Fridzia was so unhappy that as soon as war broke out she left him and went back to Krakow to live with her mother, but a few months later, when Jerzyk asked her to come back, she returned to Vilno hoping for a reconciliation. Vilno, which was part of Poland but inhabited mainly by Lithuanians, had by then been occupied by the Russians, and they both found work in the peat fields making bricks to sell for fuel. She still shudders when she thinks of that backbreaking work. She would to stand knee-deep in water for hours, her hands swollen and bleeding as she hacked the moist black peat out of the riverbed.
In 1941, when the Germans occupied that region, Fridzia left Jerzyk once again. By then she’d obtained false papers and changed her name to Slawa which sounded more Aryan, and she has kept that name ever since. German soldiers caught her and locked her into a barn with other Jews they’d rounded up. The barn was bare except for some hay heaped in one corner. When her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, she noticed a pretty young girl with a mane of tawny, flowing locks, who had managed to climb onto the parapet of the only window and stood there wild-eyed and compelling. To this day my aunt has that scene carved into her mind. ‘I couldn’t stop looking at her and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,’ she says in a hushed voice. ‘The girl standing on the window ledge was tearing out her beautiful hair, pulling it out until whole strands of it were coming away in her distracted hands. I’ll never forget the anguish in her voice when, oblivious of the clumps of hair in her hands, she screamed, “Let me out! Let me out! I’m young, I want to live!”’
‘When I looked around, I saw that some people were saying the Shema, while others were feeding bread or apples to their children because none of us knew what was going to happen. But I felt optimistic. I couldn’t believe that any harm would come to me because, in spite of everything, I’ve always believed that God does exist and knows what He is doing.
‘When there were so many people crammed into the barn that there was no room to sit down, there was a commotion ouside and the Germans started shouting. “Los! Los!” “Hurry up!” They herded us outside, pushed us into a line, and we had to walk through the street while armed soldiers yelled at us and cracked whips. I heard people panicking that this was a death march, that they were taking us out of town to murder us all. My mind was whirring. I had to do something, there was no time to lose. My fingers were shaking as I unfastened my little gold brooch and sidled up to one of the young Lithuanian guards. “Take this and look away for a moment so I can escape.” He did. To this day I don’t know what made me do that, or why he agreed. He could have taken the brooch and shot me anyway. Perhaps he wanted to have one good deed to his credit because half an hour later, at Ponary Woods, he helped to shoot down hundreds of women and children and to throw lime and earth over their still-warm bodies.’
Fridzia fled to the home of her Catholic friend Ziuta who hid her. While at Ziuta’s place she used to play with her four-year-old daughter Basia, but one day she was puzzled to see the little girl take some pillows off the bed, tie their corners together with string, loop the cord around her waist, and pull them along the floor. ‘I’m playing Jews,’ the child explained. She had watched Jews being thrown out of their homes and escorted to the ghetto, pulling their belongings behind them along the ground.
When Jerzyk sent Slawa false papers, Ziuta’s father helped her cross the border and she made her way back to her mother in Radlowa. By then German efforts to annihilate the Jews had intensified and life had become tenuous there too. During one ferocious raid, Slawa with her mother and sister ran to the woods where they hid until late at night, trembling when they heard salvos of gunfire. At night, when the shooting had stopped, they crept back to find that their home resembled a bomb site. Drawers had been emptied, plates lay smashed on the floor and everything of value had gone.
It was no longer safe to stay in Radlowa, but they had nowhere else to go. Izio was living in the Krakow ghetto, but apart from its residents no-one was allowed to enter. Izio and Lola had applied for a legal separation so that she wouldn’t have to go into the ghetto with him. As far as the authorities were concerned, Lola was German and was permitted to keep working in their shop, Syrena, which had been taken over by a German. Although she and Izio were separated, she became a go-between for the family, minding furniture and valuables, passing on letters, and helping relatives who passed through Krakow.
