Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  Then came the day when our world fell apart. Since my father had been beaten up by the police and quite possibly before that, it was my mother who had become our anchor. She kept us fed, somehow; kept us dressed. And if she didn’t laugh as much as she used to, she tried to keep us kids cheerful. One day – and the pain of it has blotted out exactly when – the Judenrat police arrived with a solution to the problem of Nathan. They would take my mother away and hold her, effectively as a hostage, against his return.

  Now there was no one to look after the little ones; Majer was back with us of course, soon after the Hakoah selection, but Josek was still only five and the rest of us were handling the long factory shifts at Rossner’s and Killov’s. So, faced with this, my father got a letter to Nathan. I never saw that letter so I don’t know whether father told his eldest son to come home or whether he told him the news and left it up to his conscience. Either way, Nathan turned himself in. Even at this late stage, he tried to see Herr Haüber, but the man was still away. Desperate, he tried to see Haüber’s cook, to get him to vouch for him. But everyone was aware of a renewed intensity in Nazi persecution, a lurch towards the genocide no one wanted to believe could happen, and the cook refused to see him. Hendla went with Nathan to the police station and she came back alone.

  Then my mother came back and it must have been heartbreaking for her – for both my parents – to know they had secured her freedom at the price of her son. There have been so many farewells since that one and the years have dimmed it in my memory, so that I can no longer be sure exactly when or in what order these things happened. But one thing I do know for sure; I would be the only one to see Nathan again, to hold him, crying, in my arms. Except for one day, when he was given special permission to help us move into the Kamionka.

  * * *

  To the east of Bedzin was a hill called the Kamionka which had been used as a quarry since the nineteenth century. I knew the place well – it was a kids’ paradise with alleyways that ran through a shanty town and little rickety homes built in the caves that had been gouged out of the chalky stone. When the quarries were abandoned, squatters had moved in, as they did on the edge of many industrial centres across Poland, and they’d built themselves a town. Over time, the wooden shacks had been replaced with brick but it was still very run down – very much an enclave that was on the wrong side of the tracks. Seven months after the Aktion at Hakoah, the Kamionka became our home.

  Essentially, it was a straight swap. Poor Gentiles moved into Number 77 and we ended up in the Bedzin ghetto. If you read history books today you will find that they argue about what was behind Nazi Jewish policy in the Third Reich. Some have an intentionalist theory: the ghetto was a halfway house to extermination, the genocide that the Nazis planned all along. Others have a functionalist explanation: the Nazis had not really thought what they were going to do with the millions of Jews they found in Poland and now the millions more in Russia. Certainly, in terms of speed and timing, the creation of ghettoes was erratic and sporadic. And no two were alike. Warsaw had its thick walls, Lodz its barbed wire; at the Kamionka, there was nothing at all but markers in the ground – as if to say, this is all of Poland you’ve got now, Jews; make the most of it.

  Why did they move us at all? After all, we’d struggled along somehow for nineteen months under Nazi control, living at Number 77 and doing the best we could. At the time we didn’t understand it and anybody who asked probing questions of the Judenrat ran the risk of instant deportation, so you didn’t ask. The explanation usually trotted out – where it was trotted out at all – was that ghettoes were there to limit the spread of disease, especially typhus, that was known in these years among Germans as Judenfieber, Jew fever. Another theory ran that they were glorified prison camps to keep us penned in while the Reich turned all its attention to beating the Russians on the Eastern Front.

  We had heard rumours from Lodz in the north that they had a sealed ghetto from as early as April 1940 and there, as in Bedzin, the Judenrat became the administrative unit of government, still jumping around as their Nazi masters pulled their strings.

  When the day of the move came, the Pivniks took what they could carry. Nathan had managed to borrow Dombek’s horses and cart and we loaded everything on it before making our way to the Kamionka. And then Nathan had to say goodbye once more. It was yet another Exodus and it reminded me of the fleeing thousands I’d seen when the invasion started and again when the Jews of Oswiecim came to our town. Now we were part of it, a dispossessed people on the move. I would never live in our little courtyard in Modzejowska again.

