We have enough virulent anti-Semitism in Poland, we don’t need more from the Germans. It was always there, of course, but it started getting much worse five years ago. First, the Polish government tried to restrict the way we Jews killed our animals; our kosher laws caused cruelty to animals, they said. My father was incensed because the way the shochet (the ritual slaughterer) slits the jugular vein of the animal is much more humane than the way the Poles keep hitting their poor animals over the head.
More and more, there is terrible, hateful graffiti—Christ killers and Death to all Zhids—scrawled on some of our Jewish buildings. Just last Christmas and Easter, the rabbi’s son Tulek Lau and my cousin Janek warned us to stay home and off the streets for fear of attacks. Janek also warned my brothers, Josek and Beniek and Idek, to stop playing soccer in the park on Sundays. He said when the local Polish soccer team loses the weekly game with their opponents from another town, they work out their anger by beating up Jews. When they win, they celebrate by beating up Jews. Even though I hate any thought of violence, I must admit having felt some pride when one Sunday, a year ago, some of our Jewish boys, including my brother-in-law, Jacob Brem, and his friend Leon Reichmann, went after the Polish boys and beat them up first.
Last year, in 1938, the old lies about Jews killing Christian children were being circulated in Piotrków, just as those hateful lies had been spewed out in the Middle Ages and in Spain during the Inquisition in the fifteenth century.
Just this July, after the Lau family returned from their summer vacation in Rabka, Tulek told Regina two chilling stories. Tulek and Milek and their friends had been playing a game they often played when they were in the countryside. A few of the boys would jump on the back of a farmer’s cart, and when the farmer saw them, they would jump off. But this time, one driver screamed at them: “Just wait, Hitler is on his way, and he will finish you!” And then Tulek told Regina that the train the Laus rode as they returned to Piotrków took four hours longer than usual because so many uniformed young men kept boarding the train: Polish soldiers being sent to the western front.
Suddenly, Rebbitzin Lau knocks at our door. A look of horror is on her face. “Tulek has just run home. He was with his friends at the corner of Jerozolimska and Piłsudskiego Streets. They heard a loud siren and saw two trucks full of Polish soldiers driving fast down the street, and the soldiers were shouting ‘Wojna!’” she says. “Turn on your radio, Gucia.”
A chill runs through me—wojna means war.
And through the static we hear the news. It has come. The Germans have invaded Poland.
I feel a perverse momentary thrill: something extraordinary is about to break the tedium of everyday life. But immediately, as the true meaning of the words on the radio sinks in, my excitement turns to fear.
All day and all night we hear people going up and down the stairs to the rabbi’s apartment. We suppose they are asking for information and advice. From Hela’s balcony we see truck after truck of Polish soldiers hurrying west to the border near Wieluń. Mama and Tatte are afraid the war might come to Piotrków immediately—this very day. They hurry off to both butcher stores hoping to sell all the meat to people brave enough to leave their houses and clever enough to stock up for the storm that is coming our way. Tatte decides not to order any more meat for the time being, and by sundown both stores are completely sold out. Mama comes home early and Tatte stays to close and shutter both shops before he rushes home. He feels the safest thing for us to do is to quickly leave Piotrków for a while and go to the countryside, where we know a Polish farmer.
Like everyone in Piotrków we leave our lights off after dark; a protective blackout in case the German air force is looking for bombing targets. We eat a sad and quiet Shabbos dinner by the light of the Shabbos candles. It is too dark to get ready to leave. We feel that God will forgive us for packing and leaving on Shabbos. Judas Maccabeus told his men that “the Sabbath is holy, but life is holier.”
SEPTEMBER 2–3, 1939
We are so surprised. It has been very quiet all night. Perhaps the Polish soldiers are fighting more fiercely than we had supposed and are successfully defending our border. Nevertheless, we get up early on Shabbos and pack some bedding. We carefully put my great-grandmother’s silver Shabbos candlesticks and a silver Shabbos kiddush cup in the middle of the bedding. We don’t take a lot of clothes because we plan to return soon. Mama has a beautiful engagement ring of platinum with a sparkling diamond and she sews it into the hem of her coat.
