by Clara Kramer
Her mother and sister Genia had been out of the house when the akcja started. She had run to the basement with her father, while her brother Icio had hidden in the attic.
After the gunfire had finally died down, she and her father crept up the stairs. They found Icio trapped beneath some metal pillars that had fallen on him. He hadn’t had time to put on any warm clothes, so he had been stuck in the freezing cold with his face pinned towards the window that faced the main square. He had seen everything. He couldn’t turn away if he wanted to. He saw it from the beginning, how the commandant of the Gestapo set up positions on all the streets and shouted for everyone to come out into the streets and then the hunt for the Jews began. Whoever did not see it with his own eyes would never believe it.
Lola had ministered to him until he could move his feet a little. Then they heard a noise, as if someone was throwing a hand grenade in a building nearby, and a woman’s voice screaming, ‘Run!’
It turned out the head of the Gestapo himself was going house-to-house searching for more Jews. They were able to run down and get out through a small hole in the wall in the backyard and by some miracle were not seen or heard. Later on they crept back to look for Lola’s mother and sister. In the middle of the square stood a taxicab surrounded by Jews who were forced to kneel. This went on until nightfall when the Gestapo marched them to the train station.
Lola wrote in her diary:
Something in me dies when I look at all that. I know that in the formation being led to the train is my mother and my dearest sister. My heart is broken. My mind cannot accept the fact that they are being led to their death.
Oh, the blowing of the whistle as the train departs. I do not know what happens to me next. I think I am losing my mind.
Her father had tried to calm her. They looked for jumpers, like Mania and I had with Pepka Fisch. They were able to find some who had been on the same transport; they had seen Lola’s mother and sister. Genia had been calm and was comforting the others and encouraging them to jump off the train. Her mother hadn’t wanted to jump and Genia refused to go without her. Finally her mother had agreed. She had helped open the window and pushed her daughter out.
A few days later a couple of jumpers had heard someone yell out in Yiddish from the courtyard of a farm. The woman’s clothes were in tatters and she was so cold and weak she could not move, but she had recognized the girls. She begged them to find Lola and tell her that her mother was alive. She had been shot at but the bullet had only grazed her head.
I am overjoyed that my mother is alive…I begin to look for a carriage but there are none to be hired. Every carriage is used to transport the corpses. What a terrible sight! Every carriage is filled with corpses and the blood is seeping from there. The streets are covered in blood. It looks as if a battle took place in our town. I feel that the ground is giving under my feet. I feel that I am falling down…I have to find a carriage as soon as possible. My mother has been waiting there since last evening…Every moment drags on…Finally I find one carriage driver, I promise him a hefty payment and off he goes. I can hardly wait for him to return. I go out to meet the carriage and what a terrible sight awaits me. Instead of bringing me my mother alive, I see a carriage full of corpses and on top is my mother. Ordnunger Shultz asks me: ‘Do you recognize your mother?’ I cry out in despair. My mother is lying on top with her head hanging down, she has only her dress on and a thin sweater, she is barefoot.
Horrible people not only did not take her in and look after her, they robbed her of her clothing. It looked as if she was asleep. It was obvious that she only recently passed away, simply because she was out in the open, weak and frozen, with no one to look after her. I cannot imagine the terrible death of my beloved mother. She was at most three kilometres from our home…We buried Mama in a mass grave with 70 others.
Lola found out from the stationmaster at Glinsko, a tiny town on the way to Belzec, that her sister was dead. She had been shot. Her father, mad with grief, later died from typhus in the ghetto.
Listening, I couldn’t help but thank God for my family; that we were still together. But who knew for how long?
Only a few days after Lola’s arrival, Rela received a letter from Uchka telling her that Josek had contracted typhus, but that she and Dudio were taking good care of him. The news of her husband’s illness ignited the otherwise calm Rela. No argument convinced her to stay. We tried them all: she couldn’t take risks. She had to survive because her son would survive the war. It was like arguing with the roar of the wind. Rela loved her husband and wanted to be with him, to take care of him, to nurse him back to health. She sent word to Laibek Patrontasch to come and get her. As soon as he arrived, Rela barely said a goodbye to any of us before allowing Laibek to lead her back to the ghetto.
