by Sam Pivnik
The 23rd Light Artillery Unit had long gone and we never saw them again. We Jews were used to fighting back in our little scraps over football and Easter but this was different. We were civilians and hard though it was to follow, the rabbi’s teachings had always been to turn the other cheek. Between them, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, two men who dismissed the rabbis’ teachings out of hand, condemned millions of my people to death.
Officially, although we never used the term, Bedzin became Bendsburg in the German Gau of Upper Silesia. The position of our Christian neighbours in the town was that they faced a stark choice. Those with German ancestry could sign papers to become Volksdeutsche, halfway to being an Aryan. The rest were told to leave, carrying their world on their backs or in their carts and prams and settle in the area the Germans called the General Government. Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer, was put in charge. ‘Poland shall be treated like a colony,’ he announced over the radios, while the people of Bedzin still had radios. ‘The Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German Empire.’ His headquarters were in Kraków, but his tentacles reached out to all of us. Jews of course could not become German citizens but now we were liable to the Nuremberg Laws which had been operating against German Jews for four years.
Jews could not work in the professions. Rapaport and other Jewish teachers in the schools lost their positions. We could not, even if we’d wanted to, join the army, but in any case our army was on the point of collapse somewhere along the banks of the River Bug and nobody considered trying to join the Wehrmacht. As for university, forget it. Bright boys from my school had their education cut short – as did I – that September and Poland was to suffer for years from its lost generation of intellectuals.
Along with countless other small businessmen, my father became a wage slave – and the wages were pitiful – as German civilians came in and bought up Jewish businesses at knockdown prices. They brought in their own Aryan managers and if part of the Jewish workforce was retained, it was always with a lower status, no bonuses and the most basic wage. I remember standing in my father’s workshop, perhaps in that October, as what had happened began to sink in. Uniformed officials had marched into the little courtyard where Nathan and I kicked a ball around. They had taken my father’s scissors, thread, sewing machine and bales of cloth. And of course there were no tailoring orders any more. Most of the civilian officials were gone and though I never thought about it quite like this, some of Uncle Moyshe’s army clients in nearby Szopoenice were probably dead.
It was six months before Alfred Rossner came to Bedzin and until then we got by as best we could. Rossner was an odd-looking man with missing teeth and a bad hip. No one knew it at the time but he was a haemophiliac and consequently lucky to be alive. He was what the Germans called a Treuhänder, a trusty, who managed two clothing factories and worked directly for the SS. One of his leading managers was Arje Ferleizer, a Jew who had once employed Rossner and who had got out of Germany in 1938 to escape persecution. It was rather ironic that he ended up in Bedzin.
Both Hendla and my father went to work in Rossner’s ‘shop’ along with nearly 10,000 Jews he employed until 1943. We didn’t appreciate the dangerous game Rossner was playing on our behalf. Unlike the more famous Oscar Schindler, Rossner was not an independent businessman but a manager on behalf of the SS and his options to help the Jews were limited. Even so, my father and Hendla were taken on as skilled workers and they were deemed indispensable to the German war effort. Accordingly they were given Sonderausweis, special blue card passes that kept them, at least in theory, safe from the random violence of the SS. We didn’t know it at the time but these passes would help to keep us together as a family for just a little longer. And while Alfred Rossner greased Nazi palms, provided senior SS men with extra-special uniforms and kept their wives in the height of 1940s fashion, he was also keeping the Pivniks alive.
It wasn’t so easy to find work for me. Father was a master tailor and Hendla, at eighteen, was already a skilled seamstress, but I was a young boy, with no real training at all. The basic sewing I could manage couldn’t hold a candle to the skills most of Rossner’s people possessed. Then I had a lucky break. I had always been fond of horses – we all were – and one animal I used to pat and stroke in his hames belonged to a Jewish delivery man named Dombek. I’d feed and groom the horse and work with him in his furniture delivery business, running errands, lifting, carrying. I don’t remember what he paid me – it was probably peanuts – but it was my first wage and I was proud to be helping out at home.
