Renia
Back in Będzin. In the early morning hours, Renia heard faraway shots. She looked through the window to discover the sky lit bright as day. Searchlights illuminated the turmoil. Police, Gestapo, and soldiers surrounded the ghetto. People ran through the streets wearing only shirts or stark naked, “like bees who’d been driven out of their hive.”
Renia jumped out of bed: the deportation! Just days after her return from Warsaw, after the comrades’ glee at her weapons stash, after Sarah nearly fainted in relief at her safe return. And now this.
But, at last, they were prepared.
It was four o’clock. Frumka and Hershel ordered everyone to go down into the bunker. Almost everyone. To stave off suspicion, a few were to remain in their rooms—those with Zonder passes. If the Nazis found the building empty, they would search. If they found the bunkers, everyone would be dead. Better to seem as if they were going about their business as usual.
No time to think. No time to implement any ambitious plans. Nine people stayed in their rooms. The rest, including Renia, crawled through the top of the stove, which was lifted off. One by one, they entered their prepared safe room. One of the comrades who stayed above fastened the cover back on the stove.
Renia sat.
An hour later, the stomp of boots. Then, German voices, cursing, opening closets, turning over furniture. Tearing rooms apart. They were searching—for them.
Renia and her comrades did not move, did not twitch, barely breathed.
Stillness.
At last, the Nazis were gone.
But the members stayed seated, immobile, for many more hours. Nearly thirty people were stuffed inside their tiny bunker. Air flowed in from a tiny crack in the wall. Absolute stillness but for the quiet buzzing of a fly. An unbearable heat set in. Then the stench. People flapped their hands, sending air to each other, trying to keep friends from fainting. Suddenly Tziporah Marder collapsed. Fortunately, the group had stashed some water and smelling salts and tried to revive her, but the young woman remained completely soaked and still. What were they supposed to do? They themselves could barely breathe. They pinched her all over until, at last, she stirred, weak. The lack of oxygen was nauseating. “Our mouths were thirsty, so thirsty,” Renia remembered.
Eleven in the morning. No one had returned. Seven hours in the bunker; how much longer could they go on? They sat for thirty more minutes. Then from afar, a single voice. A sound that seemed to emerge from a grave. A chorus of horrific cries and screams. Renia could hear thrashing, convulsing bodies above them.
The group waited for a comrade to lift the stove top. “Who knows if they are still there?” asked Frumka, her hope deflating. No one came.
At last, footsteps. The door was opened.
Comrades Max Fischer, who’d cared for the Atid orphans, and the young Ilza Hansdorf were back. Thanks to a mishap, they alone were not deported. A howl rose from Renia’s throat: seven of their best people. Gone.
It took great effort for Renia to even hear what the comrades were relaying. Everyone had been driven into an empty lot cordoned off by a rope that was held by the Jewish militia. The Jews were put into a long line. The Germans did not look at work certificates, did not differentiate between young and old. A Gestapo walked around with a stick, dividing the people: some he sent to the right, others to the left. Which group would be driven to their murders and which would stay and live? Finally, the right wing was taken to the train station to be shipped off; the others, sent home. With a small wave of a small baton, left or right, a Jew was sentenced to life or death.
Many bolted and were shot while trying to run away.
Renia and her comrades went outside and stood in front of their little house. All was futile. It was impossible to remove people from the group destined for the trains. Around them, people ran to and from the police station, wailing. One was missing his mother, another her father, husband, son, daughter, brother, sister. From everyone who remained, “they had torn one away.” People fainted in the streets. A mother who’d gone half crazy wanted to join the deportation group—the Nazis had grabbed her two grown sons. Five children returned with a cry: they had taken their father and mother. They had nowhere to go. The eldest was fifteen. The daughter of the Judenrat’s vice chair fell to the ground, tore off her clothes. They had deported her father, mother, and brother; she was alone. Why should she live? Cries, despair. All, useless. Those taken would never return.
Including Hershel Springer. Hershel, who spent his days and nights helping and saving people, loved by all the Jews, respected by the community. People cried over him like they would over their own fathers, including Renia.
The street was lined with the unconscious, with people who wriggled in agony, their bodies disfigured by poisonous dumdum bullets. Their relatives had brought them outside and helpless to relieve their agony, left them there to flail. Passersby stepped over their bodies. No one tried to resuscitate them. There was no help. Each person had her own torments, thought her own pain was the worst. Bullet-riddled corpses were placed on wagons. The grains in the field were trampled upon by people who’d hidden between stalks of corn; the rotting dead were strewn all over. All around her, Renia could hear the sighs of the dying.
It was too difficult for Renia, for anyone, to witness this. The group returned to the house. The beds were turned over; in each corner, a person lay on the ground and wailed. The children from Atid were inconsolable. Renia could not quiet their sobs.
Frumka tore the hair from her scalp, then banged her head on the wall. “I am guilty!” she screamed. “Why did I tell them to stay in their rooms? I murdered them, I sent them to their deaths,” Once again, Renia tried to calm her.
Minutes later, the comrades found her in the next room with a knife aimed at herself. They wrestled it from her hand as she screamed, “I am their killer!”
