The uncle was a kind man, and he welcomed his sister and her sons. He had a simple one-story house with a small cellar used to store coal for cooking and heating, and potatoes, the main staple of their diet. He and his wife had five children, and Jack and his mother and brother squeezed in with the family.
Jack and Jakob slept on the floor on a mattress filled with straw. By the second day, they were scratching themselves. “Lice,” Jack said. “The mattress was probably full of them. My mother was horrified and scrubbed and scrubbed us, but it was very hard to keep from getting them, because everything in the house was infested. I remember the women in the village inspecting one another’s heads for lice. A city boy like me would notice this.”
The house had no running water. Everyone used an outdoor latrine. Keeping clean was difficult. “I still remember my uncle taking a mouthful of water from a bucket, spitting it into his hands, and then washing his face with it,” Jack said. “I was not comfortable with any of this.”
For the first time in Jack’s life, food was rationed. His uncle kept all food under lock and key. When dinner came, you got your portion. If you wanted more, too bad.
“I was hungry all the time. So was Jakob. One day, Mama took us to a farmer who gave us thick black bread and tall glasses of buttermilk. To this day, I remember how delicious they tasted.”
Jack’s beautiful mother was not welcomed by the women in the village, who wore shapeless dresses and hid their hair under scarves. When they saw Mama, elegant in her fine dresses and high heels, they criticized her. “A woman who doesn’t even know where her husband is, and look at her!” they would say.
“They did not know how deeply she suffered on the inside,” Jack said. “She was trying to be strong for my brother and me, but she was terribly worried about my father, my sister, and the rest of her family scattered throughout Poland.”
The Nazis continued to lower their net over the Jewish population. Already there was a curfew from dusk to sunup, and Jews caught on the streets could be shot on sight. Jews were no longer allowed to use the library or attend public events. All Poles carried identity cards, and the Nazis stamped the cards of Jewish Poles with a big J for Jude, which means “Jew.”
Then Jews were forbidden to travel. Jack’s uncle had a small factory that produced spools of thread, but he could no longer go to a large city for necessary supplies. A Catholic railroad official who was his friend secretly got them for him.
One day, everyone in the village was ordered to gather by a certain large tree. Nazi soldiers kept their guns on the crowd as a military truck pulled up. In the back was the Catholic railroad official.
“Everyone let out a gasp, for we barely recognized him. The Catholics all crossed themselves,” Jack said. “It was horrible. He had been a large, robust man with a big handlebar mustache. We could tell he had been starved and tortured. The Nazis said he was guilty of helping the Polish Resistance. Probably they were trying to get contact names from him, and for a long time afterward, my uncle was fearful he would be arrested, since this man was his friend and had helped him.
“We were forced to watch while they hanged him. His last words were, ‘Long live Poland!’ Everyone cried. It was the first time I saw someone die, and I had nightmares about it for a long time.”
Each week in the town square, the Nazis posted a new edict against Polish Jews, each more extreme than the last. “It’s hard to remember them, there were so many. For example, if you met a soldier on the sidewalk, you had to tip your hat and step off the sidewalk into the gutter until he passed,” Jack said. “The Nazis created these to make us feel we were second-class.”
Jack quickly became expert at avoiding soldiers. You disappeared if you saw them approaching. You did not even want to pass one. If soldiers stopped you and questioned you, the best you could do was stand erect, take your cap off, and keep your head down. No eye contact, ever. And whatever you were asked, you answered.
With so many troubles, Jack turned serious. “I lost my fun-loving attitude about life. I had to be the man in the family and look out for Mama and Jakob,” he said. “Adults tried to protect us children from what was happening, but through no fault of their own, they failed us.”
In January 1940, a month after Jack arrived at his uncle’s, the Nazis demanded the services of three hundred adults every day to assist with work projects. With just nine hundred Jews in the village, this meant every able-bodied adult male had to work. Since Jack was only twelve, his name was not on the list.
