Maria Anna, Alicja and Józef Feller

A mother and two children. She — the daughter of one of the most eminent jurists of the Polish Republic, called Maryla within the family; she lived with her two children in the modern building at 7 Złota Street. In the summer of 1939 Józek went to his grandparents in Lwów for the holidays — and the war never let him come back. It cut this family in two, and the Holocaust took all of it — in Warsaw and in Lwów, behind the walls of two ghettos four hundred kilometres apart. No grave has survived. What has survived are documents — including the diary the children's grandfather kept until the last weeks of his life — and one photograph of the three of them.

This account gathers everything that is known about them. Every fact comes from a source: from the register of births, from the telephone directory, from the grandfather's manuscripts, from the family's post-war testimonies. Where the sources fall silent or speak with different voices — we say so plainly.

I. Lwów — Roots

The story begins in Lwów, in the house of Maurycy Allerhand. Born on 28 June 1868 in Rzeszów, into the assimilated Jewish family of Herman and Rebeka née Wohlfeld, after his studies and doctorate in Vienna he settled in Lwów, where on 17 March 1895 he married Sara (Salomea) Weintraub. Two children were born of this marriage: in 1896 a daughter, Maria Anna — the heroine of this story — and in 1897 a son, Joachim Herman, later a barrister and an officer of the Polish Army.

The father of the family became one of the pillars of Polish law: a professor of the Jan Kazimierz University, a barrister from 1900, a member of the Codification Commission of the Republic and of the Tribunal of State, the author of more than a thousand works, including commentaries on the Commercial Code and the Bankruptcy Law that lawyers were still reprinting half a century after his death. In 1924–1929 he headed the Jewish Religious Community of Lwów — first as government commissioner, then as its elected president. From 1911 the Allerhands lived in a seven-room apartment at 20/22 Jagiellońska Street, with a study where the Professor held his seminars and a library of several thousand volumes. It was a house of two traditions: as his grandson recalled years later, both Jewish and Christian holidays were celebrated in it.

II. Maryla

Maria Anna was born in Lwów in 1896. In the family she was called Maryla — and it was under this pet name that she entered the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony after the war; only the register of births, rediscovered in 2024, restored the names given to her at birth. She married a man named Feller.

Of the man himself we know nothing certain today — no document with his first name, profession or fate has yet been found; the searches continue. According to the account of Maria Anna's nephew, Dr Leszek Allerhand, the marriage ended in divorce.

Two children were born of this union: a son, Józef Arno, called Józek, born in 1924, and a daughter, Alicja, called Ala, born in 1925 in Lwów. After the divorce, in the second half of the 1930s, Maria Anna moved with both children to Warsaw — to the new building at 7 Złota Street.

III. The House at 7 Złota Street

The building at 7/9 Złota Street was among the most modern in pre-war Warsaw. Erected in 1935–1937 to a design by Edward Eber for the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, it had lifts, central heating and the Palladium cinema on the ground floor — and, on the upper storeys, luxurious apartments.

The trace of Maria Anna's residence: a single line of print in the directory of subscribers of the Warsaw telephone network for 1939/40

The bond with Lwów did not weaken: a photograph survives from around 1939 in which the aged Professor stands beside his teenage granddaughter, and she holds his arm. It is the last known photograph from that world — a world that had only months left.

IV. June 1938 — the Jubilee

On 28 June 1938 legal Poland celebrated the Professor's seventieth birthday. "Głos Prawa" (The Voice of Law) published a jubilee issue with a laudation, and the daily press — from the "Gazeta Sądowa Warszawska" to Kraków's "Nowy Dziennik" — printed commemorative articles, recounting the scholar's achievements and his services to the codification of Polish law. No one suspected that the family had less than four years of life together left.

V. September 1939 and the Ghetto Walls

On 1 September 1939 Germany attacked Poland; on 17 September the Red Army entered from the east. Józek, who was spending the summer with his grandparents, was cut off in Lwów. The family found itself under two occupations at once: Maria Anna and Ala in German-held Warsaw, the grandparents and Józek — in Soviet-held Lwów.

On 2 October 1940 the governor of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, signed the order creating the "Jewish quarter". By 15 November all the Jews of Warsaw had to move behind the walls; on 16 November 1940 the ghetto was sealed — on an area of just over three hundred hectares some four hundred and fifty thousand people were ultimately crammed. It was the largest ghetto in occupied Europe. The building at 7 Złota Street stood just outside the walls: Maria Anna and Alicja, like all the Jewish tenants of the house, had to leave their apartment and move behind the wall.

