21
Commemorations
Łódź was one of the very first of the 200 ghettos set up by the invaders, and it would be the longest-lasting . . .
—Fred Rosenbaum, “Łódź: A History of the City and the Ghetto” in Rywka’s Diary: The Writings of a Jewish Girl from the Łódź Ghetto
When I returned in late August, the leaves had turned a darker green and the branches were heavy with their cargo. It was this month, 65 years earlier, in 1944, when the ghetto had been liquidated. My mother, three of her siblings, and my grandmother were among the 67,000 Jews herded toward Radegast Station and into cattle cars headed for Auschwitz. Seven hundred were held back to clean up the ghetto, and then were made to dig their own mass grave. But when the Soviets suddenly arrived, the Nazis fled before they could shoot them.
I had registered for the commemoration events well ahead of time. On the first day, I picked up my materials and identification badge at the Visitors Information Center downtown. The badge would serve as my entry pass and I noticed there were several different types. Most were for general visitors, some were for press, some for VIPs. The black letters on mine jumped out: Survivor’s Family. I picked up the laminated badge with one hand and gathered schedules and maps with the other. The badge was attached to a long, black ribbon that I placed around my neck as I left the tourist office. I wondered what it would be like to wear it around the city. It wasn’t a yellow star, but it left no question about my identity.
Next, I figured out which tram would take me to the first public event, a ceremony at the former site of a Gypsy camp within the ghetto, and headed to the closest stop. It was mid-day and the tram was full. I clung to a vertical pole for several stops until it lurched to a stop. A male voice blared through an overhead speaker, saying—what? The five months I’d spent learning Polish weren’t enough to conquer this octopus of a language. As people disembarked, I stood motionless, arguing with fate.
A few feet away, an older man in a crisp, white shirt noticed me and stepped closer to help. But his Polish was too fast.
“Please, can you say it slowly?” I said in Polish.
Where was I from, he wanted to know. America, I told him.
“Perhaps you speak German?” he asked.
“A little,” I answered, still in Polish. My German was certainly no better, but maybe two languages were better than one.
I had a copy of the tram route and pointed to the stop I needed. He motioned to the northeast through the window and said it wasn’t far. I nodded and thanked him. It couldn’t be too difficult to find—just inconvenient. I had planned everything out and didn’t want to be late. As we stepped off the tram, he scratched his bony temple, then turned and darted across the street to the north like a squirrel, motioning with his hand for me to follow him.
I didn’t want to take him out of his way, but he seemed suddenly energized so I didn’t argue. His pencil-thin body angled forward as if leaning into a strong wind, and I struggled to keep up like a lagging child. I remembered my father going out of his way to help strangers, especially foreigners and women with children—how his face lit up when opening a door or performing some other kindness.
Adjusting to the stranger’s brisk pace, I caught up. Side by side now, I could hear him panting.
“Are you all right? It’s really not necessary; I can find my own way.” I switched now between German and Polish as if they were one language because sometimes I found a word more quickly in one language than the other.
“It’s because I am an old man now, 77,” he explained. “I was born in Łódź; I have lived here all my life.”
I calculated he would have been seven or eight when the war started. Despite his current age, the boyish quality remained. By the way he zigzagged, he knew both the neighborhood well and where I was going. Maybe he had glimpsed my badge, though it was partly hidden under my jacket, or maybe he had read about the event in the newspaper. Concerned about him over-exerting, I told him again that I could manage alone, but he said something I didn’t understand; perhaps he’d planned to go there later?
We arrived at a small, concrete courtyard and slipped into the crowd. The Gypsy Camp commemoration ceremony had already begun. No badges were needed. There were dozens of police in black uniforms, and white TV vans, cameras, and lights. The mayor of Łódź was delivering a speech on a raised platform.
The afternoon sun blazed and I was sweating from our laborious walk. To my left, a row of teenage girls wearing checkered skirts leaned against a brick wall. Near them, a boy scout unpacked a case of water bottles. He smiled and nodded as I caught his eye, then came over, bottles in hand. I took one for myself and one for my companion, his face beaded with sweat, who gratefully accepted it. We gulped them down as the mayor finished speaking. Clearly, he’d decided to stay. Was he headed here anyway, or was I the excuse he needed?
