Clara's War

by Clara Kramer

  In another time, the fact that the schul was still standing would have been termed a miracle. But it couldn’t have felt more different for me. Since the beginning of the war in 1939, I had been secretly expecting a miracle. I dared tell no one. Not my parents. Not Mania. Not even one of my friends. I was so deeply and devotedly religious that I had been expecting something truly biblical. The killing of the Grand Rabbi and the burning of our synagogue had destroyed any hope I had that God would save us. I felt that the very Being I worshipped had abandoned us. It was now just the four of us–Mama, Papa, Mania and me–against the Third Reich.

  Even before a representative came to our house to ask for a contribution, the news that the SS were asking for a ransom for the lives of the Kahala members had spread. When Mama told me how many kilograms of gold and silver they wanted, I couldn’t believe there was that much money in the entire world. Mama donated our silver chanukeah, her wedding band, silver trays and candlesticks. The ransom was carted in wheelbarrows to the SS headquarters. They took over the town hall, which was in Sobieski’s castle. Their offices looked out on the fountain of Madonna and the two big churches. But the piety of those buildings had no effect on the SS. The men were released and informed they were to run the Judenrat, which was responsible for all Jewish affairs. But their most important responsibility was making sure that all the SS orders were carried out to the letter.

  The Nazis postered the town with the racial laws printed in the Gothic script that had become a weapon of hate. But we had already known them by heart well before the Nazis arrived. We weren’t allowed to go to school or the park. We had a curfew. We weren’t allowed to walk on the pavement, but had to walk in the street. My father, like every Jewish business owner in town, had his business confiscated by the Nazis. We had to wear the white armband with the blue Jewish star above the right elbow. Any offence was punishable by death. The day the order for the armbands came down, none of us could leave the house until my mother had embroidered them. It took Mama over two hours to do one armband. I was furious as I watched my proud mother compelled to fabricate the emblems of our humiliation, as well those of Giza, Josek and poor Uchka, who couldn’t sew a stitch. How would she explain them to Zygush and Zosia?

  My dear friend, Helena Freymann, was killed one day as she walked out of her door and down the street. A Pole, someone whom she smiled at whenever she saw him and who had known her family for years, pointed her out to a soldier who was not even SS. He simply took out his pistol and shot her as if he were lighting a cigarette. She had forgotten her armband. This happened right down the block from our house one day after the edict came down. In this way we learned that the Pole or Ukrainian who might turn us in would not be a stranger. They would know us. Their children would be our classmates, their fathers would know our fathers, and their grandfathers would have known our grandfathers. I suppose, in the end, it made no difference if you were betrayed by a friend or an enemy. It really only meant that your heart might break a little more in the moment before you felt the bullet.

  It was almost impossible to keep up with all the orders and edicts that came from the Nazi command headquarters. All the men were ordered to report to the town plaza for an examination by a doctor. Able-bodied men were designated A; those capable of light work were designated B; those who were sick, old, weak or crippled were designated C. Mama told Papa that many of our friends were paying off the Ukrainian doctors to get the C designation. She suggested my father do the same. His response was, ‘For the Nazis, believe me, I don’t want to be a cripple.’ He didn’t know then that this would save all our lives.

  We had become a race of recluses, depressed by the news from the Nazi papers and radio stations as much as by what we were facing in our beloved little town. During the summer of 1941, the Nazis had taken Kiev, Karkhov, Minsk and all of the Crimea, with little opposition from the Soviets. From our living-room window, hidden behind the curtains, I watched young Jewish boys my age and younger as they struggled down the street, pushing carts and wheelbarrows filled with crushed stones. Papa came home and told us that they had been smashed into tiny pieces from the grave markers in the Jewish cemetery to pave the roads for German tanks. Some of the gravestones were over 300 years old. They even took the very first gravestone, which had been given to the Jews by Sobieski. It was the most sacred responsibility of the Jewish faith to find hallowed ground in which to bury our dead. It came before building schools or a mikvah or even a synagogue. Dozens of our family members were buried there. Mama couldn’t stop crying.

