Bolek, our Polish driver had been to Lwów many times and knew the city fairly well and how to deal with the police at the border. We’d heard stories of people having to wait for hours at the border, stories about having to pay bribes. Thus it came as a pleasant surprise to cross the border in less than an hour, without any questions or problems.
As soon as we were in Ukraine, the conditions of roads deteriorated. The houses and the people looked poor, neglected, and sad. We drove another hour and a half, at last entering the old cobblestone streets of Lwów. Before the war, Lwów had been considered a cosmopolitan city, famous for its opera house, university, museum, and wide boulevards. As we drove on, the streets were full of potholes, and the roads were narrower than I’d remembered. They really hadn’t shrunk, but they could no longer accommodate automobiles, street carts, and hordes of people. Furthermore, there were few traffic lights, and most cars disregarded them anyway.
We checked into the Grand Hotel, located on the main boulevard leading to the opera house. The hotel was a pleasant surprise, nicely appointed, with prices equivalent to any large European hotel. It was early enough to explore the town. I was hoping to recognize the little house that my parents had rented before we were forced into the ghetto. Bolek took us to the only remaining synagogue in Lwów, an orthodox synagogue that was spared destruction because the Russians used it as a storage depot; the Germans had found it convenient for the same purpose. The synagogue could have used interior renovations but Hebrew writing was still visible on the walls, though the paint was chipped in places. It was a dark place with no proper altar, only folding tables and chairs; however, they did have a minyan, a quorum of ten men, who met every morning.
We met an old Ukrainian woman, who more or less ran the order of things and knew everybody and everything. In addition, there was a young girl who knew a smattering of English and was happy to use it on us. They helped us phone Sarah, the rabbi’s wife or rebbetzin, to arrange a meeting with her the next morning. At first, I had trouble speaking with Sarah in Ukrainian, since I’d forgotten the Ukrainian language I’d studied in elementary school, and Sarah didn’t speak Polish. As luck would have it, she spoke fluent English, because both she and her husband had come from Brooklyn. What a joy for both of us to be able to converse without using our hands!
Bolek told us that he had to find a garage that employed a watchman so he could sleep peacefully. If he left his car in the street during the night, there would have been little left of it by morning. We ate at an outdoor restaurant while Bolek paid two boys, ten and twelve years of age, to watch the car. He didn’t even trust parking the car on a busy street in broad daylight. The boys told us that they needed money for their mother, because their father was unemployed and alcoholic. This sounded like a very familiar story.
The next morning, Sarah came to meet us at our hotel. She was a charming young woman with a cute face and the figure of a woman who’d borne six children in a short time span. She wore a sheitel, a wig worn by all observant married Jewish women. While her husband took care of the synagogue, Sarah was able to run a day school. Luckily she had many helpers who looked after her children and did all the housekeeping. Needless to say, with all of the unemployment in Ukraine, one could get a lot of help for a small amount of money. I asked why she and her husband had left America to come to Lwów. She answered simply that they were needed there and were doing a lot of good for children and families.
Our first stop was Janowska Street where the labor and transit camp had been during the war. All that was left of it was a quiet pond, surrounded by wild, lush trees and bushes, climbing as if trying to reach the sky. A handful of decades before, it had been a lake full of blood flowing from the murdered Jews on Piaski Mountain. The soil had become rich, the trees and bushes having flourished on the blood of innocents. There is a large rock, ringed by flowers, inscribed in Polish, Hebrew, and English:
Let the memory of all the Nazi genocide victims in Janowska Death Camp remain forever.
And in Ukrainian and English, a sign:
PASSER-BY, STOP!
BOW YOUR HEAD!
In front you see a spot of the former
Janowska death camp.
The ground is moaning.
Here the innocent victims
were tortured and tormented;
here they were executed
and sent to the gas chambers!
MAY THE MEMORY OF THE INNOCENTLY
MURDERED LIVE FOREVER!
ETERNAL MALEDICTION BE UPON
EXECUTIONERS!
Sarah told us that until recently, the police had trained dogs there for police work. Small buildings that housed the dogs still remained. The visitors to Janowska Street and camp had complained about barking and the disturbance to a sacred site, so eventually the dogs were removed. Nothing remained of the camp itself. One can only imagine the suffering, beatings, disease, and starvation that were the daily routines of the inmates.
Driving up Piaski Mountain was difficult, but I asked Bolek to try, hopefully without ruining his tires. Somehow he managed to get us to the top of the very steep and narrow road. Below us lay the grey buildings of a present-day jail. At the top, the ground was sandy, and there were a few broken-down railroad streetcars. A couple of men worked on the streetcars. Despite the area’s brutal history, it was very quiet and peaceful on the hill. I asked the two Ukrainian workers if I could have some sand, and they willingly obliged, digging sand and putting it in a plastic bag for me. The men said that digging sand for construction was forbidden because it was strewn with many human bones, though the Nazis had done their best to rid the area of bones by grinding them to dust in specially built drums and scattering them to the winds. One of the workers told us how every so often a group of religious Jews from the United States would climb or drive up the hill to pray. Some groups would bring food and cooking utensils and stay there several days, praying for murdered souls.
