To See Another Morning—Terror in the Ghetto
Renia
APRIL 1940
While it’s true that the horrors of the Holocaust evolved as a series of small steps, each one a mild escalation compared with the last, building toward mass genocide, for Renia, the terror of the early war cleaved her life irreparably into “before” and “after.” The job she’d successfully found as a court secretary disappeared, her hopes for a future vanished. Renia’s life was turned inside out.
In 1940 decree upon decree was passed in communities throughout Poland, including the tiny town of Jędrzejów. These rulings were intended to single out, humiliate, and weaken the Jews. Also, to identify them. The Germans could not differentiate between a Pole and a Jew, so Renia and all Jews older than ten were forced to wear a white ribbon with a blue Star of David at the elbow. If the ribbon was dirty, or its width incorrect, they could be punished by death. Jews had to take off their hats when they passed Nazis; they could not walk on the sidewalk. Renia watched, sickened, as Jewish property was seized and gifted over to folksdeutsch: Poles of part-German heritage who applied for this elevated status. Suddenly, she wrote, the poorest Poles became millionaires, and Jews became servants in their own homes, forced to pay rent and teach the folksdeutsch to manage their former mansions. Then the Jewish families were thrown out altogether, becoming panhandlers on the streets. Their shops were taken over. Their belongings, especially gold, fur, jewels, and valuables that they hadn’t managed to hide in their gardens or tuck under loose kitchen tiles, were confiscated. Leah passed her Singer sewing machine and fine candlesticks to a Polish neighbor for safekeeping. Renia overheard Poles window-shopping as they walked through town, fantasizing about what might become theirs next.
In April a forced “Jewish neighborhood” was established, an initiative that many Jews hoped would help protect them. Renia’s family—except for Sarah, who had already joined a Freedom kibbutz; and Zvi, who had escaped to Russia—were told that they had two days to relocate their entire lives to an area a few blocks off the town’s main square: a squalid locale of small low-rise buildings and narrow alleys that had previously housed the town’s riffraff. They had to abandon furniture, property—almost everything, except a small satchel and some linen. Accounts tell of mothers who did not sleep all night as they frantically packed, their children running to and fro, moving all they could carry on their backs or in baskets: clothing, food, pots, pets, soap, coats, shoehorns, sewing materials, and other means of livelihood. Hidden jewels were plastered to bodies. A gold bracelet was sewn into the sleeve of a sweater. Money was baked into cookies.
The crowding was impossible. Every apartment housed several families, sleeping on floors or improvised bunkbeds—Renia slept on a sack of flour. Fifty people could be crammed into a small home. Rare photos of ghetto dwellings show multiple families sharing a former synagogue sanctuary, rows of siblings sleeping on the bimah and under pews. A person barely had room to stretch his or her arms. Personal space did not exist. Sometimes Jews were lucky to know someone who lived in the ghetto area and moved in with them; most, though, had to live with strangers, often with differing habits. Jews from surrounding villages and from varying classes were forced together, increasing tension, disrupting the normal social order.
Even if people brought furniture, there was no room for it. Makeshift beds were dismantled during the days to make space for washing and eating; clothes hung from single nails attached to walls; small tubs were used to wash body parts and the laundry, which dried on neighbors’ roofs. Tables and chairs sat in piles outside. As the weeks dragged on, Renia’s family used the staples of their old life as firewood. Fundamentals up in flames.
* * *
All told, the Germans established more than four hundred ghettos in Poland, with the objective of decimating the Jewish population through disease and starvation and concentrating the Jews so they could easily be rounded up and transported to labor and death camps. This was a massive operation, and each ghetto had slightly different rules and qualities, depending on local Jewish culture, local Nazi rule, its natural landscape, and its internal leadership. Still, many elements of ghetto policy were standard across the country, from remote town to even more remote village, including imprisonment.
At first, the Kukielkas were allowed to leave the ghetto in order to work and buy food; likewise, Poles could enter the gate and bring bread to trade for valuables. But soon, as in all ghettos, access was shut down. Jews could leave only with a passage certificate issued by the Judenrat. From 1941 on, no movement across the ghetto boundary—for Jew or Pole—was permitted. A physical fence sealed off part of the area, a river another. Eventually, stepping out meant nothing less than execution.
