With each action, the ghetto became smaller, our situation more precarious. There was no end to our suffering. We went from a city of 150,000 Jews, to a city of 200,000 after the Germans and the Soviets divided Poland in 1939, to a city that now could count us in the tens of thousands. Our numbers were dwindling—and so was our resolve.
Here is just one example of how we were weakened. When we were still living at Zamarstynowska 120, the Ukrainian militia discovered a cache of fur coats in the attic of our building during a routine inspection. The coats did not belong to us, and they did not appear to belong to any of the other families currently occupying the building, but somehow my father was considered responsible. The soldiers determined that we had to pay a fine of 7,000 zlotys—about $1,400 at the time—as punishment for having these coats. If we did not pay, they said, they would take my father. Of course, we could not allow this to happen. My parents had money, my grandfather on my father’s side had money, but this was a lot to pay for the crime of living beneath an attic full of someone else’s fur coats. But we paid the fine. After all, this was what our money was for, to buy us our continued freedom. It did not matter that the Ukrainians kept the coats and probably sold them on the black market. It did not matter that the punishment did not fit the crime, because in fact there was no crime.
Here is another example: on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the ghetto commander, Grzymek, issued a special work order requiring all Jews to once again clean the ghetto. He ordered the men to their knees, to scrub the cobblestone streets, to pass the day that should have been spent in meaningful prayer in meaningless toil. Naturally, they knew it was an insult to require Jews to work on Yom Kippur. The work itself was an insult, so they added insult on top of insult and hoped to weaken us in this way as well.
In one important way, Grzymek and his cohorts nearly did succeed in breaking my family. Like all Jewish parents in Eastern Europe, my parents worried how to keep their children safe. It was a constant concern. My parents knew that many other Jewish families had placed their children with non-Jewish families and hoped in this way that their children could survive the war undetected. Some of these arrangements were permanent and some were meant to be temporary, with the children to be returned to their true families as soon as circumstances allowed. These were the so-called hidden children of the Holocaust, and they were great in number. Usually, there was some payment involved, some money that passed from the Jewish family to the non-Jewish family to be used for the child’s safekeeping. Sometimes there was an additional payment or exchange of property, to compensate the adopting family for the risk they were assuming in taking in a Jewish child. Many Aryan families were put to death for harboring a Jewish child; many more were sent to prison just for suspicions of the same; more still lived in fear of being found out. Some of these situations were successful, and some ended in the discovery by the Germans of the deception. Very often, the children were so young that they did not remember their biological parents and grew up without ever knowing the circumstances of their adoption; many did not even know they were Jewish.
Some months into the German occupation, my parents looked into making just such an arrangement for me. I did not know about it at first. They began making discreet inquiries until finally they located a woman who was willing to discuss the matter. The woman they found wanted only me, not Pawel. It was difficult to find a family willing to take in a boy, because of course all Jewish males were circumcised and therefore easy to identify as Jews. But with girls it was not so easy to tell, Jewish or not Jewish. This was why so many of the surviving “hidden children” were girls.
This arrangement was probably a long time in planning. It is surprising to me now that I did not know about it beforehand or read it on my mother’s face. Usually, I could hear my parents talking at night. We were living in only one room, and there was no space for secrets. However it happened, they found time to make the arrangements, and one afternoon a young schoolteacher came to our room to meet me. She had brown eyes and brown hair. She was a very nice woman, but I could not understand why she wanted to meet me. We did not have visitors very often.
My mother explained that this teacher wanted to take me. “She will be like a mother to you,” she said. “You will go with her.”
I understood immediately what they were doing, and I told my mother I would not go with this woman. It was difficult for me to be so strong in my argument because I was only seven years old, but I was fi rm. I said, “I will not go.”
My mother said, “You have to go. There is no other way.”
I said, “I am not going. Whatever will happen to you will happen to me. I do not want to live if it means I will not be with you.”
I did not feel as though my parents were trying to get rid of me. I understood they were trying only to save me. But still I would not go. I would not be saved. I would not be removed from my family. Thankfully, mercifully, my parents listened to my appeal. They did not want to live without me, either, apparently. Looking back, I find it unbelievable that two such caring, thinking, desperate adults would listen to the pleas of a child on a matter such as this, but that is just what happened. They listened. They accepted that what might be an agreeable solution for other families was disagreeable to ours, and after a few minutes the nice young teacher left. I remember she had a warm smile.
It was an impossible puzzle: how to save at least one child, even if it meant breaking up a family, how to do your best when all around there was the worst. I did not understand this then, but I understand it now. It was a difficult time, with no sure or easy path for Jewish families. Each day, there was a new dilemma, another puzzle. I am still haunted, for example, about the circumstances of one particular day. It was early in 1943, during an action that was focused on the children. I was seven and a half. My brother was not yet four. We were living in the barracks in the heart of the Ju-Lag. All over the ghetto, the Germans were going from apartment to apartment, taking only the children. I imagine that for the Germans this served the double purpose of eliminating a large segment of the Jewish population and at the same weakening the will of the surviving adults.
During this action, my father hid us in the basement, where he had made one of his double walls. Our barracks was a large brick building with a large cellar, and he had fashioned this hiding place in such a way that the basement room where he put it up simply looked smaller than it actually was. You could never tell this hiding place was there, behind the false far wall of the room, if you were not looking for it. The cellar in this barracks building was where people took their things to be repaired, where the men would meet to discuss the situation with the Germans. My mother was working at the Janowska camp when we climbed into this hiding place. There was a small entrance. We had to crawl to enter it, but once we were inside we could stand up straight. There was no light, and we held each other’s hands, for comfort. We were pressed in like sardines, and on the other side my father concealed the opening and closed us in. He put up some tape and some wood and painted over it so no one could tell that anything had been touched.