Slawa decided to try her luck in Warsaw. She didn’t look Jewish, and with her Aryan papers and excellent command of Polish, she might be able to pass as a Catholic in the capital where nobody knew her. When she heard that some of the villagers were going to Warsaw in a farmer’s cart, she arranged to go with them. Before leaving, she promised her mother and Rozia that as soon as she’d found somewhere to live, she’d send for them. ‘Don’t take too long,’ whispered Rozia, her brown eyes darting anxiously towards their mother. Lieba’s spirits had plummeted since their home had been ransacked, and the threat of being caught was increasing day by day.
As the cart rumbled along the rough country road, Slawa wrapped her woollen scarf tightly around her neck and sank her chin into her overcoat to shut out the biting wind as she jolted up and down on the wooden seat. The bare branches of the poplars pointed towards the sky as if in supplication, and as they passed wayside shrines and the other occupants of the cart crossed themselves, Slawa wondered whether her God was watching what was happening to his people.
Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard someone say, ‘Whatever they’re doing to those stinking Jews, it isn’t enough.’ It was a wrinkled country woman with a threadbare shawl thrown around her thin shoulders.
Her neighbour leaned forward, eyes burning with almost religious zeal. ‘I can smell a Jew a mile away,’ she announced with a defiant glance around the cart.
Slawa stared straight ahead with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. Suddenly she remembered the incriminating diary in her handbag. Pretending to search for something in her bag, she surreptitiously pulled out her notebook and clutched it under her coat, awaiting her opportunity. When the others were looking at a wayside shrine, she let her arm dangle over the side of the cart, opened her fingers, and dropped the diary into the muddy ditch.
By the end of 1942 Rozia’s letters had become very brief, as if she had no more heart for trivia. Her last letter to her brother Janek breaks my heart. ‘You shouldn’t worry about us so much, as the good Lord has us in his care and we trust that He won’t abandon us. Everyone does what they can. The main thing is, that God should let us survive.’
CHAPTER 19
All through the night the search for Jews continued. Skilled in the psychology of terror, the guards shone their torches on documents and then ran them up to people’s faces, watching for their frightened expressions to give them away. Knowing this, my father’s sister Andzia Rosenbaum boldly returned their gaze while they scanned her ID card. According to her Kennkarte, she was Janina Sulikowska, a Polish Catholic, travelling with her daughter Krysia and son Fredzio.
All through the night shouts and screams tore through the station. Documents were held up to the light and exposed as forgeries, rifle butts cracked on heads, whips lashed bare necks, and people were dragged away at gunpoint. For what seemed hours, the guard scrutinised Andzia’s papers before he handed them back. After he’d walked on, she spotted a peasant’s heavy overcoat lying on a bench. She looked around quickly, made sure that no-one was looking and pushed her small son underneath it out of sight.
Before dawn, when the waiting room was almost empty, an eerie stillness fell over those who remained. While Krysia dozed against her mother’s shoulder, Andzia didn’t take her eyes off the small shape bulging under the greatcoat. They mustn’t find him.
Day and night German soldiers, armed Ukrainian militia and local extortionists prowled around Lwow’s Central Station, hunting for Jews as eagerly as prospectors searching for gold. Andzia’s thoughts throbbed with one refrain: Let the train come soon. Let the train come soon. She
had to get the children away from Lwow and find some country town where they might have a chance to survive.
Suddenly the words froze in her head. A gaunt German soldier with a beak-like nose and a thin mouth turned down at the corners strode across the waiting room, stopped at the table and pulled the coat away, revealing a little boy who blinked sleepily into his face. Grabbing the child’s arm, the soldier shouted, ‘Whose kid is this?’ and, without waiting for a reply, dragged him outside onto the platform.
Something exploded inside Andzia’s head. Through the door, in the murky half-light, their lives were about to unravel while she watched. The shadowy figure was leaning over her child, fumbling with his trousers. Any second now the soldier would see that Fredzio was Jewish, take the revolver out of its polished leather holster and shoot him dead. Or pick him up by the legs, as she had once seen a German soldier do, and with a swift sharp motion let his soft skull swing into the brick wall, like an egg smashing onto a marble floor.
