Clara's War

by Clara Kramer

  ‘Clara, please, what I’m about to tell you, you cannot tell anybody. My father would kill me and they might kill him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know that the trial will mean nothing. Last night, the new party secretary had dinner at our house. He seemed like a very nice man. You should take your diaries to him. You have to hand them over personally. You have to do exactly as I tell you. He likes pretty girls. Wear your best dress. Maybe, he’ll read your diary.’

  I ran home to tell Mama and Papa what Nina had said. I decided to take Lola with me, because even though her hair was white, she was still quite beautiful. And I also decided to bring Zygush and Zosia. I knew they could make the hardest heart cry. Lola made new dresses for me, Zosia and herself overnight. When we got up in the morning, I washed my hair and Mama combed and brushed it as she hadn’t done since before we went into the bunker. She did the same with Zosia. Once I was dressed, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked as if I had never been in the bunker. I had gained back all the weight I had lost and my skin was still brown from being outside for hours and hours almost every day since we were liberated. Zosia’s hair shone and her face had the rosy complexion of the porcelain figurines in Mrs Melman’s china closet.

  Lola walked in carrying flowers and smiled. ‘How do I look?’ She had found some lipstick and rouge. Any man would have been proud to have her on his arm. I tied up the four copybooks of my diary in brown paper and twine, kissed my parents and off we went, hand in hand, to the party secretary’s office. It was across the street from the opera house and had been built in the construction spree of Emperor Franz Josef in the optimistic style he adored. The building, like the train station and the colonnaded plaza, almost smiled, they were so inviting. There were soldiers, young, some only a year or two older than me, guarding the walkway and they stopped us as soon as we went in the gate. It was clear they had their orders. No one was to be allowed in.

  I told them the papers were only for the party secretary’s eyes and that he needed to see them right away. One of the soldiers volunteered to take them in.

  ‘You can shoot me if you want to. But I have to see him!’

  They looked at me and then at the four of us, deciding what to do. I knew they weren’t going to shoot us.

  ‘Please, a man and his wife are about to be killed. They saved our lives’–I gestured to the four of us–‘and 14 other people’s as well. They’re heroes.’ The tears had already started and the soldiers, I could see, were looking at Lola and the children.

  ‘I’ll take you in.’

  Nina had been right so far and I prayed that the secretary would be as kind as the soldiers. I felt that this was the most important moment in my life. And somehow I had to find the words to convince this man to override the massive bureaucracy of Soviet justice. When I was led into the secretary’s office, I was frightened, frightened not so much of the secretary and what he might do to me, but of failing Beck and Julia. The room was a study panelled in dark wood and the secretary sat behind a massive desk, nursing a cigar. Nina was right. He did seem like a nice man and, to my surprise, I didn’t feel intimidated by the most powerful man I had probably ever met in my life.

  ‘So what’s so important it’s worth getting shot for?’

  I told him about the Becks and the bunker and how many times he had saved us and how he had risked his life for us. I also told him that the Becks had many opportunities to leave, but stayed because they had promised never to abandon us. I showed him the package and told him it was all documented in the diary. I offered it to him and he put it down on his desk.

  ‘You know the Becks are spies. He was caught with a gun.’

  ‘Please, don’t believe me. Just read the diary. It’s all in there. Everything.’

  I was in tears now. So were Lola and Zosia. Zygush was stoic as always, but he had the grave expression of an old man.

  ‘When we went into the bunker, my mother told me I had to write, to keep a record of what happened to us in case we were killed. What the Becks did to save us, I couldn’t have made up. He knew what would happen if the Germans arrested him. He knew it and still he stayed. Please. Don’t believe me. Please read the diary.’

  The secretary looked at the twine-covered package on his desk.

  ‘I’ll read your diary,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  He thanked us for coming and asked his adjutant to make sure the children were given a cookie on the way out.