My father was nearly finished when my mother completed her long march home from the Janowska camp. All the way home, she said, she worried about me and Pawel. She knew the Germans were taking the ghetto’s children and that we were in danger. She went first to our apartment, and of course she panicked when she discovered we were not there. “My children!” she cried. “Where are my children?!”
One of the women we were sharing the apartment with told her my father had taken us downstairs, and my mother rushed to the basement to make sure we were okay. She was overjoyed when she found us alive and well. Frightened, of course, but alive and well, and she joined us in our hiding place, so my father closed her inside as well. She would not leave us alone at a time such as this. Our fate would be her fate as well.
Again, I did not know this at the time, but there were those three vials of cyanide pressed into my mother’s hand. All the time, she held these vials, thinking that if we were captured, there would be time to place the poison under our tongues and put a quick end to our suffering. Thank God it never came to that.
Some hours later, we could hear the Germans searching our building. It was just one German, as it turned out, but from our hiding place it sounded like an army. We could hear him thundering through the building with his heavy boots and his thick, gruff voice as he talked to himself. He was in the basement for the longest time, and we could hear all of this moving about. We stood very still. We did not make a sound. My brother was still very young, but my father had been hiding us for so long by this point, so many different times, in so many different places, that Pawel was good at keeping still and quiet. I held his hand tight, and he was quiet.
Finally, the German lifted his voice, as in discovery. “Wet wall!” he said. “Wet wall!” Nass Wand! Nass Wand!
The German soldier had been tipped off by another Jew in our building that we were in hiding and on inspection recognized that the false wall my father had built was a slightly different color from that of the other walls and wet to the touch because the paint had yet to dry, so he took a hammer to the spot and started to bang. I cannot be sure it was a hammer, but there was a lot of banging and commotion on the other side of the wall, and inside our tiny hiding space we were terrified. Pawel at last started to cry. I think I might have screamed. My mother did not move to hush us, because we had been discovered.
When the German broke through the wall, he seemed more puzzled than angry. He was surprised at the good job my father had done in hiding us, almost pleasantly so, and he stood back from the wall as if to admire my father’s handiwork. The German soldier would not have recognized it were it not for the wet paint, and for a moment I thought he might congratulate us for fooling him in just this way. My mother spoke German, and she understood that the soldier was marveling at my father’s ingenuity. But then he pulled us out and started beating us with a leather crop. He hit me, over and over. My brother, too. We both cried, I think. He hit my mother. She did not cry, and I was proud of her for not crying.
And then, shortly after the beatings began, as if by some great coincidence, my father came home. Probably somebody had gone to tell him what was happening. He saw right away what was going on. He said, “This is my family. Please. Let them go.”
He started to beg. It was not like my father to beg, but he would do anything for his family.
The German, he was curious. About the wall, about the begging. He said, “Why did you hide them?”
My father said, “I hid them to save them. From the action. You are taking all the children.” Then he dropped to his knees and begged again for our release.
The German became so frustrated with my father’s begging that he took the butt of his rifle and bashed him on the head with it. The German, he was just a boy. He hit us like he was supposed to, like he was following his orders, but it was not like he meant it. It hurt, but my father said later it could have hurt a lot worse.
It was my mother who came to our rescue. She had a small handbag with her, and it was filled with food. Sardines, ironically, and some bread and biscuits. She did not know how long we would be shut inside our hiding place, so she had come prepared. She too must have sensed that this young man was uncertain of his role. She handed the bag to the German soldier. “Here,” she said. “Take this.” Then she handed him the gold watch from her wrist.
The German studied the watch as if it were a prize, and after a moment or two he said, “I will give you a choice. One watch, one child.”
My poor mother, how could she choose? She was horrified. This was the difficult choice she could not be expected to make, the difficult choice she nearly made with the teacher who came for me, the difficult choice Jewish mothers were undoubtedly making all over Poland. She said, “These are both my children. I cannot take one and leave the other to die.”
My father, too, was outraged at the suggestion. He could not choose between his children. He held out a photograph of me and my brother and shouted, “You see, they are both my children! You cannot make me decide!”
My father was bloodied from the blow to his head, but he kept begging for mercy, for our release. He believed that he could get what he wanted by the strength of respectful argument, by reason. He urged the German soldier to take him and to leave his wife and children behind. This was a choice my father could make, a choice he could die behind.
The young soldier seemed to consider this option, and then he quickly rejected it. He waved his hand in a dismissive way and said, “Stay!” Bleiben sie!
And so we were given a reprieve. My mother was so overjoyed by this sudden show of kindness on the part of the German that she invited him upstairs to our apartment for something to eat. I did not understand this at the time, but I know now that she wanted to repay his kindness. She also wanted him to stay for protection. She could see that he was human after all. Also, she knew that if he left, there would be others coming to look for us. She knew that as long as the young German soldier stayed with us in the apartment, we would be safe.