The weight and swiftness of Rela’s departure was stunning. There were no simple things in our lives any more. No easy comings and goings. So few casual conversations.
Julia was gone much of the time, often to Lvov to find out what was going on at Janowska camp. One day she was able to bring us good news. She had found out that Hermann was still alive and working at the oil factory at the camp. Lola’s fiancé had been spared: this was more than Lola had allowed herself to dream.
Always gracious and a hard worker, Lola now had renewed energy. She was an excellent seamstress, and she started making new dresses and sweaters from used material and worn-out clothing. Julia also began to bring home German socks for us to darn. Lola was a good teacher. She taught us how to take old clothes apart and make new ones. How to darn, and do cross-stitch. Soon we had our little sweatshop in the bunker, quite literally so, since the weather had become warmer. Mama, Mania and I all took to the work. Finally we had something to do that could earn us some money. Julia took what we made to Lvov to sell in the market.
And Lola brought something else to the bunker. Good spirits. Despite everything she had been through, she always had a smile for me and Mania. She loved teaching us, and each of our efforts was rewarded with great acclaim as if we were designers from Paris.
Klara was being kept busy too. Whenever Julia wasn’t home, Beck would ask Klara to come upstairs to help him with something. His shirts needed ironing. Something needed to be cleaned. Sometimes he would come almost as soon as the door closed on his wife and daughter’s backs. Klara received stares as she left, and worse ones when she returned. She would come down, crawl over to her pallet and sit, her face defiant, defiant and sad at the same time. I didn’t know what was going on. There were whispers from Mrs Patrontasch to her husband; whispers among the women; whispers among the men. ‘Someone has to talk to her.’ ‘Patrontasch, you talk to her, she’s your sister.’ ‘How can she do it? Right under his wife’s nose?’ ‘She’ll get us all killed!’
One day the men were smoking, waiting for Klara to come back down to the bunker. Something had been decided and I didn’t know what. When Klara came down, the men went over to her right away. I had never seen anything like this in the bunker. They looked like judges. But judges too frightened to judge the accused. Too afraid she would defy their sentence. Too aware that they had no real power. The women continued to peel potatoes. I looked up from the book I was reading for the tenth time.
Patrontasch spoke, his voice quiet, nervous, uncomfortable. ‘We’ve been talking, Klara.’
Klara’s voice was flat. ‘I’m sure you have.’
Patrontasch was equally understated. ‘I don’t know what’s going on upstairs, but whatever it is, you have to end it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Our lives depend on the goodwill of Mr and Mrs Beck.’
‘It’s not your business.’
‘Of course it’s our business! Are you out of your mind? You could get us killed.’
At this point Klara looked away as her brother went on.
‘We’re three families down here. The Becks are our lifeboat.’
‘Just leave me alone. I don’t want to ta
lk about it.’
‘Klara…’
‘Enough. Leave me alone.’
She turned away from the men. Patrontasch and the others stared at her, not comprehending her behaviour.
Someone asked her to think about the children. ‘You don’t think I’m thinking of them? You don’t know anything. Now leave me alone.’
The men went back to their cigarettes and their newspapers.
Lola whispered to me: ‘I just thank God he doesn’t want me.’
This is how I found out that Beck and Klara were having a love affair. I couldn’t comprehend such a thing. Nobody had affairs. I hardly knew what an affair was. I was nearly 16 but I had never been out with a boy, hardly danced, held hands or even been alone with one. In the bunker, I wasn’t thinking of the things that a normal teenage girl might think of. Besides the Nazis, the Blue Coats, the SS and the Gestapo, we had something else to worry about. What would happen if Julia found out about Klara and her husband. That she would find out was inevitable. But like everything else we had to worry about, it was out of our hands, and just added to our sense of resignation and helplessness.
From now on, every time Klara went upstairs, I would hold my breath, as did the grown-ups, until she was safely downstairs again. Nobody would say anything. Occasionally, an eye would glance upwards if the radio was turned on or if there was a creak in the bedspring or the shuffling of feet, or, worse, if the shuffling stopped. Nobody could say anything to Beck. The only thing I knew was that no matter how bad things were, they would get worse.