* * *
Renia put on layer after layer: stockings, another pair, a dress on top, thick as a Polish peasant would wear. Esther wore two coats and a kerchief. Fumbling in the dark, Bela helped fasten her sisters’ outfits before folding several shirts into to her waistband, feigning a pregnant belly. They all stuffed small articles into their pockets, fabric inside fabric; a palimpsest of merchandise and disguise, everything on the body. This, Renia reminded herself, was how she could help her mother, her little brother, the family.
For a second, the teenager flashed to a land far away, which was really just a few miles over and a few months past—before her middle-class life disintegrated. She daydreamed of how her mother, a force of nature, had taken care of everything: cooked, cleaned, managed the money. Their Polish neighbors used to approach Leah in disbelief. “How can you clothe seven children on your wages and make them look so rich?” In Yiddish, Leah was a balabasta: a virtuoso homemaker who always had a house filled with educated, well-behaved kids and their friends yet kept it miraculously tidy and ordered. She had her answers ready: “Buy expensive clothing because it keeps. Then pass it on. And get each child a pair of handmade shoes—a size too big. Room to grow.”
What you wore, how you wore it. Now the girls were wearing it all as both costume and livelihood. It was almost nine o’clock at night—time to go. They waved a quick good-bye and together made their way down the street, out of the ghetto. Renia never revealed how she exited this ghetto, but she may have bribed a guard, squeezed through a loose slat or grate, climbed over a wall, through a cellar, or across a roof. These were all ways that smugglers—mostly women—came in and out of Poland’s Jewish confines.
Because Jewish men were often kidnapped, they stayed home. Women, from impoverished to high society, became the foragers, selling cigarettes, bras, objets d’art, even their bodies. It was also easier for children to creep out of the ghetto and seek food. The ghettos created a whole cascade of role reversals.
The Kukielka sisters made it to the village and began walking up and down the streets. Stepping quickly, Renia thought of how she used to go with her mother to the bakery every Friday, picking out cookies, all colors and shapes. Now, bread ration cards: ten decagrams a day, or a quarter of a small loaf. Selling bread beyond the allowed quantity or price meant execution.
Renia approached a house. Every step was a risk. Who knew who could see her standing there? Poles? Germans? Militiamen? Whoever answered the door could report her. Or shoot her. Or the person might pretend to buy, then simply not pay and threaten to turn her in to the Gestapo for a reward. Then what could she do? To think that Renia used to work in the courthouse with lawyers, justice, laws that made sense. No longer. Night after night, women went out like this, mothers, too, trying to feed their families.
Other girls helped their families by performing forced labor for municipalities or private enterprise. All Jews aged fourteen to seventy-five were supposed to work, but sometimes younger girls wore high heels to look older because they wanted food. Some Jews were forced to be tailors, seamstresses, and carpenters; others were put to work dismantling houses, repairing roads, cleaning streets, and unloading bombs from trains (which sometimes went off and killed them). Even though Jewish women walked miles to work to break rocks, often in knee-deep snow and bone-chilling slush, starving, their clothes torn, they would be beaten mercilessly if they asked for a rest. People hid their injuries, dying later of infection. Body parts froze. Bones were broken in beatings.
“No one says a word,” described one young female laborer about her four-o’-clock-in-the-morning marches to work, surrounded by Nazi guards. “I take care not to step on the heels of the person in front of me, trying in darkness to estimate his pace and the length of his strides. I pass through the vapor of his exhalation, the odor of unwashed clothing, and the stench of the overcrowded nighttime homes.” Then there were the late arrivals home covered in bruises, stiff, disappointed that they hadn’t been able to sneak even a carrot for their families because of ghetto gate searches. Despite their terror of being beaten, the workers went back to their job sites the next day, including mothers, leaving their children to take care of themselves. What else could they do?
Caring for families in the ghettos, keeping Jewish children alive—physically and spiritually nurturing the next generation—was a mother’s form of resistance. Men were wrested away or ran away, but women stayed to look after their children and often their parents. Like Leah, many were familiar with budgeting money and apportioning food, only now they had to work with extreme deprivation. A day’s stamps—which procured dishes like bitter cornbread made from grains, stems, and leaves; a few groats; pinches of salt; a handful of potatoes—did not provide adequate nourishment even for breakfast alone.