Tatte leaves the apartment to get our horse and carriage. I have no time to talk to Heniek because we have so much work to do, and that makes me frantic. I have time to write him only a few desperate words in our urgency to flee. I say that we may never see each other again and that I will love him forever. I ask Rebbitzin Lau to give it to him.
When I hug and kiss the rebbitzin goodbye she says the rabbi has decided that his place is to stay with his congregation and that he will even hold Shabbos services as usual in the Great Synagogue. She tells me that all day Friday, when people asked him what to do, he would quote Isaiah 26:20: “Hide but a little moment, until the indignation passes.” We all feel frightened and empty and numb. Will the indignation truly pass? And if it will pass, when will that be? We are almost in a trance.
Tatte comes to the back with the carriage and my mother is in tears. She is worrying about her dear brother, my uncle Josef, and Tante Sura and all of our cousins: Janek, Mania and David Tanenbaum, Hancia, Mendel and Genia and their baby Shlomo, Moshe, Chaim and Rebekah, Mala and Rozia.
We quickly squeeze tightly into the carriage: Hela and Marek, Regina, Josek, Beniek, Idek, me, Mama, Tatte, and of course Janova. Although the day is warm, I feel icy cold and somewhat detached as our carriage heads down the busy streets. I feel that I am merely watching a movie and that there is a woman in that carriage named Gucia, but she is not me.
We have made this same trip every summer for as long as I can remember, but in a very different movie. Every year after Passover my parents would take a train to the village of Przyglow and arrange to rent a peasant’s cottage for July and August. Then, as soon as our schools closed, the maids would take us to Przyglow in a carriage with all our clothes and kosher kitchen equipment. My parents would come by train every weekend. Since Polish law forbids the opening of any business on Sundays, they didn’t have to worry about the butcher stores and could come on Friday before sundown and return Sunday night.
In those lovely summers of the past, we spent our days playing in the fields, gazing at the sheep, swimming in the river, going for hikes, reading, and visiting with friends. The peasants were poor and grateful for the extra money from renting their house to us. They would simply sleep and cook outside. It was so warm in the summer, it didn’t seem to be a hardship for them. But this trip to Przyglow has absolutely no similarity to those of my happy childhood.
Piłsudskiego Street is mobbed with people, a few in carriages, but mostly on foot, Jews and Poles, frantically pushing carts filled with their valuables, heading the same way we are, southeast, away from the Germans.
Just as we are nearing the outskirts of Piotrków, we hear and see German airplanes above, and the bombs start falling on our beloved city. The noise is deafening, and the sudden explosions, fires, and smoke fill us all with terror. The horse rears up and then gallops faster and faster, and we are soon away from the noise and smoke. I am trembling as I imagine what is happening to Heniek, my relatives, the Laus, and Piotrków.
It takes us only an hour to get to our cottage in Przyglow, and the farmer is not surprised to see us. He, too, has heard about the German invasion and thought we might be coming for safety. It is almost like a typical summer except we are so frightened. We put our bedding down on the floors of the little cottage and have a very light meal of bread and cold leftover chicken from Friday night’s dinner.
Sunday morning, Tatte and Mama look at a map and decide we must hurry farther southeast to get away from the Germans.
We will go to Sulejow. We load everything back into the carriages and start out, but suddenly we hear planes above us and then see bombs falling behind us and in front of us. We are in the middle of a cloud of dark, acrid smoke and deafening thunder.
The road is full of Polish soldiers coming our way. They are running away from the Germans. We must face the truth. Poland is lost. It’s too late. We are surrounded. There is no way out. We turn around and go back home to the smoke and noise and frightened, scurrying people of Piotrków and our unknown future.
SEPTEMBER 4, 1939
We are home. The bombs have spared us and 21 Piłsudskiego is still standing, with all the windows still in their frames. We are numb and frightened and have no idea what will happen next. Our building is half-empty. Because we have no cellar, many of our tenants fled to other buildings nearby for refuge from the bombing. But now the bombing seems to have stopped. It feels eerily quiet, although we can hear distant explosions, almost like thunder, coming from the south. There are rumors that the Germans are coming on foot. I have had no word from Heniek but I keep that to myself. Hela has had no word from Jacob for three months.