On 25 March, we were lying on our pallets. It was five in the morning and we felt it was safe enough to let in some fresh air. To do this we removed a brick in the foundations. Daffodils and irises with their graceful green shoots were already coming up, and between them and the bushes, the opening couldn’t be seen from the street. Mrs Melman had been so proud of her garden and worked so diligently in it. The tulips would be up in a month or so, war or no war.
Mr Patrontasch sat up and said, ‘Listen!’ That was all we needed and all of us were listening, ears alert for the slightest sound. The word was an alarm. There were footsteps, many footsteps, but not marching, shuffling, and then over the footsteps, voices, German voices yelling, ‘Weiter, weiter!’
Then we heard the trucks, coughing, moving slowly. We could hear the early morning backfires and the grinding of the gears. Patrontasch remembered to shut off the light, even though it couldn’t be seen from the street. We were lying in the dark and listening. Every one of us had family in the ghetto. Everyone was praying. We listened to footsteps and the shouting. There was an occasional gunshot that sounded like it was right outside. We would all flinch, not knowing if the gunshot was meant for one of our loved ones. Between the three families, their immediate family, their extended family, their in-laws, there had to be 200 souls that shared our blood and our lives.
The cries and screaming and shooting went all day, stopped during the night and started again at first light. We were afraid to say a word. We didn’t eat. We didn’t cook. I don’t know if I had a sip of water. How could we? All our tears were silent and our hands twisted and re-twisted themselves into grotesque contortions. Our hearts were breaking. This was the end. The end of the world. The end of the Jews of Zolkiew. It was our Tish’a B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, the worst day in the history of the Jewish people. The day of the five calamities and many more. The day God decreed the Jews would wander in the Sinai desert for 40 years so the entire generation that was saved from slavery in Egypt could die out; the day the First Temple was destroyed and ploughed under by Nebuchadnezzar in 585 BCE; the day the Romans destroyed the second temple 665 years later; the day Hadrian wiped out the Jewish rebellion; the day Jerusalem was levelled one year later; the day the Jews were expelled from England in 1290; the day that Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. But what was happening now was worse than anything in our 5,000-year history. Such a thing to witness, sitting in darkness. On Tish’a B’Av, we were admonished to recite the lamentations and the words of Jeremiah. We are proscribed any kind of enjoyment for a period of three weeks. No weddings. No dancing. No sexual relations. No one had to proscribe anything in the bunker as the Nazis committed their desecration. To hear the screams of your loved ones and the gunfire in the distant woods where we played as children; the marsh filled with cattails and long weeds, with fish and songbirds and wild flowers. It was the Borek, the woods where many summer afternoons were spent with picnics and laughter. We uttered our own lamentations, silently. We prayed silently. We fasted. We rent our clothing. All these things were as natural to us in those dreadful hours as breathing.
Finally, towards the evening of the second day, no more footsteps marched towards the Borek. There were no more screams. No more gunfire. No more ‘Schnell! Schnell! Weiter! Weiter! Los! Los!’ And now the silence was worse. We still couldn’t speak to anyone in the bunker. We didn’t know who was dead and who was alive. I didn’t count the bullets and the gunfire, the sound softened by the distance. I didn’t know what had happened to Uchka, Zygush, Zosia, Josek, Rela and Dudio. How I prayed. Without words. I prayed with a broken heart. How I loved them all.
Julia told us that she was staring out the window and she saw Mr Patrontasch’s father look towards the house as he was driven past in a truck. He was too weak to walk to his death so the Nazis were kind enough to drive him. I could hear the sob that rose from Mr Patrontasch’s breast, which he caught before it reached his lips.
Beck was our window to the world. He was our eyes and ears. And as much as I saw in his eyes that he would like to spare us the worst, he could not. Hiding us, feeding us, risking his life for us was one thing. But by sharing our grief, I think he had become one of us.