  The photo library of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has photographs of the Kamionka, showing dilapidated shacks and mothers hanging clothes on washing lines, as they tried to keep as normal an appearance as possible. Alleyways and streets were full of furniture, rotten in the rain or brittle-dry in the sun, the bits and pieces of peoples’ lives that could not fit in this exercise of Nazi ‘downsizing’. All eight of us were crowded into a one-roomed house, but at least it was brick built.

  The German police prowled the perimeter of the Kamionka night and day. Polish auxiliaries helped them; so did the fire brigade. I remember thinking that those men wore the uniforms my uncle Moyshe used to make for them in Szopienice, all a reminder of the catastrophe and the chaos of the last three years. And every day, the Judenrat police force also patrolled inside the ghetto. They wore white covers to their peaked caps and even though they were only allowed rubber clubs rather than weapons, the yellow stars on their tunics meant nothing. They were policemen, as corrupt and vengeful as any I’d known. But I’d been dodging people like that for years; I had nothing but contempt for them.

  In the Kamionka, food shortages became severe. I don’t know if anyone has analysed the figures for Bedzin, but in Warsaw the daily calorie intake for Jews was 300, at a time when for Poles it was 634 and for Germans 2,310. I only remember one shop in the ghetto, a general store that sold bread, vegetables and, very occasionally, scraps of meat. The queues to which we’d long grown accustomed continued, my mother and the little ones waiting patiently to hand over their ration coupons for whatever they could get.

  And the rumours went on. The Germans had been stopped at the Russian city of Stalingrad. I don’t remember hearing that things were going against them in North Africa too, where the British 8th Army had beaten Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel at El Alamein, but if I had, I don’t suppose for a moment that I put two and two together. If the war wasn’t going well for the Germans, that was bad news for us. Yes, we longed for liberation from all this; my father in particular just wanted to go back home and to his workshop at Number 77. But no one realised it would get worse before it got better.

  The one touch of reality at the Kamionka, the sense of continuity, came from work. But even here there was a change. Before the ghetto we made our own way to the factories, albeit only along certain streets. Now we tramped in a column, watched and guarded – a people on the move every day. It was less than a kilometre to Killov’s and the clocking in and the relatively good food kept us sane.

  The cold came and the snow and still we had no word of my grandmother or of Nathan. The world turned, filled with rumour and counter rumour, filled with dread. You keep your nose clean, you keep your head down, you get on with your work. As the spring of 1943 gave way to summer, the tension was palpable. The deportations continued. The first ones were accompanied by the empty promises of the Judenrat: council members would be going with the groups that were rounded up; they would be accompanied by doctors. Their destinations? Labour camps, of course, to keep up the war effort, to serve the Reich. It wouldn’t be long, the official line went, before Comrade Stalin would surrender and there would be peace. A Slav army, after all, was no match for the Master Race.

  But no doctors went with the groups and the Judenrat members stayed behind in Bedzin. Even so, it was still relatively civilised; deportees took suitcases with them, food parcels for the journey. Sometimes it would have t
o be cattle-trucks used for transportation, but not always and anyway, that was a temporary, regrettable inconvenience. There was, after all, a war on.

  One deportee was a Polish friend called Vladek. He used to come home once a month from a labour camp but he was very tight-lipped about what went on there. Before all this madness started he too had pigeons and we spent quite a bit of time together. He bought Nathan’s bike with 100 kilos of potatoes – paper money was virtually worthless in the Kamionka.

  It was while we were living in the ghetto that we heard news of Nathan. An old Polish friend of the family told us that he was working at the camp at Blechhammer in Slawiecice, a chemical plant, and he was well. Mother sent him some barley and some underwear but we had no idea whether he ever got them as he was not allowed to write.

