A Need to Know : Better Access to Holocaust Data May Help Ed Haven Learn His Mother’s Fate

PALM DESERT —  Bronislava Rechtszafen had a plan. After bribing a guard so she and her son could escape the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, she moved into an apartment in the city. There, she made an agreement with a neighbor.

Whenever she and her son left the apartment, she would walk on one side of the street and the neighbor would accompany the boy on the other. Rechtszafen hoped that if the Nazis captured her, the ruse would protect her blond, Aryan-looking son.

The strategy worked.

On one of their walks, Nazis seized the dark-haired Jewish woman but ignored 9-year-old Edward.

Today, Ed Haven can’t remember much about his mother’s disappearance. “I just know that all of a sudden she was gone,” he says.

But for 50 years, Haven has wondered what happened to the woman he remembers only as being tall and gentle.

“It has always been an empty spot in my life,” he says. “My father (who had been drafted into the Polish Army) didn’t talk much about my mother because he remarried. He was trying to protect me, and being young . . . I never asked.

“I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know anything about her side of the family.”

Now, Haven may find out. The National Archives has begun microfilming and cataloguing names of 300,000 to 500,000 Holocaust victims from records of transport lists, medical experiments, death camps and forced labor camps.

The records were opened to the public in 1973, but cataloguing makes them “more accessible,” says U.S. Archivist Don W. Wilson. News of the project has increased requests from relatives who have never known the fate of their loved ones, the American Red Cross says.

The Los Angeles Chapter of the Red Cross has received about 140 calls since the project was announced two months ago. About 106 people made requests all of last year, a spokesman said. Nationwide, the Red Cross has received about 2,000 requests, double the normal rate.

Haven, 58, a controller for an energy-producing company in Palm Springs, phoned the Red Cross after Jewish agencies in Poland and the United States were unable to discover his mother’s fate.

The telephone call represented another step in his exploration of his past. For many years his terrifying childhood made him afraid to admit that he was Jewish. He did not tell his future wife, an Episcopalian, until they were engaged, and he told his children as a group when the youngest was 7 and the oldest was 14.

“I never hid it; I just never volunteered the information,” Haven says. “I think my wife more or less forced me to face my past by having me tell the children. I decided it was better they found out from me than from someone else. From then on I kind of adopted the attitude that I didn’t care what people knew. I think I just matured.”

The Red Cross will send Haven’s request to the War Victims Tracing and Information Center in Baltimore, Md., which will forward it to the Central Tracing Agency in Arolsen, Germany. The process will probably take one to three years. Usually, about 50% of such searches are successful, a Red Cross spokesman says.

Haven has little information, besides a few photographs, to provide background for the search. In one photo, his mother is a slender woman in her late 20s, wearing a sleeveless dress and pearls, standing on a hotel balcony overlooking the Black Sea. It is 1930 and she is on her honeymoon.

In another picture about 12 years later, just before she was taken by the Nazis, she is wavy-haired and smiles quietly. She wears a dark dress and sits cheek to cheek with her handsome young son, who wears a sweater and tie.

“I’m hoping to find out what happened the day she was taken and subsequently,” Haven says. “But I don’t think I’m going to find out anything about her (life). I don’t even know her side of the family.”

By contrast, Haven knows volumes about his father, Louis, who was called into the Polish Army early in the war. Captured by the Germans or Romanians, he was held in a Romanian prisoner of war camp and escaped in about 1940, Haven says.

As a Jew and former Polish soldier, his father couldn’t return to German-occupied Warsaw, so he made his way to Los Angeles. He became a jeweler and conducted a long-distance search for his family.

After his mother disappeared, Haven moved in with a woman and her son on the outskirts of Warsaw. “My family, although Jewish, was very well known in Warsaw and had a lot of people working for them who were not Jewish,” says Haven, an only child.

“I think the arrangement was that whoever was with me when my mother disappeared would keep me or make arrangements with some other individual who knew the family and could be trusted to take care of me.”

When the Warsaw uprising of 1944 began, he became separated from his host family during widespread fighting and was taken in by a resistance group.

At 11, Haven says, “I became a scout. They had us trying to find out where the German troops were. I was armed with a hand grenade and taught how to use it.

“On one occasion, another boy and I came around a corner and saw a German machine gun encampment. . . . I threw a hand grenade and ran. I don’t know where it landed. I was shot in the leg, but it was a grazing blow and I made it back.”

After the Germans crushed the rebellion, Haven and 550,000 other Warsaw residents were sent to transit camps outside the city. A woman befriended him and arranged for him to live with a well-to-do Roman Catholic family in a suburb of Krakow.

“At one time a German officer was living in the house,” Haven says. “But because of my Aryan looks, he did not suspect me. Being blond saved my life.”

Meanwhile, Haven’s father had contacted the International Red Cross. In April, 1946, he learned that his son was living near Krakow. Louis Haven was still afraid to return to Poland, so he made arrangements for his son to come to Los Angeles.

“My relationship with him was very good,” Haven says. “He understood what I had gone through. He tried to make life as pleasant as he could for me.”

Haven graduated from Harvard High School and Woodbury College. He married in 1958, two years after his father passed away, and has a son and three daughters.

He returned to Poland in 1986 and visited an apartment house once owned by his grandfather. A woman was leaving to go shopping as Haven and his wife arrived.

“When she walked out onto the sidewalk, she saw me and almost fainted and started crying. Because I look like my father and she thought she was seeing him,” Haven says.

“Through translation, we learned that she had been living there and working for my grandparents before the war. She told us about these walks that my mother and I would take outside the apartment . . . and what happened to her.

“I really don’t think I saw it,” he says. “If I did, I think I would remember. Whoever was with me probably took me away quickly so I wouldn’t see it.

“It was traumatic,” he says. “I went over most of the things that had happened and (visited) where they happened.”

Haven and his wife, Judy, moved to Palm Desert in 1988. His golf-course condominium in a gated community seems like heaven compared to the hell of his youth.

“Circumstances happened to me that almost make me think I was meant to survive,” Haven says. “Things that could have gone one way or another always went well.

“I’ve been happily married 33 years to the same woman and have four wonderful children. I’ve thought about it being compensation for a rough beginning. I don’t really believe that, but mostly I’m grateful.”

“It bothers me not knowing what happened to my mother,” he says. “Studying all the history and not knowing if she went to the gas chamber. I’d just like to put that to rest.

“I don’t know if anything will come of this, but I’d kick myself if I didn’t try. It’s not only for me. It’s a legacy for my children. I believe they have a right to know their background.”