LAUTERPACHT DIDN’T KNOW that his work on the new book in the summer of 1942 coincided with a visit to Lemberg by Governor-General Hans Frank to celebrate the first anniversary of Galicia’s incorporation into the General Government. At the very moment that Lauterpacht turned to an international bill of rights, Frank set in train the implementation of the Final Solution in Galicia, as agreed to at the Wannsee Conference. The impact on Lauterpacht’s family was immediate and devastating.
Inka Katz told me what happened. She remembered Frank’s visit, the fear it engendered, the consequences that followed. Her grandfather Aron was the first to be taken, on August 16, from the flat he shared with Lauterpacht’s brother, David, an old man removed from a wardrobe in the bathroom, where he was hidden.
“Two days later, on August 18, Hersch’s sister, my mother, Sabina, was taken by the Germans.” Inka spoke with absolute calm. “It was on the street; my mother was rushed by Ukrainians and German soldiers.” Inka was alone at home, saw the events from the house, looking out of a window. Her father was at work a few houses away, in their old apartment. “Someone went and told him that my mother had been taken,” Inka said; a concierge told him. “I understood what had happened. I saw everything looking out of the window.”
How old was she?
“I was twelve, not a child anymore. I stopped being a child in 1939. I understood what was happening, I knew the dangers and all the rest. I saw my father running after my mother, behind her, on the street.”
She paused and looked out of the elegant window, across Paris, sipping black tea. “I understood it was over.”
She observed from the upper window, remembering points of detail for which a child has a special memory.
“I was watching discreetly; I wasn’t brave. If I had been, I would have run after her. But I knew what was happening. I can still visualize the scene, my mother’s dress, her high heels…”
Did she know that maybe she might not see her mother again?
“There was no ‘maybe.’ I knew.”
Lauterpacht’s sister was taken by the Germans as her daughter watched.
“My father didn’t think about me. You know what? I rather liked that. For him, it was simply that they had taken his wife, the woman he loved so much. It was just about bringing her back.”
She admired the fact that her father, in his dark gray suit, went looking for his wife.
Then her father was taken. He never returned; Inka was on her own.
“I heard nothing more from them. They had taken thousands of people. Who knows what became of them? But I knew what was going to happen to them. A few days later, I left the apartment, as I knew the Germans would come and take it. My grandmother went to the ghetto; I refused, could not imagine myself there. I went to my governess, the ex-governess; she remained close to my parents because my father was good to her. She wasn’t Jewish, although she could have been. I told her what had happened, and she said, ‘Come and stay with me.’ She wasn’t just a governess; it was more than that. She was…what do you call it, a nursemaid? My mother didn’t breast-feed me; she did. She gave me her breast.”
As we talked, Inka poured cups of dark Russian tea.
“I went there, not for very long, because of the searches. ‘She’s my little niece,’ the governess told anyone who asked. I didn’t really look Jewish at all, but I certainly didn’t look like her niece. They didn’t really believe her, so she sent me off to the countryside to be with her family.” Inka couldn’t stay there long.
“I left for other reasons. There was a man who liked young children. I knew about that; I’d read about these things, knew the jokes about such men. So I left. I went to stay with someone else my father had helped. It was the end of 1942, still around Lwów, but not in the Jewish ghetto. I didn’t stay long. The woman pretended I was a cousin, or a niece, or her cousin’s daughter. It didn’t work. Her family got anxious. I would listen through the door; I could hear them say, ‘She doesn’t look like family.’ It was true.”
So Inka left. “It was very difficult. I didn’t know where to go anymore. I would wander in the streets all day long and sleep where I could. In Poland, in those days, the front entrances of apartment buildings were locked at night, at ten or eleven, so I could go in before then, very quietly up to the attic, in a building where they didn’t know me. I could sleep there, on the stairs next to the grenier. It was frightening when someone came in the night. I was scared, alone, worried I’d be handed over to the police.”
She continued, calmly. “That lasted for a month or two. It was the end of the autumn. My mother had told me where her jewelry was, where the money was. I lived off that. Then I was robbed. One morning I woke up and everything had been taken. There was nothing left.”
Alone and desperate, the twelve-year-old girl found a client and friend of her father’s, an elderly lady, willing to take her in for two months.
“People started talking, so then I had to leave her. She was a Catholic; she talked about putting me into a convent. We went together. The nuns said yes, we will take her.”
The convent was on the outskirts of the town.
“I don’t remember the name,” Inka says. “It was very small, not well-known. There were twelve nuns, connected to the Jesuits.”
Inka speaks slowly, in a whisper, as though approaching an awkward denouement.
“The nuns said there was one condition to my staying. My family never knew this.” Inka was momentarily uncomfortable, on the verge of breaking a lifelong silence.
“They said I must be baptized. I had no choice. Maybe it was fortunate that I wasn’t any more observant then than today. I was lucky to grow up in a household that wasn’t too religious.”
Seventy years on, she retained a sense of discomfort. One woman, coming to terms with a feeling that somehow she had abandoned her group to save herself.