SEPTEMBER 5, 1939
Today feels almost like a normal day. It is quiet and Koenigstein’s Bakery down the street at number 9 is open, so we can have fresh bread.
A note from Heniek arrives. It simply says that he is well and loves me and would rather be holding my hand on a train to Warsaw than huddling in a cellar with his family.
At two p.m. our family sits around the dining room table for dinner, as if all is normal. My mother and father talk about ordering meat tomorrow and opening the butcher shops on Thursday, assuming things stay quiet. Soon it will be the Jewish New Year, the High Holidays, ten days of prayer and atonement and commitment to tikkun olam and a better future.
But around four o’clock, we hear loud gunfire very close to our house. We all run to Hela’s apartment and look out the balcony. There are about a hundred three-wheeled motorcycles with little carts on the sides, each driver and passenger a German soldier. Their uniforms are greenish and they have round steel helmets on their heads and they all wear that frightening Nazi symbol, the black swastika on a bloodred armband. So that’s why the bombing has stopped. The Germans have entered our city. The sound of exploding bombs has been replaced by the noise of gunfire. The soldiers are shooting into the apartments just across the street at 17 Piłsudskiego. One of the tenants must have made the mistake of peeping out of the doorway, because he now lies in a spreading pool of what looks like beet borscht. We run back to our apartment, close all the windows and shutters, and try to pray to God.
SEPTEMBER 6, 1939
We hear distant gunfire all morning but Piłsudskiego Street seems quiet. Late in the afternoon the Laus come back and the rebbitzin comes to see us. She is shaking and her nose and eyes are red. The weather is stifling hot but her hands are like ice. We give her some hot tea and milk and what we have left of the coffee cake. In a trembling voice she tells us that since midnight on Saturday her family had been crowded in with about forty others a few blocks away in the cellar of the Radoshitz rabbi, Rabbi Finkler. That morning a number of military vehicles pulled up outside the house and soldiers poured out. They surrounded the exclusively Jewish block nearby, bounded by Zamkowa, Wspolna, Starowarzawska, and Jerozolimska Streets, and fired into the houses. As the tenants ran out, fleeing in every direction, the Germans kept shooting into the buildings. The buildings were then set on fire and the entire block burned down. By the end, six Jews were dead and twenty injured.
Then she quietly tells us that on Monday the Germans bombed Sulejow. There are thousands of refugees and casualties, Polish and Jewish, and hundreds of people from Piotrków have been killed. Sulejow! That is where we were planning to go to escape the Germans.
My whole body feels as icy as the rebbitzin’s hands. She says she must get back to her family and she leaves. The tea is untouched. The coffee cake sits with every crumb intact.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1939
The Nazis are now suddenly, brutally, in charge of our city, our country, and our lives. They have set up loudspeakers all over our neighborhood and are constantly shouting into them, barking out orders, informing us that there is now a curfew from six at night till dawn. They are emphatic that they will shoot anyone who violates this curfew right there on the spot. They also scream and shout that although Poles are subhuman, Jews are less than that, and therefore Poles may no longer work for or serve Jews.
Bolek, the janitor, has already fled Piotrków and gone to his family in the countryside. The Nazis have come and taken our horse and carriage and Wojcek has been forced to leave, as well. Janova, who is practically Regina’s second mother, must leave us tonight. Janova is an orphan, and has absolutely no family or place to go. She will try to find Krysia, who lives near Łódź, twenty-six kilometers away.
Janova hopes to be able to get on the train, but we are all frightened for her, and sad for ourselves. She has been such a major part of our family and has always done all the housekeeping. What shall we do without her? And how will she survive without us? Mama gives Janova a nice dress and a coat of Hela’s to take. She would have given more, but knowing the desperate struggle of Jews in Germany simply to survive, Mama worries about depleting our resources. We are all desolate. Mama, Hela, and Regina are sobbing and making everyone’s shoulders wet.
SEPTEMBER 8, 1939
The bombing and shooting seem to be over. We are running low on food and so I have volunteered to go out to the bakery and vegetable stores. We will not allow Mama to take the risk. She is too valuable to our family. Hela has Marek to take care of and Regina is just thirteen. My brothers and father dare not go outside the house. It is safer for a woman to go. We hear that men are being beaten, arrested, or shot.
