by Alan Gratz
One afternoon after work, I made a fateful decision. I went by a friend’s house instead of going directly back to my family’s rooftop hideaway. If I had gone straight home, if I had gone out to get our rations with my mother and father, things might have turned out very differently than they did.
The streets of the ghetto were empty when I finally headed home that day. The emptiness could only mean one thing — another Deportation. When the Nazis came looking for Jews to deport, all the people who lived on the streets found places to hide. They had to, or they’d be taken. Men and women with homes to go to put their heads down and hurried there by whatever back alleys and side streets they could. I skirted down Limanowskiego Street, ready to duck behind a busted-up piece of furniture or hide in a pile of old rags if I heard the Nazis coming.
I was almost home when I heard the bark of German officers around the corner and the shuffling of shoes on pavement. I scanned the area for any place I could hide, but there wasn’t one. I squeezed myself into a corner on the other side of a short set of stairs to an apartment building and tried to disappear into the shadows.
The Nazi officers marched by in the street in front of me. All they had to do was turn their heads to see me, but they kept their eyes forward, followed by a ragtag group of Jews who were being deported. I watched them go by, a few hundred or so, their heads bent low and every one of them silent as the grave.
Wait — there. In the middle of the crowd. I froze.
Was that my mother and father?
I stood on my toes, trying to see into the mass of people, but the angle had changed. I was standing in plain sight now, my head and shoulders well over the top of the short flight of stairs, but I didn’t care. Were my parents in that Deportation? Maybe I’d just seen a couple who resembled them.
I wanted to scream. I almost ran to the column of marching Jews to call my parents’ names, to find out if that was really them. But the sight of the German SS officers bringing up the rear stopped me. If my parents weren’t being marched right now, I’d be caught and never see them again. But if it was them —
As soon as the prisoners and their guards were past, I dashed out from behind the stairs and ran all the way home. I burst through the door to our apartment building and raced up the stairs and pounded on the big metal door to our rooftop hideaway. The bars were still over the door, which was good news. That meant someone was still up there. I prayed it was my mother and called through the door to her as I pounded away. Behind the door I heard the steel bars being lifted and I stopped knocking, my heart racing. The door opened, and my cousin Sala stood behind it, tears running down her face.
“No,” I said. “No.”
My knees went weak, and I closed my eyes against the truth that was coming.
“Yanek,” Sala said. “Yanek, thank God you’re all right.”
“Where are they?” I demanded, even though I already knew. “Sala, where are my parents?”
“I’m so sorry, Yanek. The Nazis grabbed them as they were coming back from buying bread. I saw them taken, right there in the street in front of the building.”
I staggered through the door and into the pigeon coop that had been our home, our sanctuary, for more than a year. It was totally empty.
I fell to my knees and sobbed. Sala put her hand on my shoulder, but I could barely feel it. Mama. Papa. They were gone. My family was gone. I felt like my heart was being wrenched out of my chest.
The emptiness of the pigeon coop weighed heavy on me. I was the only one left. How would I survive? Why should I survive? Maybe I should just go and give myself to the Nazis, I thought with bitterness, with defeat.
No, I thought.
I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my sleeve. My parents would not want that for me. In the place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination.
I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they took from me, I would survive.
I was thirteen years old, and my parents were gone.
I was all alone in the world, but I would survive on my own.
The Nazis snatched me up one day when I was at work.
I was still working at the tailor shop in Kraków, hoping that would save me from the Deportations. But my work there ended up being the reason I was taken. The tailor shop at Plaszów, a nearby labor camp, needed more workers, we were told. So we were taken.
I had known this day would come. In the days and weeks after my parents were deported, the rest of my family had gone too. Uncle Moshe had disappeared while on a work detail. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela were pulled from their home in a Deportation. Cousins Sala, Dawid, and their two boys while in line for bread. Aunt Gizela and little Zytka went for a voluntary selection in Zgody Square, in hopes that the Nazis meant what they said about resettlement. By the summer of 1942, only I remained — the sole member of my family left in the Kraków ghetto. I thought I’d be ready for it when they took me away, but I wasn’t.
They loaded us into a truck, and all the horror stories I’d heard suddenly became real to me. Were the Nazis lying to us? Were we going to die? Were we really being taken to the woods to be shot? I panicked, looking for a way out — out of the truck, out of Plaszów, out of this nightmare that had already swallowed my parents and everyone I loved. But just outside the truck were Nazis with machine guns. They didn’t even have to point them at me for the message to be clear: It was either go where this truck was taking me or die here on the streets of Kraków. I had sworn to myself I would survive, so I made the choice that kept me alive, if only for the moment, and took a seat on the truck.
The women I worked with begged to be able to tell their families back in the ghetto good-bye, to tell them where they were being taken, but the Nazis didn’t listen. They just poked them with their rifles and threatened to shoot them if they didn’t get in the truck. The women sobbed the whole way to Plaszów, but I didn’t. I was gripped by fear, but I wasn’t sad to leave the ghetto. All my family were gone, and I had no more possessions of any value. There was nothing left for me there.
