by Sam Pivnik
I don’t actually remember what I did that Saturday – or the Sunday, come to that. I suppose I played with my mates and we swapped rumours we’d heard on street corners and in our respective houses – except mine, where nothing was said. Some of the adults were clutching at the straws of Allied support. The British and the French, Polish radio said, had issued an ultimatum to Germany; either pull out of Poland or face a war on two fronts. That had to be good, the adults said; not even a madman like Adolf Hitler would risk a war like that.
I don’t remember hearing any of the larger political stuff and my father never talked about it in front of us kids. It may be that Hendla knew, but she was a girl. She wasn’t likely to understand what was going on, on those grounds alone!
Historians today can’t decide just how mad Adolf Hitler was. Some of them point to his narcissism, his arrogance, his obsessive racism and his increasing megalomania. The Second World War, they say, was Hitler’s war; you don’t have to look any further than this comical little Bavarian corporal (who actually came from Austria) to explain the ghastly events of the 1940s. Others, from a different generation, look at external influences; they talk about the effects on Germany of losing the Great War; of the economic fallout from the Wall Street Crash that hit struggling Germany hardest of all. They talk about the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles which left a once proud nation humiliated and bereft.
I had no idea of what a ‘greater Germany’ was or of Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum (living space) for his people. A believer as he was in geopolitics, he thought that anywhere with Germans living in it should be part of Germany. Have a look at my country’s map overleaf as it was when I was thirteen. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had created the Polish Corridor, a strip of territory that led to the free port of Danzig on the Baltic Sea and was our only outlet for maritime trade. Hitler had said to Colonel Josef Beck, the Polish foreign minister, ‘Danzig is German, will always remain German and will sooner or later become part of Germany.’ And to the east of Danzig lay East Prussia, part of the newly united Germany since 1871 and Hitler said it was not right that East Prussia was physically separated from the mother country by an alien power. The solution? Simple. Close the Corridor and incorporate East Prussia. Will the Poles object? Of course they will. Invade them and have done with it.
I knew none of this then, nor the hatred the man had in his heart for the Jewish people. All I knew was that all day Sunday and Monday the refugees continued to stream through, the carts, the dogs, the kids – and that it was chaos.
And of course, there was no school. Did I cheer and skip around? I don’t remember. If I’d thought about it, I would have realised that the first of the constants in my life had already gone. School is one of the solidities, the certainties of childhood. It looms at least as large as family and faith. It’s not only the place where you learn, it’s the place where you learn to cope with the outside world. The Rapaport school never opened again while I was in Bedzin and my formal education came to an abrupt end.
It was Monday 4 September when they came. Among the most bizarre, yet persistent rumours was that the British and French armies were coming to rescue us. Nobody, least of all a thirteen-year-old kid, stopped to ask how this was possible. How had they got here and so quickly? The actual situation was that in Britain Neville Chamberlain made his famous announcement to his people at quarter-past eleven on the morning of the previous day. It was not until five o’clock in the afternoon that the French followed suit. In fact there would never be British or French troops in Poland, but no one knew that at the time.
To our north the Lodz Army had been beaten in a series of running fights; Reichenau had reached the Warta and List was marching on Kraków. By Monday he’d covered eighty kilometres. But rumour, not fact, was the currency in Bedzin in those September days. The British and the French were on their way. Relief. Euphoria. People were laughing, gabbling. Women and girls had collected the flowers of that hot, dry summer to throw at our saviours, to welcome the brave. We waited along the main street, nattering, excited; listening, shortly after midday, to the rumble of heavy vehicles roaring along the roads from the west. We heard cheering. People further down must be able to see them already, the flags of red, white and blue.
The first sight I had was of dark motorcycles with sidecars. Their riders wore low-rimmed stahlhelmes and grey-green uniforms with rifles slung over their backs. They were dirty from their hours on the road and the dust of summer lay like a film on their gauntlets and goggles. They were moving slowly, looking around them with wary eyes. Hard men and hard faces. Behind them came grey-painted trucks, all crashing gears and rattling tailgates. Each one bristled with soldiers armed to the teeth and scowling at us. Between the trucks came armoured cars, with cannon and machine-gun mountings – the face of total war.
The mood had changed. The flowers hung limply from the women’s hands; the cheering had stopped. The chatter was stilled and the smiles were frozen on frightened faces. I was standing near some Jewish refugees from Düsseldorf who had moved into our apartment building two years before to escape Nazi persecution as Hitler’s racist net had tightened. I don’t remember their name, but I remember the mother putting into words what we were all thinking – ‘This isn’t the French or the British. These are German soldiers.’
