On September 2, Regina Lewis celebrated her 104th birthday. Regina Steiner Lewis was born in Krakow in 1919. She was raised and lived in the Jewish community there called Kazimierz.
Her daughter, Ida Lewis, a KGH resident, shared that her mother always says she has had an incredibly wonderful life, filled with good people. She always beamed about her childhood and her family. Regina’s niece always says that her grandmother is kind and such a wonderful person.
Ida shared that when her mother was a young girl, she would pass a beggar on the way to school and she would give him her lunch. That is the kind of person she is. Later, when she was in a concentration camp, when a Nazi soldier gave her an extra piece of bread, she would break it up into morsels and share with the girls around her bunk. She said, “That little piece left for her was enough to sustain her.”
After Nazis came, her family was living first in the Krakow Ghetto. She was then moved to a work camp and then she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. From there, she was sent to Oederan in Germany, and then to Terezin in Czechoslovakia.
Ida shared the story of how her parents met. Her father, Victor Leserkiewicz, lived across the Vistula River. When her mother was around 15, she traveled on a train with a friend to a resort in the Carpathian Mountains. She was seated by the window looking out, and she glimpsed a young man on a bike riding by. She told her friend, “Look at that handsome young man. If only he would be my husband one day.”
The friend said that she knew him. When they reached the resort, Victor, the young man on the bike, was there, and he approached to say hello as he knew the friend. So, that was how Ida’s parents first met.
They didn’t see each other again until they met at a Zionist dance around 1937. After they became reacquainted, they saw each other frequently with their group of friends. They were around 17 or 18 then.
The Nazis came in 1939 when both of Ida’s parents were 20. Her mother says the Nazis were there on her birthday, so it was not a good birthday. At that point, her mother and her family were brought to live in the Krakow Ghetto. They lived with three other families in an apartment. At that time, Victor would steal food and bring it to Regina’s family for everyone. Ida’s grandfather, Israel, told his daughter Regina, “If the two of you survive this, I know you’ll be in good hands, because Victor’s taking care of all of us.”
On October 28, 1942, 7,000 Jews were rounded up and directed to the Krakow train station. The transport was destined to go to Belzec, a killing camp in Northern Poland. Some 600,000 Jews were murdered in Belzec during the ten months of its operation. Victor, his parents, an older sister, and younger brother were brought there along with Regina’s mother and two sisters. Lola, Victor’s oldest sister, was a chalutzah in 1934 and avoided the horrors of the Holocaust. Jacob, his youngest brother, was not brought to the station. Regina worked putting fur linings into Nazi uniforms in a factory, so she was not on the transport. When she returned home from work that day, her mother and two sisters were gone. She also knew that Victor and his family were taken away.
Ida shared how her father, Victor, took a hacksaw blade and hid it in his boot. When he was on the train platform, he told his parents he was going to cut the bars off the window and they would all escape. The cattle car was crammed with more than 100 men, women, and children squeezed in, without ventilation.
When it got dark, he started cutting the bars with the hacksaw. He knew that there was a Gestapo soldier on the roof of the train with a rifle, but he went ahead and cut two bars of the window.
The space was around two feet wide by one and a half feet high. Victor asked his family to jump but his father said no, and his mother said she wanted to stay with her husband. His sister said she’d stay to take care of them. So, Victor and his brother Leszek/Leib were the ones who jumped. Victor was 22 at the time. A mother told her 14-year-old boy to follow them, and he jumped out the window, as well. They jumped out of a moving train into piles of autumn leaves. Her father was unconscious and so was her uncle. They were not near each other and didn’t find each other again until much later. The young boy was on his own, as well.
Victor decided to head back to Krakow, as he realized that Regina wasn’t on the train and he knew she must be back in Krakow. He wanted to live and to live for her.
Victor went to build new barracks in Plaszow concentration camp and lived in the barracks there. He was later transported to GrossRosen where he was beaten severely by the Gestapo and presumed dead. He was thrown into a pile of corpses. Miraculously, Regina’s cousin recognized him because he was lying face up and realized he was still alive. She got help and got him off the pile. A Jewish dispatcher transferred him to Oscar Schindler’s Camp Brunnlitz labor camp in 1944. This happened four months before the end of the war.
Regina was transported from Plaszow to Auschwitz-Birkeneau and was fortunate to avoid the gas chambers there. She was later transported to Oederan and then to Terezin (Theresienstadt). Victor’s brother was also sent to Terezin.
The way Ida’s parents found each other again was more incredible hashgachah. Someone told Victor that his brother was in Terezin and he was dying from Typhus. The man then told him, “I’m going to take you to your brother, but I want to take you to someone else first.”
Ida described what happened next and it was like a scene out of a Hollywood movie.
The man brought Victor to the women’s barracks. Before the door opened, Regina was talking with the others about what plans they were going to have now. She said, “If Victor is alive, I know I’ll be in good hands.”
The doors opened and Victor was standing there. She couldn’t believe he was there.
Victor and Regina married, and Ida was born in a DP camp in Bad Ischl, Austria. The then-family of three immigrated to the US in 1949. Ida’s brother, Al, was born in New York City.
Ida shared that her father spent his life saving others. He helped to support the building of the first Beit Halochem in Jerusalem, a rehab for Israeli war veterans. He was able to procure millions of donations. Her mother was always wise, and people sought out her advice that came from a deep place of caring for others. Somehow, despite all that she endured; Regina stayed positive. “She’s always had a glow,” Ida shared. She’s very resilient. She shared that in her whole life she only witnessed one argument between her parents.
Much later, Ida shared that they got in touch, through amazing hashgachah pratis, with the boy who had jumped through the train window and who was now of course a grown man living in Israel. The Lewis family moved to Kew Gardens Hills in 1958 and Regina has lived here very happily for 65 years.
There is so much hashgachah in Regina Lewis’ story, and in her husband Victor’s story, as well.
It was an honor to write about such a special person, and her husband as well. Ida shared that her parents’ story is published in an anthology of love stories during the Holocaust, titled Love with No Tomorrow with a forward by Michael Berenbaum. Ida Lewis plans to write a memoir basing the root of her miraculous birth and life on her parents’ story.
By Susie Garber