The truck did, after all, take us to Plaszów. It was a labor camp just a few kilometers outside Kraków. The truck stopped just outside the camp’s gate, where more Jews were being unloaded from trucks. I didn’t know where the others had come from: Kraków? One of the villages outside the city? Somewhere else? Some of them carried suitcases and bags; others, like us, had nothing.
“Schnell! Schnell!” a German soldier barked at me. Quickly! Quickly! He struck me in the back with the butt of his rifle, and I stumbled forward into the dirt. I scraped the skin off my palms trying to catch myself, but that was nothing compared to the screaming pain in my shoulder. I got to my feet and brushed the grit from my bleeding hands as we were herded inside.
Plaszów was a series of long, low buildings separated by dirt roads and surrounded by barbed wire. The few other men and I were separated from the women. A guard ordered us to turn over any valuables, and I gave him the few zloty I had in my pockets. After that we were ordered to take off our clothes. Reluctantly, I removed my dirty, too-short shirt and pants, and added them to a pile. Another soldier gave me a pair of wooden shoes and a blue-and-gray-striped prisoner uniform made out of a thick canvas material. I put them on and held my arms out to look at myself in my new clothes.
Now I am officially a prisoner, I thought. I almost laughed — in truth I had been a prisoner since the Nazis walled off the Kraków ghetto, but now I finally looked the part.
After we were all given uniforms, we were marched to the Plaszów tailor shop by another prisoner wearing a yellow armband. He was a kapo, he told us, a prisoner who’d been put in charge of other prisoners by the Nazis, so they wouldn’t have to deal with us all the time. We were to do what he told us, he said, or we would feel the sting of the wooden club he carried. All of us knew enough by now to follow along and do what we were told without speaking.
There were thousands of pri
soners at Plaszów, most wearing a yellow Star of David on their uniforms to show they were Jews. But there were other prisoners too, I soon learned, all of whom wore different colored triangles. The red armbands belonged to political prisoners. Green meant criminals. Black armbands were worn by gypsies, though there were very few of those, as they were usually killed straight off. Purple meant Jehovah’s Witness. Homosexuals wore pink. And all of them had a little letter in their triangle to tell you where they were from: P meant Polen, or “Pole”; T meant Tschechen, or “Czech”; J meant Jugoslawen, or “Yugoslavian.” There was no letter in the Jewish stars though. No matter where we had come from, we had no country. We were only Jews.
As I scanned the prisoners along the way to the tailor shop, I thought I saw a familiar face. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Uncle Moshe!
“Uncle Moshe!” I called. “Uncle Moshe! It’s me! Yanek!”
Moshe looked up, not in excitement but in horror. His eyes were wide, and he shook his head at me quickly before turning his gaze back to the ground.
“Who called there? Who was that?” our kapo barked, bringing my group to a halt. The prisoners looked back over their shoulders to show it hadn’t been them, and I looked back too, as though trying to see who had called out. One of the men behind me gave me an angry glare, then turned as if to see if he could find the source of the yell behind him.
“The prisoners will remain silent unless spoken to,” the kapo told us, and he struck a man in the back with his club. As the kapo herded us the rest of the way to the tailor shop, my face burned with shame. I was such a fool! Someone had been hurt because I’d called out to Moshe. I resolved then and there not to speak again until I could find Moshe and talk to him privately.
We worked all day in the tailor shop doing what we had done in Plaszów, only now there were more SS guards, and we were often beaten for no other reason than because we were Jews. I saw one man struck so hard in the head with a club that he fell off his stool and didn’t get up again. He was dragged away and never returned, and suddenly I understood why the Plaszów tailor shop needed new workers, and always would.
That night we were marched to our barracks, where we were each given a small piece of bread and a bowl of watery soup. I was just finishing my meager meal when Uncle Moshe found me.
“Yanek!” he said. He glanced around to make sure our barrack kapo was gone, then pulled me into a hug. I hadn’t hugged someone in so long that I was almost too stunned to embrace him back. Moshe held me away from him to look me over, then pulled me close again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t greet you this morning, but no doubt you’ve seen what they do to anyone who speaks out of turn.”
I nodded.
“Yanek, we haven’t much time,” he whispered. “Listen closely. Here at Plaszów, you must do nothing to stand out. From now on, you have no name, no personality, no family, no friends. Do you understand? Nothing to identify you, nothing to care about. Not if you want to survive. You must be anonymous to these monsters. Give your name to no one. Keep it secret, in here,” Uncle Moshe said, tapping his heart with his fist.
“Are my parents here?” I asked him, daring to hope. If Moshe was alive, why not my mother and father?
Moshe shook his head. “I am sorry, boy. No. Unless they were taken to another work camp, they are most likely dead — and Plaszów is where they bring most of us from Kraków, being so close.”
My legs felt wobbly. I had to sit down on my bunk, or I would have collapsed. I had known my parents might be dead — there were the rumors, after all, about where people went when they were taken. But I suppose I’d never let myself really and truly believe it until now. I didn’t try to stop the tears that filled my eyes and coursed down my cheeks.
Moshe sat beside me and put a hand on my knee. “But you are alive, boy! There is a blessing in that. You’re the only other one of us to survive.”
