[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  The Germans tended to favor Ukrainians, unless they were Jews or Communists, and across the city local militants trolled the streets, stripping and beating Jewish men and women. Later, Feliks would learn that German soldiers had roused the crowds by spreading rumors that Jews were responsible for the mass killings of local prisoners under Soviet occupation.

  The mobs forced Feliks into a sprawling labor camp set up in a factory on the outskirts of the city, desolate rows of brick buildings with barbed-wire fences and barracks with wooden boxes for beds. The prisoners worked on the pier at the River Poltva, which flowed through the city. Those who grew tired and slouched were kicked from all sides by German guards.

  Don’t go down, Feliks told himself as he joined the others. He pretended his body was numb. The work went on for hours, and when it was done the prisoners were made to run back to the barracks, past the bodies of men who had been shot and left for dead.

  Feliks managed to slip past the guards several days later, running until he could no longer see the camp. Back in town, the Germans were looking for mechanics, and Feliks quickly decided that working in a garage commandeered by the German police seemed a far better option than the confines of a brutal forced-labor camp. He volunteered with a group of Jewish men.

  “I have no blind idea about mechanics,” Feliks confided to the Polish man who appeared to be in charge. It was a risky admission, but Feliks reasoned that the head mechanic would soon have seen for himself.

  “Shhh,” the man said. “Be quiet. We’ll help you when we can. You do what I tell you to do.”

  Feliks tapped and tinkered and twisted, making a good show of it until a German officer pulled him into a quiet corner of the garage.

  “Is it true you’re a medical student?”

  Feliks hesitated, studying the officer, a doctor in the German army who appeared to be in his late twenties.

  “Yes,” Feliks said softly.

  “Look.” The doctor’s voice was urgent. “As of tonight, they’re going to take all of you away. I don’t know where.”

  The doctor pointed to a cluster of buildings just beyond the garage. “There’s a stable on the left side of the building there. I’ll give you something to carry for me to the stable and meet you there.”

  Feliks walked quickly, careful not to draw attention from the German soldiers who were milling about the garage. In the stable, the doctor motioned to a secluded corner near some horses. “They will never find you there.”

  Feliks crouched low.

  “Somehow, you have to get out of here and go to town,” the doctor instructed and slipped away.

  He returned once more, late in the night, to give Feliks a cooked chicken. It was a benevolent gesture in a world that had gone mad, and Feliks could scarcely find the words to thank him.

  “That’s all I can do for you,” the doctor said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He frowned and disappeared.

  The next morning, the garage was cleaned out, the Jewish workers whisked away, just as the doctor had promised. The only place Feliks knew to go was his dormitory, and he crept inside and made his way downstairs. In the basement, he discovered three Jewish medical students huddled on the floor, the shallow breathing of hunted men, waiting in the darkness.

  LWOW WAS STILL overrun by mobs. Feliks and his three classmates decided to go farther east, through fields and forests that would provide cover under the night sky. They crept out of the dormitory and walked, kilometer after kilometer, the town giving way to farmland. Sometime in the night, a Russian truck rumbled past, and Feliks waved his hands over his head, frantic, hoping the soldiers might take them to Moscow. But the soldiers only pointed their guns and drove on.

  Feliks and his companions kept walking, passing grain and sugar-beet farms, until they saw a small village in the distance. The shtetl of Zolochiv, once part of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, was one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Galicia. They inched toward town in silence, taking slow, measured steps through thickets of birch and fir trees, unsure what they would find beyond the tree line.

  The armed men seemed to come out of nowhere, from behind, from the sides, guns drawn. Quickly, they forced Feliks and his classmates into the town square. Bodies were everywhere, piled one on top of the other. At first glance, Feliks thought they were praying.

  “Line up! Hands up!” someone shouted.

  The square was a mass execution site.