  There was hope. The secretary didn’t tell us if or when he would make up his mind. There was nothing to do now but wait. Papa and Melman still went to Lvov every day to try and find someone who could help the Becks. They knew it was futile. They knew their money was being stolen. But they had to do something. We could not lose the Becks. A few days later one of the young soldiers who guarded the secretary’s office returned the diary. The books had been rewrapped in brown paper and twine. There was no accompanying letter or message of any kind. He told us he was simply ordered to deliver the package.

  If the secretary was going to help the Becks, he would have written. I couldn’t comprehend how he could not be moved by the Becks’ courage or how he could believe that Beck was a spy. But that was the only conclusion left. After all that we had gone through, what right did I have to expect a happy ending with the Becks? Why should the world make any sense? Why should courage and generosity, loyalty and selflessness be rewarded? The world had changed and those qualities were so rare, it seemed, that anyone exhibiting them could not be trusted. The joy I had felt at our liberation slipped away like a lost memory. I knew I had to live because that was what Mania would have wanted. But how to live in a world that would destroy the Becks, who were living saints, as noble and courageous as any, was something I could not face or understand. All I wanted was for the Becks to come home.

  A few evenings later, I was reading when there was a knock. I looked out the window. Beck and Julia were standing on our steps, waiting to be let in, smiling, looking like hell. Exhausted. Thin. Pale.

  ‘Mama, it’s them!’ Everyone knew who ‘them’ meant. There was only one them. I ran to the door and opened it. I couldn’t believe it. Beck’s look said: ‘What’s the fuss all about?’ I hugged him and Julia and Mama was screaming for me to get the men. She led the Becks inside as I ran across the street to the factory, screaming, ‘They’re here. They’re here!’ By the time I got there, Papa, Melman and Patrontasch had heard our cries of joy and were already running home from the factory. Within minutes, the news of their arrival had spread up and down the street and our house filled with the 16 of us, the few of Becks’ friends who hadn’t left town and many of the other survivors he had helped. Food and vodka appeared out of nowhere and the first true celebration since the day we walked out of that bunker began. The Becks were overwhelmed and wanted to kiss and hug and touch every one of us.

  As I watched the outpouring of love and gratitude, I knew that we would be bound to the Becks forever. The Becks, the Schwarzes, the Melmans, the Patrontasches had been united by a marriage under God that no man could ever put asunder. Whatever future awaited our families, we would be as intertwined as any vines that clung to the tree that supported them. Our tree had been the Becks. Julia was smiling now without any embarrassment over her teeth. Beck found me a few minutes later and took me aside. ‘Clarutchka, they told me about the diary. I guess you said some nice things about me after all.’

  Epilogue

  LIFE GOES ON

  September 1944 to present

  Today, I’m an 81-year-old woman, living in quiet, leafy, suburban New Jersey. I have a wonderful husband, Sol, and two great adult boys, Philip and Eli and five grandchildren, Micki, Tracy, Brian, Jamie and Mindy. How I wish Mania could have met them. I still miss my sister so much. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her. I wonder what kind of person she would have become, had she only had the chance.

  I often look at the photographs, the only thing of value left from the war. The
school pictures of my sister and me in our sailorsuit uniforms. Mama and Mania in the Carpathians with tall pines and brisk clouds moving in the background. Mania, Zygush, Zosia and me, little twigs of children trying not to squint in the sun. Aunt Giza in full stage make-up and bright lighting with raccoon eyes from too much kohl. The engagement portraits of Uchka and Hersch Leib, looking like twins. My grandparents looking so severe in their black clothes, so unlike the boisterous couple I remember, laughing often and always talking.

  And my few pictures of the Becks. Julia with a smile trying to emerge from her lips. Mr Beck just a few years after the war with his hair turned grey and looking a generation older. Lola swaggering down a street in a Parisian hat. And Ala at 16, just before the war, a smile on the face that charmed dozens of Nazis and saved our life countless times. It was easy to see why they all fell in love with her. Anyone looking at these pictures who had no knowledge of the Holocaust and the fate of most of them could only draw one conclusion. What a lovely, happy family. There are over 30 of us in the pictures.