I suddenly realized what Moshe was saying. “Aunt Gizela? Little Zytka?” I asked — his wife and daughter.
Moshe’s own eyes teared up, and he quickly wiped them with the backs of his hands. “Dead,” he said. “They could not work, so the Nazis shot them.”
I asked about my other uncles and cousins, but Moshe shook his head. “You and I are the only ones left. You must show them you can work, boy, so you can keep living.”
“I have a job in the tailor shop,” I said, sniffling.
“Good. Good! Any job you can do outside the camp will help you avoid Amon Goeth.”
“Who?”
“The commandant of the camp.”
Outside, someone shouted.
“Roll call,” Moshe said, and he stood. “We must all go and line up to be counted. Remember: You are no one. You have no name. You do not speak, you do not look at them, you do not volunteer for anything. You work, but not so hard they notice you. Gizela. Zytka. Your parents, Oskar and Mina. They are dead and gone now, Yanek, and we would grieve for them if we could. But we have only one purpose now: survive. Survive at all costs, Yanek. We cannot let these monsters tear us from the pages of the world.”
I nodded, wiping away my own tears, and followed Moshe to the open field in the camp where roll call was taken. We were lined up in row upon row while the Nazis checked the numbers on our uniforms against the tally on their clipboards. I realized then: They would beat us and starve us and shoot us like we didn’t matter, but they would always keep track of us.
While soldiers worked their ways up and down the lines checking us off, one man in a crisp SS officer’s uniform and tall riding boots walked among the prisoners, twitching a riding crop against his legs. Two sturdy-looking German shepherd dogs followed along behind him. The SS officer stopped in front of the prisoner beside me and suddenly commanded his dogs, “Attack! Attack! Kill the Jew!”
The two dogs were calm as pets one moment. In the next instant, they became rabid killers. They leaped at the man and took him down in their jaws. The man screamed for mercy and then for help as the dogs bit and tore at him right beside me. I wanted to help, to fight back. But Moshe glanced back at me with a warning in his eyes, and I remembered — I was no one. I had no name. They must not notice me. So I stared straight ahead at the ground, just like everyone else, silent and still as the man beside me was ripped apart. When he stopped moving and stopped crying out, the SS officer shot the man through the head with his pistol.
Goeth looked into our faces, daring one of us to react, then walked away laughing.
That was how I was introduced to Commandant Amon Goeth.
When roll call ended, Moshe went to his barrack and I went to mine. The man beside me hadn’t been the only man to die at roll call — another was shot, supposedly for not smacking his cap against his leg with enough snap when doffing it for one of the soldiers. I felt as though I had survived a battle.
“What’s that make the score?” I heard someone ask. It was one of the men who had already been in the camp before I arrived.
“Goeth seven, Jews nil,” another man told him.
“What’s that?” I asked. “How many Jews Goeth has killed since you’ve been here?”
“No,” the man said. “How many Jews Goeth has killed today.”
Amon Goeth wouldn’t have his breakfast each day until he’d killed at least one Jew.
He liked most to sit on the second-floor balcony of his house overlooking the camp and shoot Jews with a rifle while he listened to music on his record player. It didn’t matter who you were, or what you’d done. If you hurried through the parade grounds trying not to get shot, he would shoot at you on purpose. You had to walk through normally, acting like there wasn’t a madman on the balcony above you with a rifle ready to shoot you, and hope he didn’t notice you.
The best way to not get shot was to not be there in the first place.
I escaped the daily shooting gallery through my job at the tailor shop. I left early in the morning and returned in time for roll call, and then hard bread and thin soup in the barracks each ni
ght. Uncle Moshe did the same, working in a furrier’s shop outside the camp. There was still a chance Goeth would get me at roll call — no one was safe, not even the kapos — but with Moshe’s help, I learned to be anonymous enough to survive for months.
Then the tailor shop closed down. I was never sure why, but one morning, when the other tailors and I assembled, we were told our services at the factory were no longer required. We looked around nervously at one another. Without our off-camp job, we would be around Amon Goeth all day, and without special skills, we were even less valuable than before.
I was put to work building new barracks for the never-ceasing truckloads and trainloads of Jews brought to Plaszów every day. It was backbreaking work: digging out a level patch of earth, hauling rocks in wheelbarrows, hammering boards in place. And always there was the threat of Amon Goeth and his dogs.
After a man on my work detail was killed for moving too slowly, Uncle Moshe traded his daily rations to a kapo to get me assigned to a new job outside the camp.
I reported to my new work detail the next morning and was loaded into a truck, not knowing where we were going or what we were doing. None of us did. This was some new job no one had ever done before, and we were all a little nervous. There was always a chance that our work would be to dig graves in the woods — and then be shot to fill them.
The truck bounced to a stop, and the Nazis ordered us out. But it wasn’t the woods we had been taken to, or another factory. It was the Kraków ghetto! We looked at one another in wonder — why had we been brought back to the ghetto?
A guard at the gate on Lwowska Street let us through, and we saw right away what was different: There were no more people. No one was on the streets, and no one was in the houses. The whole ghetto had been liquidated after I’d left. There was no sign of life anywhere.