  Pushed to his knees on the cobblestone street strewn with the dead, Feliks looked straight ahead at the brick wall in front of him. German officers prepared to fire before a rapt crowd, hundreds of local farmers and shop owners who had poured into the village to welcome the Germans with bread and salt, certain that the Germans would be far less violent than the Soviets.

  Feliks closed his eyes and waited, three seconds, five, ten, his mind and body still. This, he decided, must be what death feels like.

  He thought about his father, who months earlier had managed to slip out of German-occupied Lublin and make his way to Lwow. Soviet soldiers caught him swimming across a narrow expanse of the Bug River and accused him of being a spy.

  “I am a Jew looking for my son,” he had pleaded.

  The soldiers let him go, and he soon found the dormitory where Feliks was staying. He cried when he saw Feliks, who had nothing but a dirty overcoat with a missing button to keep warm at night.

  Feliks had marveled at the sight of his father, familiar eyes and a familiar smile in a town of strangers. “Don’t worry about me here,” Feliks said. “At least nobody is going to kill me. Nobody is going to shoot me.”

  His father pointed to Feliks’s coat. “If your mother would see that, she would be very unhappy,” he admonished. In town, he found a needle, thread, and a new button.

  “Stay with me,” Feliks pleaded. They would look for ways to bring everyone else.

  His father only shook his head. “There is no way. There is no way to do that.”

  Several days later, his father returned to Lublin.

  Crouched in the execution line alongside the three other students, Feliks waited for the first bullet. He felt almost peaceful, as if he were floating underwater, no sound, no movement. Years later, he would come to believe that his body was defending itself in a final, agonizing moment of violence.

  Twenty seconds. Thirty. Feliks figured that he must be dead already. Such a short life, Feliks decided, a mere twenty years.

  Finally, he opened his eyes and blinked, taking in the scene around him. The German executioners and many of the spectators had been sprayed by bullets. He looked to his right and saw one of his classmates slumped over, shot dead in a puddle of blood. Then Feliks saw the shadows of two departing Soviet warplanes. They had fired into the town square just as the execution squad was taking aim, striking the German officers and the boy next to him.

  It was a wicked twist of fate, life and death separated by inches, the air between bodies.

  Run. Feliks and his two surviving classmates darted back through the trees toward a river on the outskirts of the village. There was no place to hide except in the cold, murky water, and they sunk in neck deep. Feliks pulled brush and sticks over his head for cover. He lost track of time, the rise of the sun and the moon. The water was relentless. It numbed his limbs until he was too miserable to care about dying. Several days passed. Finally, he pulled himself out of the river and inched back toward town with the others, passing a group of local men.

  One of them laughed. “Three more Jews not killed?”

  But the pogroms that had swept eastern Poland in the days after the German invasion were finally over. Up the road, they found a Jewish hospital that was still in operation, and the three boys stripped off their rotting clothes and sank into beds. Feliks couldn’t bring himself to sleep. He wanted to get word to his father. He needed to tell his family that he was still alive.

  Feliks and his classmates left the hospital and made their way back to Lwow, through the fields they h
ad crossed only days earlier. In town, Feliks found a Polish man who was willing to smuggle a message to Lublin.

  Feliks would never know exactly how his father had persuaded a Polish cab driver to help a Jewish boy in a country where such a gesture, if discovered, meant certain death. But three days later, under the cover of night, a driver from Lublin inched into Lwow. Feliks said good-bye to his classmates, slipped into the stranger’s car, and closed his eyes.

  He was going home.

  Chapter Two

  The Color of Blood

  Lublin, Poland

  1942

  The rolling hills of the Lublin countryside turned yellow and green in the springtime, acre upon acre of rapeseed flowers that sweetened the wind with scents of musk and honey. Lucyna Stryjewska had once waited for spring because after spring came summer, and summer meant meandering walks to the community swimming pool, barefoot and sweaty, and lazy nights spent at home with her younger brother, a pudgy-faced boy named David. Lucyna had been fourteen and David only six during that last, mellow summer, when their beds were soft and dinner was served on china.