We drove back down to the street and then a bit farther. We came upon an insignificant little grey building, the railroad sub-station in Kleparów, a suburb of Lwów. Before the war it had been a substation of the central station. The Nazis, however, had used Kleparów Station for a different purpose. Empty cattle trains waited there day in and day out, only to be crammed with the innocent victims of German brutality. Part of Hitler’s infamous plan was for a “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question,” and became known as Operation Reinhard—the systematic annihilation of Jews between German-occupied Poland and German-occupied Soviet Union. Jews were rounded up by the thousands, kicked and beaten, and shoved as fast as possible into cars so they could reach their destinations—the death camps of Chelmno, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek.18
The Bełżec camp was designed in such a way that the train arrived alongside its wall. All the victims had to quickly disembark, undress, and have their heads shaved (the Nazis used the hair for stuffing mattresses). All clothing taken from “the dirty Jews” or Untermenschen was washed and sent to Germany, so that pure Aryan Germans could wear the the clothing of murdered Jews. The Germans did the same thing with the clothes taken from Jews in other concentration camps, while Hitler spent his nation’s resources on armaments. There were no barracks in Bełżec; there was no work for the prisoners, they were gassed upon arrival. The Nazis were in a hurry.
After our “visit,” Sarah took us to “her” school, where a simple meal of gruel soup and fried fish were served to us and to the students. We met a small group of children who’d finished their lunch and were singing Hebrew prayers. Many were Russian, enjoying summer camp at the end of their school year. These children had a difficult life at home, some with only one parent, some orphans. In Sarah’s school, they were able to eat one nourishing meal a day, study general subjects, as well as Hebrew and religion. They learned how to cultivate a garden, to grow flowers, berries, and fruit trees. The cooks, teachers, and other employees were all Ukrainian; Sarah was the only Jew. Th
ere were very few Jews in Lwów to perform such jobs.
We met Sarah’s husband, Rabbi Bald, before his evening service. When we asked him about a reform synagogue in Lwów, he had no knowledge of any. We told him that our Temple Israel in Long Beach, California, had presented a Torah to the rabbi who served the reformed synagogue in Lwów. To Rabbi Bald, the only synagogue was his conservative synagogue. When I pressed him on the subject, he suddenly remembered the name of another rabbi, guessing that our Torah must have gone to Kiev. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to bring Rabbi Duckovny’s card, still on my refrigerator door at home in Long Beach. It had been quite a while since Rabbi Duckovny had taken the Torah back with him to Europe, and it was possible that he traveled between cities, performing religious services in each large Ukrainian city. In any case, he was not located in Lwów. But it was puzzling that Rabbi Bald did not want to acknowledge the existence of the reform rabbi until we pressed him with more questions. As far as he was concerned, the reform synagogue and the reform rabbi were a closed subject.
We visited the area that had been the Lwów ghetto. Like other parts of the city, the former ghetto had been seriously neglected—potholes in the roads, broken stairs and windows, and dilapidated walls in need of repair. Harold and I happened to notice holes on the right side of the front door that once held a mezuzah (doorpost in Hebrew), containing verses from Deuteronomy. A woman who lived in one of the homes told us that the holes had been repaired several times but nothing had stuck—no putty or sealant stayed fixed in the holes. It was as if some power were keeping the holes open to remind the present-day occupiers of the house that Jews had lived there before them—Jews who’d been ousted and murdered by the Nazis.
Early the next morning, we left Lwów to catch a plane for Israel. We had trouble crossing the border due to a long line of semis and cars, stretching for miles. Several lanes of cars waited to cross the checkpoint. Traffic was at a standstill. The day grew hotter and more humid with each passing minute, and Bolek lamented that we’d be stuck there until nightfall. He got out of the car to assess the situation. As he was coming back to the car, a small car drove from the opposite direction, stopping next to us. Two men got out of their car and Bolek spoke to them briefly, then he got into the back seat as one of the Ukrainian men slipped into the driver’s seat, driving very fast to the checkpoint booth. He spoke on the phone to border guards, telling them that he was bringing us. When we got there, he jumped out of the car and was gone. Bolek returned to the driver’s seat and smiled as we crossed the border. After we were safely on the Polish side, he told us that the two men were Ukrainian mafia who worked with the border police—that was how they made extra money. Because our car had Polish registration plates, they felt that they could talk business with us. This quickie cost us $50 and was worth every penny. The next morning, Bolek drove us to the Kraków airport and without any problems, we left for Israel.
It was our ninth or tenth trip to Israel. In 1962, on our first trip there, we had been the young leadership representatives of the Long Beach Jewish Community and the only couple from the West Coast. We met Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, young Shimon Peres, and other Israeli luminaries. We saw our friends and distant relatives. We wanted them to know that we thought of them, that we supported them, and to tell them that they were not alone in their new country, surrounded by enemies. We were very proud of this new tiny Jewish country.
We spent six wonderful days in Israel, going to Jerusalem for a day to see all the new construction around the city. We managed to see a new exhibit of a computerized model of the Temple before its destruction. We even squeezed in a dinner at Abugosh, a restaurant in an Arab village in a suburb of Jerusalem, where they served the best St. Peter’s fish.
