By the time we were to move, Radom had become unbearable to me. It was now impossible not to understand what Hitler's plans for the Jews were, and every day that I had to pass the demolished ghetto opened the wound afresh. Sometimes, at night, Janina and I would recall Jewish friends from our girlhood, remembering the trouble we got into when we snuck out at night to attend a party, or the laughs we had falling into the lily pond near Tatuś’ factory. David, Aaron, Rachel, Ruth—friends who were Jewish but who were not different from us. It seemed to us, as we lay sleepless in the dark, that if our childhood friends could be considered enemies, what was to keep us from the same fate? Weren't we all the same? Hitler would finish the Jews, ghetto by ghetto, and then turn his full attention to the rest of us Poles.
I was sorry to say farewell to Aunt Helen, but I did not regret leaving Radom. I did not expect to find life different anywhere else, however. We were sent east by truck to Lvov; the new factory in Ternopol was not yet ready, but it was necessary to move our operations closer to the Russian front.
Janina and I packed; our luggage was one suitcase for the two of us. As the convoy of trucks bounced and bucked over the potholed roads, we watched the countryside go past. April had poured streams of wildflowers between the furrows of the farmland: the yellow kaczeniec, blue forget-me-not, pink primroses. But much of the farmland was fallow, abandoned by peasants on the run from the war, or left idle by farmers who were themselves fighting in the war. At this time of year, there should have been a pale green haze like a lacy scarf lying over the rich land, but there were few fields where the wheat was coming up. Food would grow scarce that fall, obviously, but I knew it wouldn't be the Germans going hungry.
Our temporary barracks in Lvov was another converted hotel. Now, close to the front, our outfit's staff grew, and I was kept on the run constantly—before, during, and after every meal. Janina's job was to act as housekeeper for the German officers’ and secretaries’ rooms. Our schedule left us little extra time. My birthday, May 5, came and went with little to make it different from every other busy day, except that Janina surprised me with a bouquet of lilacs, which perfumed the kitchen and reminded us of old, sweet times.
I was twenty now, and it seemed as though half my life had been wartime. Sometimes I felt like an old woman. I had seen terrible things, and terrible things had been done to me. Often—such as when a German officer made some rude, suggestive comment, or when I saw a child in the street who looked particularly thin and hungry—often I felt a great welling up of hatred and rebellion. It was not right, what I had seen, and what had been done to me, and what I saw around me every day. In God's name, it was not right! And yet I was relatively safe. I was well fed. I had my sister with me. I knew that most people were not as well off as I was. If I felt so much anger and outrage, what must other people not so fortunate be feeling? Surely, the evil being done in my country must be a poison that would ruin the soil, tarnish the air, and foul the water. Sometimes, when I thought of the amount of hatred dwelling in Poland, I was surprised to see that the grass was still green, that the trees still flourished their leaves against a blue sky.
And yet they did. It is a terrible irony of war, that nature itself does not rebel when man turns against his brother. I have seen nightmares take place on beautiful spring days. The birds can hop from one branch to another, tipping their heads and honing their small beaks against the bark while a child dies in the mud below.
From time to time—when there was time—these thoughts led me to church. One Sunday, Janina and I found ourselves walking out at the end of the mass with a young Polish woman and her mother. We exchanged greetings, and seeing that it was a beautiful day, and that our paths lay together for some distance, we took a stroll together, which brought us to a park. The young woman introduced herself as we paused by a duck pond.
“My name is Helen Weinbaum, and this is my mother, Pani Klimeka.”
“Dzien dobry,” Janina said with a sunny smile. “It is such a pleasure to meet you. I am Janina Gutowna, and this is my big sister, Irena.”
“How nice to speak Polish!” I said. “We work for the Germans—their language sounds harsh, no matter what ! you say.”
“Have you always lived in Lvov?” Janina asked.
Helen and her mother exchanged a sad look, and Helen patted the older woman's shoulder.
“No. We used to live in Krasnoe, but my—my father was killed by the Gestapo in a reprisal because someone slashed the tires of the commandant's car. And my husband, Henry, was taken to a work camp for Jews near here. I have tried to get permission to visit him at the Arbeitslager, but so far it is not allowed.”
Helen absently tore a handful of leaves from an overhanging branch as she spoke, dropping them one by one into the water as she mentioned each thing that had befallen her family. The ripples spread out from each leaf, gliding away endlessly. She was lucky, if you could call it luck, that they had not arrested her along with her husband. Helen was not Jewish, but she fervently swore she wished she were: At least then she would be with her beloved Henry in the Arbeitslager.
In turn, Janina and I told of our own misfortunes, and of how we had come to be in Lvov. Everyone in Poland in those days had a bitter story. Everyone. Our tales made a bond between us; we parted company that day as good friends, and Janina and I promised to visit Helen and her mother in their cottage outside of town when we could, and to bring food, because they had so little.
We did visit with them often as the spring progressed, and I began to feel I had another sister. There were times when Helen and Janina and I could laugh and act as if there were no war; but then something would remind Helen of her Henry, and her laughter would stick in her throat.