  We noticed – even possibly little Josek, who was six by now – that the visitors to the ghetto were becoming more frequent. And the visitors were SS men, grey-uniformed with their lightning-flash collar insignia and the grinning death’s head above the peaks of their caps. They came with their own German police, the Gestapo, and the ghetto police ran at their heels with their vicious dogs, trying to look important. The barking and clatter of boots echoed around the Kamionka, ringing in our ears and reverberating around the hovels we called home. I remember hearing the thud and crash as they kicked down doors and shouted orders. There was no need now for the ‘Ist ein Jude hier?’ that we’d heard before the ghetto. Everyone in the Kamionka was a Jew and the question was redundant. Now they were looking for certain Jews – the young and able or the surplus relatives of the young and able. It was time to go. And if anyone objected – and a few did – the answer was a bullet in the head. Those were the sounds of the ghetto – dogs barking, boots clashing, furniture going over. Then the short, sharp screams punctuated by the dull crack of a pistol or rifle. And stillness.

  How long would it be, we all wondered, before they came for the Pivniks? By the long, hot summer of 1943 I was nearly seventeen, ideally eligible for deportation. What were our options? We could run, father emotionally drained and exhausted, three little children being shepherded through the alleyways by mother, Hendla and me. How far would we have got in the night, in the dark, against the dogs and guns of the ghetto guards?

  The alternative was to hide and this we tried to do. Our house may only have had one room but it had a steeply pitched roof and there was an attic space which might just be big enough for us when the jackboots came to a halt outside our door. I was an experienced carpenter by now and my father and I built a wooden partition from scraps behind which we stashed food and water. We put a chamber pot and a bucket there too.

  Things like this were happening all over the ghetto and it was part of the quiet resistance by Jews, a story which still waits to be told. Why didn’t they fight back, the Holocaust deniers ask today; if things were so terrible, why didn’t the Jews do something about it? The answer is that we did and it started in the Kamionka for the Jews of Bedzin. Scraps of information, pieces of timber and nails lifted from the factory, food that would keep in a small, cramped space in a hot summer. It’s not the stuff of heroism which overgrown schoolboys like me still dreamed about, but it was resistance nonetheless. Rumours reached us about the ghetto rising in Warsaw in April. It gave us pride. It gave us hope.

  On 19 April partisans inside Warsaw had snapped and hit back. Deportations there, we learned long afterwards, were on a far larger scale than those from Bedzin. In October 1940, nearly half a million Jews were crowded behind those seven-foot walls; two years later, only 70,000 were left. The Jewish partisans stole guns, slaughtered the SS wherever they found them and lost their pursuers in the Warsaw sewers, with cholera, typhus and rats for company. Nearly a month later – and it was as well perhaps that we didn’t know this at the time – the SS commander there boasted that 14,000 Jews had been killed since the rising began and a further 40,000 had been sent to Treblinka.

  The end for us came on a hot, dry Saturday late in July. Beyond the Kamionka I remember seeing the harvest in full swing, men in shirtsleeves and vests swinging their scythes and sickles under the bristling guns of the SS. The sheaves of corn they collected stood like silent sentinels in the fields, as I remembered them in the Garden of Eden through all the summers of my childhood. I’d been working all day as usual, in the factory, barely able to remember now the rituals of Shabbat in peacetime. We ate supper and went to bed. I don’t remember the conversation or anything else different about that day until the early hours of the morning.

  I woke up with a start. Jackboots. Dogs. Shouts in German. Coming our way, up our alley, to our door. Father had time to pop his head out and ducked back inside again. Germans and far more than usual. He shepherded us up into the loft space, Mother and Hendla quieting the children who by now knew better than to ask anything but whispered questions. There was shooting and screaming as Father and I dragged the false partition into place and crouched there, hardly daring to breathe.

  By turning my legs and leaning sideways, I could see our alley through a peep hole we’d made from a loose brick and beyond that to the ghetto square. Something was going on. This wasn’t a conventional raid for deportation purposes. This was a gunfight. The people were fighting back. Police were running in all directions, firing indiscriminately, the flashes from their pistols illuminating the twisted little houses they ran between. The SS, lights reflecting off their insignia, were more organised, in control. I even saw members of the Hitler Youth, with their ridiculous shorts and scarves waving their little Hitlerjugend knives in the air and shouting some rabid Nazi slogan. They were boys of my age and younger and they wanted to kill us.