The conditions behind the wall killed even before the deportations began. On less than three per cent of the city's area nearly a third of its inhabitants were crowded together — on average seven people to a room; the three-metre wall, topped with wire and broken glass, ran for eighteen kilometres. The official food ration fell in 1941 to less than two hundred calories a day — ten times below human need; bread, life, was smuggled over the wall by hungry children. Hunger and typhus killed more than eighty thousand people in the ghetto even before the transports to Treblinka began. Somewhere in that dying district, for more than a year and a half, lived Maria Anna and her teenage Ala — their ghetto address remains unknown to this day.

VI. Lwów: the Professor's Diary

On 30 June 1941, after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht entered Lwów; pogroms broke out in the city at once. That same day the seventy-three-year-old Prof. Allerhand began to keep a diary — in pencil, on the reverse sides of office record cards. The manuscripts survived (today in the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, in the so-called Lwów Folder) and were published by his grandson as "Zapiski z tamtego świata" ("Notes from That Other World"); they are among the most precious testimonies of the Holocaust in Lwów. It is from them that we know the rest of this story.

The family had occupied the apartment on Jagiellońska for thirty years. When in July 1941 his wife and son wanted to hide the paintings and books with a Polish friend, the Professor refused: since the Bolsheviks had respected the property of a university professor, he reasoned, the Germans would respect it all the more. The lawyer who had believed in the law all his life could not yet grasp that the time of lawlessness had come. On 6 August 1941 the director of the Viennese company "Kompos" entered the room where he lay ill — without removing his hat — and read out from a sheet of paper that the apartment was confiscated; only clothing, linen, gold and silver could be taken. To his wife's question of where old people were supposed to go, the answer came: "das geht uns nichts an" — that is no concern of ours. To the question about the library: "Nein, Sie werden die Bibliothek nicht mehr brauchen" — no, you will not be needing the library any more.

The next day, 7 August 1941, handing over the apartment — as the first Jew in Lwów to be deprived of his home — the Professor said in Polish to the building's manager: here is my library, which I collected for sixty years. The police officer present replied that it was no longer his library, and added the sentence that opens this story. In the apartment remained thousands of volumes — first editions of Mickiewicz and Słowacki, Linde's dictionaries, complete sets of legal journals — and a collection of paintings: three portraits by Simmler, Chełmoński's "Wianki", Malczewski's "Boy on a Road", canvases by both Kossaks and a copy of Matejko's "Rejtan" kept in the family for seventy years. All of it was taken over by a private Viennese company. "None of our acquaintances can understand it" — the Professor noted.

For the next seven weeks he hid with a stranger — rightly, for the very next day the police came to arrest him. At the end of September he moved in with his son Joachim at 32 Sobieskiego Street, and from 23 November 1941 — with his wife and grandson Józek in the ghetto at 58 Zamarstynowska Street. Polish friends prepared a new identity for him and an escape to the Aryan side. He refused.

The Lwów ghetto, assigned to Zamarstynów — the poorest district beyond the railway tracks — was the third largest in occupied Poland, after Warsaw and Łódź: more than a hundred thousand people were crammed into it. The resettlement itself turned into a selection: under the viaduct on Pełtewna Street, which the Jews of Lwów called "the bridge of death", the German police picked out the old and the sick — during the move itself more than a thousand people were murdered. In March 1942 the first great action took some fifteen thousand people to the gas chambers of Bełżec; nearby operated the infamous camp on Janowska Street — slave labour and a place of execution in one. Before the war about a hundred and ten thousand Jews lived in Lwów — the third largest Jewish community of the Republic; with the refugees from beyond the German demarcation line there were about a hundred and fifty thousand of them in September 1941. According to various estimates, between a few hundred and a few thousand lived to see the liberation. In this world the Professor, Salomea and Józek survived eight and a half months.

VII. Józek

In those same notes the Professor recorded the fate of his grandson. Józef Arno Feller got a job as a messenger at the Lwów Jewish community office on Starotandetna Street and worked in its Presidium. In mid-October 1941 a German soldier burst into the community building and took several workers away for labour — Józek among them. The boy was beaten already on the way, and then while hauling loads on Mączyńskiego Street: when for lack of strength he could not lift them, he was beaten on the head, the arms and the back. After a few hours he escaped — helped by a person from outside the Jewish community employed at the same work. The grandfather noted everything down with a lawyer's precision: the welts on the body, the blisters on the hands, several days of treatment. And the payment for a full day of slave labour: a quarter of a loaf of bread.

VIII. The Year 1942: Treblinka and Bełżec

On 22 July 1942 the Germans began the Great Deportation in Warsaw — mass deportations from the ghetto to the extermination camp at Treblinka, set in motion a day later. Every day transports of several thousand people left the Umschlagplatz; by 21 September about three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews had been deported. At Treblinka death in the gas chambers came within an hour or two of the train's arrival; within some fifteen months close to nine hundred thousand people were murdered there, and in the autumn of 1943 the camp was razed to the ground and sown with lupins — almost no trace of the victims remained.