As the weeks followed each other into the summer, more and more of the officers and secretaries went on ahead to Ternopol; our work became much lighter, and we had more time off to spend with our new friends. One Sunday in July, we found Helen and her mother in a state of barely controlled hysteria. They had heard a rumor that a large number of Jews from the Arbeitslagers and from surrounding shtetls had been rounded up by the SS and were being held in a nearby village. Helen begged us to go with her, to see if she could find Henry among them.
Janina and I did not have to confer. The four of us hitched a ride on a farmer's wagon and were soon in town, at the bus station. There were dozens of people waiting for the same bus, and from the bits and pieces of overheard conversation, we knew that most of them were on the same fearful errand.
As we waited in the sun for our bus, rumor snuck like a pickpocket through the crowd, stealing the hope from people's hearts. At first, only isolated words stood out against the general murmur: Camps. Disappeared. All. Death squads. Then we heard whole phrases: Burned the synagogue. Shot the men. Orders from Berlin. One by one, these words and phrases fitted into each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Somewhere a woman let out a wail. An old man called out to God. Helen was staring ahead at the street, as though forcing the bus to arrive by her own will. I saw that she was holding her mother's hand, and then realized that I was holding Janina's hand. Wherever Henry Weinbaum was, he was in danger: He was in the hands of the SS. We might find him at the end of our journey. We might not.
All of us in that crowd were fearful of what lay ahead, and yet when the bus finally came wheezing and grinding its gears down the street, we rushed forward as one body. The bus filled. It pulled away. We were all on it.
There was very little talk as the bus made its way to our destination. There was nothing to say. When we arrived, we climbed down onto the hot pavement, and as if by some secret signal, like a flock of sparrows wheeling away across a church square, we all moved in one direction.
It was in the marketplace. The whole square had been fenced off. Behind the barbed wire stood hundreds of people whose yellow stars marked them as Jews. Trucks were unloading scores more, and as each man, woman, or child jumped down, bewildered and frightened, the black-uniformed SS men sorted them roughly: women and children one way, old men another, young men toward another mass of trucks. Outside the fence, friends and family members pressed against the wire, calling out names, crowding for a glimpse of a loved one.
“I don't see him! How will I find him?” Helen wailed, standing on her toes and looking frantically one way and then another.
Suddenly, several of the guards strode toward the fence, shouting at the crowd. “Raus! Raus verHuchte Schweine!” One of them slung the gun off his shoulder and began shooting into the air.
There were screams on our side of the wire, and people stumbled into one another. Some would not be chased away, but kept pressing forward. The man with the gun leveled it at us, and we broke in panic. We were all running, but when I heard Janina cry out, I turned to help her.
“I've twisted my ankle!” she gasped, struggling to her feet.
Helen and I took her arms, and the four of us dodged through the crowd to a row of buildings lining the square. We slipped down an alley, and I found a door that stood ajar. Putting my shoulder to it, I shoved it wide, and we all hurried inside.
It was a house. It was someone's house, but no one lived there now: furniture was broken, scattered across the floor. Broken dishes and glassware lay in piles, and dark squares on the wallpaper showed where pictures and paintings had been taken down.
“This is a Jewish home,” Helen said, turning around and around amid the wreckage. “This house has been raided.”
We heard more shouts and pounding footsteps on the street outside. Without speaking, we ran up the stairs and into a front bedroom. Janina hobbled to a window, and stood with her back to the wall so she could peek out sideways. We all did the same. We did not speak, but our hard breathing was loud in the empty room.
Below in the marketplace, the SS men had lined up facing the Jews, their guns gleaming in the sun. “Raus, Schwein-hundjude! Schnett! Schnett!” Out, Jewish pigs! Fast! Fast!
The gates were dragged open, and the Jewish prisoners were forced out through a gauntlet, while the guards beat at them with their rifle butts. An old man, tottering with a cane, was not fast enough, and a guard shot him on the spot. In vain, women tried to protect their small children from blows, men tried to shield their old fathers. But every time someone stumbled and fell under the beatings, shots rang out. The street was paved with bodies, and still the Jews were forced to march out over them.
We watched this from our windows in a paralysis of horror. We could do nothing but watch. We could not even pull back from the glass to keep hidden. An old rabbi carrying the Torah stopped to help a young woman with a shrieking toddler, and all three were shot. A graybeard in a faded uniform of the Polish army from the last war limped past the guards, and he, too, was not fast enough. The sun shone down on all of them, and the dust settled in pools of blood.
By this time, the four of us were crying uncontrollably. Helen was on her knees, sobbing in her mother's arms. Janina turned her face away. But I watched, flattening myself against the window. As I pressed against the glass, I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother, too.
But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.
When the long march of prisoners had filed down the road out of town, we crept from our hiding place. Already, trucks had cleared the street of corpses; flies buzzed and hovered over the stains congealing on the cobblestones. Like frightened children lost in a forest, we scurried from one shadow to another, startling at every sound, our hearts pounding with fear and dismay. We did not need to say to one another, We must see where the Nazis are taking those people. We simply followed, as soon as we dared.
And yet, before we had reached the outskirts of town, we began to hear shooting. We flattened ourselves against the wall of a garage, and with each crackling wave of gunfire, we flinched as though we were being shot ourselves. The shooting continued for a long time—a very long time—and when it finally was over, we left, again without speaking, for the bus station. We walked like dead women, our souls crushed.
We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time when we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, “Behold. This is the worst thing man can do.”