The poor suffered the most, Renia noted, as they could not afford goods sold on the black market. A mother would do just about anything to avoid having to watch her children starve—“the worst kind of death,” Renia reflected later. Unable to provide basic existential needs, they foraged for nutrients, hid their children from violence and, later, deportations (silencing them in hiding spots, and sometimes forced to smother their own crying babies), and treated illness as best they could without medication. The women in the ghetto, always vulnerable to sexual assault, went out to work or smuggle, risking being caught and leaving their children alone in the world. Others handed over their babies to Polish caregivers, often with hefty sums of money, and sometimes had to watch from a distance as their children were abused or told lies about them. In the end, countless mothers who could have been spared for work ultimately went to the gas chambers with their children, refusing to let them die alone—comforting and holding them to the last second.
When husbands remained, marital conflicts often erupted. Men, who arguably had less tolerance for hunger, tended to eat whatever food they found. Women had to hide rations. Sex in cramped quarters and between starving bodies was usually not a possibility, also adding to the tension. According to the Łódź ghetto records, many couples filed for divorce, despite the fact that being single made one more susceptible to deportation and death. In many cases, they were the first generation to enjoy love matches rather than arranged unions, but romantic bonds disintegrated with chronic hunger, torture, and terror.
Women, who had been trained in domestic skills, also took great care to delouse, clean, and stay primped—skills that helped them survive emotionally and physically. Women, some said, suffered more from the lack of hygiene than even from starvation.
Despite best efforts to cope, the insufficient food, crowding, and lack of running water and sanitation had led to a typhus epidemic in the Jędrzejów ghetto. Each infected house was shuttered, and the sick were taken to a Jewish hospital set up especially for this disease, which spread through lice. Most patients died from lack of treatment. Special bathhouses disinfected bodies and clothes, often rendering the garments unwearable. Renia heard rumors that the Germans prohibited treating typhus patients and ordered the sick to be poisoned. (The Nazis were notoriously germophobic. In Kraków, noninfected Jews mingled at the contagious hospital to save their lives.)
Hunger, infestation, the stench of unwashed bodies, the lack of work and of any daily schedule, and the constant fear of being snatched for forced labor and beaten was the everyday reality. Children played Nazi-versus-Jew in the streets. A little girl yelled at her kitten not to leave the ghetto without its papers. There was no money for Hanukkah candles or Shabbat challahs. Even affluent Jews ran out of the money they’d brought into the ghetto or the money they received selling goods. While their items sold to Poles for next to nothing, the black market was exorbitant. A loaf of bread in the Warsaw ghetto cost a Jew the equivalent of $60 today.
Now, at the door, was Renia’s chance; she was desperate for funds. Like so many Jewish women across the country, she did not think of herself as a political person. She was not part of any organization, yet here she was, risking her life in action. She reached out her fist, each knock a potential bullet.
A woman answered, ready to bargain. They buy happily, Renia thought. They have nothing else to spend money on. Hastily, she offered a small amount of coal. Renia asked for a few coins, so much less than the heirloom lace placemats were worth. “Okay.” Then she walked away quickly, heart thumping. She fingered the change in her pocket. Measly, but at least she had done something.
* * *
One morning, the dreaded knock. The militia. An order. The Jewish community was directed to select 220 strong, healthy men to be taken to a forced-labor camp outside of town. Renia’s younger brother Aaron was on the list.
The Kukielkas pleaded with him not to go, but he feared the threat of noncompliance: that his whole family would be executed. Renia’s insides burnt as she watched his tall, blond figure disappear out the door. The group was gathered in the firehouse, where they were examined by doctors and tortured by the Gestapo, forced to sing Jewish songs, dance Jewish dances, and beat one another up until they bled, while the Gestapo laughed. When the bus arrived to take them away, the Gestapo—armed with dogs and machine guns—hit any lingerers with such force that the other boys had to carry them onto the bus.