Like a tigress, propelled by a power beyond her conscious will, Andzia sprang forward, flew at the soldier and pummelled his uniformed arm just as it was tugging at the elastic waistband of Fredzio’s knitted pants. Pretending to misunderstand what he was doing, she started scolding him like a fishmonger at the Friday market. ‘How dare you? What do you think you’re doing with my child? You should be ashamed of yourself! What are you, a pervert? Get away from my son this instant!’ Taken aback by this tongue-lashing, the guard stepped away from the child and, taking advantage of his momentary hesitation, Andzia grasped her son’s little hand and stalked back into the waiting room, pulling him behind her.
Instead of slumping down on the nearest seat as she longed to do, Andzia kept up a righteous tirade for the benefit of the other travellers, trying to appear like a simple Polish mother outraged at having her child molested. ‘My God, imagine that! Grown men sticking their hands into a six-year-old’s underpants. Cholera psiakrew!’ she swore. ‘To hell with them. They think they can do anything, the devil take them. What’s the world coming to?’
The other travellers, mostly country women in kerchiefs with big wicker baskets, looked sympathetically at the feisty young woman with such beautiful children. They took in the angelic little boy with fair curls and long lashes, and the girl with the wistful expression of a Madonna.
Krysia looked at her brother, sighed, and looked away again. On their own, she and her mother would manage without any trouble, but Fredzio put all three of them in danger. All they had to do was look inside his trousers and they’d be finished. With her ash-blonde hair, creamy complexion and dreamy grey-green eyes, twelve-year-old Krysia had no trouble passing as a Polish child, especially with the little gold cross hanging around her neck.
It was the very shininess of that cross that caught the attention of a stout red-faced soldier a few minutes later when he came back to check the occupants of the waiting room yet again. It was that oppressive time just before dawn, when the sky resembled a crinkled sheet of pewter and the acrid smell of soot hung over the station. Peering into Krysia’s frightened face, the soldier motioned her to go with him. ‘Los! Los!’ he barked, and before Andzia could do anything to stop him, he’d gripped the girl’s arm and propelled her out of the station.
Fifty years later, in her immaculate Tel-Aviv apartment decorated with Persian rugs and sparkling crystal, my Aunty Andzia, an erect, elegantly dressed woman of eighty-seven, leans forward and, jabbing her beautifully manicured fingernail in the air for emphasis, stares into my face and says in a slow, hypnotic way, ‘The war lasted for five years. Each of those years lasted three hundred and sixty-five days, each day lasted twenty-four hours, and each hour lasted for sixty minutes. And every one of those minutes lasted an eternity.’
I’ve arrived to hear Aunty Andzia’s life story, but at first she refuses to talk about her experiences. ‘There are already too many stories about the Holocaust. The world is going to suffocate under them all. What good will it do me to talk about it? You’ll have your story and I’ll have nightmares.’ From the hot street below, the noises of a Levantine city float up to her flat. Car tyres screech, a man shouts, someone is honking the horn. ‘I don’t need more unhappiness. As it is, sometimes I feel like jumping out of that window,’ she sighs.
I know that I should respect her wishes, but I’ve travelled halfway around the globe to hear her story. There will never be another chance. I try once more. ‘Your story is unique, it shouldn’t be lost.’ Finally she shrugs assent, bemused as well as annoyed by my persistence, and soon I’m sitting beside her in the waiting room of Lwow railway station, every muscle in her body taut with anxiety as she wonders what’s happening to her daughter.
Although she longed to follow Krysia, Andzia knew she had to stay where she was. With the cross around her neck and her fair hair, Krysia could pass for a Polish girl, but it wouldn’t take the soldiers long to find out that Fredzio was Jewish, and then they’d all be done for. For the tenth time that minute, Andzia unclenched her fists and tried to stop herself from glancing at her watch. Stay calm for God’s sake, she told herself. Don’t attract attention. How long could they question Krysia?