It was as if the sentence was the signal for the crowd to break up. People scattered, taking their flowers with them or throwing them with contempt on the cobbles. Home – that was everyone’s aim. Get home, bolt the doors, cover the windows. Work out – somehow – what to do. I didn’t go home. Just as I was fascinated by the bombers of two days earlier, I was mesmerised by the Wehrmacht and saw a sight I couldn’t understand at the time and can’t fully explain even today. In the vast cavalcade of troops pouring into the town was an open-backed truck driven by Germans but carrying men in Polish uniforms. They were laughing and joking among themselves as if riding in the enemy’s vehicles was the most ordinary and natural thing in the world. I suppose I should have looked to see if they were armed or not because if they weren’t, they may well have been prisoners of war. But if they were, why did they appear to be enjoying themselves? If they were Germans, why were they wearing Polish uniforms? People talked about this for days and we never found the answer. Most likely they were Volksdeutsche, Poles of German extraction happy to welcome the invaders with open arms. One of them was a short, stout man I remember, the Kappellmeister or band master of our local regiment with the three pips of a captain on his shoulder. He used to teach music to us kids in the Rapaport school from time to time. He never went off to fight, never left Bedzin as far as I recall. But like many of the events of the next six years, I still don’t know quite what went on.
I went home to a kind of siege mentality. We were now in exactly the same predicament as the refugees we had seen passing through. Now it was our home ringed by Axis steel. But if we took to the road, loaded our belongings onto a cart – father’s sewing machine, Nathan’s Baloofka bike, my skates, all our worldly goods – where would we go? That Monday night we stayed indoors, occasionally venturing as far as the courtyard but not out into the street. There were trucks driving around as darkness gathered, loud-hailers barking in their distorted way that everyone must stay in their homes or be shot. We did as we were told, listening to the growl of the trucks and the sporadic crackle of rifle and pistol fire.
It’s difficult to put into words after all this time, and everything that happened after, how I felt. I was scared, of course; who wouldn’t be? I’d been brought up – we all had – to be loyal Poles; we’d said a prayer for the President every morning in school, just as my grandfather would probably have said one for the Russian Tsar. I didn’t know then that the Polish government didn’t care very much for Jews. Two years before the Germans arrived there had been anti-Semitic violence in some Polish towns, violence that had looked suspiciously like a pogrom. For the adults there was a sense of déjà vu about all this. Throughout time the Je
ws had been the victims of persecution. We had been kicked out of countless European countries, told to move on, find somewhere else – ‘You have no right to live among us.’
If I was aware of anti-Semitism in my own life, it was only for a few days after the Christians had celebrated their Easter festival. I played with Gentiles as well as Jews at all other times of the year – Jurek and the Gutsek brothers among them – but at Easter there’d be fist fights as the Gentiles accused us of killing Jesus Christ. But there were always fist fights – over a football foul, a chance remark. If the war had not come when it did, doubtless we’d have been fighting over girls in the years ahead. It was all over and forgotten in a day. You carried your cuts and bruises with pride and then you forgot about it. The only trouble I heard about – and Nathan talked about it sometimes – were fights after football matches if the Gentile team lost. It was always started by outsiders. We had a good police chief who kept the lid on things like that. Until that September, the pogroms never came to Bedzin.
Would this be the same? And if not, could we Jews move on, as we’d always done, and find another safe haven? Where, in the end, could I find another Garden of Eden?
* * *
The next days are hazy in my mind. Elsewhere in Poland, I learned much later, the army was pushed ever further back, leaving us isolated and defenceless. On 6 September, List’s Fourteenth Army took Kraków and the Polish government left Warsaw. Their army, exhausted, outnumbered and outfought nearly everywhere, was ordered back to a line along the rivers Vistula, Narew and San. Within a day they had to fall back to the Bug River.
Meanwhile, our own priority was to eat. We must have been allowed out to try to buy food but the curfew still held and there was no one except Germans on the streets after a certain hour. By seven o’clock we had to be indoors. We couldn’t be seen on the streets again until eight in the morning. There’d been no fighting in Bedzin so in the town centre there were none of the ruined buildings or smashed walls that were to characterise so many of Europe’s cities in these months. There were however soldiers everywhere, most of them in the grey-green of the Wehrmacht or wearing the chain around their necks to denote the military police. By the Saturday following the invasion – still no one mentioned the synagogue – I noticed the uniforms begin to change. Increasingly, we spotted the blue-green tunics of the civil police and soon men started arriving in light brown tunics with red, black and white swastika armbands – Nazi party bureaucrats who moved into the town hall and other civic buildings with filing cabinets, typewriters and paperwork. One of the many things I learned about the Nazis in the years ahead was their obsession with detail. Everything in triplicate, cross-referenced and filed. They were proud of their achievement. Most alarmingly, the Bedzin police were out on the streets too; they may have been Volksdeutsche or they may have just been jumping on the passing bandwagon of survival.
I also noticed the round-ups that began almost at once. Men were ‘collected’ by the soldiers, especially the Orthodox Jews with their black clothes, ringleted hair and long beards. They were herded together in squares and at street corners and marched out to the town’s limits, to the bombed factories that we’d seen hit the week before. Their job was to find unexploded bombs because bombs could be ‘recycled’ for the war effort. They had no training and no safety equipment. They were human minesweepers and they were expendable. If a bomb went off and a couple of Jews were blown to pieces or suffered terrible injuries, so what?