  Three summers had come and gone since then, and on a bleak morning in November 1942, a few hours before dawn, Lucyna woke to the sounds of shouting.

  Come out to the square.

  She bolted upright and peered into the darkness, blinking at the unfamiliar shapes and shadows in the stranger’s shack where her family now lived. She hated the place, the never-ending stench of sweat and rot, the barbed wire and armed guards that kept them locked up like farm animals. But at least she still had her parents and brother, a miracle really. They were among the last Jews in the last Jewish ghetto of Lublin.

  All Jews will be deported east.

  Lucyna turned to her father, who stood motionless as he listened to the instructions shouted in Yiddish and Polish. His face was ashen. So many had already been taken, neighbors, friends, cousins, grandparents, sent away with only a bar of soap or a few scraps of silver tucked inside their knapsacks.

  The Germans had talked of Jewish settlements in the east, but there were whispers inside the ghetto, tidbits of information from Polish friends about a Nazi-run camp called Majdanek, in plain sight from the main road to Lublin. “They are building something there,” the Poles had warned, “something very suspicious.”

  Lucyna’s family and a few thousand others had been told that they would get to stay in Lublin on a permanent Jewish settlement, set up on a tired stretch of farmland once occupied by Polish peasants. But now the shouting.

  There is no more Jewish settlement.

  Should they go or hide? Did they have a day or an hour? In the early-morning darkness, it seemed to Lucyna that time was passing too quickly, a flurry of urgent whispers between her mother and father that she couldn’t bear to hear. And then another announcement, bleaker than the rest.

  Come out to the square. You have three days. Anyone found hiding will be shot.

  WAR HAD COME to Lublin from an angry night sky. Lucyna huddled in the cellar as the bombs fell, a crackling, shrieking assault that lasted until dawn, more terrifying than any sound she could remember. And then came a sight she would never forget, German soldiers with machine guns marching in the streets and town square, heavy boots crunching on the remains of fallen buildings. They had marched into a synagogue on the sacred holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, but then turned around and left without uttering a word, as if they were sizing up the task at hand.

  “This might be worse than any other war,” her father said that first night, stunned at the collapse of the Polish government, whose leaders had fled to London.

  It was September 1939, and Lucyna had just finished her first year in a private Jewish high school with dozens of other girls, the city’s Gitlas and Chavas and Helenas and Reginas. But now much of the neighborhood lay in ruins, a bombed-out heap of concrete and glass. In their apartment house, Lucyna’s parents stockpiled food and hid jewelry.

  The grown-ups talked around the kitchen table, trading hearsay more than news since both of Lublin’s Yiddish newspapers, the Lublin Daily and the Lublin Voice, had stopped publishing. Some families were fleeing east to parts of Poland that had fallen under Soviet occupation. Others were making plans to hide in attics, cellars, closets, back rooms of the local slaughterhouse.

  Lucyna’s neighbors planned to escape on a bus to the Soviet Union. There was room for Lucyna’s family, but to her parents the prospect of a new life in the remote interior of a strange country was out of the question, and so they had dutifully turned in their radios and furs and worn armbands with the Star of David.

  In 1939, there were 122,000 people in Lublin. One in three was Jewish. Jews had representation on the town council, controlled hundreds of commercial and social organizations, owned silver workshops and leather factories. This will pass, some of the elders said, convinced that the German occupiers and their rules were only a temporary problem, a political setback rather than a permanent shift in Polish-Jewish life.

  But soon, SS and German civil administrators commandeered buildings. The street signs were changed to German, the Park Litewski, sprawled along Lublin’s main thoroughfare, renamed in honor of Adolf Hitler. Lucyna had watched soldiers in white gloves round up Jewish men for forced labor, taking sons, husbands, and fathers in a matter of seconds. She hid inside with her parents and brother, but one afternoon three soldiers burst into the apartment, demanded to see the contents of the library cabinet, and stole the watch that Lucyna’s mother was wearing.