Our apartment was on the first floor, directly above the basement, so we went upstairs. My mother was so happy that this latest threat had passed, almost giddy. She asked the German what he wanted to eat, and he answered that he wanted eggs with onions. Ein mit zwiebel. Even today, whenever I catch the smell of scrambled eggs and onions, I think back to that tense night in our kitchen, in that overcrowded apartment. I remember the German soldier who swung at us with his leather crop, who told my mother to choose between my life and Pawel’s, and the way my mother and father managed to turn him from our enemy to our protector, to find the kindness beneath the cruelty.
My mother went to the kitchen and scrambled some eggs with onions for the soldier, and of course we all followed. She made him a heaping plate—six eggs, as I recall—and we settled in to watch him eat. As he ate, we could look through our kitchen window to the courtyard below and see that it was full of people. Jews, mostly, and they were frantic and frightened. All of our friends and neighbors had been emptied from their homes and onto the streets, where they were lined up in the gutter and waiting to be herded onto the transport. Some of them had already been shot, but most were just waiting or looking hysterically for their loved ones. Up and down the street, I could not see any children. They had already been taken away. All that was left were their grieving parents and grandparents, who were themselves about to be taken away.
Somehow, my mother managed to spot her cousin in the crowd, from the safety of our kitchen window. She pulled from her belongings another fancy watch and handed it to the German. She said, “Now I will give you a choice. One watch, one member of my family.” Her German was perfect, so she was able to plead a convincing case. She pointed to her cousin and said, “That woman out there, that’s my cousin. Go and bring her back to us. Please.”
The German, with his full belly and another fine watch for his trouble, went downstairs and called the name of my mother’s cousin, but she was too afraid to respond. She thought the man was just singling her out and that to follow him would be to go to her death. She did not know he was trying to save her. She did not know that her cousin, my mother, had sent him. She did not know that all she had to do was stand in answer and she would be led to safety. And so she sat with all the others and refused to acknowledge the soldier when he called her by name.
We looked on from the window, unable to help her, unable to signal that it was okay for her to go with this man, that it had been prearranged, and after a while the German simply gave up and left her in the crowd. And of course the Germans did come and take her away, and we never saw her again after that. But our German soldier came back to our apartment. He stayed with us a while longer, protecting us, sharing our food, talking to my father about how he had built this or that hiding place.
Soon after the transport was gone, a few thousand of our friends and neighbors dead or on their way, we heard some muffled crying from the kitchen window. Always, after an action, there would be a time when those who had been in hiding would get the courage to go outside and see what the Germans had done. And now, after our ghetto had been cleansed of virtually all children, I could hear these particularly sorrowful noises through the walls of the apartment and up on the roof. I looked outside, and everyone seemed stunned, ashen. It was, I realize now, the face of grief. And along with that face came something else. When I stepped away from the window, I heard a loud thud. It sounded like a sack of potatoes hitting the pavement below. Then I heard another loud thud, another sack of potatoes. I raced back to the window to see what might make such a noise, but my mother stopped me. She did not want me to look. She did not want me to see the grieving mothers, their children now taken from them, jumping to their own deaths from the roof of our building.
Our German soldier stayed with us until early that evening, when the other Germans left and the action subsided. For a few days or weeks, it was calm. For a few days or weeks, we felt secure. But then, every few weeks it was something else.
Somehow, my father’s actions during Joseph Grzymek’s grand procession had placed him on the mind of the SS Obersturmführer. Since then, they had many encounters, with the ghetto commander trying to get the better of my father and my father trying warily to outsmart his adversary. It was unusual for a German of such authority to pay attention to a Jew of such little consequence, but in my father’s mind they became like rivals. Back and forth they went, as in a chess match. Grzymek had the advantage, of course, because he stood with the strength of the German army, the Gestapo, the SS.
Certainly, my father would not openly cross Grzymek. He knew what would happen. He had seen it with his own eyes. Once, my father recalled, a group of Jews was made to stand in a row. They were given some mops, some brooms, some shovels, and told to clean the streets. After some time, the SS man in charge told the workers to put down their tools. He told them that they were being taken to the Piaski. Of course, the Jews knew what this meant. They knew they were being taken there to be killed. One of them, a doctor, stepped to the front of the line and screamed, “You cowards! You are afraid of our mops and shovels! You are only strong in front of people who are unarmed!” Then he spat in the face of a high-ranking German officer, and when he did this the SS took out their revolvers and shot him. The rest, they corralled onto a transport and killed in the Piaski.
Another time, a group of Jews killed an SS man in the ghetto. This happened every now and then, a small uprising among a group of Jews who had been pushed to their limit, and when it happened this time, Grzymek decreed that fifteen hundred Jews would be taken as retribution. Fifteen hundred Jews for one German. This was the price of this one small uprising.
With my father and Grzymek, it was a more subtle conflict. Grzymek would deliver a difficult assignment for my father, and always my father would manage to complete it. Always there was something, and all of these somethings nearly came to a terrible end when Grzymek was preparing new living quarters for himself. He had placed my father in charge of some aspect of the renovation. My father had an impossible deadline to meet, and as it happened he did manage to complete the work in the time allowed. However, the paint on the interior staircase railing was still wet when Grzymek made his inspection. This, to Grzymek, was a punishable offense, so he decided that my father deserved to be hanged.