I remember very clearly Friday 8 September. That was the day the Einsatzgruppen arrived. We had no name for them then and no idea what the precise mission was that they were undertaking. Most of them looked like policemen in a sort of combat uniform. Others had Wehrmacht uniforms but they were somehow different, with black epaulettes and collar flashes. They wore eagle badges on their sleeves and they turned up in the usual motley collection of motorcycles, trucks and jeeps. These were the execution squads, the men tasked by the Nazi high command with systematic attacks on my people. This particular unit I know now was commanded by SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch, a Silesian nobleman who had been a member of the Nazi party for years. The gruppe was about two thousand strong, made up of that peculiar combination which characterised these units. They were all members of the Sicherheitsdienst, the various police departments called Gestapo, Kripo and Ordo. They were ordered by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to spread fear and terror throughout the Katowice area. They were the beginning of what the world has come to know as the Holocaust.
That afternoon I was indoors because it really wasn’t safe to be anywhere else. From time to time we heard the crackle of shots ringing round the town’s streets. And then, as the afternoon turned to evening, there was a smell of burning. It was different from the factories that had been blitzed the week before and I was keen to find out what was going on. My parents of course wouldn’t have any of that. My days of kicking a ball around the streets in safety had gone. Mother kept her brood with her. But as dusk fell I crept out of the apartment and climbed onto the roof of a lean-to shed against a high wall. I could see the sky glowing red and the black smoke billowing into the purple of the oncoming night. It was the great synagogue, the symbol of my people and it was ablaze, the timbers cracking and collapsing on the ridge below the castle. And it was Shabbat, our special day.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, on tiptoe, transfixed by the sight. There were no fire engines racing to put the blaze out and the fire was spreading to the buildings around the synagogue, all of them Jewish businesses, Jewish homes. Not until I heard Hendla shouting at me to get down could I pull myself away from that sight. The Pivniks were at home that weekend, huddled together as the world we knew was falling apart outside.
On Monday morning we summoned up the nerve to go out. We may well have had no food left by now so it was probably a matter of necessity. The sight we saw was almost unimaginable. All weekend the Einsatzgruppen had been carrying out their mission and the results were everywhere. There were bodies lying in the streets, sprawled in the agony of death, rivulets of their blood a rusty brown in the gutters. I had never seen a dead body before and these were people I knew – neighbours and family friends who days ago had been carrying out their work and going about their business without, I now realise, a real care in the world. Most of them were elderly Jews, easily identifiable by their devout traditional clothes and hats – the easiest targets for the rifle butts and bullets of the Einsatzgruppen. It would be a comfort to think that these men died quickly, but I don’t think it was like that. They would have been taunted, humiliated and slapped around first, kicked to the ground and shot where they lay – the bruises on their blackening faces were testimony to that. And it wasn’t only the old and the Orthodox who lay there. There were younger people too, of both sexes, and even kids of my age, caught in the murderous random firing of the Nazis that we had heard all weekend.
The most ghastly sight I remember was that of Jews hanging from the trees that grew in the square, black-coated men who looked like some ghastly parody of Christmas tree decorations. I remember how still they looked, their hands and feet dangling, their bodies at the mercy of the weather. I didn’t count corpses and none of us looked too closely in case the Einsatzgruppen decided we should join them. Only God knows how many people died in Bedzin that weekend and it was not only Jews who died.
Some of the shootings must have been random. Someone running for cover between houses. Someone looking for family. Friends. Other murders were planned, deliberate. Bedzin, like every other Polish town, had its intellectuals, its nationalist groups, the right- and left-wingers who all knew clearly before September 1939 exactly in which direction Polish politics should go. We know now why these people were targeted. They were potential trouble and somebody in the community must have fingered them – how else would the Einsatzgruppen know on which doors to knock? They were hauled out of their houses, frogmarched to the edge of town and shot. That was the rumour, and after what
I saw that Monday in the streets around Modzejowska I couldn’t doubt it.
In seven days the world we knew and understood and loved had gone. I could read the bewilderment in my father’s eyes. When trouble had loomed in the past he had always gone to the synagogue, to the rabbi, to talk to the other elders and ask God for guidance. Now the synagogue was a still-smouldering heap of rubble and many of the elders lay stiff and dead in the streets.
Historians still argue today over how many people died that weekend. Apart from those who may have burned to death in their own houses, the best estimate was about a hundred men, women and children; perhaps eighty of these were Jews. It seemed at the time to be far more to me – after all, wasn’t just one too many?
But the Pivniks held together with a new-found stoicism. How much worse, we asked ourselves, could all this get?
3
Occupation
The Rapaport school had closed. The synagogue was a burnt out shell. My father was no longer a small businessman with pride in his tailoring skill and his status in the community. He was out of work like almost everybody else and he was a potential target for the uniformed thugs who roamed the streets.
We all had to adapt, to come to terms with a new way of life which, we didn’t realise then, had swept the old one away for ever. Rumours reached us from the east, and the history books confirm it today, that the Russians invaded Poland on 17 September. We only had eighteen battalions along the River Bug because all our fighting units were in the west, trying to hold off the Wehrmacht. Poland was like a nut in the steel jaws of a nutcracker and the next day the President and the Commander-in-Chief were imprisoned. They left messages telling the troops to fight on.