  Perhaps Hendla had known something about this and had kept quiet. Perhaps she was not, as young people say today, ‘in the loop’. The resistance leaders, I know now, were Baruch Giftek and Frumka Plotnika and the freedom fighters were all members of the Gordonia and the other Zionist groups. How they got hold of weapons I don’t know, but this was not Warsaw. We had no sewers to hide in and perhaps our desperation was not so great. In the fighting of the next few days, over 400 partisans were killed, many of them just like us, civilians caught in crossfire. The German casualties? One.

  All that terrible night we crouched in our homemade Hell and at dawn watched through the brick loophole as neighbours were frogmarched out of their hovels with whatever they could carry and kicked along the alleyways. What we were watching was the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto, that appalling casual euphemism that actually means the deaths of thousands. I heard my father say in one of his grimmest moments, ‘What’s happened to the others will happen to us too,’ and we prayed. We prayed every day in the Kamionka just as we had in our real home.

  Sunday was 1 August. Christians call it Lammastide, the festival of the candles. Beyond the Kamionka, beyond Poland, the war went on. Behind our partition we sweltered and worried, filling the chamber pot, the bucket. The heat and the stench were unbearable but we daren’t move. Random shooting throughout the day told us that the Nazis had not just melted away. They were doing what they did best, hunting Jews.

  By the end of Monday we had run out of water and our food supplies were getting low. Whatever plan my father had to stockpile essentials had not counted on a siege of many days’ duration. To sneak out and find fresh water would be to invite certain death. The dogs would smell us, the prowling SS men were alert to catch any sound. Tuesday was just as hot, just as unbearable. We sat, caked in our own sweat, our mouths bricky dry, ill with dehydration. I don’t know who suggested it, but I remember my mother sprinkling a little of the sugar she still had into a cup. The cup was passed and we drank from it, gratefully. It was warm, but it was sweet and it was liquid. It was urine.

  I would be seventeen in a month’s time and I was crawling in a sweltering attic in semi darkness, drinking piss and listening to the sobs of my siblings while outside the Germans were still shooting my people.

  The end of the ghetto. The end of all t
hings?

  5

  Descent into Hell

  Our little resistance effectively ended on Wednesday 6 August. The liquidation of the Bedzin ghetto had lasted for four days. In the end, for us, the summer heat was unbearable and we climbed out of our partitioned hidey-hole and gave ourselves up to the inevitable.

  I can only remember fragments of that day, like the glimpses of a dream. It must have been mid-morning when, stiff and aching with dry, cracked lips, we joined a moving column that wound its way down the hill from the Kamionka to the station. It was less than a mile, but it was like running a gauntlet. We had been assembled in the ghetto square, perhaps a thousand strong. It crossed my mind that even this tiny group of Jews outnumbered the SS men who were marshalling us. But there were old people in the crowd, babies and little children. In my family, Majer was fourteen but Chana was a year younger; Wolf was only eight and little Josek six. We were weak with hunger; unarmed. You can’t fight back against grown men with machine-guns, rifles and dogs with resources like that.

  During the trudge down the hill, local Gentiles jeered at us, mocking and laughing. One or two were crying, their heads in their hands. It symbolised the schizophrenic attitude of Poland to its ‘Jewish problem’. These people had been our neighbours once, men who placed their tailoring orders in my father’s workshop; women who had talked babies with my mother; shopkeepers we used to buy from; lads who kicked a football around with me. Now they were helping themselves to our furniture and meagre belongings, like hyenas picking over a kill and taking away the choicest bits. And I recognised the local police too and the fire brigade, herding us along like cattle. The SS men I didn’t know but they prodded us with their gun muzzles and rifle butts. The little ones clung tightly to mother or father, terrified of the snarling, snapping dogs.