‘Coincidentally’ Born at Mila 18: An Address History Would Claim
I have read Yakov Szurek’s testimony, which sits at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, more times than I can count. This time, one line struck me: “coincidentally born at Mila 18.”
“I was coincidentally born at Mila 18,” he says. “Most of you might know that that’s where the bunker was. Ziv Lubetkin and the headquarters were located there, and that house was located inside the ghetto. That street was a street that contained 99% Jews before the war, only the servants and the housekeepers were Polish and a few families here and there.”
Coincidentally.
This word, from a man who survived what most of us cannot imagine. A man raised in a house full of a loving family, a family mostly murdered. A home that became one of the most infamous addresses in the history of the Holocaust.
A man recounting his testimony to be preserved at Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which he helped found alongside Warsaw Ghetto Uprising survivors Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman. A man who casually testifies that his childhood home became the command bunker of the ŻOB, the Jewish Combat Organization, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
On May 8, 1943, the Germans surrounded the bunker. Three hundred people were inside. The civilians surrendered. The fighters stayed. The Germans siphoned in gas and threw grenades, and about 120 died, many taking their own lives at Arie Wilner’s command. Mordechai Anielewicz, the twenty-four-year-old commander of the Uprising, died there among them. The bodies were never exhumed. They are still there. The mound that marks the site was built from the rubble of Mila Street, and the memorial calls it “one of the liveliest streets of pre-war Jewish Warsaw.” Mila 18 was reduced to that rubble. The home where Yakov was born, where his family of ten once lived, became part of the grave.
The home where Yakov was born, where his family of ten once lived, became part of the grave.
Yakov was the fourth child among eight. Edna was the sixth. All born at Mila 18. A father who owned a leather factory, a mother who organized lavish weddings for Warsaw’s wealthy families. Out of ten, four of the children survived the war. But two of those four would not survive what the war had done to them. Shlomo to drink, Miriam to despair, both gone before their time.
Analyzing his testimony again, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. I never thought to look at Yakov’s testimony in this light. He describes Jewish life in prewar Warsaw, and it gives us an extraordinary lens into what that world was.
His grandmother, who died before the war, was sought out like a rabbi. A woman, in prewar Warsaw, whose counsel drew religious men from far away. In Yakov’s words:
“My grandfather from my mother’s side was very conservative, almost a Rabbi. My grandmother was, Rabbi Nissenbaum and other important people came to consult her from places far away. I remember her funeral before the war.”
Imagine that. A woman whose counsel was sought by religious men in prewar Warsaw. Simply extraordinary.
The father, Avraham Szurek, came from a different side of the prewar Warsaw Jewish community. He was a member of the Bund, the secular Jewish socialist labor movement. He owned a leather factory, and he was a labor activist. In Yakov’s words:
“My dad was very left-wing, a ‘bunt,’ part of the anti-Zionist rebellion or something like that, and he was an active member.”
Set against the near-rabbi maternal grandfather, you have one family spanning the whole religious-secular range of prewar Warsaw Jewry.
A childhood memory jumps out at me from the page:
“As a child in the streets of Gesia, one time I went out to the streets and I saw the Freiheit youth (‘Dror’). I went there as a kid and I saw them dancing the Hora. It was something I didn’t understand, it looked so wild, so much noise.”
The small boy who watched the Dror youth dance the Hora on Gęsia Street, not understanding it, grew up to help found a kibbutz with Dror veterans. Zivia and Yitzhak were Dror leaders. The dance he could not comprehend as a child became the movement that defined his entire adult life.
Since 2022, archaeologists from the Warsaw Ghetto Museum have been digging at Mila 18, under the rabbinic supervision of Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich. They have found more than 5,000 objects of prewar Jewish life. Charred pages of Hebrew prayer books. Fragments of a Polish novel. Two leather tefillin boxes. The site will not be reburied. The museum’s director wants it left open, as a permanent memorial, so the young can touch what was real.
Now, eighty years later, the street Yakov described in words is coming back into the light, object by object. His testimony and the ground are saying the same thing.
His testimony and the ground are saying the same thing.
A man who survived it all. Who reached Palestine, fought in the War of Independence, helped build a kibbutz and a country from the ashes. A man who began, coincidentally, at Mila 18.
Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, the true story of her mother-in-law’s survival of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Polish resistance, released on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2026.
