It was a beautiful morning.
It was an awful morning.
Ten thousand Jews were forced to walk along Miła Street in the warm light of the September sun, toward the gates that the Germans had erected. We moved forward slowly. Very slowly. The Nazis and the owners of the workshops were waiting at the gates, and decided according to the tags which way we had to go. One gate meant life, the other one meant death.
Every person caught in this human cauldron was stricken with fear. Including the Jews with the tags. We had got to know the Germans well enough by now to know that they would be the first to break their own rules for no apparent reason. A tag handed out by them was by no means a guarantee of safety.
The streets were lined with Ukrainians, Latvians, and Germans hitting people with truncheons or whips. There was no chance that anyone in the terrible procession was going to fight back. The crowds of people stuck in the cauldron were far too disturbed for that. I could hear a man shouting at the gates, “I don’t want to work! I said I don’t want to work!”
That surprised me. Someone was actually willing to go to the trains?
“I’ll stay with my children!”
Then he went quiet. Probably they’d let him have his last wish. He was just another Jew who was going to be gassed, as far as the Nazis were concerned. With his children! Who cared?
A woman walking beside me in the cauldron was carrying a sleeping baby in her arms. I could see that she was wearing one of the treasured tags round her neck. Her life would be saved. But not the life of her child. The woman noticed me staring at her. She had heard the man shouting to be allowed to go to the gas chambers with his children, too. Quietly, she said to me, “It’s always possible to have another child.”
I didn’t know what she meant at first.
“But if I die with the child, I can’t bring new life into the world.”
She was willing to leave her baby. And she’d worked out reasons to convince herself. Reasons that sounded more like life than death.
I felt sick.
I looked away and tried to see if I could spot Hannah, Mama, or Ruth anywhere in the cauldron. I didn’t see them. Good. There was still a chance that they might be able to survive somehow instead of me.
I didn’t bother looking for my brother, though. He must be heading toward the Umschlagplatz, too. I couldn’t see why the Nazis would allow anyone without a tag to remain alive. The one time their rules always applied was when they were intended for killing Jews.
I was stuck in the cauldron for about two hours before I reached the selection area. When I reached the SS man, I wasn’t even nervous or afraid. I already knew which way he would send me. There was no hope left. I felt stunned and as heavy as lead. I didn’t look up at him. Without a word, just with a small hand movement, he signaled for me to walk through the gate that led to death.
As I stumbled toward it, the woman with the child was still beside me. The SS man saw her tag, and she was allowed to live. Without a word, she handed me her sleeping baby. I was to take it to death instead of her.
Before I could say anything, she was gone through the other gate. I had the choice of being there for this stranger’s child. Being there for it in its final hours, no matter how hard that might be. Or just laying it down there on ground. Where the soldiers would either shoot it or simply trample it to death with their boots.
What kind of person did I want to be?