"One could die anywhere”, says Lucyna, “even while sitting in a café. The lorry was coming, there were shouts “Raus!, Raus!”, and they were taking people away to be shot.”
In Wilno, where she lived with her parents, sister and brother, the executioners were the Lithuanians and Germans. She used to meet the Jews, when they were led to work from the ghetto. They walked on the street, not the footpath. She would bend her head down and feel ashamed of those who wanted to humiliate the Jews in this way.
She was in the ghetto only once. She had an idea to help Lena, her close schoolmate. Lucyna entered with the crowd. Suddenly, the crowd disappeared. It was empty, dark and scary. The girl went around the streets, did not meet anybody and ran away. She was a child from an affluent family.
Her parents said that a twenty-year-old woman, a former clerk, was to move into the room occupied by Lucyna and her sister. Each time she would walk out on the street, Lucyna was to be her "security guard". Then she came – tall and elegant. She wore a blue, tweed suit and was beautiful. Her name was Bronisława Malberg. She spent three months at their home, then she moved to their grandmother. Her mother had died in the ghetto and she mourned terribly.
After the Wilno ghetto was liquidated, the father provided her with the documents in the name "Joanna Malinowska", which enabled her to work as a French teacher in the town of Niemenczyn.
After the war, Lucyna became aware that the vegetable farm in Troskulany - bought by her father at a bargain price during the war and into which they moved - served as a refuge, where her father hid two Jewish families. One of the families were Henia and Adi Kulgan.
The Honouring of the Antonowicz Family
On 23rd September 1997, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem honoured Wincenty and Jadwiga Antonowicz with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. Lucyna Bauer received that title on 14th June 1998.
“Righteous Among the Nations sounds nice", says Lucyna. "But the war was something so terrible that, unluckily, one can never forget it.”
