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A Murder in Poland
[TabletMag] I was digging in a field in Poland hoping to solve a 75-year-old murder mystery. It had rained the day before our arrival, so the mud was thick, wet, heavy; the temperature hovered over freezing. Two archaeologists surveyed the land with a magnetometer and found two areas with suspicious anomalies. A third marked the areas with wooden pegs and string.In the 1970s, someone found the remains, stuck his pinkie through the skull’s bullet hole, and reburied the bones. I was optimistic they were still here. The field was huge, stretching in a green expanse for about half a kilometer. But the witness testimony had been specific. This should have been the place. I dug faster. The mystery of who murdered Josef Kopf, my husband’s cousin, piqued my interest after a trip to the Kopfs’ ancestral town of Turobin in eastern Poland, three and a half years ago. We were welcomed like long lost relatives by various descendants of Antoni Tetlak, the Polish man who risked his life to save Josef’s younger sister, Genia, during the Shoah. She was 15 when she entombed herself in a hiding place in his barn, not high enough for her to sit up, just to lie down, legs folded. A year and nine months later when she emerged, her first steps were like a toddler’s and it took her time to adjust to the light. Her brother, Josef Kopf, escaped from a death camp in a daring feat depicted in the 1987 British film Escape from Sobibor. Josef’s breakout anticipated by more than two months the great Sobibor revolt, the largest escape from a German concentration camp. Most of the nearly 300 prisoners who escaped were killed by landmines, gunfire or during the ensuing manhunt. Only 58 survived. After his escape, Josef spent a year hiding in the judenrein countryside, until the Russian army liberated eastern Poland in July 1944. He surfaced in Lublin and tracked down Toivy Blatt, a Sobibor escapee working in a bike shop. “One day Josef showed up,” Blatt recalled, speaking from his home in California. Blatt, who wrote two books about Sobibor, remembered Josef as a tall man who wore tall boots. “He asked to borrow one of the bicycles. He wanted to ride out to his hometown to pick up something he had hidden before being taken to Sobibor. He put air in the tires, left, and never returned.” Once home, Josef’s luck ran out. He was shot in the back of his head in broad daylight. No one was charged. His place of burial was unknown. One online historical archive notes that Josef Kopf was murdered in August 1944 by Polish anti-Semites, with no further information. More at the link Posted by: badanov 2021-02-10 |
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