Although Falicja Raszkin-Nowak was born in Warsaw and lived there until the war, she was the daughter of Bialystok residents. Her mother, Betty Szapiro, grew up at 33 Lipowa St., while her father, Jakub Raszkin, lived at 8 Kościuszki St. The couple regularly visited their hometown, and Felicja's earliest memories are connected with her grandmother Maria's apartment, which was located in the magnificent house at 33 Lipowa St. The entire tenement house was an inheritance of the Tropp family.
The whole house was an inheritance from Felicia's great-grandfather, Osipp Tropp, who had made a considerable fortune - he owned a sawmill and traded in lumber. When the great-grandfather died, the flats in the tenement passed into the hands of his children. So Felicia had contact with almost all her cousins from an early age. Grandmother Maria's flat was on the first floor and in her granddaughter's memory it was a magical place. Large and bright, it was filled with books and precious family mementos. Her grandmother's younger brother, the somewhat mysterious, usually very busy engineer Mojsiej Tropp, and her dear uncle - an Esperantist and journalist - Jakub Szapiro, with his wife and son, also lived there. The visits and the atmosphere of her grandmother's house laid the foundations for Felicia's happy childhood.
When war broke out and the Germans occupied Warsaw, Felicja and her parents fled to Bialystok. It seemed a safer place, although it was also occupied by the Soviets. Not for long, as it turned out.
The tenement house on the most prestigious street in town was a tasty morsel for all the inhabitants. First it was taken over by the Soviets, then by the Nazis in 1941. Felicja, already a teenager, witnessed the looting of her grandmother's beautiful Gdansk furniture. The Germans also took her uncle Jakub's extremely rich library.
In her memoirs, Felicia wrote: "Nothing remained of the cosy apartment, where every corner, every crack was familiar to me from my childhood.

The palace of the Nowik family, or rather its courtyard next to the Tropps' tenement house, stands out in Felicia's memory as the place where she played her most wonderful childhood games. With a group of other children from the neighbourhood, she would crawl over the fence into the neighbour's garden, where the fun never stopped. There was also a bakery in the yard of this house, owned by a man called Chackiel, who sold his baked goods in a small shop on Lipowa Street. The smell of bialys, buns and bagels filled the yard. Chackiel's sons, always covered in flour, were Fela's faithful playmates.
The Nowik Palace, built in 1910 by hat factory owner Chaim Nowik, was one of the city's finest residences. Unfortunately, the Nowik family, affected by personal tragedies and the Great Depression, was unable to maintain the factory, and the apartments in the palace on Lipowa Street were also rented out. In 1939, the Bialystok Defence Headquarters was located here. To this day, the palace is owned by the Polish Army and houses the Military Recruitment Centre.
In 1941, the building was taken over by the Germans and designated as the headquarters of the Red Cross. Felicja, who, as she herself recalled, was "drawn to Lipowa", managed to get a job there at the beginning of the occupation. Twelve German Red Cross sisters lived in the beautiful, high-ceilinged apartment. Felicja polished their shoes, scrubbed their floors and helped in the kitchen. It didn't last long - the sisters soon moved her to the railway station, where she was needed more.

Since the first railway line passed through Białystok in 1862, the building of Białystok Railway Station has witnessed almost every historical event. From tsarist times to the world wars, the army passed through here. Marshal Piłsudski was received here, and thousands of tonnes of goods were transported through the station, bringing fortune to local manufacturers. The Tsarist -era railway station, which was burned and looted several times but still exists today, was also the workplace of our heroine. Felicja worked at the Red Cross station until February 1942. It was shift work, very physically demanding. A shift lasted 12 hours. The main task of this point was to feed German soldiers passing by on trains. Transports were constantly moving - after serving soup, hundreds of plates had to be washed by hand. In the breaks between transports, the stone station floor had to be cleaned, the windows and all the equipment washed.
Employed Jews worked for food for themselves and for extra portions to take to the ghetto for their loved ones. This included slices of bread left over from the machine, nutritious meat soup and small amounts of sugar or rice. Felicja provided food for the whole family, but it put her in great danger every day. It was forbidden to bring food into the ghetto, and those caught in the act were searched and beaten. You had to be very clever. Smuggling food was risky, but the work, though hard, gave Felicja something more. It was a chance to leave the ghetto, to come into contact with the world, to escape for a few hours from the grey and misery of a closed district condemned to vegetation.