The shooting did not stop. The group to be deported stood at the station, guarded by armed soldiers. A few attempted to run and jump over the metal barrier that separated them from the road. On the other side of the barrier, Poles and Germans watched, seemingly content. “It’s a shame that a few are left, but their end will come soon,” Renia heard one say. “They couldn’t send everyone at once.” Others replied, “Whomever Hitler will not kill now, we will murder after the war.”
The train arrived. The Nazis shoved people into overpacked cattle cars. There was not enough space. The leftover Jews were pushed into a large building that had once served as an orphanage and senior home.
Renia watched as the wagons left for Auschwitz.
All aboard would be dead by the end of the day.
The remaining locked-up Jews peered out the fourth-floor windows, searching madly for a savior. The building was surrounded by Gestapo. Militiamen mulled around, anxiously considering whether they could help a family member or friend. In the end, Rossner’s specialized workforce was freed. As long as he lived, Rossner said, he would not let his workers be dragged away. But the Gestapo knew it didn’t make a difference. Sooner or later, all the Jews would be killed.
The leftover Jews were to be sent out the following morning. The Nazis needed another few hundred people to make up a whole thousand—the full contingent of a transport. “We couldn’t understand what’s so special about that round number,” Renia later wrote. “We used to joke that that’s the minimum number of people they can kill.” Even in this barbarism, gallows humor helped Jews diffuse fear, deny the importance of death, and feel some control over their lives.
A few hours later, the Gestapo tore into one of the workshops and grabbed the remaining number. And so, in two days, the Nazis took eight thousand people out of Będzin to be murdered, not counting those who were shot or perished from grief and fear.
* * *
With Hershel gone, Frumka was no longer capable of running the kibbutz. She could not bear all the worry or plan for the future. Freedom began to fall apart. No one had any desire to go out. “What taste was there for work when an expulsion hung over our heads?” Renia posed. The comrades knew that it was only a matter of time—short time—until they’d all be killed. They began to think about leaving the ghetto and dispersing, each fleeing to his or her own destination.
The Judenrat leaders addressed the community with “positive speak”: work and only work will save the lives of the remaining Jews. Some sought normalcy and returned to labor. A heavy mood in each step.
Then, several days after the Będzin expulsion: a minimiracle. A militiaman delivered a note. Renia couldn’t believe her eyes: Hershel’s handwriting. Was it for real?
Renia, Aliza Zitenfeld, and Max Fischer followed the police back to the workshop, a route speckled with Gestapo men stopping each passerby. They passed a militiaman who was bleeding heavily, his ear torn apart, his cheek smashed. His white suit was red, his face pale. A Gestapo had shot him for amusement.
Their militiaman escort brought them to the top floor, into a cluttered small hall. He moved piles of merchandise. In between, as if in a nest, Hershel.
Renia ran over to him. He was badly beaten, nearly unrecognizable. His face was scratched, his feet wounded. But he chuckled and hugged them like a father, tears trickling down his sunken cheeks. He reassured them, saying that nothing too dangerous had happened. His legs may have been smashed, but “the most important thing is that I’m still alive, and I got to see you all. Nothing was lost.” He showed them the contents of his pockets, then told them his story:
“They shoved us into the train car. . . . We were all beaten. . . . I looked for a way to escape. I had a pocketknife and a chisel with me. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to pry the window open. It was very crowded, so no one noticed, but when I was about to jump, people held down my arms and legs, screaming, ‘What are you doing? Because of you they’ll kill us like cattle!’
“The train kept moving. Yoel and Gutek took out razor blades to kill themselves. I wouldn’t let them. I told them to wait until everyone was distracted, and we would jump. Suddenly the opportunity arrived. I didn’t think and leapt. Another person jumped out behind me. . . . I preferred to die this way than to end my life in Auschwitz. Behind me I heard gunshots, coming from the Germans who were guarding the road. I threw myself into a pit. The train moved on. In the distance, I saw people lying on the road—probably jumpers shot dead. Not far from me, a Polish woman worked in the field. She pulled me into the field, away from the tracks.
My feet were bruised. I could no longer walk. She told me that Auschwitz was nearby, that I was smart to jump, that all the Jews were being taken to their deaths. She brought me food from her home, tore off my jacket, and used it to bandage my foot. Then she told me to leave, because if the village peasants saw me, they’d hand me over to the Germans. By now, it was night. I got up on all fours. I crawled in the direction she showed me. During the days, I lay in the field and ate carrots, beets, plants. After a week of crawling, I arrived here.”
That night, with the help of a militiaman who was kind (some were, Renia recognized), Renia brought Hershel to the kibbutz. He would have to move into the bunker permanently to avoid the Gestapo. People were incredulous. Their father had returned from the dead. Life would somehow turn out okay.
They knew, however, that their joy was temporary. The Judenrat had begun to notice the kibbutz’s activities and became suspicious. The Kamionka ghetto was by now filled with the empty apartments of the murdered, so the Freedom group split into three. Each ten-member unit took up residence in a different part of the ghetto. They still, however, maintained communal life. “We are all one family”—the mantra that guided them, always.