Twarda 28

Part Two: The Indomitable Building

This is how the decrepit tenement would look, restored with AI imagery.

With the assistance of a genealogist, I traced the branch of the Osnos family that lived at Twarda 28 to around 1740, when Jews in what was then the Russian empire, including large swaths of Poland and Ukraine, were mandated to add surnames to what had been only first names and patronymics, as in Ivan Ivanovich (which means “son of Ivan”).

The explanation provided was that individuals could now be added to tax rolls under a surname and thereby be available for the draft into the czar’s armed forces.

Osnos is an adaptation of an Old Testament name: Asenath, the wife of Joseph. The name is rendered in English in various spellings — Osnes, Osnoss, and so forth. We found Osnos families (with baptismal certificates) as far removed as Norway and Nebraska.

Over the years, I gathered fragmentary information from my father about his family. He expressed pride in their heritage, generations of university education and business prosperity.

Only now do I realize that he did not include their tragic demise. And I did not ask for more.

On a visit to Auschwitz in 2019, I encountered the scroll of names of people who were killed during the Holocaust, on which there are nineteen Osnos names. I now realize that this list certainly includes members of my father’s family, as enumerated on the headstone in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery.

I had known that my father’s brother Jakub, a doctor who lived at Twarda 28, became a Polish army officer at the start of the war and was murdered at Katyn Forest, the massacre of Poles carried out by the Soviets in the spring of 1940, while Stalin was still an ally of Hitler.

This was a particularly notorious and much-studied episode of the war.

After the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed in June 1941, another brother (whose name I so far haven’t found) became a Red Army officer and survived the war, the only sibling aside from my father who did. I was told that he was exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1948 and that my father had been able to reach him at some point, years ago.

In 1977, while I was in Moscow for the Washington Post, I received a telephone call at the office from a person who identified himself as my “cousin from Siberia” and who said his name was Piotr, Russian for Peter.

At the time, the Soviets had launched a campaign against Western journalists, and I was repeatedly identified in the press as a “secret agent of the United States,” allegedly working for the CIA. A call from a “relative” on an open phone line seemed unlikely, and for his sake, mainly, I said I had no cousins in Siberia.

In 2020, I tracked down a man named Vladimir Osnos in Moscow, who I was told was related to us. He was the son of one of Russia’s most celebrated chess masters. I asked him by email whether in the 1970s he had ever been contacted by “authorities” about me. His response was classically ambiguous: “I can say nothing about that.”

My father had a nephew in New York named Zarka. In an oral history he said he had made it out of Poland to New York because he spoke fluent German and “did not look” Jewish. There was doubtless much more to that story, but, frustratingly now, I never asked and he never offered.

Finally, my great aunt Bassya Osnos married Nachman Syrkin, a leader in Socialist Zionism, of sufficient stature for Israel to name a naval vessel after him. When Bassya died at thirty-eight, Nachman, who was living in New York, went to Warsaw and married her younger sister Machette. Nachman’s daughter, Marie Syrkin, had an illustrious U.S. career as a writer, professor, and biographer of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

All these details amount only to clues about the Osnos family. I would have known much more had I asked or if my father had not been so focused on his full life in the United States. After my mother died and he was nearing ninety, he would talk to my wife, Susan, a bit about the past. By then the details tended to be confused.

Readers: While it is possible, get as much as possible about your background. It helps to explain your own life and character, and for second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants or refugees it can be of great interest and benefit.

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Twarda 28 in the early months of the war was something of a sanctuary for my mother and brother, in particular. My father had left Warsaw, initially to join a military contingent; when that became impossible, he made his way to Bucharest, where he succeeded in arranging a way for his wife and son to escape Poland.

As described by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier in In the Garden of Memory: “In June 1940 Robert Osnos and his mother left Poland. . . . Very few people managed to get out of Warsaw so late in the day in the day; it is a miracle that they succeeded. To bring it off, two superhuman powers combined forces: his father’s and his mother’s.”

It was at Twarda 28 where much of the miracle unfolded. There are three sources for what happened. One is Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book. The others were memoirs written by my mother, Marta, and my brother, Robert, describing the months in Warsaw after the war started and how they finally escaped. The full versions can be downloaded at the “virtual attic” of anespeciallygoodview.com, in the memoirs section.

Robert attributes his memories to the personalities of his parents: “Optimistic, very strong willed, amazingly competent, and resourceful. That is why I could write this, rather than being buried in Auschwitz. . . . As far as I know they were pillars of integrity.”

At Twarda 28, Marta wrote, people from elsewhere in the building moved into the ground-floor apartments, thought to be the safest, “so they would slowly move down, bringing pillows, covers, food, and advice. In a way it was good for Robert. He has children to play with all day long. . . .

“The last 24 hours before surrender, we spent all 18 people in a small bathroom in the middle of the apartment. Somebody had a pocket full of raisins, so from time to time, we nibbled some.”

With the immigration papers my father had managed to obtain in Bucharest, and my mother’s conversion to Catholicism in order to be able to travel, Marta and Robert left Warsaw on June 9. My father greeted them in Bucharest with roses.

Those in the Osnos family who did not leave were the ones whose names are engraved on the headstone and who are listed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as victims of the Shoah.

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When the boundaries of the Small Ghetto were drawn in 1940, after Marta and Robert had left Warsaw, Twarda 28 was included. Conditions in the ghetto have been collected in great detail. In the 1970s Marta herself was the translator of the major study of hunger disease carried out by Jewish physicians about conditions in the ghetto.

The study’s leader, Dr. Israel Milejkowski, wrote that the symptoms of hunger “consisted of crowds of beggars and corpses often lying on the street covered with newspapers.”

Somehow after the war, Twarda 28 was refurbished and once again became an apartment building. Professor Jakub Lewicki’s account reports that in the 1960s it was taken over by the State Treasury, and a general renovation was carried out, removing the decorative elements of the building’s exterior — which explains why the building now is so grim an apparition in downtown Warsaw.

A news story in the spring of 2025 reported that the district including Twarda 28 had submitted documentation to Warsaw’s Office of City Property and to the State Treasury about preparing the building for sale. The district “argues that private investors have funds for renovations, which local governments do not. It is worth emphasizing that the new buyer of the building will be obligated to maintain it in accordance with the guidelines of the historic preservation officer, and if they decide to remodel or add to it, they will do so in consultation with the preservation officer.”

So, once again Twarda 28 will escape destruction, if a sale happens and the buyer has an interest in Warsaw’s Jewish history.

The history of the building and the family that owned it, or those few that survived the war, is a tribute to their resilience against enormous odds.

An abandoned building is their legacy.