When Felicja was a few years old, she was a cute blonde with curls like springs. One day, her grandmother Maria took her to a nearby photographer to have a souvenir photo taken of her granddaughter. There were two copies of this large portrait photograph. One, of course, decorated Grandma's living room, and the other hung for many years behind the window of the photographer's studio in Bialystok. Years later, when Felicja was a teenager walking around Lipowa with her friends, she would look at the picture of her child in the photographer's window.
The same place appeared in Fela's memories under much sadder circumstances, during the occupation.
In December 1942, as part of Operation Reinhardt, more and more Jewish communities from the Bialystok region were exterminated in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Friends of the Tropp family, aware of this, decided to try to get Felicja out of the ghetto. They were Mr Piotr's Christian family from near Bialystok, who were friends of Felicja's great-grandfather. A plan was drawn up, based on the assumption that she would work in Germany on Aryan papers. Felicja left the ghetto for a day to find out about the conditions for her rescue. She met her friends and asked them to take a group photo with the same photographer who'd had her childhood portrait hanging for years. It was a small substitute for normality for the then 18-year-old.
In the end, Felicja decided not to leave the ghetto, leaving behind her mother, grandmother and the rest of her family.

During the Soviet occupation, the apartment at 33 ul. Lipowa 33 was nationalised, i.e. taken over by the state. Only Felicja's uncle Jakub Szapiro, together with his wife and son, was able to stay in the tenement, or rather the annex, of Tropp's grandfather. In exchange for a roof over their heads, the Soviet authorities gave the family a four-room apartment at 10 Nowy Swiat Street. This particular house did not survive the war, but there is still an original and perfectly restored pre-war tenement almost opposite. Felicja must have seen it from her windows and passed it every day...
After the Germans entered Bialystok (27 June 1941), it soon became clear that the apartment at Nowy Swiat Street was in the area designated for the ghetto. So all the cousins and family moved there. 11 people lived in four rooms, the kitchen and bathroom were shared with another family. But very soon, on 12 July, a tragedy happened to thousands of families in Bialystok. Including Felicja Raszkin's family.
On a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, the occupiers blocked the whole block of Lipowa Street: Polna, Nowy Świat, Różańska and other crossroads. The Germans entered the flats and dragged the men out - there was no escape from this trap. That was the last time Felicja saw her beloved father. It was he who opened the door in response to the vulgar knocking. As she wrote, "the brutal raus was meant to throw him into the darkness". That day, Felicja's father shared the fate of 3,000 prisoners shot by the Germans in the forests and fields of Pietraszy. Uncle Kuba and cousin Lowa did not return home that day either. It was in the same apartment that her beloved grandmother Maria met her tragic end. In February 1943, during the so-called February Action, the sick old lady (in Felicja's absence) was dragged out of bed and thrown onto a lorry. She died during the transport.

Niewielki skwer, od lutego 2018 roku noszący imię Felicji Raszkin Nowak nie jest miejscem przypadkowym. Po drugiej stronie ulicy Poleskiej rozciąga się ul. Sitarska.
To tutaj w czasie wojny mieszkała Maria z córką Elinor. W małym domu, niedaleko ogrodzenia getta, lecz po aryjskiej stronie. Maria była Niemką i żoną bliskiego kuzyna Felicji - Beno. Z przyczyn oczywistych w trakcie okupacji niemieckiej małżeństwo się rozdzieliło. Beno jako Żyd ukrywał się zaś Maria była stale obserwowana, czy oby nie ma kontaktu z mężem. Pomimo tak trudnej sytuacji Maria wielokrotnie pomagała rodzinie męża.
Felicja odwiedzała ją, kiedy jeszcze wychodziła z getta do pracy na dworcu. Dzięki jej kontaktom Felicja wiedziała, kiedy przy bramie getta stoi przychylny strażnik. Mogła wówczas przenieść jedzenie czy w innym momencie wraz z rodziną wyjść poza getto. Maria i Beno byli skrzynką kontaktową pomiędzy zamkniętymi w getcie Raszkinami a ich przyjaciółmi po aryjskiej stronie.
Ulica Sitarska odegrała też kluczową rolę w czasie, gdy Felicja uciekła z getta i oczekiwała na pomoc ze wsi. To oczekiwanie trwało aż 6 dni a kryjówkę, zupełnie przypadkowo Felicja znalazła w kamienicy naprzeciwko domu Marii. To na Sitarską, 31 sierpnia 1943 roku przyjechał furmanką pan Piotr i szczęśliwie wywiózł Felicję do swojej wsi w Puszczy Knyszyńskiej. W domu p. Piotra Felicja ukrywała się do końca wojny.