  We knew there would be no more letters from Rosa and Babcia, but at least we knew what had happened to them. Uchka knew there would be no letter from her husband. The children asked about their father all the time. ‘When is he coming home? Why isn’t there a letter?’ Zygush was old enough to pester Uchka. What was sadder was when he stopped.

  Just as Papa was getting ready to leave the house on the appointed day and hour for those men whose name began with ‘S’, a soldier came to the house ordering him to come to the town hall. We were terrified. I don’t think I took a breath until he came home. He had been told that he would carry on running the oil-press, at no salary of course. It wasn’t an offer but an order. As soon as he had told us, Papa ran across the street to the factory, where the workers shook his hand. They told him they were lost without him and couldn’t run the damn machines. They were terrified that the SS would think they were incompetent and shoot them, so they had all signed a petition. Papa said the most important thing was that the Nazi army needed oil; the police needed oil; the SS needed oil. He hoped that his job would buy us enough time to find a way out.

  Just like Papa, Mr Melman and Mr Patrontasch had also been spared by their work at the factory. The men got together and started a business in contraband oil. Papa and Mr Melman kept the factory open several nights a week while Mr Patrontasch would liaise with the black market. Word spread quickly among the peasants. The farmers who had been bringing their family grain to the press for generations now came at night. They paid with a sack of potatoes, eggs, cheese, onions, anything that could be sold on the black market. The Russians had moved part of the factory from across the street to a building six doors down on our side. Papa would go out the back door and cut through the backyards to get to work.

  Uchka’s armband hadn’t been worn enough to get one speck of dirt on it when she showed up at our front door weeping. She was crying so hard that we knew something must have happened to Hersch. She told us a peasant from a small village who brought his grain to my father’s press had heard that Hersch Leib had been killed just a few days after marching out of Zolkiew. His unit had been headed to Tarnopol when they were bombed by German fighter planes. If not for this peasant, we never would have known anything of his fate. In their engagement photo, Uchka and Hersch shared the same dreamy expression, the same half smile on their lips, the same dark eyes looking off together. Their wedding was only a few years ago. I could see Hersch in Zygush’s face as he was struggling to make sense of this new world in which he would have no father.

  I was beginning to understand that when we grieve, we not only grieve for the loss of a loved one but also for the part of us that is lost with them. The Hassids say that we perform the mourner’s Kaddish for the prescribed eleven months because the souls of the departed linger, still hungry for those they have left behind; with words unspoken and deeds undone; with the spark of their transgressions still burning. It is only with Kaddish over that period of time that they will understand that our love and devotion is enough to free their souls to ascend to Heaven.

  We were all in a state of shock. Hersch Leib was the third member of our family to die and we knew there would be more. Uchka was heartbroken, but brave. Without a husband and with two small children to support, Uchka needed to earn a living. She borrowed some money from my father to start a used-clothing business. She would sell Jewish clothes to non-Jews.

  As the summer wore on, we started to emerge f
rom our state of numbness. Uchka had such a good reputation that women were now coming from other towns to buy from her. Mania and I were together more than we had ever been in our lives, but we rarely went out of our front door. Like Papa, we travelled from one backyard to another, passing through fences where we had pulled out the nails so we could move the slats. We’d either go to my friend Genya’s house or down to the orphanage three backyards away where we’d play with the children. I read anything I could get my hands on.

  As desperate as we were, I knew we were privileged: we were together, we had enough to eat, we lived in a rich town. The elders in the Judenrat had come to an arrangement with the commandant of the SS in Lvov. Almost every Saturday, month after month, the commandant drove to Zolkiew to collect his tribute. Jewels. Gold. Coins. Ingots. Family silver. Watches. Fabric. Furs. Lumber. Clothing. Stamps. Art. Rare books. Somehow we scraped enough to buy us another month. Others weren’t as fortunate. Town after town around us was being decimated; the inhabitants either slaughtered or moved to ghettos in Lublin or Lvov. We knew that our safety was a matter of whim. We were in the eye of the storm.

