to distrust all things Jewish, Julian considered his mother's behavior un-Christian. In the winter of 1940, as conditions worsened, Julian and his mother made a dramatic escape to Hungary on foot through the Carpathian mountains and Julian came to believe that even Jews could go to Heaven.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9780897337847
    Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939
    Author

    Julian Padowicz

    Born in Lodz, Poland into a middle class Jewish family, Julian Padowicz was 7 years old and living in Warsaw when WW II began. With bombs falling on their heads, Julian and his socialite mother began a trek that took them into southern Poland, where they endured Soviet occupation before escaping, in dramatic fashion, over the snow-covered Carpathian Mountains, into neutral Hungary. These experiences, as well as subsequent ones on their way to the United States, have been recounted in a three-part memoir by Padowicz under the titles, “Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939,” (Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine) “A Ship in the Harbor,” (Second Prize, Connecticut Press Club) and “Loves of Yulian.”In 2010 Padowicz broke into the field of fiction with “Writer’s Block,” a humorous romance/adventure about the retired literature professor, “Kip” Kippur who sets out to avenge the wrongs of his life by writing a thinly disguised memoir and ends up in a series of life-altering and life-threatening adventures. The success of “Writer’s Block” led the author to produce a series of sequels featuring the same humorous characters and the coastal village of Venice, Massachusetts. They include “The Best Sunset in Venice”, “A Scandal in Venice”, and “Alexander’s Part Time Band.”Padowicz received a degree in English from Colgate University, and served 5 years in the Air Force as an intercept instructor and navigator, prior to a 35-year career as a documentary filmmaker. As president of BusinessFilm International, he wrote and produced films on the role of newspapers in a democratic society, alcoholism, and the legitimacy of feelings, among other subjects, as well as scripting a series on the American way of life for the U.S. Information Agency.Retired from filmmaking in 1991, Padowicz went on to write books on photography, dealing with angry customers, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, before launching his memoir series and his novels.In demand as a speaker about both his Holocaust-related experiences and the creative process, Padowicz speaks in libraries, synagogues, churches, and universities throughout the country. He was recently invited to do annual book signings at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.With his wife, Donna, Padowicz lives in Stamford, Conn. He is an avid tennis player and is frequently seen on his daily runs along Hope Street, where he says he does his most creative thinking. In a blog entitled “Confessions of the Hope Street Stalker” (hopestreetstalker.blogspot.com) Padowicz shares many of the thoughts and incidents that occur during these runs.Padowicz has three daughters, two stepsons, ten grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter. Born under the sign of Capricorn, he professes to be a “late bloomer.”

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    • 3/5
      A word to the wise: this book, while a fine enough memoir, is not about the Holocaust. The subtitle "escape from Warsaw" and its placement in the Holocaust section of the library lead me to think so. The author and his mother were Jewish, but in fact this book is more about escaping the Communists than escaping the Nazis.

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