Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  I was fourteen by this time and even though what I saw wasn’t much of a rite of passage, I was astonished nevertheless. There were beer bottles on the table, the room lit with lamps to compensate for the drawn curtains. The younger girl was about eighteen, not much older than me but a woman in every sense. She was stark naked, lying on the settee in a languid pose. The older one was reclining on a bed. She’d have been a few years older with a fuller figure and I stood transfixed. I’d often seen those girls around, of course, but never with their clothes off. Mitschker and Machtinger couldn’t get into the action fast enough. They were both struggling with their shirts, throwing off their boots and wrenching their trousers down.

  I suppose my tongue must have been hanging out but this was no ordinary peep show. I knew that these girls weren’t enjoying themselves, even if the men were. They were going through the motions, their faces stony and passionless. This was blackmail of some sort, payment for an easy life and for the authorities to look the other way. I got scared and ran away.

  Life is full of ‘ifs’ isn’t it? If this wasn’t wartime, if we weren’t Occupied, if I hadn’t known about the treachery of Mitschker and Machtinger, I’d probably have dashed around to Dudek and the others and enjoyed being centre of attention while I told them all what I’d seen, their eyes wide and their mouths open before the sniggering started. But this wasn’t a story to spread. Its consequences were too drastic. Word got round nevertheless – and not from me. An SS man sleeping with a Jew was a shooting offence. And there was no honour among lowlife like that.

  Mitschker had a scare – I don’t know the details – but he dropped his two informers like hot cakes. Machtinger and Kornfeld were among the first to go once the deportations started. Piekowski, his wife and daughters followed later.

  I couldn’t at the time take in what was happening. Mine was a constantly shifting world in which policemen had sex with girls they should have been protecting and the Judenrat, our own people, were waiting for a chance to earn Brownie points, getting into bed in a different way with the SS.

  It must have been in April 1941 that refugees began to stream into Bedzin. Others, they told us, were moving to nearby Sosnowiec. They weren’t refugees in the same sense as the homeless people running away from the Wehrmacht in the autumn of 1939, but their homes had gone nonetheless. They came, in their carts and wagons, sledges and prams, carrying as many of their belongings as they could, from the town of Oswiecim, just over forty kilometres away. I’d never been to the place, but it was not unlike a small version of Bedzin with half its population Jewish. The photograph that somebody took at the time of the new arrivals confirms what I remember – by this time we all had to wear yellow armbands with a black Star of David. They had been moved out of their homes because the Germans were building a big new camp at the artillery barracks near their town and there was no room for them. We didn’t realise then how many of them would be moving back there before too long.

  It must have been about this time – and perhaps because of the new influx – that the noticeboard outside the Judenrat headquarters announced that every Jew must have his photograph taken. Throughout time people have been afraid of this sort of registration and classification. Primitive peoples in nineteenth-century empires were afraid of the camera because they believed it stole their souls. Excessive record-keeping, often a forerunner to increased taxation, was viewed with dread too. In England in 1086 when William the Conqueror’s men asked people how many ploughs and cattle they had, they thought it was Judgement Day from God. The optimists among us thought we might be deported to Palestine and Hendla would have her wish after all. Pessimists predicted every hellhole they could think of, perhaps in the Far East. I know now that this was part of the Madagascar Plan, one of the many ‘final solutions’ the Nazis envisaged for us Jews.

  The plan was hatched the previous year and there had indeed been a brief flirtation with Palestine among the Nazi high command, but it was considered unviable. Madagascar belonged to the French but France had been overrun by the Wehrmacht, except Vichy France in the south, which was collaborating with the Germans. The cash to send us all to the island off Africa would be found from confiscated Jewish property. Even at 228,000 square miles and the world’s fourth largest island, Madagascar was too small to house all the Jews in Europe – not that our continued prosperity was of any concern to the Nazi high command. The problem arose because the British would not play ball with Hitler, and Britain, as even the Germans had to acknowledge, ruled the waves. Nevertheless, we all dutifully stood for our ‘mug shots’. The one of my grandmother still survives – one of only two pictures I have of her; she was slowly going blind, even then.

