by Clara Kramer
She told me their story. One night in March 1943, her father, a member of the Judenrat with special privileges, took her to the train station and handed her to a stranger. He told her that this man would take care of her. The man, whom she later found out was a partisan arms dealer, took her to his flat in Lvov. Giza’s two aunts were there. Two days later her mother joined them. Her father never made it. He died in the March akcja when the SS murdered the entire Judenrat.
From the stories the survivors told us, I realized we had it better than most. I learned of friends hiding in the homes of peasants where they were betrayed in the last days of the war. One woman lost her daughter, the week before the liberation. She went out to forage for food while the Nazis were preparing to run for their lives. With Zolkiew surrounded by Russian troops, they were still killing Jews. And that’s how we found out who was alive. Over the first days of the liberation, they wandered into town, in ones and twos, amazed to see that anyone else survived.
Out of 5,000 Jews in Zolkiew, there were only 50 left. Klarunia, Igo and I were the only children who still had both their parents left. Our house became a gathering place for all the survivors. The 50 of us clung together as if we were in a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Artek was a constant visitor at Lola’s. The three families, the Becks and Lola ate every meal at our house and only went to the Patrontasches to sleep at night.
We hadn’t been out of the bunker more than a couple of days, when there was a knock on the door. It was Pavluk. In one hand he was holding our pillows and the featherbed, freshly laundered, we had given him for safekeeping. In the other he carried a chicken, which he brought as a gift. He stood as straight as a pine and proud as a new father. He looked even more like a giant to me than he did before we went into the bunker, and the tears he was holding back told me he was grateful we were alive. For months and months before we went into the bunker, when I went out, I was used to being looked at like I was dirt; like I was nothing; like I was an affliction. And to see this one man with so much gratitude for our survival was more important than food. He knew Papa, but I was a stranger to him. And I knew his tears were not only for Papa. I saw the way he looked at us. He told Papa that anything he could do for us, he would do. And I knew he would. He shook Papa’s hand and said goodbye. Mama made us some soup from the chicken.
Over the next several days, we didn’t wander more than a few metres from our house. I was still afraid. The Nazis were gone, but the area was still filled with Ukrainians, marauders and bandits. Beck still kept us informed and told us of several pogroms where surviving Jews were brutally murdered. I didn’t want to be far from Papa and the children. I didn’t want to be far from the Russian soldiers who passed up and down the street in front of our house. Zosia asked about Uchka all the time. ‘Where’s Mama? When am I going to see Mama? When’s she coming back?’ She’d sit on the steps and watch the street waiting for her return. But nobody knew how to tell her and we kept up the ruse that she would be reunited with her at some point. Poor Zygush knew and was silent during all these conversations. He never mentioned his mother to us or asked about her.
When Mama started to feel better, she decided we should have a gathering of the 50 survivors at our house. I was overjoyed to see anyone who survived, but in that same moment was filled with grief and loss for their family members who perished. It was a party of ghosts. I couldn’t help being reminded of all the other parties at our house, which seemed to bloom like new flowers over the course of the summer. With all our family and friends, dozens of them, laughing, eating and talking like there was no tomorrow. Everybody brought whatever food they could find. We had the rations from the Russian soldiers, and the Poles when they fled had left their vegetable gardens, which had been taken over by weeds. But there were still potatoes, carrots, onions and other vegetables to be dug up and picked. Mama was able to make a good soup.
And despite the fact that we were 50 out of 5000, we still felt like we were a community. We were still the Jews of Zolkiew. We were eating in our backyard, sitting on the steps and under the fruit trees like in the old days.
I don’t know when I noticed, but I sensed Zygush was missing. Mama was panicked and furious. It was my responsibility to look after the children. I didn’t know when Zygush slipped off, where he went or why he went. He knew as well as any of us there were still pogroms and marauding bands of Ukrainians. He was a survivor and knew what he could do and what he wasn’t allowed to do. All 50 of us went to find him. To lose him now would have been more than any of us could bear. We searched everywhere. The town. The Melmans’. The factory. Zygush’s pre-war friend Helen’s house down the street from us. He might have looked for her since he didn’t know that Helen and her family had been deported. But he wasn’t there. I thought he might be at the park and I started running there, praying that nothing happened to him. Not after all he went through. Halfway there, running past the bombed-out buildings and the streets littered with the burnt-out shells of German artillery and tanks and the earthworks and barricades that guarded the plaza, I thought, Oh my God. He ran home. I didn’t know how I knew, but I ran there with the certainty I would find him.
The orchard at the back of the house was ripening with apples as if they already had no memory of the war. But I had no time to waste gazing at their beauty. When I got to Zygush’s house, there was an old babushka tending her garden. I asked for Zygush and she told me he had a job watching some cows for a local farmer. She pointed to the far fields at the back of their house. A job? He was eight. And he didn’t tell any of us. Not me, not Mama, not Papa. I ran through the field and saw Zygush about 400 metres away. He had his shirt off and already his tiny body was walnut brown. He had a switch in his hands, with which he made figure eights in the air. When he heard me screaming his name, he turned and waved, happy to see me. He wore a proud smile. When I got to him, before he ever said a word, my arm and hand jerked away from my body and I slapped him across the face. I was as stunned as he was. But I couldn’t stop hitting him. I was crying with relief and rage and it took several minutes for me to realize what I was doing. I had never struck anyone before and I couldn’t stop hitting him. And Zygush, the boy who never cried, was crying now. Zygush didn’t fight back and his weeping stopped me. I couldn’t stop crying and I embraced him. I was forgiven as soon as his brown arms moved round my neck.