The guest of honor was the head of the Roma nation, a large, swarthy man whose arms swung loosely from his heavy, dark suit. He walked like an enormous hulk, ordinary and sad, like a piece of dark earth poured into a human body.
From the speeches and materials on site, I learned that 5,007 Gypsies—Romani and Sinti—were transported from Austria to Łódź in cattle cars in November 1941. Not one survived. More than half were children.
Double barbed-wire and a moat, two meters deep, on either side, had surrounded this prison within a prison. Its three or four tenement houses consisted of 120 to 150 small rooms. Instead of beds, straw was spread over the floor and covered with rags. The windows were boarded with planks. Only one bowl was provided for every five people, and even then, not for several weeks. There was no running water, no toilets, nowhere to bathe.
As might be expected, a typhus epidemic soon broke out. The ghetto’s Jewish doctors drew names each day to decide who would attend the dying Gypsies. Knowing most of them would be infected, the duty was only assigned to those without families. Within weeks, over 700 Gypsies were buried in mass graves in the Jewish Cemetery, and the disease began to spread outside the ghetto. When a Nazi commander became infected and died, the authorities decided to liquidate the camp to prevent any further Aryan contamination.
Between January 5 and 12, 1942, the 4,300 remaining Gypsies were deported to the death camp at Chełmno nad Nerem and gassed. Though Jews were Hitler’s largest and primary target, they were by no means his only one.
At the end of this ceremony, my self-appointed escort and I followed the crowd to a row of modern buses waiting to take us to the next ceremony at the site of another sub-camp within the ghetto—a camp for Polish children and youth. Just as my companion would not have taken a bottle of water had I not handed it to him, I knew he would not have stepped into the tourist bus without me, for he was no tourist. He had helped me find my way and rescued me from being alone; in return, I’d given him a purpose and reason to belong.
A monument stood just outside the former Children’s Camp—a sculpture of a human heart, broken in the middle, with a naked child, ghostly white, facing into its hollow center.
Broken Heart Monument at Childrens Camp
As we stood together on the grass near the sculpture, I could no longer stand the sense of near intimacy with a total stranger.
“Please,” I asked. ‘What is your name?”
“Mariusz,” he replied.
“I am Ellen.” I offered my hand and we shook.
We belonged to the situation in different ways. In our bond of conjoining needs, I wasn’t sure who was benefitting more. Now he’d found his stride, shaking hands with people he apparently knew.
There was something about his German—or did I imagine it? It was beginning to sound like Yiddish to me, but I wasn’t sure because the German I’d briefly studied in college was fuzzy and, even though I’d known Yiddish since birth, I’d spoken it only rarely. At times the languages blurred.
Yiddish was, after all, a dialect of German, yet it had never seemed like a real language to me. It felt illegitimate somehow, like being a Jew. Relegated to family, it burst with nuance and wit that evaded translation. It was the essence of caricature, curved, not straight, embarrassingly intimate like a grandmother’s underwear, yet precise—the irreverent code of cosmic gossip.
Could Mariusz be Jewish? Something about his bone structure looked almost oriental, yet not incompatible with being Jewish. It had a familiar quality, like a friend of the family I might have met.
The guests of honor included four survivors of the more than 1,500 Polish children and adolescents once imprisoned here and subjected to slave labor and beatings. The inmates had consisted largely of orphans—children whose parents had been arrested or killed by the Nazis.
One survivor wore a dark green military uniform, laden with medals, and a thick, dark moustache. His demeanor seemed impenetrable, his face expressionless. But as he described being taken from his family, the harsh labor in the camp, and no longer being called by his name, his composure dissolved. Childish memories rippled over his face like bursting storm clouds. His shoulders began to shudder. Suddenly he could only whisper.