Every day, there was a lineup in the ghetto’s main square, and Grzymek would make his pronouncements while the Jews stood in line. On the day of this “failed” inspection, Grzymek pulled my father from his place in line and told him he would be hanged. There was another worker assisting my father on this job, and this man was told the same. Their families, Grzymek said, would be sent to prison. My father knew Grzymek was crazy and that to say anything would be to make the situation worse. He had seen the way he could put down any Jew who made his life difficult. Even so, my father feared for his family, so when he was not being observed, my father passed a note to a friend asking him to tell my mother that she should take me and my brother and flee. This we did. We had been in our first-floor apartment and ran to a third-floor apartment in our building, where a kind tailor with a sewing machine helped us to hide.
My father and his coworker were taken to a corner of the square where the Germans had erected a gallows. Soon, Grzymek arrived and the ceremony began. Always, with this man, there was a ceremony. My father told us later that he was numb to what was happening. It was like a dream. He was told to empty his pockets, remove his belt, remove his clothes. He stood naked on the platform as they placed a noose on his neck. The other man was also made to strip and to receive the hangman’s noose.
It was Pawel who noticed the commotion from our neighbor’s upstairs window. He looked outside and said to my mother, “Look, Mama, they are going to hang someone.” He did not recognize that this was my father.
My mother came to the window, and she knew right away this was my father. I looked, too. We were on the third floor, and this was happening directly below our window. I recognized my father immediately. I wanted to scream, but I knew I could not.
My mother did not want us to watch. She said, “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.” She said this over and over, as if she were in a trance.
But, of course, I watched. Pawel was in my mother’s arms, and she held his face to her chest in such a way that he could not see out the window. I looked over to her and saw that she was watching, too. She did not want to watch, but she could not look away.
My father wrote later that he was resigned to his fate, that it was as if he were inside his own bad dream. He stood and waited for the hanging to proceed, and then, inexplicably, Grzymek gave a dismissive wave of his hand and said, “Ah, you can stay alive.” As if it were no longer worth the trouble to proceed with the hanging. He offered no explanation, and my father did not want to wait around for him to change his mind.
My father was stunned. Happily so, but stunned. The other man was also waved free, and he too did not know what to make of it. My father turned and bowed to Grzymek, as if he were thanking him for his freedom, and then he turned and began to step down from the gallows. As he did so, a German voice called him back: “Halt!”
My father thought, What could this be? Was this Grzymek playing with him again? Another round of cat-and-mouse? A cruel back-and-forth? You will be hanged, you are free, you will be hanged, you are free. This was Grzymek’s nature, my father realized. This was just like him, to set him free and then hold him back. For amusement. But it turned out Grzymek merely wanted my father to take his things. His clothes, his belt, his shoes, his watch. Grzymek said, “Hole dir deine sachen, wirst doch nicth so mit dem macketen schwanz herumlaufen.” Take your things because you cannot leave with your naked penis.
My father had been walking away without any of his clothes, completely naked. He was so swallowed up by the moment that he had not realized, so he hurriedly collected his clothes, stepped into his pants, and walked quickly from the scene.
I remember hugging and laughing and crying with my mother and brother as we watched this. Hugging and laughing and crying, all at once. It was so unexpected, to look out the window to see my father about to be hanged, to see him suddenly set free, to see him scurrying away from the gallows without his clothes. There was nothing to do but hug one another and laugh and push away our tears. We had all been so scared, so terrorized, and we were now so weakened by our fear and overcome with relief that we could not help but find this picture a little bit funny, this picture of my father standing naked before the ghetto commander.
My father did not come home right away. He did not know we were in the tailor’s apartment. Also, he did not want Grzymek’s men to follow him, so he hid for a time in another building, and sure enough Grzymek sent the Gestapo to look for him. When they found my father, they brought him back to Grzymek. Once again, my father thought the game was continuing.
“Where were you?” Grzymek said. “I was looking for you.”
“I was hiding,” my father said.
“You are a coward,” Grzymek said. “You are the biggest coward I ever met.”
My father thought, I am the coward? In Grzymek’s apartment, he has twenty-four-hour guards. He hides behind his guns and tanks and grenades. And I am the coward? He did not say anything, my father, but this was what he thought.
This would not be the last time the two would meet. Sometimes they would meet by chance, and sometimes Grzymek sent for my father. For whatever reason, Grzymek appeared fascinated with my father. Maybe he liked that he kept turning up, like a bad penny. Maybe he saw in my father the face of humanity. Certainly, the ghetto commander’s inhumanity toward the Jewish people of Lvov was in full evidence, yet he had spared my father from hanging, and he would spare him several times more.
Once, Grzymek tried to ask my father about his background, as if to gain understanding. He said, “Who is your father?”
My father lied and said his father was an Austrian doctor. This seemed to impress the ghetto commander. He said, “Ah, so you have German genes! This explains it!”
Next he asked about my father’s mother. Again, my father lied. He said his mother was a Russian princess. He was toying with Grzymek, manipulating him.
“Where were you born?” Grzymek asked.
“Turkey,” my father said. It was like a friendly interrogation, and my father wanted to give Grzymek something with one hand and take it away with the other. This was how he explained it. He would let Grzymek think my father was of German descent and then infuriate him with the part about Russia and Turkey. He was a very proud man, my father. His back was not always bent. He would not be humiliated by this madman, yet to engage in a battle of wits with a witless German official was very dangerous; but my father believed Grzymek would not lash out at him if he remained intrigued. Also, my father knew that Grzymek needed him. Why? My father had developed a reputation as one of the finest carpenters in Lvov, and there was much work to be done.