‘Are you out of your mind? Do you want to get yourself killed? We were worried sick! Never. Never, do you understand me, leave the house without me!’ I was horrified at what I had done and held him. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We couldn’t find you. We were so scared.’
‘I thought you’d be proud of me. We’ll have milk. And butter and cheese,’ was all he said. I was proud of him. Here in this field, there was no sign there ever was a war. The cows were content and the fields and hillsides had their usual high summer carpet of ripening rye, wheat and corn. These were the fields I’d look out upon from Paradise Hill, which from here, lost in the haze of a summer sky, looked like less of a hill than usual. Zygush didn’t have to say it, but he was now the man in his family and he was doing what a man does. Taking care of his loved ones. I wanted to tell him that he was just a child and I wanted him to stay a child. But after losing Uchka and Hersch and enduring the bunker, at eight years old he was not a child any more. I stayed with him in the field until the end of the day and we drove the cows home to their barn. Zygush collected his pail of milk and proudly carried it back to our house.
The next weeks were spent, as with all the other survivors, engaged in two tasks. Regaining our strength. And trying to locate family members. We never went anywhere alone, so all three families made a pilgrimage to the cemetery to see if we could locate where Mania and our other relatives were buried. We passed the synagogue and looked in. There was nothing but fire-scarred and blackened brick, broken windows, old hay and garbage. At the cemetery, even though there was nothing there but a few cows grazing, just knowing Mania was buried somewhere made it ha
llowed ground. We also kept asking after Tilzer and Schitling, the boys who betrayed her. We asked dozens and dozens of people, but they had probably fled with the Germans and the other Volksdeutsche. We knew it was futile, but we kept asking.
We gained our strength just from the process of living, doing the small things that we had come to miss. Walking around the house. Speaking in a normal voice. Cooking our food. We wrote several letters to Rosa, but hadn’t heard back yet. Dudio. Rosa. Manek. Babcia. They were all we had left.
And Mama was becoming Salka the Cossack again. She was sending me with soup to the hospital for Mr Taffet and the other survivors. Eastern Europe in those days was filled with exiles, wandering from town to town looking for loved ones, hoping to find even one family member who had survived, or just trying to go home to see if there was anything left of their lives. Chances are there would be nothing and no one there. But I understood why they came. It was all they had left and the only place they had to go. They came through Zolkiew exhausted and starving. And, somehow, Mama had gained a reputation. If you came to Zolkiew, go to the Schwarzes where there would be a meal and a bed. We kept a mattress in the front room for the travellers, who were all afflicted with lice. She renamed our front room the louse suite. And she was also mother now to Zygush and Zosia, which was formidable because Zygush was something of his old self and you still needed a whip and a chair to take care of him. Zosia, still as silent as a memory, turned brown in the sun and clung to me and Mama, hardly ever letting us out of her sight and, more often than not, holding a hand or a bunch of skirt.
The Russian authorities came to my father and the other men and asked them to take over their factories again. It was a godsend for my father. But even though he was busy with a thriving business, the spark that had come to Mama’s eyes never returned to Papa’s.
It was summer and even though there was a war, the fields were filled with ripening grain that the farmers brought in on their carts. Papa offered Beck a job, but Beck declined. He was exhausted and was happy to be taken care of, as he had taken care of us. Now that Papa, Mr Melman and Mr Patrontasch were making money, they made sure the Becks didn’t have to lift a finger. But they didn’t know where Ala was. They didn’t know if she was alive or dead. The war was still being fought in western Poland and there was no mail or any way to find Ala. There were close calls we relived that had become almost legend, but in Beck’s retelling there was a light missing from his eyes. The person he wanted to share these war stories with was lost. Whenever we made a little money we always gave some to Beck and he always said the same thing, ‘This is for Ala. This is for Ala.’
Since the very first day of our liberation, convoy after convoy had been going through Zolkiew to the front. Every night they bivouacked in the town plaza. Sometimes there would be several thousand soldiers setting up their tents and their cooking fires. The Russians were always crazy for music.
Of course, we and everybody else in town had to inspect the troops, who looked more like boy scouts than soldiers. Most nights, the different battalions organized singing competitions around huge bonfires. Each company had their own group and on a summer evening they were all practising ballads, folk songs, love songs, dirges, work songs, army songs, songs from Borodin and Shostakovich, and as chaotic as this might sound, the songs and voices wrapped themselves around each other in one harmonic choir. This was our entertainment. Around dusk, we’d walk down to the plaza and wander through the troops. I knew some of the songs and sang along from time to time, which brought us large smiles from these boys who were far away from home, many for the first time. I had never sung in front of strangers before and this was the first time I realized I had a pretty voice. In the evenings, the damage from the war faded into shadows and the castle, the colonnades and the church spires were as beautiful and consoling as ever.