Renia’s brother told her later that he’d been sure he was being taken to his execution, but to his surprise, he was delivered to a forced-labor camp near Lvov. This may have been the Janowska camp, a transit camp that also had a factory where Jews were made to toil for free in carpentry and metalwork. The Nazis established more than forty thousand camps to facilitate the murder of “undesirable races,” including transit camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, and combinations. The SS leased some of the labor camps to private companies, which paid it per slave. Women cost less, and so companies were drawn to “leasing” them and putting them to work at arduous hard labor. At state-owned and private labor camps across Poland, conditions were atrocious, and people died from starvation, constant beatings, illness from the unsanitary surrounds, and exhaustion from overwork. In the early years of war, labor camp prisoners were demoralized by being forced to carry out humiliating and often pointless tasks, like stone breaking; with time, the need for workers to help meet the demands of the German army intensified as did the tasks. The daily menu at one camp consisted of a slice of bread and a bowl of black soup made with vetch, a crop that fed animals and tasted like boiled pepper. The prospect of being enslaved in a forced labor camp terrified the Jewish youth.
Despite the country’s utter social collapse, postal networks still functioned, and one day a letter arrived. Shaking, Renia unfolded the pages to find that Aaron was alive. But the horrors of his life shocked her: the boys slept in animal stables on straw that was never changed; they worked from dawn to dusk, and were starving and freezing, eating wild berries and weeds picked from the ground. They were beaten daily, carried home on their friends’ shoulders. At night, they were forced to do calisthenics, and if they couldn’t keep up—death. Lice chewed through their flesh. There was no sink. No toilet. The stench was deadly. Then came dysentery. Realizing their days were numbered, many boys escaped; because of their conspicuous clothing in the winter cold they had to avoid towns and cut through forests and fields. The Gestapo started chasing after the escapees, while torturing the boys who remained.
Renia immediately sent her brother care packages. She included clothes with money sewn into the pockets so that he could buy a ticket home if he managed to run away. She watched out daily for any retuning escapees. The sight of them was sickening: skin and bones, bodies covered with ulcers and rashes, clothes full of insects, limbs swollen. Boys suddenly looked like frail old men. Where was Aaron?
So many Jews were sent to the unknown. “A father, brother, sister, or mother,” Renia wrote. “Every family had one person missing.”
But everything can become relative. Renia would soon come to know that only “one person missing” was good. Even “one person alive” meant you were lucky.
Renia knew that she had to make her own luck.
* * *
One night, dusk weighing down on the ghetto’s ramshackle roofs, a notice arrived. Each message, every thin note, had the potential to change your life forever; to smash whatever fragile comfort you had managed to construct in order to cope. Now the Kukielkas, along with the other 399 wealthiest families in the ghetto, were being forced to leave town. By midnight.
Renia had seen how the rich tried to pay their way out of decrees, bribing the Judenrat to put workers in their place, or hiring laborers to work instead of them. People dealt with hardship in the ways they knew, playing systems the way they always had—only now the games had no rules. The rich were respected only by other Jews; Germans didn’t care. The wealthiest families tried to pay their way out of this forced departure too, but the Judenrat’s coffers were filled from previous bribes—in fact, they gave each wealthy family fifty złotys toward relocation costs.
The Kukielkas frantically packed their possessions onto a sled and were off into the middle of the night. It was freezing in Wodzisław, where they were dumped. This was part of the Germans’ plan, Renia deduced: shuttling Jews from town to town for no reason other than to shame and depress them. Renia shivered, pulled her coat tighter around her (lucky to still have one), and observed, helpless, as hysterical mothers watched their babies’ flesh turn blue from the cold. The Jews of Wodzisław let the mothers and their half-dead babies into the sheep pens in their yards, which at least protected them somewhat from the howling winds.
Eventually all the Jews were herded into the freezing synagogue, icicles hanging from the walls, and fed soup from a communal kitchen. Once the most affluent and influential people in their community, they now accepted that the only important thing was to stay alive. “The result was that the Germans hardened the hearts of the Jews,” Renia wrote, sensing the toughening of her own core. “Now each person cared only for themselves, willing to steal food out of the mouth of their brethren.” As a survivor remarked about the callousing of the soul that took place over time in the Warsaw ghetto: “If you saw a dead body on the street, you took its shoes.”
* * *
As in all the ghettos, the decrees only became more barbaric.