He told us that the common grave covered over with sand was heaving and that blood erupted from the soil. He told us that Mr Astman, the father of my best friend in the entire world, Genya, who lived across from the church that took in the Jewish girls to save them, had crawled out of the grave, not wounded at all. Not a scratch. It was a miracle. And, like Hatikvah, the song that so many of us sang on the path to our deaths, he had every reason to hope that he would be saved because a Polish man he knew found him. I didn’t know if this man was a friend. I imagined Mr Astman crawling out of the grave, looking at a spring sky with trees starting to bud because it was too horrible to look around him, and seeing the face of a friend on the man who found him. I could imagine this hope that springs forth into eternity because that is the direction all hope runs to; this hope that was destroyed in the moment Mr Astman saw his fate in this friend’s eyes. He took Mr Astman to the police, where he was shot on the spot.
That evening, Mr Beck brought Herr Doktor Professor Steckel and his wife into the bunker. We were now 14. We had created more sleeping space in the area under Ala’s bedroom: space in which to crawl and lie down. Herr Steckel was the only pharmacist in Zolkiew and so had been allowed to live outside the ghetto. This had saved his life. I had never met them before and they were an austere-looking couple. I didn’t want to think they were haughty and stuck-up, but those were the words that came to my mind. What must they think of us in our rags with our faces and eyes swollen with hunger and grief; our limbs mottled with sores and infected scratches that oozed pus? Them in their clean clothes; he in his wool coat and wire-rimmed glasses and she in her mink coat, looking around the bunker, looking where to sit without fouling herself?
Beck introduced us, all of us. And there wasn’t one word of solace, friendship, solidarity, gratitude or grief. They knew what had happened. Yet to look at them, they could have just arrived back from a vacation. Only money could allow them to look at us as if we were so beneath them.
I was smart enough to know Beck brought them here for their money. It was written all over their faces. There had never been any formal discussion between Beck and our families about money. The Becks had never asked us for payment in exchange for protection. All they wanted was f
or us to cover expenses for food. Not a zloty more. But from the very beginning our three families felt an obligation to give the Becks whatever we could because we knew they were risking their lives for us. No matter how much we were able to give them, it could never be enough.
Beck was going on and on with a smile, extolling the Steckels, letting us know we were their last resort and that Beck had a moral obligation to save them. ‘How could I turn them away?’ was what he said, and I knew there was no arguing or protesting. They were Jews. The Nazis wanted to kill them. We would make room. Life was very simple in the bunker. They had recently come to Zolkiew so I didn’t know if they had any family or if they knew the positions my father and Melman and Patrontasch had held in our community. Or if they knew the breadth of my father’s scholarship and generosity and the compassion of Mama. We who gave away most of everything, we had to provide for others. I could see the diamonds sewn in a special pocket in the lining of Frau Steckel’s blouse.
Through it all my father started to explain how we took turns cooking, washing; he informed them of what the families kept to themselves and what they shared; where the buckets were; how they were emptied. Frau Steckel interrupted and said that Julia would be doing all their cooking. Okay. We all understood. It would be us and them.
We had to eat. It had been days since any of us had put anything in our stomachs. The women were ladling out the boiled potatoes onto our enamel plates.
There was a knock on the hatch. But even before Patrontasch opened the hatch, the smell of roasted chicken and pirogies assaulted us. I can’t describe it any other way. Julia kneeled at the hatchway with a tray in her hand. Chicken, pirogies, vegetables and bread. Fresh bread. The tray had to be passed from hand to hand, from family member to family member. The tray had to run the gauntlet of starving human beings, past the noses of Igo and Klarunia, two starving children, to the Steckels, who took the tray eagerly and started to eat without a word or a look at any of us. Why we didn’t take their food, I can’t tell you. But my father and the other men, their decency was transcendent. They knew we were all hungry and I’m sure felt that, in time, without urging or any coercion, the Steckels would share their food, at least with the children. Poor Igo and Klarunia, their eyes bigger than their shrunken stomachs. What must they have been thinking? We had our rules, and we had to live by them to ensure our survival. Sometimes they were brutal, as brutal as any Nazi edict. But at least they were ours. To deny these children a bite of their food told me everything I needed to know about the Steckels and their character.
