Renia
OCTOBER 1943
Now, outside the cell at Mysłowice, a gendarme was waiting for Renia.
“You,” he said.
She had lingered for so long, grasping on to the last shed of hope. She was ready. Ready to die.
“Any day now,” he said slowly, deliberately. “Any day, someone is going to take you out for a new task. You’ll be working in the police kitchen.”
What?
Renia said nothing but shook in relief. Miraculously, not Auschwitz after all. Not even an interrogation, but a promotion.
One month into her incarceration, Renia left Mysłowice for the first time. On the street, the normal street, headed to the police station, she searched madly for someone she might know. Anyone familiar, anyone she could tell about her imprisonment. But they were all strangers.
Renia’s shift ran from four in the morning until four in the afternoon. She left her cell in a darkness that lightened into dawn, then bled into daylight. The cook, she recalled, was a gluttonous German woman, but she gave Renia good food, and Renia regained her strength. Due to daily inspections, she couldn’t bring food back to her cell, but satiated from work, she gave her prison dinners to women hungrier than she was, mostly Jewish women. Others eyed her angrily.
One of the gendarmes who accompanied Renia to work treated her graciously, giving her cigarettes, apples, and buttered bread. He told her that he had lived in Poland for many years but was originally from Berlin. He became folksdeutsch. He was forced to divorce his Polish wife; she took their baby and fled to her parents.
“I can’t tell why I believed him and trusted him,” Renia later wrote. “I genuinely felt that he was honest and that his friendship could benefit me.”
One evening, when the prisoners were asleep, Renia wrote a letter. She had to take a chance. She asked the friendly gendarme to mail it to Warsaw for her, “to my parents.” She explained that since she’d been arrested, no one knew her whereabouts. He promised he’d attach a stamp and send it. Then he waved a finger at Renia, warning her not to mention this to anyone.
But from that moment, Renia could not sleep. What had she done? What if the gendarme gave it to the Gestapo? That would make her situation much more difficult. The letter, albeit coded, contained information and a few addresses; items needed to be removed from those locations. Most important, she wanted the comrades to know where she was. But with each day, as she sunk further into the vortex of the Nazi prison compound, it seemed less and less likely that anyone would find her.
* * *
Late one night, four women and a baby were brought into the cell. They were all Jewish, except for one woman, Tatiana Kuprienko, a Russian, born in Poland. Renia befriended Tatiana. Speaking in a Polish-Russian mélange, Tatiana explained that she had been hiding these Jewish women who had helped her before the war. She sheltered and fed six adults and a baby in her attic, assuming nobody knew. She hired a counterfeiter and arranged for them to get wildly expensive Polish papers, hoping they could find work in Germany. Most of the women were hesitant to part from their husbands, whose features were too Jewish, but one woman left for Germany and had written to say that she’d found a job.
“Two and half months later, the police arrived at my house with a seventeen-year-old Polish boy,” Tatiana continued. “Before I could say a word, the boy told the police that I was hiding Jews. We were all arrested. My two brothers and the counterfeiter too. I still don’t know how they knew about the attic, the fake papers, the woman in Germany, even the counterfeiter’s fee. Before taking my testimony, they read aloud what they knew; everything was true.” At the police station, Tatiana was beaten. The Gestapo told her she was lucky to be Russian; otherwise, she’d have been hanged. They kept threatening to kill her or lock her up for life.
Two days later, the Jewish women and their husbands were transported to Auschwitz. Two days after that, the Jewish woman who had left for Germany was brought in, in a state of utter despair. Sure that she’d survive by spending the rest of the war working for a peasant near Berlin, she’d suddenly been arrested. After interrogation, she was carried back to the cell on a stretcher, disfigured to the point that Renia hardly recognized her. Large pieces of flesh were torn off her body. The Nazis had gagged her mouth, then pounded her feet with metal rods, and pierced her skin with a hot iron. Despite this torture, the Jewish woman didn’t disclose the name of the counterfeiter or that she knew Tatiana. The Nazis used similar methods to abuse Tatiana.
One day, when she was in better spirits, Tatiana told Renia, “After all I’ve been through, I have a feeling I’ll be freed one day. I must live to take care of my mother. I have a wealthy brother-in-law in Warsaw; maybe he’ll bail me out.”
Renia smiled, assuming she had gone insane from all the beating.
A few days later, Tatiana’s name was called. She went pale—another interrogation. It would be her end. She exited the cell and was taken by the Gestapo.
But a few minutes later, Renia heard maniacal laughter. Tatiana returned, kissed every one of them, and told them she’d been freed. She was going home!
When she came over to kiss Renia, she whispered in her ear that, indeed, her brother-in-law had paid a half kilogram of gold for her.
Renia’s eyes lit up. If it was possible to bribe the Gestapo, even here at Mysłowice, maybe there was hope.
* * *
One afternoon a taxi arrived at the camp gate. Two men in civilian clothes got out, presented papers that said they were undercover Gestapo men, and headed to the men’s ward, to the most terrible of cells, where living shadows were chained to their beds. The plainclothed Gestapo called out the names of two young men who’d been convicted of leading a partisan gang. They unchained them and hauled them to a waiting car that quickly disappeared. The guards saw the Gestapo carrying the prisoners, which was never done, became suspicious, and just after the taxi left, notified the Gestapo in Katowice. It turned out that the two “plainclothed Gestapo” were partisans who’d used fake papers. All four men had disappeared. Free.
Renia was simply elated. “That incident awoke my passion for life and my faith in freedom,” she recalled. “Who knows, maybe a miracle could happen to me, too.”
The prison overlords, however, were furious. The guards were imprisoned. Discipline was tightened, cases reopened. Suddenly one morning, Renia was told she was not going to work. Instead, she was hit and locked in a dark cell, allegedly as punishment for her lie that she’d simply stolen across the border. Now they suspected her of espionage. The beating left a permanent scar etched on her forehead.
Renia was moved to a cell for female political prisoners. No one here went out to work. Every few days, a Gestapo committee arrived to examine them, like cattle in the market. There was no hope of getting out.
By chance, Renia learned from a woman from Katowice that Ilza had confessed to being Jewish and was hanged. Her heart broke into a million pieces, but she didn’t twitch a muscle. “Even if I was stabbed with a knife, I could not break.”
Day and night, Renia contemplated the fate of her comrades. She felt like her memory was fading, as if she were going mad. She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t remember her testimony. She wasn’t sure she could trust herself if they decided to interrogate her again. She had a constant headache. She was very weak, could barely stand. It was forbidden for the prisoners to lie on their beds during the day, but the key keeper pitied her and allowed her to perch on her cot. She jumped up whenever she heard the supervisor’s jangle, so no one could see her, sitting idle, haunted by Ilza’s young face.
She had been so close to freedom.