Stephen Shooster few of the bits of coals that I risked my life collecting in the stove and basked in its life-saving warmth. About 16 of us huddled around that pathetic little stove. All of the Nazis acted with impunity against the Jews, but a few insidious charac- ters still managed to stand out for their disdain of humanity. My own school ac- quaintance’s father, Kubala, weighs heavily, and along with him was a hired killer who came from Poznan. He was the Devil incarnate, earning the nickname Zimny Mroz, or Cold Frost. This nickname foretold his behavior. He was a killer, without conscience or remorse. He became a member of the Blue police. He revealed in walking side-by-side with the Gestapo. He was the one who arrested the teachers and intelligentsia, participating in their interrogations, beatings, deportations, and indiscriminate murder. Headmaster Korzen, of my public school, was arrested. I have no idea where he was taken, and we never saw him again. I don’t know what happened to him. Such was the time in which I lived. The change in attitude within my own town towards my race was like an hourglass had been turned over. Another world, far more sinister and deadly, replaced ours. Those who were slow to react to the change, or who resisted it openly, were killed immediately or deported. Some tried to assimilate into the new social order. These people became tools of the Nazis, who used them until their usefulness ended, and then they disposed of them as readily as they did anyone else. Others, mostly young men, took to the hills to organize an armed resistance. It was times like this that brought out the best and worst in people, sometimes both. At each location to which I was involuntarily taken, I was both victim and witness to what would happen. My life hung precariously by a thread. The Polish underground executed Zimny Mroz in 1944. The head of the local Gry- bow underground was none other than the son of Mrs. Paszek. He was the same fellow who once in a while would give me some change to buy a treat in the bakery for holding his horse, Franciszek Paszek Kmicic. And although I readily give him credit for removing this scourge from the earth, I knew the underground made it a point not to befriend Jews either. His mother, on the other hand, survived Auschwitz. I made another trip that caused a temporary conflict with my father. He arranged for me to take a night trip to Tarnow to pick up a wagonload of flour. Somehow my cousins who lived in Tarnow had accumulated contraband flour. The danger was ex - treme. I traveled the 60 kilometers at night; my horse without his bells and my sled wagon without a lamp. Both forbidden actions. The ride to Tarnow was uneventful but very cold. I reached the three-story house that was my destination in six or seven hours. I remember the address, Lwowska 3.
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