She sighed as she thought how her life had changed. Only three years ago, in another lifetime, her biggest worry was which outfits to buy. Every morning, when Krysia was at school, Andzia used to visit Lunia and together they pored over the Warsaw Illustrated Review to study the Paris fashions. Then they’d go to their favourite cafe, Pavilon, in Krakow’s Planty Gardens, and gossip about everyone they knew over tall glasses of iced coffee marbled with cream.
In those days, which now seemed a million years ago, she had a maid to do the housework and a husband who humoured her every whim. Zygmunt was a good-natured man, but no matter what he did, Andzia always found reason to carp and complain. She regretted it now. Some perverse spirit stopped her from enjoying what she had, envy poisoned all her relationships. The more placating Zygmunt was, the more shrewish she became. ‘Aneczka,’ he used to cajole her, ‘be reasonable,’ but she would only rage about her misfortune in marrying him, in not having the kind of apartment she longed for, in being saddled with two children. Everyone had better parents, kinder sisters, richer husbands and smarter children.
If only Zygmunt was with her now. Again she glanced at her watch. Would Krysia remember all the words of Our Father? Sometimes she stumbled over the words. That girl took after Zygmunt’s family, she was so phlegmatic at times. Closing her eyes so that no-one would see the fear in them, Andzia thought, Dear God, let her remember that prayer.
An ironic smile fluttered across her mouth. If her father only knew that she was praying to God so that her daughter would remember a Christian prayer! Daniel Baldinger had prayed to his God every day of his life. She’d never seen the point of all that praying, but perhaps her father’s God had taken care of him after all. Daniel had died before the war began, so he didn’t have to run and hide like a hunted animal, wondering whether his children were going to be butchered in the street. Craning her neck to see out of the waiting room door, Andzia sighed again. If only Krysia would come back.
If only Mummy was here, Krysia was thinking as she stumbled on the chipped mosaic floor of the station, trying to keep up with the angry soldier. ‘Hurry up, you Polish idiot, what’s the matter with you? Do you want me to speed you up?’ Her skin prickled with terror. Where was he taking her? What did he want? When would she be able to rejoin her mother? She looked back, hoping for some signal from Andzia, but she couldn’t see the waiting room any more.
Her captor pushed her ahead of him across the street until she was standing in front of a building decorated with statues of lions. The soldier swung open the oak gate and pushed her inside. ‘Wait here and don’t budge! If I come back and find that you’ve moved one centimetre, I’ll whip you till all your skin ends up on the floor in shreds!’ he shouted and slammed the door behind him.
When the sharp clicking of the soldier’s iron-studded boots on the
cobbled street had faded away, Krysia looked around her. She was in a chilly cavernous room. At the far end three young soldiers flung a man across a wooden stool and began flogging his bare back. They beat him so hard that they grunted with each blow while he let out hollow moans that made her bite the inside of her cheek and stare fixedly at her shoes. She didn’t want to see the blood trickling down his mushy back or hear the sound of their fists on his bones. ‘Own up, Jewish scum! Tell the truth, Schweinhund!’ they kept yelling.
Twisting her handkerchief around her numbed fingers, Krysia knew that they wanted him to admit that he was Jewish so that they could kill him. The prisoner didn’t own up, and the beating continued. When he lay as limp as a rag doll, they tossed him into another room. She pressed her hand against her mouth. ‘Now it’s my turn,’ she thought, longing for her mother to burst in and protect her. ‘Now they’re going to start on me.’ She jumped when a door banged behind her, but it was only the guards going outside to get some air, puffing and panting from their exertion.
What would they do to her when they returned? Would she ever see her mother and little brother again, or the father she idolised? At the thought of her father, the handsomest, kindest person in the whole world, tears rolled down Krysia’s pale cheeks. ‘Be brave, I’ll be with you as soon as my papers are ready,’ Zygmunt had told her only hours ago, giving her one last hug.
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