  In the autumn, Mama decided we needed to learn and she organized a school. There were five or six girls: Mania, me, and my friends Giza, Genya, Klara and Lipka. We met in a different house every day for our safety. We studied Hebrew with Gershon Taffet, mathematics with a famous university professor from Warsaw who had fled to Zolkiew. We even had Latin. I don’t think any of us studied harder in our lives then we did in those months.

  When the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there was a burst of optimism that died within weeks. The American involvement changed nothing for us in Zolkiew. By February 1942, there was nothing left in Zolkiew with which to bribe the SS. The commandant had bled us dry. On 25 March, every category-C man and his family was herded like swine down the mansion-lined street that led to the train station. The cattle cars were waiting for them. The Nazis were sending them to the camps. Mama saw it all. She told us that the streets were red with blood. Those not moving fast enough were shot on the spot. From the balcony of the biggest mansion on the street, the wife of the head of the Gestapo was pulling out her hair and screaming, ‘Who will pay for this? Who will pay for all this?’ She knew there would be a day of retribution. At least a dozen girls I knew from school were on that transport. I didn’t know how to begin to mourn them.

  Sooner or later everyone would share the same fate as that of the category Cs. But we didn’t know exactly what that meant. Nobody knew where the train was headed. Somebody, I don’t know who, hired some peasants to follow the train. They reported back a few days later, telling us that the train had stopped near Belzec, where the Nazis had built a camp in the deep woods. They said they couldn’t get near the camp because there were too many soldiers. Although they were still kilometres away, they said they could smell the stench of burning bodies.

  There were no more illusions for us. Every family we knew was trying to find a way to get out of Zolkiew, either with false documents, or escaping to Romania or Hungary, which hadn’t been overrun by the Nazis. We continued to live our day-to-day lives, but we knew that time was running out. The oil press would not save us for ever. Mania would not let up on Mama and Papa. She drove my parents crazy.

  ‘Papa, Papa, please, stop…listen to me. We need a hiding place. We need to find a way to get out of here. Papa, please, tell me we’ll get out of here…’

  My poor father was trying to get papers, trying to find a place to hide or a way out, but without success. I could see the pain in his face as he listened to Mania’s incessant demands. ‘Enough! Please, Mania.’

  ‘Did you find something? Did you find something? Just tell me, just tell me we’ll get out.’

  ‘I’m doing everything I can.’

  ‘What does that mean? What does it mean, Papa? Does it mean we’ll get out, or does it mean we’ll die trying?’

  She would be waiting for him when he came home from work with an expectant look in her eyes, hoping. Every time someone managed to escape, she would tell Mama and Papa. It wasn’t information, but an accusation.

  Hiding, escaping, papers cost a fortune. I didn’t know how much money we had, but I knew that the underground business had been making the three families rich. The Melmans and the Patrontasches saved their money. But Mama was spending as fast as Papa could make it, buying food and running the soup kitchen to feed the refugees as well as the poorer Jews who had already run out of money. The town was starving. The Judenrat had a soup kitchen, but it wasn’t enough for Mama, who started one of her own. We had a gigantic pot, almost as big as the stove, which we usually used to boil our sheets to make them white. Every day Mama would make soup in this giant pot with buckwheat groats from my father’s press and whatever else she could buy and put it out on the back porch above the stairs. Mania and I were her helpers. The hungry came, lining up for hours before the soup was ready.

  Mrs Mandlova, one of Mama’s closest friends, saw the crowd outside our door and cried, ‘Salka, the Gestapo!’

  Mama simply said, ‘If God wants to strike me dead for feeding the hungry, then let Him.’

  My father begged, argued, reasoned, but she was stubborn as Dzadzio, although she would always deny it.