All this changed early in 1940. By this time I had found work in a furniture factory belonging to a man named Killov and managed by Herr Haüber. These men were kind Germans too, but not in the same league as Rossner. The factory made furniture and wooden packing cases and the workforce was segregated, Jews and Gentiles. I was making the heavy beech-wood crates used for transporting and storing the 500-kilogram bombs that the Dorniers and Heinkels of the Luftwaffe were raining on towns and cities all over Europe. We had no idea as 1940 became 1941 what was happening in the rest of the world. By this time we’d lost our radios and mail was a thing of the past as far as we were concerned. My father asked me to mention that I had an elder brother available for work and since Dombek no longer had any help with his horses, it made sense that Nathan worked for him.
If anything, Nathan loved Dombek’s horses more than I did and he ended up in charge of two of them, until the cart slipped on the hill to the station one day and went over his foot. Eventually he got a hernia and his work with Dombek was over.
My time in the factory was surreal. It felt like we were all part of a machine. Us Jews were paid less than the Gentiles, of course, and with their typical Teutonic obsession the Germans deducted tax and social security from our weekly wage packet. These deductions increased as the ‘contributions’ called Winterhilfe were levied, providing cash for warm clothing for the troops on the bitter, appalling Eastern Front.
A vital factor in my work at the Killov factory was the food, a constant which became more important as everything else began to fall apart. We had soup or stew at midday and a leisurely forty-five minutes in which to eat it. Being young – probably the youngest on Killov’s roster – I caught the eye of Herr Haüber and he took a fatherly interest in me. He’d get me to run errands and in the early days before the orders from Berlin became ever harsher, I would walk his little daughter to school in the morning. Nathan did the same. This was the Furstenberger school, for Gentiles, which continued to function after the invasion. If ever I had to go to Haüber’s home – I sometimes drove him there for lunch in his two-horse carriage – Frau Haüber would slip me extra food for the family. I’d like to say it was a pot of jam, a loaf of bread, sausage, tea, sugar, butter … but that was the stuff of the Garden of Eden and it was already becoming a distant memory. Even so, vegetables and potatoes were very welcome to a family like ours. Chana was still only seven and the boys Wolf and Josek younger still. Even Majer was only eleven and in a town where jobs were at a premium, he couldn’t earn anything.
But the factory had its downside. Killov and Haüber might have been kind but their underlings were not. The official who clocked us in and out every day was a confirmed Nazi and regarded us with contempt. He was a vicious bastard with only one arm and there was always an anti-Semitic jibe, often followed by a clip round the ear if he was in that kind of mood. Nobody complained, nobody did anything, largely because the Poles had mainly become Volksdeutsche. In many ways this was the hardest thing to take during the Occupation – friends and neighbours now stared at us with ill-concealed hatred, glad they didn’t have to work alongside us in the workshops. When the drip-drip of Himmler’s rabid racial policy was reinforced by guns and dogs and the total application of martial law, it’s surprising how quickly people changed.
Beyond the factory, life was getting harder by the day. Shops and businesses began to reopen in the weeks following the invasion but of course they were run by Ge
rmans or at least Polish Volksdeutsche and Jews were not allowed to use them. So, confined to certain areas of the town and able to buy from a limited range of premises, queues – the symbol of home life in wartime all over Europe – became the norm. Women and children in particular would stand for hours in the pouring rain or the biting wind just to get some bread. This was why the Killov soup was so vital – Nathan and I at least had one half-decent meal a day. I knew our parents went without, to make sure that the little ones had enough.
But queuing wasn’t just an inconvenience caused by wartime shortages. We wore no yellow armbands in those days – that stigma would come later – and non-Orthodox Jews looked pretty much the same as everybody else. Polish kids – some of my friends among them – would scuttle along the lines, shouting ‘Jude! Jude!’ and pointing to Jews in the crowd. They got extra butter and marmalade for this, like the pieces of silver in the Christian New Testament. The police – by this time entirely German – would haul the Jews out of line and slap them around, often leaving them and their blood on the snow.