  There were over 50 of us in the immediate Schwarz/Reizfeld clan. After the war, including Rosa and Manek, who survived in Aktyubinsk, there were eight of us. At a recent wedding in Tel Aviv, the eight had multiplied to over 60. When I think of the Holocaust, I don’t think of 6 million lost, I think of the 50 million who never had a chance to be born.

  In retrospect, and in rereading my diary, the fact that the eight of my family survived at all seems like a miracle, much more even than it had while I was living through it. There was no logical reason for our survival. It wasn’t will alone that had saved us. How many who had had the same had perished? We had been lucky, of course, but it was more than that. How many had been saved time and again by luck, only to perish in the end? You only need to be unlucky one time. When I think of the one thing that we had, and the others didn’t, it was the Becks. Everything I have learned about love, honour and courage, I learned from them. After all that they did for us in the bunker, I know that nothing in life is impossible. When I left that bunker over 60 years ago, I felt that my life was no longer mine alone. I knew I would have to lead a life worthy of having been saved.

  The war ended on 8 May 1945. The Becks had left for southern Poland a month earlier. The Ukrainians had made sure that the Poles would have no future in Zolkiew, and the Russians were doing nothing to defend them. The Becks had to leave before they were murdered. As soon as the travel ban was lifted, they left on the first train out of town. We all went to the train station to say goodbye. For more than 28 months we had seen each other every day. They had been our lifeline and had become our family. It felt like a part of ourselves was leaving with them, but we knew they had to go. The Polish government had promised them a beautiful farm, which had belonged to one of the six million who had died in the war. We prayed that they would be safe there. How do you say goodbye to someone to whom you owe absolutely everything? I told them how very much I loved them. How much they meant to me. That whatever I would accomplish in my life would be in their honour and in their name. But it would never be enough to repay them.

  Over the course of the winter, we knew there was nothing left for us in Zolkiew. The town we loved existed now only as a communal memory. There was no Jewish community left. The Ukrainians were still as anti-Semitic as before. We couldn’t practise our religion and were barely making a living. We decided to leave Zolkiew and join Beck. The Patrontasches and the Melmans were already there. As we left Zolkiew by train, in the same cattle cars that had once gone to Belzec and Auschwitz, the hairs on my neck stood on end. Nobody talked about it, but I knew we all were feeling the same thing. None of us looked back as the train left the station.

  A letter had finally arrived from Ala. She was alive and living in Krakow. The first thing we did was to give Beck the letter. We hadn’t dared send it by the unreliable post lest it get lost. Beck broke down in gratitude, as if we had saved his daughter.

  We were all together, but the local economy was still in chaos. There were no opportunities for my father. We had to move on after only a few months. We went to Liegnitz in Silesia, which bordered Germany. As a result of the Potsdam conference the town had been given back to Poland and 95 per cent of the town’s population had been repatriated to Germany. My father was able to take over an oil-press business. The children and I were able to go back to school. After school, the other children would run and greet their mothers calling out, ‘Mama, Mama.’ On the first day, Zosia ran out too, calling ‘Mama, Mama’ to my mother. She had always called her auntie. But from that day onwards, it was official: my mother was hers too. There are certain moments that stay with a person for ever, and the first time that Zosia called my mother Mama is one of them.

  The business was doing well and I was doing well in my studies. Life seemed normal, but we knew it wasn’t. With the communist government and the pogroms, we knew there was no future for Jews in Poland. In the winter of early 1946, young men, boys really, from the Bricha, the organization of Warsaw ghetto survivors, Jewish partisans and the Jewish Brigade, which had fought alongside the British Army, came to Liegnitz. They circulated through Eastern Europe encouraging immigration to Palestine. If there had been a Jewish State in 1939, the international community couldn’t have turned its back on the extermination of six million Jews. The idea of our own country was intoxicating. They were blunt and told us that it might take years; that we would have to smuggle ourselves across borders; that if we were caught, we might be sent to concentration camps. There was no guarantee that we would reach Palestine. Despite the setbacks, it wasn’t hard to convince us to take part. We settled our affairs and in the summer of 1946 found ourselves in the back of an old canvas-topped army truck, singing Zionist songs to keep up our spirits. Zygush was more than excited. He was on the adventure of his life. When I think back, I was excited as he was. The only one of us who didn’t share this spirit was my father. I worried about him. He was no longer the man he had been before the war. I worried that he would never find peace again. Mania’s death had robbed him of his joy.