  Signs appeared around town: For reasons of public interest, an enclosed Jewish residential district is hereby established with immediate effect.

  In this new Jewish district, Lucyna’s parents would make themselves indispensable. Her father, Leon, spoke five languages and had been a court interpreter before the war. He would help run the Jewish administration in the ghetto. Lucyna’s mother, Leah, had put herself through school to become a dentist. She would treat Germans and Poles in the hospital. Lucyna would get a permit to work in a bank in the city.

  The Germans had called that first ghetto the “Jewish quarter,” but to Lucyna it had been a short stretch of hell along Lubartowska and Franciszkanska Streets, in the oldest and poorest part of Lublin. The place was filthy, tens of thousands of bodies squeezed onto streets covered with a thick layer of mud, near a grand synagogue that had been built by Lublin’s Jews in 1567.

  Lucyna, her parents, and her brother had crowded into an apartment with three other families. Lucyna was grateful for the work permit that allowed her to leave, past the miserable houses packed tight with miserable people. The walk to the bank gave Lucyna a few moments of peace, a chance to lose herself in the familiar streets of the city, where she had once been a schoolgirl in fresh white tights and leather shoes, brown hair curled into a bob.

  Inside the ghetto, German soldiers ripped the beards off Jewish men. Mothers hawked wedding rings for a day’s supply of coal. Typhus had wiped out entire families. But Lucyna had been careful to avoid trouble and, for one summer and one winter, the chronic gurgling in her stomach had seemed only a temporary problem, a bad memory that would go away once Europe came to its senses.

  THE MEN IN black uniforms and black caps seemed to appear out of nowhere. The Ukrainians, the elders called them, though by the sound of their accents there were also Latvians, Belarusians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Russians.

  Late one night in March 1942, they had surrounded the perimeter of the ghetto and lighted the street lamps, forcing sleepy, startled families outside. Then came a grim announcement: one thousand five hundred Jews a day would be taken away and resettled in the east.

  Lucyna’s family had been given an exemption by German security forces, a special stamp on their identity cards for Jews with critical jobs. When the ghetto was empty they would be moved along with several thousand others to a smaller ghetto on farmland once occupied by the poorest Polish peasants. The peasants had been resettled in city apartments owned
by Jewish families. On her walks to the bank Lucyna had spotted pigs and ducks languishing on third-floor balconies. An absurd sight.

  Jews selected for deportation were ordered to report to the ancient synagogue, for as long as Lucyna could remember a solemn site to mark births, marriages, deaths, to pray to God during the High Holy Days. But in those early days of March 1942, the synagogue teemed with the men in black uniforms, some not much older than boys.

  Where had these violent jailers come from? They were surely more terrifying than the dreaded SS officers milling around the city.

  The men in black stormed every apartment building in the ghetto, forcing Jews outside and using their rifle butts to bash the heads of stragglers and resisters. They killed with abandon, callously and randomly, creating chaotic, bloody scenes on the streets. The ghetto shook with the crackle of gunfire, the wails of children, shouting from the men who raced up and down the steps of apartment houses, guns cocked and ready.

  Lucyna, huddled inside with her parents and brother, had tried very hard not to listen. She was sixteen, and she had met a boy.

  The promise of something sweet and new kept Lucyna awake at night, filled with hope even when reason screamed that there was no place for love in the ghetto. Feliks Wojcik had seen so much more of the war already, moments that he could scarcely bring himself to talk about. Still, he was kind and warm and, to Lucyna, a badly needed distraction from the violence all around her. Feliks worked as a medic on the Lublin railway alongside his father. His family had also been spared from deportation, their work for the Germans considered too essential.

  When the big ghetto was empty, the two families had moved together to the newer, smaller ghetto, clusters of thatched-roof shacks squeezed behind barbed wire. A summer place for Jews, the Germans had said, and then insisted that every family plant a garden. The soldiers had been rather cordial about it, offering prizes to anyone who could till the soil.