There was something of a joke in Bedzin in the early days of Occupation: you either worked for Killov or Rossner or you were a member of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council – there wasn’t anything else. Like all the other institutions of the Nazi state, it was a puppet creation. Its basic function was to maintain order in the Jewish community by informing on troublemakers and getting us all identified and registered. My father was not a member but several of his friends were and the Judenrat headquarters were just along from our house on Modzejowska Street, nearer to the marketplace. Outside the door was a notice-board with important messages in Yiddish, translating Nazi orders so that no one could be in any doubt as to what was happening. It may have been jackbooted Germans who took away my father’s sewing machine but it was the Judenrat who told them where to look. Systematically the Jewish community in Bedzin was looted and the leaders of that community connived in that.
The leader of the councils in Eastern Silesia was Meniok Meryn, who acted as a go-between for the German Gauleiter and Molczacki, head of the Bedzin Judenrat. Some people regarded Meryn as a chancer and a collaborator; others believed that he slowed down the speed, at least, of Nazi persecution. Molczacki, it was rumoured, used to ferret through his employees’ waste paper baskets looking for evidence against them. I was just a kid; what did I know?
The real extortion started in February 1940. In that month the Russians were fighting the Finns in the frozen north, using skis and snow-camouflage. We of course had no knowledge of any of this. Bedzin was one of the few places in Poland where the Nazis had not set up an actual ghetto, so you could say it was easier than it might have been for us. Even so, Bedzin represented a siege situation. No one was allowed to leave or enter the town without permission from the SS and the parameters of my life were more restricted still. I walked to the factory and I walked home. From time to time I’d go with Nathan and my grandmother to pick over the slag heaps on the edge of town looking for coal pieces good enough to burn. There were police and guards everywhere and you got the impression they were just itching for an excuse to pull those triggers.
In that February, the Nazis pressured the Judenrat into handing over more than 15 kilograms of gold and 60 of silver from the Jewish community. This was in recompense for some imaginary crime we’d committed. No doubt if pressed, they’d say we’d killed Christ or used the blood of Christian children in some ritual – this was before they stopped having to find reasons for such punishment at all. Council members went round the town, knocking on doors and shuttered windows, invading the sanctity of our homes, which was all we had left. I don’t know if they managed to reach the demanded amount or how much was still squirrelled away under floorboards and in attics against the day – and surely it could come – when the Germans left. We all had to hand in any ski equipment we had (the Pivniks had none) presumably for the war against the Finns. Our radios had already gone for the most part, but anybody still in possession of one lost it now. Then they banned us from various streets and public areas, creating a sort of ghetto without a name. Nathan became a victim of this. Caught in a Nazi no-go area, trying to obtain bread illegally, he was frogmarched to the town gaol. I don’t remember the formalities, whether he had to appear before a magistrate or an SS official. I do remember the unbearable tension at home when he’d gone and the helplessness my father felt when he couldn’t do anything about it. Nathan was there for six weeks.
Yet, despite it all, somehow life went on. The factory was bearable – in fact I looked forward to going to work. And I could still manage to kick a football around occasionally, even if the number of friends I played with had dwindled. And I still had my pigeons, cooing unconcerned in Mr Rojecki’s loft. For them, I remember thinking, there was no war, no clip around the ear, no tightrope to walk. If I’d thought about it though, I would have realised that there wasn’t as much food for them either.
Food was a major problem. Nathan and I were growing boys, so was Majer. Ten of us lived in the little house at Number 77 and only four of us brought in any money. My grandmother was too old and my mother had her hands full with the little ones (Josek was only three). There was a black market of sorts, people who knew people, and you’d occasionally see cash and food parcels changing hands furtively on shadowy street corners. And we still had some Polish friends.