The fountain of the Virgin Mary had been repaired and the children of the Ukrainians splashed and played, laughing and screaming with delight. There were no Jewish children left to play and all the Polish children had fled with their families. I was singing along with some of the soldiers and I noticed a girl from my classroom. Nina was a little older than me, sweet and very serious. Everybody knew that her father was a colonel and the ranking officer in Zolkiew. Consequently she was fawned over like a Russian princess by any adult who knew who her father was. But she didn’t care. We never said much to each other at gymnasium, but I considered her a schoolfriend, although I never saw her outside the classroom. I didn’t know what moved her, but she came up to me and we started talking to each other and became real friends that day.
The Russian army was running the town in a laissez-faire way. There was no central authority. Just troops coming and going. But they were all so kind to us. I never gave a thought to the NKVD, the Russian secret police. We were free to reconstruct our lives.
I was looking forward to starting school in just a week’s time at the beginning of September. I learned the NKVD had returned when Comrade Dupak stopped by to see if we were still alive. He, too, looked happy to see us. I didn’t know his title, but from the look of his car and the way he was dressed, he had done well in the war and was very high up in the NKVD. He greeted us warmly and gave my father a present. A bicycle.
The next day, in the quiet early morning hours, a car drove up to the house where the Becks were living, just up the street from ours. I was still asleep. We all were. It was the NKVD, and before any of us had awoken on that summer morning, they had been arrested and taken to the jail in town, to be held until they were transported to Lvov for questioning. The news of their arrest swept up and down the street as fast as the fire. The NKVD had found several rifles in the house. Beck and Julia, who everyone in town by now knew were the heroes who had saved 18 of us, were German spies. They were left behind by the Nazis to commit acts of sabotage. They were starting an underground Volksdeutsche partisan group. All these ideas were insane. Except for the guns that Beck insisted he keep after our liberation.
Papa had begged Beck to get rid of them. The authorities were clear. Anyone caught with a gun was guilty of treason. The idea that the Becks were going to be shot as traitors or sent to Siberia, after all they had sacrificed for us, was the final, most bitter irony of the war. We were determined to get the Becks out, no matter what it cost. Papa and Mr Melman went to Lvov almost every day, telling our story to the army, to the NKVD, to the civilian administration. They spent all their money on bribes. But it was hopeless. The Becks were Volksdeutsche. They were criminals. And they were sent to a concentration camp to await their trial. We woke up every morning worrying about the Becks, looking for answers, looking for anyone who might help. We went to bed every night having failed them. I prayed for them as I had prayed in the bunker for Mania, Uchka and the children. Even after we had been liberated I felt safer, happier, more secure, more trusting, more optimistic with Beck and his wily, laughing blue eyes and unrepentant confidence just a few doors up the street. Week after week went by and we still hadn’t any hope of success. I started school, which I had been looking forward to with so much enthusiasm. But it meant nothing if the Becks weren’t free.
Chapter 18
THE DIARY
September 1944
I was sitting on a bench in the park by the river. Behind me the castle walls were intact and I could see the windows of my classroom. The grass was overgrown and the park littered. Up ahead, above the train station and the orchard, Paradise Hill still looked down upon the town, unchanged and uncaring. I didn’t think I could ever go up there again without Mania and Uchka. I was across the street from Nina’s house. It was the largest house on Railroad Street and it was always taken by the ranking officer of the last three occupations. It had a large garden filled with pink peonies behind a wrought-iron fence. Now that it was autumn, the peonies and other flowers had died, and the garden, filled with dried brown stalks, needed to be cleaned out and prepared for winter. This is the house from which the German officer’s wife had
foreseen Jewish revenge as our family and friends were led to the train station. I couldn’t stop weeping about the Becks. They had been taken to the Brigitka jail in Lvov before being shipped off to a nearby concentration camp.
Papa learned that the Becks were scheduled to be tried for treason and sent to Siberia. Once they were in Siberia, there would be no hope for them. Even if they survived the journey, all they would receive as a reward for their years of courage and generosity would be a short hard life in a labour camp.
Nina must have seen me weeping from her balcony and had come down to where I was sitting in the park. She asked why I was crying. I didn’t know where to begin. I had never talked about the Becks and the bunker to anyone but my family, who knew and felt everything I did. When we talked about the bunker, there was no need for tears because so many had already been spent inside. I didn’t want to reveal what we had gone through to a stranger, I couldn’t possibly. It would be too painful.
But as I spoke to Nina, the words poured out in spasms, choked out between sobs and halted breath. Mania. Uchka. The children. And the countless times, like the fallen leaves at my feet, that the Becks had saved us and almost lost their own lives. And how Papa and Mr Melman had made trip after trip to Lvov, sometimes almost every day, begging, bribing and pleading for the Becks’ lives with anyone they hoped might help them. They had no success and we were free and safe.
Nina sat next to me without speaking. She was sensitive enough to know that there were no words of consolation that would serve as a balm. After a long time, she broke the silence.