Somehow, for some reason, Grzymek let my father go once again, but he was determined to kill him with his own hands. This was what he said to his soldiers, my father learned later. Indeed, after the final liquidation, Grzymek was seen on Zamarstynowska Street searching frantically for my father. “Where is Ignacy Chiger?” he shouted. With everything else that was going on, he was going crazy that he could not find my father. There were not many survivors of this final liquidation, but one man who survived told my father about it after the war. He said Grzymek seemed obsessed.
The two would meet one final time, in 1949. Grzymek was on trial for war crimes at a court in Warsaw, and my father went to testify against him. Of course, my father was not the only person to testify, and I do not even think his testimony was central to the case, but he was looking forward to it because now Grzymek could not hide behind his bodyguards and his guns and his uniform. Now they would be equal. All during his trial, Grzymek denied everything. He did not admit to the actions, to the establishment of the Ju-Lag. He did not even admit to being in Lvov during the liquidation. And then he saw my father and his expression turned. It was, my father said, the strangest thing. The judge asked him if he recognized my father. Grzymek said he did not, but his expression gave him away. Eventually, his interrogator pulled the truth from Grzymek’s lying lips. The questioning came back to the subject of my father, who was still in the courtroom. This time Grzymek said, “I know him well. Chiger. He was the main contractor in the Ju-Lag. He built all the bunkers. He checked all the canals. He was an artist.”
Then Grzymek told the whole courtroom that he knew my father would survive. Among all the Jews, he knew, Ignacy Chiger was the one who would survive.
In the end, Grzymek was sentenced to death, and I could not say which my father seemed to relish more—that the SS Oberstürmführer finally received the punishment he deserved or that he at last acknowledged my father in this admiring way.
One of the last places we lived before being sent to the Ju-Lag barracks was in a small house at Kresova 56, with my grandparents on my father’s side. We lived in the kitchen. There was a large credenza and a big old oven. The floor was made of raw wooden planks. I remember the planks because I spent so much time on my hands and knees scrubbing that floor for my mother. We were living in desperate circumstances, and sleeping on the floor, and still my mother wanted to keep a clean house.
My grandfather came home one evening and told my father we had to run. Something had happened, and the Germans were looking for his entire family. He said, “Tomorrow, they are coming for us.”
My father, he did not want to run. He did not want to take his wife and children deeper into the ghetto. My grandfather Jacob, he was insistent. He said to my father, “You have to save your family.” This was always the most important thing to my father, to protect his family. If he had been on his own, he might have fled Lvov some months earlier or entered the resistance movement. He might have joined one of the uprisings. It was not his character to quietly accept such cruelty and hopelessness. But he had his wife and children to think about.
Finally, my father relented and my parents packed our few things. My grandparents would leave in the morning, but we would leave in the middle of the night, because my father thought it would be safer for us to move about under darkness.
My grandfather lay down next to me while my parents were making ready to leave. He said, “Sing to me, Krysha. Sing me our lullaby.” Always, I would sing him a lullaby before I went to bed:
Za gorami. (Behind the mountains.)
Za lasami. (Behind the forest.)
Tancowala dziewczyneczka z ulanami. (A girl is dancing with the soldiers.)
Always, I would sing and he would give me a kiss. It was our special routine. So I sang him our lullaby, and he kissed me and hugged me, and then we stood in the doorway and said our good-byes.
My grandfather had a fine gold pocket watch. He wanted my father to take it, but my father refused. My grandfather was insistent. He said there would come a time when we would need it to buy our way out of trouble, so my father took it. My grandfather’s second wife—my stepgrandmother, a sweet, kindly woman whom I also loved—gave my mother a bottle of milk to carry for my brother, and then we went out onto the street. All of this happened in the doorway at Kresowa 56, before we disappeared into the night.
It was the last time I ever saw my grandparents.
Later, as we walked to some new place, my mother tripped and dropped the bottle of milk. It shattered on the cobblestone street. My father yelled at her. It was one of the only times I can remember him yelling at my mother. Probably his yelling had to do with something other than the milk. I was only seven, but I realized this.
My father doubled back the next morning to see which direction my grandparents were headed, hoping maybe to reconnect with them later, and he watched as a German soldier shot his father. There was nothing my father could do but watch. He did not see what happened to my grandfather’s wife, but he expected the worst. He said it made his stomach turn to watch them shoot my grandfather, but this was what it meant to be Jewish in the Lvov ghetto in the early part of 1943.
Here is a curious memory. In our last proper apartment before we moved at last to the barracks of the Ju-Lag, my parents participated in a séance with a noted Jewish spiritualist. My parents did not believe in such things, but a group of people had gathered to listen to this man, and so my parents listened. The man’s name was Dr. Walker, and he said he could predict the future of everyone who participated. He could tell who would survive the liquidation of the ghetto and who would not. He made a demonstration. There were about twelve people sitting around the kitchen table. Everybody was holding hands. At some point, the table began to knock. I do not know if it was the table itself that was knocking or if Dr. Walker was making the noise. The people all seemed to be hypnotized. Dr. Walker asked, “Who will stay alive?” Then he went around the table and the knocking stopped only when he reached my parents. He said this meant that they would be the only two who would survive. This was an ominous prediction to make among such a group, but Dr. Walker seemed to be somewhat hypnotized himself.