Afterward, buses took us to the day’s final ceremony at the Jewish cemetery, the largest in Europe, where over 180,000 Jews were buried amidst a vast array of monuments—some elaborate, some in decay—thick with foliage and vines. I had been here with Łukasz on my first trip and with Herb a few months earlier. My grandfather and his twin brother had died of typhus within two days of each other in December 1941, during the Gypsies’ incarceration. They were buried here along with many other ancestors, no doubt.
Mariusz seemed to know even more people here. With confidence bolstered by our newfound partnership, we grabbed two chairs right behind the VIP seats. I felt certain at this point that he must be Jewish, but it seemed out of the question to ask. Was it possible that, even in this protected situation, he was wary of revealing it to me—the Jewish daughter of a survivor from Łódź? With growing conviction, I stopped trying to speak German, which required a certain extra effort, and nudged my brain toward the homier feel of Yiddish.
Now Mariusz was asking people how he could get an identification badge to attend the rest of the events. I explained that he could get one at the Tourist Information Center at Piotrkówska 87, but he ignored my suggestion and continued asking.
In retrospect, I understood that it would feel like an insult for someone who had lived here all his life, who was probably a Jew hidden by a gentile family during the war, to have to ask for an entry badge at the Tourist Office. He was a survivor and this was his home, though he was keeping his identity secret, at least from me. We were bound together, yet strangers.
Finally, I had to find out. Mixing German and Yiddish, I asked, “Mariusz, maybe you know Yiddish? Do you speak Yiddish?”
Instead of saying yes or no, he kept repeating a sentence containing a word I didn’t know. Then he borrowed my Polish-English dictionary and pointed to it: WROG—the English beside it read “enemy.”
“I speak German and Russian—the languages of the enemies.”
With that, he’d summed up several chapters of Polish history, with Jews becoming convenient targets as Russia and Germany took turns demonizing them to divert Polish attention away from their own agendas.
At the end of the ceremony, Mariusz and I traveled back together on one of the buses provided to Plac Wolności and parted ways.
“Do jutra,” he said, meaning “til tomorrow.” It was only natural to assume we would resume our companionship the next day.
“Do jutra,” I nodded.
The next day’s event was the biggest—a ceremony on a large piece of land close to the ghetto, now designated as Survivors Park. Four hundred and twelve saplings had been planted there in tidy rows, each one dedicated to a survivor. I’d had one dedicated to my mother the year before but hadn’t yet located it.
Honored guests included the president of Poland and the Israeli ambassador to Poland. Security was in full force. One needed a registration badge to be seated under the covered awnings where their speeches and presentations would be made. As I waited in the security line, to my right I saw hundreds more people in the distance. They would not be allowed anywhere close to the proceedings, and I knew Mariusz was among them.
I sat in the fourth row, a privileged location next to my friend Peter, the Łódź-born university professor living in Minnesota whom I’d met by accident on my first trip to Poland, and again today in the security line. Peter had two VIP badges and offered me the one belonging to his mother who was too sick to attend. If I’d known in advance, I could have given my badge to Mariusz.
Directly across from where we sat, separated by a channel of water and wide concrete steps, was the new Monument of the Righteous—a Star of David and a Polish eagle. In front of the monument was covered seating and a speaking platform for the president, ambassador, mayor of Łódź, chief rabbi of Poland, and speakers and dignitaries from Israel and elsewhere. Their presence proclaimed that the world had not entirely forgotten, and a weight I had not been aware of lifted from my heart.
Medals of Honor were awarded to those who had promoted peace and friendship between Israel and Poland, and to others who had saved Jews during the war. The monument was dedicated to them, as was a special concert. Throughout Europe, the punishment for helping a Jew was imprisonment and possible death. Though the punishment in Poland for helping a Jew in any way, even providing a ride in a vehicle, was death for one’s entire family, more Poles had risked their lives to save Jews than anywhere else in Nazi-occupied Europe. Peter’s Catholic father had been among them.
I knew virtually nothing about Moishe, my red-headed uncle who was supposedly taken in by gentiles, except that he didn’t look Jewish. According to my uncle’s account, a Polish family had kept him safe during the war, only to be killed in a pogrom just after the war ended. I imagined something similar had happened to Mariusz, except that he survived. If he was indeed Jewish and had lived in Łódź since birth, he was something of a living miracle.
