Liliana Syrkis, nee Binensztok, was born in 1923 in Pińsk. In 1939, she was transported together with her younger sister and mother to Siberia, where she worked in the kolkhoz. One year after the war they returned to Poland. In the mid-1940s Liliana left for Sweden and one year later she went to Brazil, invited by her uncle who had been living in Rio de Janeiro for many years.
After coming to Rio de Janeiro Liliana Syrykis started working as an assistant in a boutique that sold hats. The owner of the boutique was her soon-to-be mother-in-law, the mother of Eugeniusz Syrykis. Soon Liliana got married. For many years Liliana Syrykis had been running Maison Colette, one of the most renowned fashion showrooms in Rio de Janeiro.
Liliana Syrkis wrote down her reminiscence in an autobiography titled “Lila”.
Interview by Aleksandra Pluta on 6th May 2015 in Rio de Janeiro.
One day I went to school because back then, in 1939, I was 16 so I went to school. I enter my classroom and my friends are standing there and saying: “Have you heard that Lila was sent to Siberia today?”. So I say: “I wasn’t sent anywhere. I’m here”. But I realized that probably while I was walking to school the NKVD arrived at my house and they wanted to take my mother away. So I rushed home not to leave my mother alone and back then my sister who was born in 1939 was only 6. My mother said: “No, I won’t take her to this banishment with me. I’ll leave her with my mother”. She meant her grandmother but the last moment she took Janeczka with her. Can you imagine what would have happened if my mother had left her? All the Jews were killed in Pińsk. Maybe three of them survived.
- For 6 years I attended school and worked at the kolkhoz. At first I worked, I made these bricks of dung. We would leave them to dry out in the sun in the summer and then we used it as fuel. I worked really hard at the kolkhoz but at the same time I was very ambitious I wanted to succeed and I wanted to learn Russian to get good grades.
- There was a school, right?
- Yes, everywhere. In that regard Russia was amazing, this communist Russia. There was no village without a school. Of course, junior high school that I attended was 18 kilometres from our village because there was just this public school in the village. So I went there on Sunday evening, I lived there for a week and I returned on Saturday. After that I just worked at the kolkhoz.
There was the Kielce Pogrom. At the time a widower, we knew that mum was also a widow and she was a very beautiful woman, so he said… he wanted to emigrate to Australia. He said: “You cannot stay in Poland. See what is happening here. You risk your life here”. But we had an uncle here. My father’s sister was living in Brazil because before the war he had been working at the Immigration Association for the Polish Farmers. They were settled in Curitiba. And the war found him here. When he found out that we were the only people left of the entire family only because we had been sent to Siberia, he wrote to us that he is sending us papers, ticket, so that we could go, but there were some difficulties, of course, because during [unclear] they didn’t allow Jews travel to Brazil. We went to Sweden and lived there for almost a year and a priest gave us papers that we are Catholics and then we got a visa. There my mother worked in a restaurant, washed the dishes, and I went to work at the clothes factory to get by because we had no money at all. They trained me there for a week, 10 days, how to sew and then I worked there. And my sister was 12 at the time, I think, so she sewed on the buttons in the morning and in the afternoon she went to school.
We couldn’t get to Brazil because at the time Brazil didn’t allow Jews to enter its territory. There was this Minister of Foreign Affairs, I can’t recall his last name, but he had a Romanian wife. He was a terrible anti-Semite. And that [unclear] probably too. So it was forbidden.
- The journey was just awful. It was a ship and we travelled in third class under the deck. People vomited and the smell, filth, it was just terrible. But we got to Rio and when we were getting close and I saw this beautiful city, those mountains, the sea. My uncle was waiting for us and he got a job for me straight away.
- How long did the journey take?
- It was really long, I can’t remember exactly but it was a really long journey.
- And the ship sailed off from?
- From Le Havre, France. Before that we had to get to France, to Le Havre, from Sweden and then we got on the ship.
When I came to Brazil my aunt, who had lived here, said: “You know, I’ll get you a job because I have this friend who makes hats in the best haute couture showroom”. And she did. This lady, who made the hats, she was from Łódź and back there she had the most elegant hat showroom in Łódź before the war. She went to Paris four times a year to get models because there were four seasons in Poland: spring, summer, autumn and winter. When the war broke out she was in Paris.
- What was this organization doing? I mean the one that your uncle worked for? Was it bringing...
- From Lublin.
- From Lublin?
- Yes. It was an official governmental organization. Or private? I suppose it was governmental.
- And they brought Polish farmers?
- Yes, those who wanted to start fresh but it was all poorly organized. They were settled in Parana and Espirito Santo.
- When was this organization operating?
- In the 1930s.
- In the 1930s, before the war?
- Yes.
I was amazed by this country. There aren’t many religious differences here. In that sense it is an amazing country. I’ve never witnessed any antisemitism here. And you know, in Poland, as I remember, there was this Korczakowski Gathering. It was when John Paul became the Pope so I went there to this Year of Korczak event. Then I take the train to go to Cracow to my friend, who lives there. Nothing else was said on the train, people only talked about the Jews.