  We struggled on as best we could but the arrival of the Oswiecim Jews made resources more limited still and the black market worked overtime. Father, a broken man though he was becoming, still had the energy to smuggle scraps of cloth out of Rossner’s uniform factory and he’d sit at home at Number 77, cross-legged on the floor with his needle and thread, making clothes for Gentiles in exchange for flour or some sausage.

  But danger was never far away. Men and women in the factory sometimes lost fingers in the unguarded machinery. There were no safety regulations for Jewish workers. But one day things got too close for comfort. Our near neighbours were the Schwartzbergs; they lived three doors down from us and in the spring of 1941 Mr Schwartzberg and his eldest son were taken away by the Nazi police. I didn’t see it but it was the talk of the street for days. Their crime? Schwartzberg senior had bought a cow from a Gentile farmer, slaughtered it and sold the beef. How flagrant could the man be, the Nazis would have asked themselves. Clearly, Schwartzberg had enough money to buy the animal in the first place, even though he should have handed any surplus to the Judenrat. He was also undermining the SS ration system which was at subsistence level. And he was raising two fingers at their authority. We heard after a few days that both Schwartzbergs had been shot.

  Next came the Wechselmanns, another family we knew well. One of them had bought a sack of flour from a Gentile and all of them had eaten the bread it made. They hanged the Wechselmanns and I saw their bodies dangling from the trees that ringed the main cemetery. Again, as with the invasion, the purpose was deterrence. Cut out the black-marketeering or this – this frozen, grey corpse with the awkwardly jutting neck – will be you.

  In the eighteen months of Nazi Occupation, I saw my parents ground down by the sheer strain of keeping the family going. I saw it in the streets too and in Killov’s factory – young men grown old and grey with fear, with malnutrition, with exhaustion. I was working twelve-hour shifts as a boy of fourteen and struggling to find a crust of bread to eat. I didn’t appreciate the fact that we were still together as a family, still hoping that official policy would change; that one day all Germans would be like Rossner and Killov. And what, after all, had we done? The Schwartzbergs and the Wechselmanns had broken the law, but it was an unreasonable law, an unjust law. And the rest of us? We were Jews and that was enough.

  4

  Day Turned to Night

  It’s difficult to be accurate about the pace of change in Bedzin before they set up the ghetto. All I know is that it was downhill, a one-way process heading in the wrong direction.

  On 22 June 1941 the Germans launched their Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. News of the whole thing reached us of course second-hand and days later, but the Russians seemed to have been totally unprepared for what happened. The statistics available today make grim reading – by midday on that first day, the Luftwaffe had knocked out nearly 1,200 Soviet planes and Army Group North, commanded by Reichsfeldmarschall Wilhelm Leeb, had advanced forty kilometres into Russian territory. The Army Group South which had been massing, unbeknownst to us, in the general area east of Bedzin, was doing less well, but was advancing nevertheless.

  The knock-on effect for us was that deportations began in earnest. Young men in particular were targets, being rounded up and taken away to
labour camps. The only safety net was being accepted as an essential war worker, what they called in other parts of Europe as having a ‘reserved occupation’. My father and Hendla were all right because they worked on Wehrmacht uniforms in Rossner’s factory. I was all right because I counted as a skilled labourer under Killov and Haüber. The problem was Nathan.

  My big brother was nearly eighteen and well within the age when deportations were most likely. And at this point he still worked with Dombek, outside the factory complex proper, and was more exposed than the rest of us. The obvious solution was to get him inside, working with me, and by hook and by crook we did that and Nathan Pivnik became a joiner.

  The timing had not been good, however. The Judenrat, ever more anxious to do the Nazis’ bidding, were busy drawing up lists for deportation and would pin these to the dreaded noticeboard outside their offices in the old Furstenberger school. It was around this time – April 1942 – that Nathan was arrested. This was a ghastly experience for him, a seventeen-year-old boy with what he assumed was his whole life stretching before him. My father was at least allowed to visit him and take him food although there was precious little of that.