  Mania and I now devoted all our time to helping other Jews. School had become a luxury since the category-C transport. There was a war and we could not sit in the false security of our house while other Jews suffered. Over the course of the winter and spring, there were more and more transports. Soon there was a train every day that would pass through Zolkiew on the Lvov–Lublin line. After each train skoczki–jumpers–would wander into town. Teenage boys patrolled the tracks near the station for injured jumpers. Those who were near death, sometimes with broken bones protruding from their skin, were taken to Pepka Fisch. But often the jumpers had perished in the fall; entire families would be found scattered over hundreds of metres; sometimes dead mothers were found with living children in their arms.

  Mania and I started to work with Pepka. I had learned a lot during my time in the hospital the year before. As soon as I was able to get around, I had wandered the hospital following the nurses, trying to be useful, watching and learning. When I started with Pepka, I wasn’t squeamish like some of the other girls. I was soon doing the work of a nurse. The stories the jumpers told were simply too horrible to believe or comprehend. Yet the truth was sitting before me, bloodied, terrified, broken. There was a death camp at Oswiecim, a small town less than 150 kilometres north-west of us. A report on the radio claimed a million Jews had already been killed. Special SS death squads were murdering thousands of Jews at a time. I listened to the stories that fell from their lips like poisoned prophecies.

  Pepka was tireless and quickly earned a good reputation. Some jumpers had been told to try their luck near Zolkiew because they had heard about the hunchbacked nurse who was as good as any doctor at setting bones. We learned to make splints and bandage and clean wounds. One day my friend Genya Astman came running to the house and said I had to get to Pepka’s right away. A jumper named Hela Ornstein and her mother were there. I couldn’t believe they were alive after jumping off a train. Mrs Ornstein’s face was half torn away. Genya’s family took the two of them in.

  In June 1942, Josek and Rela had a baby boy. Handsome Josek, the family Don Juan, had surprised us first by marrying a plain girl with a big heart, and then again last winter when they had announced Rela was pregnant. We were stunned that anyone would think to have a child. But no one said a word to her. Their son was named Moshele. The baby was healthy and blond with blue eyes. We couldn’t resist having a small family celebration, and a bris eight days later to circumcise the child, as is prescribed by our law. My mother had baked a honey cake, the traditional sweet to celebrate a birth. A sweet life; that’s what the honey cake was supposed to ensure. The party was lavish. If we had known, if only we had known what would come, we would never have celebra
ted his bris and marked him as a Jew. He could have easily passed for an Aryan, and then he would have been spared.

  We all loved the baby and couldn’t get enough of him, especially Mania and I. There was something about the way he looked at us, just happy to be held by someone who loved him, so content and unaware of the hell he had been born into.

  Things were grim. Papa hadn’t been able to find a way for us to escape, so he was now searching for someone to hide us. I took refuge with my girlfriends whenever I could. Giza Landau lived several streets away, and it was too dangerous for her to come and visit. But there was Genya, Libka, Muschka and Klara Letzer nearby, and still alive. One day at Genya’s house, we realized that we were the last of our group. We had already lost so many friends, and we were discussing which one of us would be next to die. We mourned the fact that we had nothing, not one photo, to remember our friends by. We decided to go to Mr Domanski and get our pictures taken to have something to remember each other by. We wanted a token of our friendship to survive the war, even if we didn’t. But as I left my house to go to the studio a boy called me a dirty Jew on the street. I was terrified and went back inside. When we eventually went, Mania schlepped along with us. She didn’t want to miss anything, even having what would perhaps be her last photograph taken. We decided not to dress up, but we braided each other’s hair. We had a group picture taken as well as individual portraits of each of us. Mr Domanski had the prints for us the next day. I was shocked at the picture. I had been trying to smile, but I wasn’t. It was the only picture of me in which I wasn’t smiling. We sat in Genya’s living room and exchanged the pictures, writing our names and the date on the back. We thought about writing a message on each picture, but what was there to say?