We didn’t know it then, but the Reich orders that were being drawn up in Berlin would come down hardest of all on Poland in the months ahead. If a Pole helped a Jew and gave them shelter by the time of the Aktions, the removal to the camps, that Pole and his entire family would be sentenced to death. It hadn’t reached that point, of course, in 1940, but the Christians were still taking a risk. They’d slip us food when they could and this sometimes put the older Pivniks in an awkward position. One day I came home with a food parcel tucked under my jacket. It was a present from the mother of my friend Dudek and it was pork sausage. Now this didn’t prove too much of a problem for me – in the years before the war I’d often eaten pork at Dudek’s house – but to my father it was anathema. With all that had happened to Judaism in Bedzin – the burning of the synagogue, the closure of the schools, the hangings, burnings and shootings of Jews and the wholesale treachery of the Judenrat – there were still principles and my father could not deviate from the teachings that were part of his life. His initial reaction was to throw the sausage away. I don’t remember a row between my parents, nor even a discussion. Perhaps father just looked into mother’s eyes and what he saw there was enough. She was a good Jew too, but her children were hungry and for a mother that was the only priority. In the end, he left the house while we ate the pork, and from that point on, that was the unspoken agreement. We wouldn’t eat pork in front of him and we wouldn’t tell him if we ate it behind his back. It was one of the prices we all had to pay for being the targets of madmen.
In some ways, the Occupation hit my father hardest of all. He was a proud man, a traditionalist, and he was used to having the respect of the community. Now he had none. And it got worse when one day he came home, shaking and covered in blood. He’d gone out to try to buy bread and had been gone for some hours. We weren’t concerned at first because that was how it was with queues. You just had to wait for as long as it took. This time a neighbour brought him home. He’d been denounced in the queue – the dreaded pointed finger which would become such a feature of my life from now on – and several policemen had had a go at him. He was badly shaken but the wounds on the inside must have been worse than those we could see. From then on, the only place he went was Rossner’s factory. Hendla, Nathan and I stood in the queues. It was my mother who became the rock in our family, the one who kept us together. Looking into my father’s face I could see that all the fight – all the life – had gone out of him.
The younger generation had more of a will to fight back – the exuberance and folly of youth, I suppose, and a sort of resistance movement developed in Bedzin in the spring
of 1940. It came from the youth organisations I had been too young to join before the invasion and couldn’t now because they were technically illegal. Poale Zion, Dror, Gordonia, Hashomer Hatzair, Hanoar Hatzoni, Hashomer Hadati – I remember their names still, as many young Germans would remember the anti-Nazi Edelweiss Piraten movement in Germany itself. Hendla in particular was heavily involved in Gordonia, although her dreams of going to Palestine seemed more remote than ever now. One of my cousins, Hirsh Wandasman, was involved still further and it was people like him the Nazis watched most carefully.
The way to do this was via informers and there were two of them in particular I had cause to remember. One of them was a publican called Kornfeld. He would have been in his thirties, I suppose, and before the queue incident confined my father to Number 77 and the Rossner factory, he and Nathan would occasionally go to the pub on Saturday afternoons (with Nathan strictly on the lemonade!). Kornfeld’s brother-in-law was a little younger and worked as a shoemaker; his name was Machtinger.
I was coming home from work one evening when I saw Machtinger ahead of me, walking along Modzejowska. With him was a German police officer, a nasty bastard named Mitschker I’d come across before. The two of them were behaving, as the police would say today, suspiciously, checking to see no one saw them as they sneaked into the side door of the house of Piekowski, the horse dealer. As one of the richest men in Bedzin, Piekowski had been approached by the Judenrat to help with the extortion problem. He’d flatly refused, even though another horse dealer, Wechselmann, had given what he could.
What intrigued me about Machtinger and Mitschker was that they went into the ground-floor apartment of Piekowski’s grand house. The Piekowskis lived on the first and second floors; their pretty blonde daughters lived in a separate flat on the ground floor. I waited for a minute or two – there was no sign of the Piekowski parents. Then I ducked through the bushes and round the back of the house, standing on tiptoe to peep through a gap in the curtains of the window that overlooked the garden.
