April 4, 2003

Wives and Mothers, Husbands and Fathers, and the 2 Tracks of the Holocaust

By NECHAMA TEC

Over the phone, the man's voice asked, "Are you the daughter of Ester Bawnik?"

What I heard took me to a different world, a ruined world, a world buried under many seemingly forgotten memories. The man identified himself as Samuel Gruber. In 1939, as a soldier in the Polish army, he had been captured by the rapidly advancing German forces. In 1941, he came with other Jewish soldiers to the work camp Lipowa 7 in Lublin, my birthplace. In the late summer of 1942, Gruber escaped into the

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