  We were dropped off in the middle of a forest on the Polish/Czech border. There was a quota on immigrants from Eastern Europe, so we were told to destroy all our identity papers and anything else that would give us away. We were supposed to be Turkish workers en route for Germany. As I took my diary out of the suitcase, ready to throw it away, my mother stopped me. ‘You’ll throw away that diary over my dead body.’ She led me into the train station bathroom and we hid half under her clothing and half under mine. We boarded another cattle car and were taken to a displaced-persons camp in Austria near the German border. The saga of the Jews in the displaced-persons camps, where we lingered for years, often behind barbed wire, deserves its own telling, and I hope some author undertakes the task. The world simply didn’t know where to put us.

  Most of the camps were old factories with large floors that served as our barracks. In every camp we were kept under guard by US or British troops. Each camp was filled with bulletin boards with thousands and thousands of notes requesting information about lost relatives and family. We read every note hoping we might find just one survivor. We met Mr Melman’s beautiful distant cousin Inka, who had survived the war in a nunnery. Most of the floors of the camps were made of stone, but there was one wooden floor. We were all longing for normal lives; for everything that had been taken from us. The young men got down on their hands and knees and waxed the floor using candles, if you can imagine such an effort, just so we would have a proper dance floor.

  Sol Kramer asked Inka to dance. He was tall, handsome and charming in the most blunt way. After a couple of dances, Sol whispered to his brother, with whom I had been partnered, ‘Can the fat one dance?’ Sol and I danced together and we’ve never left each other since.

  The beginning of our relationship was uncertain. My father asked if I was serious about Sol. I said it didn’t make any difference because he was going to America and my mind was made up about P
alestine. We hadn’t gone through everything to survive the war to be separated from our parents and siblings now.

  We had leave to go to another displaced-persons camp near Munich, which was the staging camp for illegal immigration to Palestine. I said goodbye to Sol and we were then smuggled across the Austrian border by the Jewish Brigade…The Bricha devised a clever system to account for all the trafficking. If 20 Jews left the camp for Palestine, the Jewish Brigade would smuggle 20 new Jews into the camps to take the papers of the émigrés who had just left. My mother, father, Zygush, Zosia and I all had identity papers of three different families. I was a Weiss. My mother a Rosenberg and I can’t remember my father’s name.

  Sol, however, was determined to make me his wife. He paid professional smugglers to smuggle him from Austria to Germany to see me. We were in love, but I felt I was lucky still to have parents. I wasn’t going to leave them and move to a country 6,000 miles away. Neither Sol nor I would consider not respecting our parents’ deepest hopes for us.

  His father and my father started corresponding. His father finally said that since he had most of his family with him, Sol had his blessing to go to Palestine with me. My father asked if I wanted Sol, and we became officially engaged…via mail by our fathers.

  The displaced-persons camps were more than a hotbed of romance. There were marriages almost every day. And there was no such thing as linen. There might be one pair of sheets in the entire camp. For their honeymoon, new couples were given the sheets and a private room for the night. This was our honeymoon. I can tell you this, we didn’t need the linen. Being alive was honeymoon enough.

  After Israel was declared a state, we were able to emigrate just a few months later. We had been writing to the Melmans and the Patrontasches and they emigrated to Israel about the same time as we did. After living in tents for months, all three families found apartments on the same street. It was little Zolkiew and we were back and forth between apartments all the time. We prospered. You could not be a Jew in Israel at that time and not feel you were part of building a nation. It was the perfect antidote to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Every shtetl and town formed associations to memorialize their towns. Ours was no exception and we spent years gathering stories and tracking down the fates of all 5,000 of us. My son Philip was born in 1950 and Eli was born in 1954.