Renia
Sarah had arranged everything.
It was a bright autumn day, and Renia was returning from church, like a regular Catholic girl. She arrived at the Hollanders to find the sister of the militiaman who had taken her in. “A smuggler from Będzin is here,” she whispered.
“Already?” Renia’s heart leapt into her throat. This was it.
Sarah had hired a woman to help Renia cross the border from the General Government to the Third Reich annex. En route, she would be passing Miechów, the town where Jews—including her family, who had recently been caught—were being temporarily trapped. Her heart ached, longing for them. She was determined to stop there on the way. Today, at last, she would see her parents and her beautiful, sweet Yankeleh.
Renia served the Hollanders dinner in a state of exhilaration, her limbs light, cheeks flushed, heart bounding with energy. Mrs. Hollander noted how happy she seemed—so unusual for her.
That evening, after scheming with the militiaman’s family, Renia approached her boss. “My aunt fell ill,” she claimed. “They called for me to come quickly, to care for her for a few days.”
Mrs. Hollander, of course, understood. Why wouldn’t she trust her best employee?
The bright sun turned to clouds and rain, then the night’s darkness set in. Total quiet. Renia, posing as “Wanda” from the found documents, waited for the train, her heart beating wildly. Even once she and the other passengers were speeding along, every moment felt like an hour. Over and over, she played through her mind the upcoming scene of glee: how her parents’ faces would glow when they saw her.
And yet, why did her stomach ache ominously?
They arrived at a small station. “Is this Miechów?” Renia quietly asked her non-Jewish smuggler.
“Not yet. Soon, soon.”
And then it was soon. “This one?”
“We cannot get off at Miechów.”
“What? Why?” Renia froze.
“It will make your journey too difficult,” the smuggler whispered. Renia was about to protest, when the woman added, “I don’t have time to take you.”
Renia pleaded. No was not an option.
“I promise,” the smuggler told her, quieting her, “that as soon as I get you to Będzin, I will turn back and go to Miechów. I will get your parents and your brother. I will bring them to you in Będzin.”
“No.” Renia put her foot down. “I must go see them now.”
“Listen,” the smuggler said, leaning into her. “Sarah said you absolutely cannot go to Miechów. I cannot take you there.”
As the locomotive chugged past fields and forests, Renia’s mind whirred. She did not have long to decide. Should she ditch the smuggler, get off, stay here, and try to cross the border later somehow? But Sarah was older, wiser, more competent. And it made sense that Renia cross the border quickly; that she get the most dangerous part of the journey over with.
Renia passed the Miechów station glued to her seat, her heart leaden, her brain in a fog.
She spent a few days at the smuggler’s house in Częstochowa, snacking, sleeping, longing, waking up jolted by frantic thoughts. It had been several years since she’d seen her sister—a lifetime. What did Sarah look like now? Would they recognize each other? Would she make it across the border? Renia felt weirdly comfortable in this alien part of Poland, where she was a stranger. Her foreignness was an asset: no one would recognize her. Her Jewishness was buried that much deeper.
* * *
The border crossing went without incident, and once in Będzin, Renia set out along the streets that sloped uphill to the castle, passing the town’s colorful and ornate facades, its Art Deco–rounded balconies and Beaux Arts gargoyles and balustrades that marked the area’s prewar glory. To the Freedom kibbutz! Feeling optimistic, the eighteen-year-old leapt up the stairs and threw open the door. She saw a hallway that glistened in the sunlight, and a room with young men and women, all dressed in clean clothes, sitting around tables, reading. It seemed so normal.
But where was Sarah? Why didn’t she see her sister?
A young man, Baruch, introduced himself. He, like everyone here, knew who she was. Renia took one moment for a deep breath. What a treat—to be herself.
Baruch struck Renia as kind, resourceful, and full of life. He led her up two more flights of stairs to the sleeping quarters. The room was quiet, dark. She stepped in gingerly. Then she made out a muffled moaning.
It was Sarah, lying in bed. Sarah!
Baruch took Renia’s arm, led her over. “Sarah,” he said, gently, “would you like it if Renia came to see you?”
Sarah jumped out of bed. “Renia!” she cried. “You are all I have left in the world. I was sick worrying for you.”
