On December 24, 1939, on Christian Christmas Eve, Pola Resz was married to Marceli Najder. Marceli and Pola's son, Tomasz Najder, later wrote in a commentary to the book "Rewange" (a collection of parents' notes from the occupation period) that "it was probably the fears that the" worse "would come that made them instinctively consolidate this relationship." Worse things came on July 2, 1941, with the beginning of the Hungarian and later German (October 1941) occupation.
Until March 1942, Marceli was still working in pharmacies in Kołomyja and Peczeniżyn. After the creation of the ghetto in Kołomyja and the relocation of the Najder family to it, he joined the Sanitary Platoon of the Jewish Order Service (Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst; for short, OD). The gradual liquidation of the ghetto began on September 7, 1942. As an OD officer, Marceli was assigned to secure the property left behind and to clean the train station of the bodies of ghetto prisoners killed while being loaded onto carriages. Pola, along with other residents of the house at ul. Copernicus, she was hiding in a shelter dug under the building. At that time, her husband left her with a lethal dose of morphine in case the hiding place was found by German soldiers. He also carried poison with him. In November 1942, the Najder secretly moved into the attic of one of the abandoned buildings in a district excluded from the ghetto. They made a makeshift household there, using equipment that they found in other empty apartments. Due to the threat of revealing herself, Pola did not leave the hiding place at all, and the spouses cooked meals only at night. In January 1943, the family moved to a dugout on Andrzej Śliwiak's farm. Together with 8 other people, they spent over a year in a 6 m² room that was formerly used to store beer kegs. For safety reasons, the residents of the bunker took turns watching at the entrance. At the beginning of August 1943, an economic branch of the Gestapo was stationed on the farm. The threat got even closer. The German soldiers not only did not discover the hiding place, but throughout their stay they handed over to the Śliwiak family food rations from the camp kitchen, which the hosts shared with Jews. Originally, the room was used to store barrels of beer. With the help of the host, a new entrance to the bunker was located in the shed adjacent to the house. The entrance was camouflaged by covering it with a dog kennel, which had been broken down especially for this purpose. Electricity was also supplied to the bunker, which allowed not only to illuminate the room without windows, but also to use a radio.
While Pola was hiding, she wrote a diary. In it she mentions that the secretly carved chess pieces were to be offered to her sister (Bela) after the war as proof of her suffering. The journal also contains information that Pola made a lampshade for a lamp from an old shirt. However, this object has not survived. Activities such as planing chess pieces, making a lampshade or writing a diary helped to fill the hiding place, thus surviving a year of exclusion, forced inactivity and a constant sense of danger. The complete chess pieces (32 figures) were donated to the POLIN Museum collection by the son of Pola and Marceli Najder - Tomasz, and are now on display at the core exhibition.
A set of chess pieces consists of 32 pieces (without the board). The set consists of 16 pieces and 16 figures (4 rooks, 4 knights, 4 bishops, 2 queens and 2 kings). All the pieces are handcrafted from chestnut wood with a small knife (trestle). Each of the elements of the set has been carved from one piece of raw material. There are traces of carving with a knife on all verticals and figures. The sticks are of the natural color of the wood (they have not been painted or varnished). Half of the pieces and pieces are marked with a sign consisting of two intersecting lines ("X") on the bottom, which allows dividing pieces between two players. In the case of marked objects, the edge of the base has been additionally outlined with a pencil. The dimensions and form of each of the identical elements differ slightly due to the hand-made workmanship.
Marta Frączkiewicz