I stand in a very long line of Poles and Jews, all women, and my ears are buzzing with snatches of horrible bits of gossip and rumors in Polish and Yiddish. God forbid that they be true. A woman turns to me and asks if I have heard about Baila Reichmann’s youngest son, Abraham. He was shot and killed last night for being on the street after the six-o’clock curfew. Abraham was only twenty-three. Poor Pani Reichmann. She’s been a widow since her husband, Hercka, died just after Abraham was born, leaving her with six young children under age eleven. For over twenty years she has carried the full burden of the family’s wholesale hardware and building supply store. With the help of her three sons, each leaving school as a young teenager to work in the business, she’d made it a big success. Now, with her oldest son, Josek, studying in Jerusalem, she must grieve for her youngest, leaving only Leon to help run the business and for her to lean on at home.
And then another woman whispers to the women around me, in Yiddish. Have we heard that the Nazis took three girls away this morning? She names three of my former classmates. These girls were very attractive and had reputations for being a bit “wild.” The Germans just grabbed them off the street and pushed them into a green Volkswagen and drove off. The women start gossiping about why the Nazis would take these beautiful young girls and what will happen to them. My stomach tightens and churns.
By the time I get to the head of the line my hunger is replaced by nausea. There is very little food left. I am lucky to get the last day-old challah, a few pounds of potatoes, two wilted cabbages, and ten old, wrinkled carrots. With Janova gone, we will all have to pitch in. I guess Mama and Hela will cook the meals. The only thing I have ever cooked before is coffee and that was a disaster.
SEPTEMBER 9, 1939
We are just about to sit down for our Shabbos dinner. With only a few potatoes, cabbage, and old carrots, our meal of watery soup does not look very appetizing. We hear heavy boots coming up the stairs. Regina peeks out the door and comes back crying. There are two large men in German uniforms pounding impatiently on the rabbi’s door. We cannot eat a bite. We sit there listening for more steps. After an hour we hear the rabbi’s door open and loud footsteps going down the st
airs. Regina again peeks out our door and sees that the two Germans are leaving alone. Mama rushes to talk to the rebbitzin, who says that, surprisingly, it was a very nice, polite meeting. Rabbi Lau had been summoned to go immediately to the office of the new military governor of Piotrków, Colonel Brandt. When the rabbi said that it was his Sabbath and he could do no work, the Nazis said that Sunday was their Sabbath and they could do no work, so the rabbi was to show up at their office on Monday. We all feel greatly relieved, and a bit of hope is kindled. We even try a taste of the now-cold soup and the dry, stale bread.
SEPTEMBER 11–12, 1939
On Monday, when Rabbi Lau comes back from the meeting with the new military governor, he says that Colonel Brandt complimented him on his perfect German. The colonel was very polite but emphatic that no Jews were to show any resistance whatsoever to any of the commands of the Nazis. He further declared that the rabbi must provide two hundred strong men each day to work for the Nazis to ensure the peace and to take care of necessary city tasks. The rabbi explained that he was just the spiritual leader of the people, the leader of the Jewish Court, and that it was the responsibility of the Community Council to handle relations between the people and the government. Only the council had access to the population rolls, and until it resumed functioning, there would be no way to implement the colonel’s order.
On Tuesday, we hear a rumor that Polish police and German soldiers have started going house to house forcibly taking strong young men for the German labor needs. We are so frightened for Josek, Idek, and Beniek, and try to think of some way to make a hiding place for them, but we have no cellar or attic. Our minds are totally empty. Our heads feel full of cotton. We feel paralyzed and cannot think or plan. We are consumed by fear and dread. This cannot really be happening.
SEPTEMBER 13, 1939
It is the start of the High Holidays, with Rosh Hashanah beginning at sundown. On this day, three men in black uniforms with red swastika armbands come to Rabbi Lau’s. They introduce themselves as Radom District Security Police and, again speaking politely, tell him that they are now in charge of dealings with the Jews and repeat Colonel Brandt’s demand for Jewish workers. Also, the rabbi is to provide without delay a lot of information about the Jews of Piotrków: a map showing where they live, names, addresses, properties, community organizations, names of officers, tax rolls, etc.
Claiming My Place Page 9