During the séance, an SS man appeared. Someone had left the door open and he stepped inside to see what was going on. He could see right away it was a séance. Everyone was startled by the noise of his arrival and awoke from their trance. They were scared that they would be shot, because of course it was against regulations to engage in any kind of spiritual activity, but the SS officer sat down at the table and said, “Continue.” He was intrigued. Very often, this was our experience with the Germans in authority. In a group, they were brutal and heartless. Alone, they could be curious and feeling and human.
Next, Dr. Walker moved to a part of the séance where the spirit was spelling out certain words, like you sometimes see with a Ouija board, only it was not a Ouija board. It started to spell out the letters “H” and “I.” My mother told me later that everyone thought it was going to spell out Hitler’s name, but instead came the letters “H-I-L-F-D-E-N-J-U-D-E-N.” Hilf den Juden. Help the Jews.
The SS man appeared startled. He stood and left. The others watched him go and considered the strangeness of the moment. To be huddled in a séance with an SS man, in the middle of the ghetto, in the middle of such terror and turmoil. Sure enough, the others at that table would be killed. Dr. Walker himself was killed during the very next action. And, just as Dr. Walker’s table had predicted, only my parents would survive.
For a few weeks more, my mother continued to work. Always, it was very difficult for her to leave us each day because Pawel would cry. He did not cry when she was gone, when we had to hide, but he cried when she had to leave. The separation was painful. He did not want her to go, and all day long he would wait for her to return. Together, we would worry we might never see her again. We would run to my mother at the end of her long day, and we would hug her close and fill her with questions. We were hungry for information about what was going on in the city, on the other side of the ghetto fence. What the other people were doing. What the other children were doing. We were trapped inside, so long inside that any piece of news was welcome.
The Janowska camp was still being operated as a labor camp, but it was also a death camp. At its busiest, the Schwartz Co. plant employed over four thousand workers, and there were other manufacturers based at the camp as well. If you were young and strong and healthy, you were sent to Janowska and put to work. If you could not work, you would be shot. There was nothing in between. Sometimes the Germans would take you to the Piaski sand pits for the shooting, but sometimes they would just shoot you right there in the Janowska camp. It was not a place built for the execution of Jews, but it became a convenient place for it. Of course, the camp was not just for the Jewish people of Lvov, but for those from all over Poland, all over Europe. Over time, the Germans would kill over two hundred thousand Jews at the Janowska camp, although this number probably included the Jews who were shot at the Piaski nearby. The sad irony was that my mother went to work at the camp every day, sewing uniforms for the men who were out to kill us all.
Today, if you go to the Janowska camp, you will see a sign at the entrance. In English it reads, “Passerby, stop! Bow your head! There is a spot of the former Janowska concentration camp in front of you! Here the ground is suffering! Here the Nazis tormented, taunted, executed innocent people and sent them to the gas chambers. Let the innocently undone victims be remembered forever! Eternal damnation on the executors!” I think it is a moving inscription to commemorate the lives lost in this place. I read this and I get goose bumps, because this was where my mother worked each day, where so many members of my family were taken, where surely the earth must have absorbed so many tears, so much anguish.
It was around January 1943 that my father first started to think about where he would take his family when we were pushed at last from the ghetto. Already, he was running out of hiding places. For a time he considered fleeing. He had an Aryan friend named Michat Kollerny. They had played together on the national volleyball team before the war, and he had brought my father some false documents with our pictures on them that we could have used to negotiate our escape. There were four complete sets of papers, one for each of us, but my father determined it was too dangerous. He was too well-known because of his flirtation with Grzymek, so we abandoned this plan. We kept the papers, but my father was afraid to use them, except as a last resort.
Another plan was to build a bunker beneath the ghetto commander’s quarters. My father thought this was an ingenious strategy—to hide beneath the very nose of the man who had vowed to kill him with his own hands. My father believed Grzymek would never search for him below street level, so he dug a tunnel from an unoccupied house across the street from the German command center. For several weeks, he prepared a bunker for us, while he was doing legitimate work on a greenhouse for one of Grzymek’s men. The bunker was just beyond the ghetto fence, and each day my father would do his work on the greenhouse and then some extra work on our bunker. This went on for several weeks. He completed the tunnel. He put in supplies: an electric light, two beds, food, some pots for cooking. All by himself, he did this. It was, he thought, a good place to wait out the war with his family. Dangerous, but probably not any more dangerous than what we were facing aboveground. All that remained was to wait for the day when we would have no choice but to descend to this bunker and continue our lives there.
We were confined now to the barracks in the deepest part of the ghetto. The living conditions were miserable. The people were miserable. One night my father was doing some repair work in the basement of one of the barracks and noticed that it would be possible to enter the city’s sewer system from this place. It would take some digging and some calculations to determine the precise spot for the digging, but it would certainly be possible. Later that same week, when he was hiding once again from Grzymek, my father escaped through a manhole into the sewer. He wanted to see what it was like beneath the city streets. The bunker he had built for us was really only an extension of a basement. It was not so deep underground that it could not be discovered. Perhaps it was not such an effective plan to hide us there after all. But the sewer! There were miles and miles of pipes and tunnels and good hiding places. They would not be pleasant hiding places, of course, but they would be safe. Certainly, my father thought, no one would look for us in the sewer, just as no one came looking for him when he escaped through the manhole. He found his way below by calculating the location of the streets above, and in this way he was able to resurface through another manhole in a different part of the ghetto without being detected.