“One day the Germans invented a new way to kill Jews,” Renia wrote. Was it possible to feel more terrorized? Somehow, despite it all, the shock had not yet faded. With each sadistic innovation, Renia felt a sick haunting, a deeper sense of the boundless malice, the myriad ways that her murderers might inflict violence. “At night, a bus full of Gestapo would arrive, drunk out of their minds.” They came with a list of thirty names, grabbed these men, women, and children from their houses, and beat and shot them. Renia heard yelling and firing, and, in the morning, saw bodies strewn in the alleys, black and blue from flogging. The families’ unbearable wails broke Renia’s heart. Each time, she imagined that one of her own might be next. It took days for the community to calm down after these incidents: Who had made up this list of names? Who did one have to be careful around? Whose bad side were you on? People were afraid to even speak.
This is how Jews in the ghetto came to feel fully occupied. Their territory, their skin, even their thoughts were threatened. Anything they did or said—the smallest movement or motion—could result in their execution and their entire families’. Every element of their physical and spiritual existence was under surveillance. “No one could breathe, cough, or cry without having an audience,” described a young female ghetto dweller. Who could be trusted? Who was listening? To have a candid conversation with an old friend required prearranging a meeting spot, then walking together as if on a household chore. Polish Jews feared that even their dreams would somehow betray them.
Sometimes the Gestapo arrived in the ghetto at night and simply shot people to death. One night the whole Judenrat and all their families were executed. On another memorable evening, several buses of Gestapo forced Jews, half naked, barefoot in nightclothes, to go outside and run around the snow-filled market while the Gestapo chased them with rubber clubs, or told them to lie in the snow for thirty minutes, or forced them to flog their fellow Jews with whips, or to lie on the ground and have a military vehicle run over them. The Nazis poured water over freezing people and made them stand at attention. “You never knew if you’d wake up alive the next morning” was Renia’s new reality. Why did she?
Daytime nightmares began. Machine guns echoed in the forest. Nazis had Jews dig their own graves and made them sing and dance in the pits until they shot them. They forced other Jews to bury the victims—or, sometimes, bury them alive. Elderly Jews were also made to sing and dance, the Nazis plucking out their beard hairs one by one and slapping them until they spat out their teeth.
The ghetto was a closed-off society—no radios allowed—but Renia sleuthed for information. Hundreds of women were taken to unknown locations, never to be heard from again. A candid soldier revealed to her that these women were sent to the front to serve as prostitutes. They contracted sexually transmitted diseases and were burnt alive or shot to death. She listened raptly as he told her that one time, he saw hundreds of young women revolt. They attacked the Nazis, stealing their bayonets, wounding them, gouging out their eyes, and then killing themselves, screaming that they would never be made into prostitutes. The girls who remained alive were eventually subdued and raped.
What was a fifteen-year-old to do? Renia remained vigilant, knowing instinctively that she had to gather information and face the truth. She listened to rumors streaming in from other towns. People were starving to death en masse, begging for potato peels, food trash. Jews were taking their own lives and killing their own children so they wouldn’t fall into German hands. Whole transports—sometimes ten thousand Jews—were forced to walk from the ghetto to the train station; they left cities to unknown locations. People were sorted and allegedly taken to work. Jewish communities heard from a select few who, it was thought, were intentionally left alive by the Germans to misinform them. Most people simply disappeared. “They leave as if into an abyss,” Renia wrote. Where were they all going?
Collective punishment was the Nazi way. The SS decreed that any Pole who helped a Jew would be killed. Ghetto Jews feared that if they escaped, their entire families would be murdered in retaliation. Stay and protect your community? Or run? Fight, flight.
The slaughtering was constant. Extermination committees made up of folksdeutsch, “Ukrainian savages,” as Renia wrote, and “young, healthy Germans for whom human life meant nothing” set to work. “They were always bloodthirsty,” Renia explained about the Nazis and their collaborators. “It was their nature. Just like an addiction to alcohol or opium.” These “black dogs” wore black uniforms and hats decorated with skulls. When they showed up with their hardened faces, bulging eyes, and large teeth—wild animals ready to pounce—everyone knew that half the population would be executed that day. The second they entered the ghetto, people scurried to hide.
“For them,” Renia wrote, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.”