  The deportations which now scarred our lives were part of the ongoing – and continually changing – Jewish policy of the Third Reich. We had no idea that new initiatives usually sprang from the unminuted and secret meetings that Hitler had with Himmler at Berchtesgaden or in Berlin. For the moment the Jewish solution was still a territorial one. Madagascar had failed, but there were other options. The euphemism ‘resettlement in the East’ began to be heard all over Europe. But we were in the East already, and for us the natural destination was the labour camp. By May or June 1942, we noticed another change. It wasn’t just the young, active men who were appearing on the lists of the Judenrat, it was the old and the crippled, the people who needed all the help society could give them. Except that society wasn’t giving them any help at all. Old ladies with their sheitels, their traditional black wigs; old men with no teeth and people with an artificial arm or leg; those confined to wheelchairs; the blind. They were expendable, all of them surplus to requirements in the brave new world Hitler and Himmler were cooking up between them.

  And we began to notice an increased frequency in freight trains that rattled and rumbled through the junction near Modzejowska. Wooden boxcars with slats, the sort of thing you’d see every day if you lived near a railway, trucks taking cattle, pigs, sheep or poultry to slaughter. But these weren’t quite the same. There were padlocks on the sliding doors and barbed wire around the air holes. On the roof sat SS men with rifles and yet more in the guards van. As a fifteen-year-old I didn’t know what to make of this – they were probably transporting Russian prisoners-of-war to a labour camp further west. Then I saw the faces of the truck inmates – pale, drawn men of all ages with long, straggling beards and frightened eyes staring out of the shadows. I know now that they were Jews, my own people, singled out for special treatment, what the Germans called Sonderbehandlung, bound for the camps of Belsen, Treblinka and Sobibor.

  More and more in the summer of 1942 there was talk of the camp at Oswiecim which the Germans called Auschwitz. It wasn’t far away and people knew people who knew people. There was talk of a little white house where Jews were sent to be killed. But that was nonsense, surely. This was the 1940s, the twentieth century; things like that had happened in the Dark Ages under madmen like Genghis Khan and Timur I Leng. People who whispered these things must be idiots.

  12 August 1942. It was a sweltering day, the sky over Bedzin a cloudless blue. This was the day of the Aktion, the day the Judenrat had been threatening for months. Every Jew in Bedzin and its outlying villages was to report to one of the two football stadiums in the town and we were to bring our papers. Jews had always had to be prepared to show their papers but the war had brought a new urgency to this. Every Jewish male now had ‘Israel’ appended to his name; every female, ‘Sara’. The Pivniks made their way to Hakoah, the stadium on the edge of town. I’d often been there before, cheering on the local teams from the terraces, hoping to catch sight of my schoolboy heroes, like Nunberg, the best goalie in Poland. But the day of Aktion was different.

  There must have been 20,000 of us crammed into that football field, most people sitting in their family clusters, talking in muttered asides, anxious, apprehensive. Mothers tried to quieten their grizzling babies, tetchy and fretful in the climbing heat. Small children, naturally wanting to run around as they always did, were told to sit down and behave. I noticed my mother keeping Josek close to her. There were SS men patrolling the grounds, armed and watchful, the odd dog straining at the leash and barking at the nearest Jews.

  Shortly before midday, an SS officer made an announcement over the tannoy system and the muttered hubbub faded into silence. We were told a selection was to be made – the first time I had come across the idea. We were all to be divided into three groups. Essential workers, Group A, would stay here in Bedzin. Group B would be sent to the labour camps. Group C – and in German, it sounded even more sinister, would be ‘umgeseidelt im Osten’ – resettled in the East.

  If ever we believed in omens – and the Jews are prone to it – what happened next made the hairs on the back of my neck crawl. There was a rumble of thunder directly overhead and the sky crackled with lightning. In minutes, day had turned to night and the sky was black as pitch. The rain stung down on us, sending the little ones scurrying under their parents’ coats for shelter. The ground we sat on became waterlogged and the rain seeped through to our skin. Nobody had come prepared for this, not even the SS and they got as wet as we did, shouting orders, marshalling us into lines, prodding us forward with their gun muzzles. Now the kids were crying in fear and little Wolf and Josek were near to tears themselves.