We visited an antiques dealer who sold me a pair of Viennese candleholders, dating back to the early 18th century. They were as tall but less ornate than our old ones, appropriated by the Soviets in 1940 in Przemśyl.
Our next destination was England to visit relatives and friends. While there, we helped my cousin, Fred Marshall Mantel, celebrate his 80th birthday, and we visited a distant cousin, Bertek Gottlieb, in Nottingham. Then we checked into a hotel in London, turned in our rental car, and used roomy London taxis to get around the city. Four days was not much time to spend in that glorious city, but if one cannot walk very well and had to depend on taxis only, London got very pricey. Of course, we visited the Gottliebs and Ludek, and Harold got on famously. As always, it was great to return home and appreciate once again the freedom and beauty of California.
* * *
17 A London friend related a similar story about the Polish ambassador in London who’d offered to get her a Ukrainian visa. After a few days, he called her quite embarrassed, relating that the Ukrainian embassy in London didn’t answer their phones either.
18 In Bełżec extermination camp, 434,508 were murdered over the course of nine months, from March to December 1942.
Freedom Writers
Some people have read The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them, written by Erin Gruwell and her students. Many others have seen the film, Freedom Writers, based on the book and starring Hilary Swank. Although I didn’t appear in the movie, I was mentioned in the book several times and played a part in that four-year project at Wilson High School in Long Beach, where Erin taught.
Wilson High School also happened to be the school that my three children attended. I gave lectures there to students studying European history, World War II, and the Holocaust.19
Erin was a young teacher on her first assignment and had been given a class of very difficult ninth graders at Wilson. They were of mixed ethnic and national backgrounds, kids from the “hood,” kids who had seen drive-by shootings, who dealt drugs, who had been abused by parents or relatives—tough kids who didn’t think that studying was cool and who had no plans to graduate. Erin entered the classroom for the first time wearing a simple navy dress with a pearl necklace, took one look at those kids and said to herself that she wouldn’t last more than a week at her job. The students took one look at her and thought the same thing.
But something unusual happened during the first few weeks of school. There was one student who was particularly difficult to manage. One day, Erin found a caricature of that boy’s face floating among giggling students. Erin got angry and wanted to find out who’d done the drawing. She told the students that she wouldn’t tolerate such prejudice and that the cruel caricature reminded her of anti-Semitic cartoons that had been widely circulated in Europe before the Holocaust. But her students had never heard of the Holocaust, which is why she decided to invite Mr. Mermelstine to her class, a survivor of Auschwitz, who happened to be my neighbor. I had read about Erin inviting Mr. Mermelstine in the Long Beach Press Telegram and called Erin to congratulate her on asking a Holocaust survivor to speak to her class. She then invited me to speak to her class on March 26, 1996. I developed a great kinship with these tough kids. They called me “grandma,” and we seemed to understand each other. They were very touched by my story.
I attended the end-of-year picnic, where each and every student got up and spoke about their problems and how “Ms. G” had helped them to cope. They had developed love and respect for her, because she had made them believe in themselves. There wasn’t a dry eye at that picnic, and there was no more talk of students dropping out of school.
The students spent many hours after school, staying with Erin to work on extra projects, sometimes leaving the classroom through the window because the school was shut down for the night. Luckily, their room was on the ground floor.
Thanks to the philanthropy of billionaire entrepreneur, John Tu of Kingston Technology,20 Erin’s whole class would fly to Washington D.C. for Memorial Day weekend. I was invited as a chaperone, and Harold was invited as class doctor. An entire United Airlines jet was booked just for us. Most of the kids had never been on an airplane; most of them had never been ou
t of Long Beach. The excitement was high, but they all had to promise to behave: no smoking, no drinking, no drugs or else they’d be sent home, and their parents would have to pay for their tickets.
There were no behavioral problems among the students during our four-day trip. We stayed at the big, luxurious Marriot Hotel, and the kids were thrilled with their accommodations, never having stayed at a hotel before, let alone one so elegant. They all behaved like ladies and gentlemen. We visited Arlington cemetery and JFK’s grave. We went to several museums, including the Holocaust museum. We visited the White House and heard interesting speakers. On the last night, holding hands, 150 strong, we walked through the streets of Washington, stopping traffic all the way to the Washington Monument, where we lit candles and sang.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the students and for us adults, as well.
Later on in the year, a young girl from Bosnia, Zlata Filipovic, came to visit Erin’s class for a week in May. Zlata, fifteen years old—the same age as the students at Wilson—had written her own diary about living in war-torn Bosnia. She and her family had been lucky to leave Bosnia, moving to Ireland, where she was able to continue to write. Her book was compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. Zlata had a lot in common with the students and enjoyed attending their classes and socializing with them. They showed her the sights of Long Beach. I stayed in touch with Zlata. We exchanged Christmas cards, and a few years ago, she contacted me because she’d written another book and was scheduled to talk about it at the Skirball Museum. Harold and I spent an evening together with her, reminiscing about the past.
The Girl in the Cellar Page 15