After an hour and a half of presentations, Peter had to leave and offered me a lift to his dad’s, near my old apartment. Since it was a convenient place to catch a tram to where I was staying, I accepted, though the president was about to speak again. If I stayed, I’d be alone among strangers and perhaps regret it later. To avoid my inner critic, I erred on the side of convenience.
That night, the choice weighed on me. When I’d visited this park before, it had felt new and artificial. The gathering had created a presence, a powerful mood. So much work and energy had gone into the event, the largest and most important of the commemoration. Something in me had wanted to stay, and I had ignored it. Perhaps this gathering had the power to heal ghosts, and I could have done more to help. I wanted to make a difference—to be more than a spectator.
And then there was Mariusz. It haunted me not to see my mysterious companion who was a surrogate representative of my lost family, and who meant more to me in a way than any of these events. The bond between us was personal and, like the spontaneous kindness of strangers, it had arisen for no reason. I knew I’d never see him again.
The night before, on my way to the concert honoring the Righteous at Poznański Palace, I walked past Herring Park, a block from where my mother had lived. As dusk’s horizontal rays caressed the busy street, wrapping everything in golden-pink light, I caught my mind turning away from that stream of sublime light as if it had more important things to do. The light was simply too beautiful. As soon as I noticed this internal censor, it no longer held me captive and the door of the moment grew wider. Everything belonged in that warm golden light: red and yellow trams, silver bicycles, old women carrying baskets, and couples arm-in-arm. Voices mixed with the hum of motors and the air caressing my skin. Nothing was excluded.
When the concert ended, it was after 10:30. I had never used the trams so late at night. Halfway along the route of the number 15, the heavy-set driver stood up and looked back at me with bulging fish eyes. He looked like he was in a hurry to get to his beer or his girlfriend, and I knew I had to get off. I stepped onto the broken pavement and wondered what to do next.
The transfer stop was a wild place, overgrown with grasses and shrubs where two parts of the city were badly stitched together, punctuated by tram tracks and obscure paths. Another tram stopped moments later, heading to its overnight resting place behind the trees. As the driver stepped out, I asked if any other trams were running in the direction I needed. Convinced I was lost, he tried to send me back toward the center of town where the hotels were. When I convinced him that I knew where I was going, he suggested walking to the next stop to find a bus.
I walked through tall grasses, following the metal tracks to Telefoniczna, the road leading back to Basia’s, and waited at the bus stop. It was after 11:00 now. I strained to read the printed schedule nailed to the post, but there were no street lights close by. Unaware that there were special buses that ran only at night, I thought the young driver had felt obligated to tell me a hopeful lie—the fruit of Polish kindness and leftover Communist shirking of responsibility—and began the long walk on uneven blocks of cement that formed the sidewalk, and lumpy stones in sand that formed the cross streets, in slip-on shoes that flipped sideways every few steps.
The road was empty except for intermittent explosions of barking dogs from behind the metal fences I passed, though I tried to walk silently. There was no reason to be afraid. I’d always felt safe here in the daylight, but it was so dark, so empty now. The darkness was distant even from itself. I didn’t want anyone to know I was walking alone in this deserted place and hobbled as quickly as I could, the wind whipping my face like taut rope, as fear curled around my heart.
By the time I arrived at Basia’s, it was past midnight and everyone was asleep. I sat at her blonde wooden dining table and took some deep breaths, surrounded by artifacts of home and safety—the matching blonde china cabinet, a white teapot and sugar bowl, pastoral landscapes against a pale green wall, and Basia’s grey kitty arching his back against my leg. My heartbeat gradually slowed, but an edge remained. I felt the chill of that lonely darkness, the uneven ground, the barking dogs. That edge of fear awakened a hunger I needed to know, and knowing it made me more alive.
For many, coming to Łódź had to do with the past. For me, the past breathed life into the present and into me. Each coincidence or mishap held meaning. I needed to make plans, but not rely too much on them. I needed this edge of uncertainty where place and time, past and present, weren’t quite separate.
Monument at Radegast Station
Author at Radegast Station 2014