Passing through the ghetto gate was Felicja's daily routine until the complete closure of the Jewish district in November 1942. As she recalled, this was the way she left the ghetto most often, as it was the quickest way from her home on Nowy Swiat Street. She was in a hurry to leave this sad, grey and depressing place. She missed the green trees, Planty, Zwierzyniec and the beach in Dojlidy.
"I wanted to get out of the ghetto as soon as possible, and I usually crossed the gate on Kupiecka Street. I used to come back this way when Maryla (a colleague from the tobacco factory) accompanied me. Our paths diverged at the heavy gate. My place was in the ghetto, and she continued along the street lined with linden trees. The old trees in front of house no. 33 were green like in my childhood".
As she walked, Felicja saw the Church of St Nicholas, where her maid, Fienia, used to go before the war. Almost opposite the church was the house of the respected cardiologist Dr Kryński. The building was designed by Felicja's uncle, Mojsiej Tropp. He was a city councillor and took an active part in modernising Białystok during the time of Governor Zyndram Kościałkowski. Thanks to his uncle, who had extensive connections among engineers, the family survived until the establishment of the Little Ghetto. Mojsiej probably died together with his mother and Felicja's closest family in Majdanek.

From November 1, 1942, the ghetto was reduced and sealed. Jews could no longer go outside to work, so a frantic search for work in the ghetto began. Fela found employment in the same tailoring factories where her mother worked. It was Oscar Steffen's factory - he made a fortune on the work of Jews, whom he paid with a bread ration... The ghetto's manufacturing activity was enormous. Knitting, shoemaking, saddlery, felt, brush, carpentry, lathe and many other factories were in operation. Jews believed that employment (i.e. their usefulness) was a chance for life. In 1943, during the week-long February Action, the Germans deported 9,000 people from the ghetto and killed a thousand on the streets. Indeed - those who were in their factories survived then. People took their children and families with them to the factories. Felicja and her mother, however, could not persuade her grandmother to leave the house in any way. She stayed at home, with three cousins in a makeshift hiding place. They never saw each other again.
During the February action, the hunt for people in the streets of the ghetto began at 7 a.m. Workers left their homes at 3 a.m. to go to work, and crowds marched through the streets. Workshops and factories could not accommodate the crews of all shifts. "In the hall where we worked, there were almost three times as many workers as usual. It was necessary to pretend that everyone was working, to give everyone a task (...). Children, brought by desperate mothers, became a big problem. The older ones sat on the worktables, the younger ones underneath, so that no one could see them. The little ones were put in big boxes (...). It was amazing how disciplined these little ones were to keep peace and order".

One of Białystok's main streets is often mentioned in Felicja Raszkin Nowak's memories. As a teenager, when she spent her holidays in Białystok, she used to walk endlessly along Sienkiewicza Street with her friends. As a young lady from Warsaw, she was very popular - she flirted, went to the cinema and danced. The highlight of the day was the walk from Astoria to the Apollo cinema.
During the Soviet occupation, when the family moved permanently from Warsaw to Białystok, Felicja attended the eighth grade of the pre-war Zeligman and Dereczyński Gymnasium. It was located at Sienkiewicza 4 and was renamed to an anonymous number by the Soviets. It was at this school that the teenager developed a passion for gymnastics. She trained passionately, taking part in Spartakiads and competitions. It is possible that her good shape helped her to survive even the hardest physical labour later on.
Sienkiewicza Street certainly played a role in the girl's final escape from the ghetto. Together with her mother and uncle Mojsiej, Felicja escaped death in Treblinka during the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1943. They were part of a group of 850 people who were imprisoned in the so-called Small Ghetto. This small group had their death sentences postponed for a few weeks. They were to work on dismantling machines and removing the last loot from the liquidated ghetto. It was then that Felicja decided to escape. She had an Aryan appearance, good clothes and a baptismal certificate. She was also very lucky. A German guard turned his head when she told him she wanted to escape. All this happened somewhere near Sienkiewicza...

Felicja's father, merchant Jakub Raszkin, was born and spent the first years of his life in this house. He had two brothers, Artur and Mila, and a sister, Sala. Felicja's grandfather, Izaak Raszkin, the father of the family, a cloth merchant, remained in her earliest memories. He would visit her in Warsaw and stroke his moustache and pointed beard with a small brush. Even great-grandmother Rozenblum remained in little Fela's memory - as an old woman who spoke Yiddish, wore a wig and always sat in an armchair. Unfortunately, after her death, her grandmother Muszka Raszkin quickly took her mother's place. Her illness, her departure and her grandfather's despair left their mark on her granddaughter's memory. After Muszka's death, when the children scattered, Grandpa Raszkin was left all alone. Felicja visited him often and remembered many details:
"You entered my grandfather's flat in Kościuszko Square from the courtyard, up the stairs to a long balcony that ran along the wall of the whole house. Then up to the first floor. The stairs were made of wood with metal plates on the steps, and it was easy to trip over them. You couldn't run on the balcony because the boards moved and everything creaked with age. I held on to the railing and was afraid to look down. There was an attic above the flat and that's where my father's cousin, Etia Rozenblum, had moved in. She had a kitchen and a large room, and there was an attic with a window overlooking Kościuszko Square.