Sarah’s kisses and embraces were warm on Renia’s skin. Tears pooled on the mattress. Despite the older girl’s weakness, she led Renia straight to the kitchen to feed her. In the kitchen light, Renia could see how skinny her sister’s face had become, all bone and edge. She tried not to think about how, years earlier, Sarah had obtained papers to immigrate to Palestine. The owner of the shoe store where she worked had even offered financial help, but their father had been too proud to ask his relatives for the additional funds she’d need. So, she had stayed. She looks so much older, Renia noted, disturbed. Sarah’s face was not the countenance of a twenty-seven-year-old. But watching her sister assemble a meal for her, full of gusto, Renia thought, She’s still young in spirit.
* * *
The sisters, needing a plan to save their parents, spent days rolling through ideas, but there were no good ones. The smuggler’s promise of bringing them back, it turned out, had been a lie—a betrayal that Renia refused to dwell on for fear her anger would consume her. Sarah and Renia faced a multitude of problems. To begin with, the kibbutz didn’t have room for the Kukielkas. And besides, the fee for smuggling them over was extraordinary. Impossible.
Then a letter from Renia’s parents arrived, the contents horrifying.
Moshe and Leah had spent the past days in a small, dirty neighborhood in Sandomierz, a town east of Miechów, living like animals. The Jews huddled in tiny, moldy rooms, where they slept on the floor or on a thin mattress of hay. They had no food and no fuel for heating. Their days were filled with fear: deportation, extermination, execution, the whole ghetto could be set on fire. Any of these atrocities, at any moment.
Yankeleh, too, composed a letter, begging his siblings for help and to bring him to Będzin, even just temporarily. All he wanted was to be with his sisters, the only people he could count on. Despite the inhuman horrors he’d witnessed, he clung to life. “Our parents may do the unthinkable and commit suicide,” he wrote. “But as long as I am with them, I keep them sane.” He escaped from the ghetto each day, trying to earn some money. Every grosz he received went to the 120 złotys per night they had to pay to sleep on exposed board, crammed together like fish in a barrel. Mother, father, and son warmed one another, “as worms ate our flesh,” Yankeleh described. They hadn’t changed clothes or underwear in months. There was no detergent, no running water.
As Renia’s eyes galloped over the words, she felt sick. What could she do? She lay awake for several nights, terrified that the end was coming for them all.
And then, the last letter, the final farewell: “If we don’t survive,” her mother and father wrote, “then please fight for your lives. So you can bear witness. So you can recount how your loved ones, your people, were murdered by sheer evil. May God save you. We are about to die, knowing that you are going to stay alive. Our greatest pain is the fate of Yankel, our youngest. But there’s no anger toward you. We know that you would do everything possible to save us. This is our fate. If this is God’s will, we must accept it.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the letter also told of the fate of Renia’s sisters Esther and Bela. They had stopped in Wodzisław, and, sensing a roundup of Jews, hid in an outhouse. The landlady’s seventeen-year-old son came out to use the facilities, discovered them, and alerted the Gestapo.
They were sent to Treblinka.
Lost. All was lost.
But Renia shed no tears. “My heart,” she later wrote, “turned to stone.”
These were horrible days for Renia. “I am an orphan,” she repeated to herself, the sick reality sinking in. Renia felt disoriented, as if she were lacking her memory, her sense of place, of self. She had to realign her being, remind herself that now she lived for her sister, for her comrades. This was her new family. Without them to ground her, to provide her with a sense of reality and personhood, she would have gone mad.
Then the girls lost contact with Aaron. Rumor had it he was transferred to the arms factory at Skarżysko-Kamienna, where Jews were forced to perform brutal labor, barefoot, clothes torn, for a mere slice of bread and cold water. More than twenty-five thousand Jewish men and women were brought to this labor camp; the vast majority did not survive the unsanitary conditions and exposure to toxins that turned hair green and skin red. Aaron, Renia heard, contracted typhus. His superiors liked him, which saved him from immediate execution, but his health was fragile. As an “unproductive,” he was barely fed.
And yet.
Renia and Sarah were alive. They were shadows of selves, empty shades, but still, alive. As with so many of the Jewish youth who lost their parents, their newfound freedom accompanied grief and guilt but also energy. The ties binding them to normal life had been severed; they were no longer responsible to others. To live, to retain any sense of human spirit, they needed to stay active, to blur their intense and overwhelming pain by plunging into demanding work that would curb introspection.
“If I’m destined to go down,” Renia said, personally uttering Abba Kovner’s mantra of resistance. “I will not die like a clueless sheep sent to the slaughter.”
Her zeal fanned a hot fire that was already burning among the Będzin youth.