This notion, that the sewer might offer us sanctuary, was a revelation for my father. He remembered when he was a small boy, when the Peltew River was open, before it was covered with stones by Italian POWs after the First World War. The Peltew was the main waste waterway for the city sewer. Back then there must have been a terrible smell by the river, which was probably why city officials were forced to cover it. My father watched the workers dig the first canals and set the stones for the retaining walls. He knew where the river ran in relation to the streets that had since been built above. It was not so long ago that the river was covered. It was not hard to reimagine.
At around this same time, my father met a man named Jacob Berestycki. The two men had good friends in common. They were told they could trust each other, and so they got to talking. Berestycki knew my father as someone who was very good at building hiding places. He wanted to talk to my father about building some kind of bunker beneath the city where together they could hide from the Germans. He was not thinking about the sewer necessarily, just some space below the street level. Someplace like the bunker my father had recently completed and stored with supplies. My father wanted to talk to Berestycki about this idea he had of using the sewer for sanctuary. Berestycki mentioned that he knew someone in one of the other barracks who was pursuing a similar plan. This was how it started: a group of Jewish men, reaching for some last, desperate measure, looking for someplace to go to escape the Germans.
Berestycki introduced my father to a man named Weiss. I remember going to meet this man with the rest of my family. I remember I did not like him. To be fair, Weiss did not expect my father to show up with his wife and children. He was expecting a secret meeting to discuss a delicate matter with a man he did not know. Still, I did not like this Weiss. He had some other friends with him, and I did not like them, either. They were all so sour, so miserable. We met in the basement of Weiss’s barracks, and my father huddled with the men in one corner while my mother sat with me and Pawel in another. The men talked for a long time.
Weiss did most of the talking. He was like the spokesperson for his group. He had most of the ideas, but really it was just one idea: to descend into the sewer and follow the river to the outskirts of the city. My father did not think it was a good strategy to try to escape to the countryside with a wife and two small children. If he had been by himself, possibly he could have taken his chances. With his family to think about, however, it was better to find a place where we could hide for an extended period. His plan was to build a kind of bunker for us in the sewer where we could wait out the war, but he thought it might be profitable to continue his association with Weiss and these other men. He thought they could help one another.
Together, the men recognized that it would be possible to descend into the sewer undetected from this barracks basement. Weiss had heard of my father’s facility with tools and carpentry and thought he would make a good addition to his group. Berestycki said he could be trusted. And so a partnership was formed. Weiss claimed to have a lot of money. The other men in his acquaintance also claimed to have a lot of money. My father, too, had money. Where he kept his money, I never knew, because at this point he had only the clothes on his back and perhaps another change of clothes. Probably he built good hiding places for his money and valuables the same way he built good hiding places for his children. Always, the Jewish people of Lvov were sewing money and jewelry into their clothes, so probably this was what he did. Wherever his money was, there was always enough to pay our way out of trouble, always another fine watch to replace the ones we had to trade for our freedom.
Very quickly, the men determined a good entry point into the sewer and began digging a tunnel through the basement floor of Weiss’s barracks. They took turns with the digging, using spoons, shovels, picks . . . whatever they could find. The floor was made of cement that had been laid directly upon the soil. The cement was cracked and broken in many places before the men even started to dig, so they targeted an area where the floor was already compromised, to make the digging easier.
With this new plan, my father abandoned the bunker he had made beneath the ghetto command. This would be better, he said. This would be our best chance.
My father built a false wall surrounding the area where he and the other men were digging, so that upon casual inspection it would appear that the basement was slightly smaller than in fact it was. The false wall concealed an interior room of about one meter wide and two or three meters long, and it was in this room that they did their digging. They dug very quietly, usually at night. Sometimes my mother would take me and Pawel and we would stay with my father while he dug. We did not like to be separated, but there was not so much room behind the false wall for all of us and the other men. There was not enough air to breathe. The men worked by candlelight, and the flame swallowed up oxygen, so it was difficult to get a full breath. Difficult, but not as difficult as being separated. During the day, the men would cover up their work with a carpet, a table, and some stools. Then they would go off to whatever jobs they were assigned in the Ju-Lag camp. During the day while the men were at work, we would sometimes use the concealed space to hide, if there was an action or some other uncertainty that required it.
We were not living in the same barracks as Weiss, but we spent a good deal of our time in that basement. I do not think Weiss and the other men appreciated having my mother, Pawel, and me around. It was such a small space, and everyone was nervous about being discovered. They must have worried that we might scream or cry and give us all away. My father was not worried about this. He knew we would be good, and he knew we wanted to be near. But the other men did not know us or how well we had been trained. They looked at us and assumed we were like other children, when in truth we were like animals. We knew only how to survive.
It took about eight days to dig all the way through the cement floor to an opening into the sewer. I remember it as taking much longer—weeks and weeks and weeks—but in his journal my father noted that it took only eight days. Eight very long days, from a child’s perspective. Usually, my mother and father would work their regular shifts during the day, and at night we would meet in Weiss’s cellar. Usually, we children would sit nearby with my mother and Weiss’s elderly mother while the men did their digging. Most nights we fell asleep in the cellar, huddled in my mother’s arms.
Here again, the intrusion of children into this dangerous scene was not especially welcome by the others in our group, but my father did not give them any choice. He would keep his family near, he said, or he would lend his tools and his ingenuity to some other escape plan. He did not tell the others about the bunker he had already prepared, but he kept it in the back of his mind, as an option, in the event this uneasy alliance came apart.