  Jostling started in the crowd. The lines couldn’t form properly, there wasn’t the room. Those at the edge of the field began to look for ways out, digging under the chain-link fence under cover of the sheets of water and the press of people. I recognised some of their helpers as friends of Hendla and Nathan from Gordonia. The Zionist groups that learned Hebrew and longed for a kibbutz in Palestine had turned into partisans, an Underground pledged to resist this latest example of Nazi bureaucracy. They were hauling up the wire and helping people to scrabble through. As I turned round, I saw my brother Majer join them, wriggling his way through the undergrowth, his jacket, hands and face daubed with the mud that was suddenly everywhere. I didn’t understand at the time why Majer went, but as the hours wore on, the situation became clear. And beyond the wire, the shooting started.

  Still the thunder rolled and the faces of the terrified were lit by the lightning flashes. You could tell the rattle of rifle fire from the noise from the heavens and we all jumped every time we heard it. What if they were shooting at Majer? I had a lot of faith in my little brother; at twelve, he was strong and fast but no one can outrun a bullet. We saw through the mist of the rain the rifle butts and clubs of the SS fall again and again on saturated, desperate bodies struggling beyond the wire. The Aktion was judgement day and none of us would be quite the same after it.

  It rained all night and all night we waited in the open, huddled together. I don’t think anyone slept. We were cold now, chilled to the bone, exhausted and hungry. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before and the little ones were complaining, asking when they could go home and what was going to happen to us.

  It was now that we thanked our lucky stars for Alfred Rossner’s blue cards, proof that my father and Hendla were essential war workers. And now I understood why Majer left. My parents had sent him, hugely risky though it was. Nathan and I had similar documentation from Herr Killov so we were all going to stay put in the essential workers group A in Bedzin. The cards we were issued with during our long, terrible wait at the stadium gave permission for two people each to stay. That meant that my mother and the little ones could be included and would be safe. With Majer gone, however nerve-wracking a situ
ation it was for my parents, the numbers added up. Almost. The exception was my grandmother, Ruchla-Lea, because we were a family of ten and were one card short. The last I saw of her was in that sodden, churned field with rows of exhausted Jews dependent on a piece of paper to determine their lives. She was eighty-two by now and far from well, frail and half blind. All my life I had known and loved her, her kindly twinkling eyes, her bony hands, her bedtime stories. She was part of my life and now she was ripped from us. There were sudden, tearful farewells, empty-sounding phrases. We said we’d see each other soon and my parents urged her to look after herself; then the frail old lady was shepherded away to stand with a huddle of other town elders, shivering with shock and fear. I never saw her again.

  As we were leaving the stadium, numb and trembling, a strange thing happened. A neighbour of ours, a Christian Pole, took my father by the arm and offered to take little Josek away, to raise him as his own child. Agonising decisions like that take days, weeks, perhaps months, to make. My father, who had just lost his own mother, now stood to lose his youngest child too. In those whirlwind seconds he went with what must have been his gut reaction and said no. He wanted to keep what was left of our family together.

  The Judenrat posted another list. Nathan’s name was on it. My father pointed out in vain that Nathan was an essential war worker but he hadn’t been in Killov’s factory for long enough and was deemed expendable. The usually supportive Herr Haüber wasn’t there at the time because he’d been sent away on service. The only other solution was to hide Nathan.

  It seems extraordinary to me today that a teenage boy could hide in a town like Bedzin, where everybody watched everybody else and a network of spies was everywhere, reporting to the Judenrat or the German authorities. I never knew where he was and looking back, my father and mother probably engineered it that way – better I shouldn’t know. The less I knew the less I could tell anyone who asked. I remember various members of the Judenrat hammering on our door at Number 77, while we could still call that place home, looking in cupboards and outbuildings without success. These were policemen, in uniform, with jackboots and what today we call ‘attitude’. But they were also Jews and none of us could understand how they could hound us, looking for another Jew they had branded a criminal because he didn’t want to leave his family. For most of the time, Nathan was in fact hiding in Killov’s factory, sleeping in the hayloft above Dombek’s horses.