“But there were some well-off people who didn’t want to do this labor, and they were willing to pay for someone to take their place,” Jack said. “I jumped at the chance. I had been helping out in my uncle’s factory, wanting to do my share, so I was learning what hard work was.”
The first day, the forced-labor crew’s job was to remove heavy snow from a road. Because they had no snow-removal equipment, this had to be done with shovels. The snow was two feet taller than Jack. As he worked alongside the men, nobody questioned his age. They understood what he was doing.
That night, exhausted but full of pride, he was able to hand his grateful mother the few coins he had been paid.
From then on, six days a week, every minute of daylight, he worked as a substitute. His mother hoarded the little he earned, and after several months, she was able to rent a room for the three of them. “She wanted to get Jakob and me cleaned up,” Jack said. “When we moved out of my uncle’s home, he was supportive, and he and my mother remained close. Mama paid the rent and fed us by using my earnings and by selling her last pieces of jewelry.”
The small room had a bed, a stove, and two chairs. Every morning, Jack rose at five A.M. and reported for work, never knowing where he would be assigned that day. It was always hard labor—digging cisterns, building roads, hauling bricks, crushing rocks. By using forced civilian labor to do these tasks, the Nazis could send more soldiers to the front.
“On our work details, the soldiers were strict with us—they would scream at us and even hit us—but I never saw them shoot anyone, like they did in other places,” Jack said.
The war pushed on, and the Nazis won victory after victory. Soon they occupied most of Europe. Jack turned thirteen in April 1940. By the time he turned fourteen in 1941, he had been supporting his mother and brother with his daily labor for two years. He was always ready to work hard. His body got tougher and stronger, and he took pride in how much he could do. Sometimes, he worked in a metal shop. For a while, he worked in a factory.
He never felt sorry for himself. “I knew my mother and brother needed me, and I accepted this responsibility. I never forgot my father’s saying he counted on me to take care of our family.”
Every night, he returned to the room to have dinner with Mama and Jakob. “We ate whatever Mama could scrounge up,” he said. “Everyone in the village was hungry.”
People were running out of money to pay Jack as a substitute, and he made barely enough to keep the family going. He worried about what would happen when he could no longer earn anything. Along with his mother, he worried about his father in the concentration camp and his sister, Jadzia, who was still staying with the aunt and uncle.
Then the Nazis gave him a new worry. Sometimes, they would block off a street, round up healthy Jewish workers, and send them deep into Germany as slave labor. Nobody heard from them again.
“I was getting older and I was afraid this was going to happen to me,” Jack said. “I tried to be very careful never to be where they would catch me, but if they decided to block off a street, there would be no escape. I knew if I disappeared, my mother would go crazy. She could not stand to have another family member missing.”
Jack had been assigned to assist a Catholic electrician who was rewiring the home of a Nazi official. It was dangerous work, but Jack approached it as he did everything, doing the best job he could.
“I had a good attitude and I knew the electrician liked me,” Jack said. “I also knew he was concerned I was going to get assigned to another job. So I took a big risk. I asked him to get me an official letter with a Nazi stamp on it saying that I worked for the Nazis, so I could come back every day to help him. My hope was that if they caught me in a raid and I showed the paper, I would be let go.”
The electrician was able to get the letter, and Jack made sure he always had it with him.
“Whatever they decided the rules of the game were, I made up my mind to play by them,” Jack said. “I just wanted all this over with so that I could get back to the life I had known. I still believed the war would end soon and my sister would return and Papa would come for us.”
In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. He also stepped up his war on the Jews. By the end of the year, one section of Jack’s village was turned into a restricted living area for Jews. To make room for this ghetto, non-Jewish families were forced to move out of their homes, and three or four Jewish families were moved into each one. Jack and his brother and mother were assigned to one room in a small house.
“This was not as bad as a city ghetto with barbed wire, but we were very crowded and we had little food,” Jack said. “We did not know why the Nazis wanted us all together like that.”
They would find out soon enough.