Finally, the opening to the sewer was finished. It was small, about seventy centimeters in diameter, barely enough room for an adult to slip through, but it would have to be big enough. When the opening was ready, a group of the men decided to go through it, to make a kind of trial run. My father was among this group, along with Weiss and Berestycki. It is possible that they were joined in this by my uncle Kuba, my father’s brother-in-law, whose wife and daughter had been taken in the action with my grandmother some months earlier, but I cannot be certain. Also, my mother’s father, Joseph Gold, was still alive and living in another barracks, and he was included in our plans as well, although I do not remember my grandfather participating in the digging.
The group descended into the sewer with a lantern and some tools. There was a ledge above the Peltew, and the men walked along it for several hundred meters. The ledge was too narrow for regular walking; the men had to move with their backs against the stone wall, shuffling their feet from side to side.
My father reported that it was very dark and very noisy. The rushing water of the Peltew was like a thousand waterfalls. The men walked for several minutes, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what they were looking for. What most impressed them, my father said, was the absolute blackness. When the lantern was out, they could not see one another even though they were standing close together. They could not imagine how it would be possible to survive in such darkness for an extended period of time, but this was the last option available to them, they all felt.
The following day, my father and the others made another descent into the sewer, this time to look for a place that might provide adequate shelter. This time, as they stood sideways on the ledge above the Peltew, they saw another lantern swinging in the distance. This was terrible! The men thought they had been seen and would soon be captured. It never occurred to them that the lantern might have belonged to another group of Jews also seeking refuge. They thought it was the Gestapo. There was no place to run. They could only turn off their lantern and hope that whoever it was holding the other lantern had not seen them and would turn back before they reached them. They could not turn back themselves, because without a light to guide them they would surely fall into the rushing wastewaters of the Peltew below. So they stood still and silent, the sound of their breathing swallowed by the sound of the rushing water.
Finally, the lantern illuminated the faces of my father and his companions. In the light, my father could make out the features of the round-faced man who held the lantern. It did not appear to be the face of a fellow Jew. This face was so round, so ruddy, it was almost cherubic. The man who wore it did not seem to mean them any harm. He seemed more curious than intimidating, my father said. Behind this man, my father could make out the features of another man, his face in shadow. And behind him stood a third man.
“What are you doing here?” the first man said. He was dressed like a sewer worker, with tall rubber boots and a cloth cap on his head. His tone was pleasant.
“I am looking for a place to hide my family,” my father said.
“Here?” the first man said, incredulous. “In the sewer?”
“It is the only place left,” my father said.
The first man considered this for a moment, and then he whispered to the men who stood behind him, who were dressed in the same manner. From their whispers, my father could hear that they were discussing whether or not to turn them in to the Gestapo. This seemed to be the preferred action of the two men in the background, but the first man who held the lantern seemed to have a different notion.
After a short while, the first man spoke: “So it is not just the group of you, then?”
My father shook his head. “I have a wife and two small children,” he said.
The man with the lantern seemed to consider this. “Take me to them,” he said.
It is interesting to me now, in the retelling, that my father did most of the talking, because up until this moment Weiss had presented himself as the leader of the effort. It was Weiss’s initiative, Weiss’s basement, Weiss’s operation. He was always the big talker. But in the sewer Weiss was mostly silent, leaving my father to make this all-important first connection to the man who would ultimately become our savior.
My father and the other men retreated along the ledge above the Peltew the same way they had come in, their backs to the wall, their feet moving side to side. The three other men followed. They stopped when they arrived at the tunnel to the basement floor. The man with the lantern looked up at the opening. “Look at this,” he said, marveling at the group’s handiwork. “Look at what you have done.” He was silent for a while, and then he said, “Maybe we can help you. For a price, maybe we can help you.”
This was a welcome thing for my father and the other men to hear, because they did not know if these men were SS, or Gestapo, or Wehrmacht. They did not know if they had been captured and the three men were merely looking for accomplices before shooting them on the spot, or if these three men had no more official business in the sewer than they had themselves. It was a very tentative few moments, my father recalled.
The man gave his name as Leopold Socha. He was a sewer worker, he said. He introduced his partners, Stefek Wroblewski and Jerzy Kowalow. Kowalow was the foreman of their group, and he was said to be more familiar with the pipes and tunnels and crawl spaces of the sewer than any man in Lvov. Under the right terms, they would consider helping my father and his family, but first there would be much to discuss.
And then Leopold Socha fit himself through the narrow, spooned-out opening to the basement floor of the barracks above. The sight of his cloth cap peeking through the hole in the basement floor fairly startled my mother, who was expecting my father or one of the other two men. She was sitting and waiting for their return from their underground exploration, my mother having ssshhhed us to sleep some hours earlier. The last thing she expected was to see the cloth cap of a complete stranger. And then, beneath the cap, the stranger himself! My mother pulled us close. Her sudden movement awakened me, but I knew to keep quiet. I was on one side and Pawel was on the other. My mother did not know what to expect. Probably she was terrified. And as for me, probably I was more excited than scared. I took one look at this man’s face and his warm, beautiful eyes, and I could not be afraid of him. I wondered, Who could this be?
Socha noticed my mother and smiled. He later said that it was at that moment that he decided to help us. The sight of my mother holding us close, like a hen and her two chicks. Kania z piskletami. This became his name for us. And this began a dangerous relationship that would not only save our lives, but also, Leopold Socha hoped, save his soul as well.