In one of those transports, in 1942, was forty-six-year-old Maria Anna Feller. According to the family's testimony and the findings of her biographer, Prof. Adam Redzik, seventeen-year-old Alicja perished then together with her mother. The post-war testimonies, given from memory, are not fully consistent: one version of the family account points to Majdanek as the place of Maria Anna's death. This discrepancy has not yet been resolved; one thing is certain — according to none of the testimonies did the mother and daughter from 7 Złota Street survive the year 1942.

Three weeks later the fate of the Lwów part of the family was fulfilled. On 10 August 1942, during the so-called great August action, Maurycy, Salomea and Józek were taken from the ghetto to the Janowska Camp in Lwów. According to the account of Prof. Karol Koranyi, citing an eyewitness, the Professor was killed on the camp grounds by a Ukrainian policeman — shot after he, seeing the man torturing a woman, appealed in Ukrainian to his conscience. Salomea and Józek were most probably murdered in the extermination camp at Bełżec — the place where, from March to December 1942, the Germans put to death about four hundred and fifty thousand Jews, and from which only single individuals survived.

IX. The Survivors

Only the family of Maria Anna's brother survived the Holocaust. Joachim Allerhand — who in September 1939, as an officer in Soviet captivity, had almost miraculously escaped the fate of the victims of Katyń — fled the Lwów ghetto in August 1942, on the eve of the action, with his wife Zinajda and their ten-year-old son Leszek. He hid under the name Paweł Jan Mrozowski, working in a sawmill in Jaworów; Zinajda and Leszek, on Aryan papers, survived until July 1944 in more than thirty hiding places. After the war Joachim was a barrister in Kraków and a defence counsel in the political trials of the Stalinist years; he firmly advised his son against studying law — "it is not good to study law in times when it is lawlessness". Leszek Allerhand (1931–2018) became a physician in Zakopane, the publisher of his grandfather's diaries and a co-founder of the Allerhand Institute, established in 2009. It is to him that we owe the family accounts and photographs on which this story rests.

X. Remembrance

The names of Maria Anna, Alicja and Józef returned to Złota Street thanks to research in the partly preserved residence register of the house, the pre-war telephone directories and the Yad Vashem databases, and above all thanks to the kindness of Prof. Adam Redzik, the biographer of the Allerhand family, and the consent of the Allerhand Institute Foundation. On 21 August 2026, twelve Stones of Remembrance (Stolpersteine) will be laid in front of the buildings at 7 and 9 Złota Street. Among them will be the stones of Maria Anna Feller née Allerhand and her children. They have no graves — their ashes were scattered by the wind over Treblinka and Bełżec. What remains of them is memory — and this house.

Timeline

A Note on Sources

This account is based exclusively on sources: the birth register of the Israelite registration district of Lwów for 1896 (jewishgen.org search, 2024); the pre-war directories of Warsaw telephone subscribers (1938/39, 1939/40) and the partly preserved residence register of the house at 7 Złota Street (State Archives); the manuscripts of Prof. Maurycy Allerhand from 1941–1942 — Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, Lwów Folder, ref. 229 (including account no. 4 on the confiscation of the apartment, ref. 229-10, and account no. 8 on Józef Arno Feller, ref. 229-6; scans in collection RG-89 of the Holocaust Museum LA), published as M. Allerhand, L. Allerhand, "Zapiski z tamtego świata", 2nd ed., Kraków 2011 (first edition: Kraków 2003; fragments of the Lwów Folder — "Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute", 1979); the studies of Prof. Adam Redzik — "Maurycy Allerhand (1868–1942) — on the 150th anniversary of his birth" ("Palestra" 2018, no. 7–8; "Głos Prawa" 2018), the biographical entry on Joachim Allerhand (Biographical Dictionary of Polish Advocates, vol. III, 2018) and "On the circumstances of the death of Professor Maurycy Allerhand" ("Kwartalnik Historii Żydów" 2005, no. 2); the memoir of Prof. Karol Koranyi ("Państwo i Prawo" 1947, no. 1); the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony submitted by Dr Leszek Allerhand; the photographs and family accounts from the collection of the late Dr Leszek Allerhand, provided by Prof. Adam Redzik (2024–2026), and the consent of the Allerhand Institute Foundation (2024). The historical context of the Warsaw ghetto, Treblinka, Lwów, the Janowska Camp and Bełżec — after the studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the scholarly literature.

Opracowanie w ramach projektu upamiętnienia mieszkańców kamienicy — prepared as part of the project commemorating the residents of the building at 7 and 9 Złota Street in Warsaw · www.zlota7-9.com