Esther Rivka Wagner (born Esther Willig) was the daughter of Rabbi
Shraga Feivel Willig (b. 1870) and Sarah Chaya Blei (b. ca. 1890).
Esther was
born on March 2, 1924 in Buczacz, Poland (now Ukraine) where her father served as the rabbi and mohel
of the city. Rabbi Willing died a natural death in 1941 exacerbated by the
events of the time.
Sarah Chaya Blei was the second wife of Shraga who had six
children from his first marriage. Esther was their only daughter; she grew up
with two much older stepbrothers. They lived in an apartment adjoining the
religious court where Rabbi Willig worked.
The city had 10,000 Jews and 2,000
gentiles most of whom lived on the outskirts of the city. Esther attended a
Zionist nursery school and then was privately tutored at home since her father
did not want to expose her to the Catholic traditions and symbols in public
school. In the afternoons, she first attended the Tarbut School and later Beis
Yaakov which her father helped establish. Esther spoke Yiddish with her parents
and Polish with her friends.
When Esther turned 14 her father received a letter from Rabbi Shmuel
Wagner of Lvov regarding a "sidduch" (match) for his son Yisrael. For
several years Esther did not want to hear about this but when she was 17, (in
1941) she agreed after Rabbi Wagner traveled to Buczacz. By this time the
Soviets had expelled Esther and her parents from their apartment, and they were
living in a carpentry workshop. The Russians wanted to draft Yisrael so he
decided to flee to Buczacz and live with the Willigs as well.
In June 1941 Germany occupied Buczacz. Her father was called to City
Hall, ordered to form a Judenrat and given a list of other demands. All Jews
were required to wear armbands, abide by a curfew and relinquish their fur
coats and trimmings in spite of the harsh winters and lack of heat. Esther
worked in the local soup kitchen.
The Germans also began deporting Jews. Esther
and her family found a trapdoor leading to a cellar of the carpentry shop where
they lived and hid there together with Yosef, neighbors, and cousins. However
before long, a neighbor informed the Germans that the family had not reported
to the marketplace as ordered. Esther and the others were soon found, marched
to the railway station, and separated by age and genders into cattle
Esther felt she was suffocating and together with another person managed to pry
open two tiny windows which were closed with wooden planks and barbed wire. She
stepped on a barrel and jumped out while the train was still moving. Another
girl jumped as well, but the Germans began shooting as soon as they
noticed what was going on.
Esther landed in a corn field and overheard two men
speaking Yiddish. They were merchants who knew the roads well. Esther
accompanied them to Buczacz and returned to the carpentry shop as did her
brother Moshe and his family.
 |
| Paulina Wilanska, 1943, Warsaw. |
Esther learned that most of the people on the train, including Yisrael,
were sent to the Janowska labor camp. His brother, who had Aryan papers, helped
Yisrael escape. Yisrael then wrote to Esther's brother saying hat he no longer
wanted to live since he believed that Esther was no longer alive. Esther wrote
back immediately. Chaim purchased false papers for Esther under the name Paulina
Wilanska which he paid for with her engagement ring. Yisrael and Chaim, and
their sister Luba, joined Esther in the workshop. Luba obtained a job as a maid
taking care of children in the family of a Christian woman married to a Jewish
convert to Catholicism. The others remained in the workshop until it became too
dangerous.
Luba found work for Esther in Warsaw with the sister of the woman
she worked for. Esther began her work there in December 1942. This didn't last
long as a visitor recognized her. However, the family was compassionate and
allowed her to use their summer home in the Praga district until she found
another job. She soon found other employment since she had the proper
registration papers. It was difficult, but she lived there for another 8 months
until she felt she had to move again as there was suspicion that she was
Jewish. The next position that she found was with an older couple where the man
of the house was a Volkdeutscher and who were fairly kind to her although he had
a drinking problem.
In 1944 Esther was sent as a
messenger for her boss. At this time, Luba was staying with her since she was
suspected of being a Jew in the town where she was living. Both girls therefore
were traveling together when the Polish uprising against the Germans broke out.
They got off the trolley and walked for several hours until they reached their
house. Two days later the Germans came by and began burning the houses of the
Poles, including theirs. They were brought to an assembly are in Warsaw. Esther
and Luba managed to escape and by luck met a sympathetic German who offered to
help and drove them to Blotnica. Since Luba knew German and how to type, she
worked in an office while Esther found work in the kitchen.
However, after a
few weeks, the girls became nervous and wanted to leave. The same German who
brought them there was kind enough to take them out. He took them to a camp not
far from the village with an anti-aircraft unit that was shooting down Russian
planes. They were taken into their unit and spent the next eight months going
back and forth from the Russian occupied territory to Poland. They reached as
far as Danzig when they learned that Hitler was dead.
They were sent up by boat to Schleswig-Holstein and arrived on May 8,
1945. There they remained for another eight months still using their false
names. Esther worked as a waitress in the English Officer's mess, and her
sister-in-law found another job. Luba also met her future husband Bill who was
with the British air force and came from Israel.
 |
| DP camp Bergen-Belsen (Celle) |
Esther left the area as soon as she could reestablish her identity with
the help of the UNRAA. She took up her old name of Ester Rebecca Willig and
moved to Celle, a DP camp near Bergen-Belsen. Esther worked in the camp's Beis
Yaakov and also as an interpreter as she knew some English from Schleswig. Her
fiancée Yisrael Wagner found her in Celle after searching for her for a year
after the war in Warsaw and other displaced persons' camps.
 |
| They married in Salzburg, Austria on Lag B'Omer on May 19, 1946. |
 |
| Rabbi Yisrael Wagner in La Paz |
Esther
was employed by UNRAA helping survivors fill out questionnaires searching for
family members.From there Esther and her husband left on false papers for Belgium
where they remained for 6 months and then immigrated to Bolivia where her
husband was employed as a Rabbi in La Paz.
They stayed there for several years,
gave birth to their first son, but later moved to the United States.
The father
of President Donald Trump helped them to build a synagogue and became a friend
of the family and regular guest at the Jewish Cultural Center.
Years later, after making Aliyah with her whole family, at the age of
80, Rivka began a new career: once a year she traveled to Poland with college
aged students to tell her story in the place where most of it happened.
Her youngest daughter Malka accompanied her on seven of these trips.
They celebrated Rivka’s 90th birthday in Warsaw. Together with about 200 young
women, they went to the train station and she would tell the story of how it
felt to get on the train as Rivka Willig and be Paulina Wilanska when she
stepped off the train.
At the end of the trip to Poland, there would always be one student who
would say, “Rebbezin Wagner, how did you keep your faith? They took everything
from you, your home and family and life and your name. How did you keep your
faith?”
Each time, Rivka would give the same answer. “My faith was the only
thing that the Nazis couldn’t take away from me. My faith is what I had inside
of me, instilled by my parents and their parents before them and all the way
back. My faith was what helped me get through. Not everyone was like me, but I
was free to do what I wanted, only with that.”
“But what about God?” another student dared to ask. “weren’t you angry
at God?”
And then Rivka would answer, “God was not my problem. Man was my
problem.”
Rivka, of blessed memory, passed away in 2016 at the age of 92.
 |
| Malka talking to John Somerville in Yad Vashem's synagogue where she spoke to the group. |
Each time Malka tells a group visiting Yad Vashem about her mother’s ‘leap
of faith’, people have tears in their eyes.
*********
Malka gave a more detailed description of the events, which the USHMM didn't mention. In the near future, I hope to share Malka's version in another blogpost!
The personal pictures of the Wagner family are from the USHMM website.
Sources:
Malka Weisberg, Yad Vashem
