Holocaust (42 page)

They kissed for the last time.

“Goodbye, my beloved wife,” he said. “Perhaps all will go well. Perhaps they are telling us the truth. I’ve been saved at Buchenwald and at Theresienstadt because I could paint. Perhaps it will happen again.” Then he looked at his clawlike hands and laughed bitterly.

She would not let him go, kept kissing him.

Finally, Maria had to separate them, as the kapo, slapping the truncheon against his leg, entered the studio.

“You must let him go, Inga,” Maria said.

“Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, my love.”

They watched as he was shoved into a line of confused, frightened people—the once privileged inmates of the “Paradise Ghetto”—destined for the death camp. The guards ordered them to march off.

My parents were in Auschwitz. But Uncle Moses, now an active member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, had escaped the roundups. There could not have been more than fifty thousand Jews left in the
ghetto, from a peak population of almost half a million. And those that remained were ill, hungry and terrified.

On January 9, Himmler visited the ghetto to see with his own eyes the pitiful remnants of European Jewry. He ordered a final total liquidation. Every last Jew was to be sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz.

The Jewish Fighting Organization, numbering about six hundred activists, but supported by perhaps a thousand other “irregulars,” decided to make a stand when the next roundup occurred. It was becoming harder and harder for the Germans to deceive the Jews. All the promises of family camps, the bread-and-marmalade, were now known to be lies.

On a day in mid-January, my Uncle Moses and Aaron Feldman, pretending to be peddlers, shoved a pushcart toward a section of the wall that had been evacuated.

A ghetto policeman warned them that there would be a curfew in ten minutes.

Uncle Moses tipped his hat. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’re just getting our merchandise home. Pots and pans, you know.” Then he whispered to Aaron, “Don’t worry. He was bribed.”

As dusk fell on the wintry, deserted city, the man and the boy approached the wall.

Aaron leaped onto the cart, and with the aid of a grappling hook and a rope, scaled the wall. He kneeled on the top and whistled softly.

Two men from the Polish resistance—one was the man named Anton—ran from a doorway. They tossed a wooden crate to Aaron, who in turn dropped it to the cart below. The procedure was repeated with a second crate.

Then Aaron slid down the rope. Uncle Moses put the crates under the dirty canvas covering his “wares” and they started back to the resistance headquarters.

“You’re late,” the ghetto policeman said.

“My apologies,” Uncle Moses said. And as he walked by, he bribed him a second time.

In these final months of the ghetto, whole neighborhoods had been emptied—the inhabitants either wiped out, or shipped to their death. It was in secret apartments in these areas that the so-called “illegals” now lived, the resisters, the fighters, the ones determined not to be led away praying and weeping.

To an apartment on the upper floor of what appeared to be an uninhabited building, Uncle Moses and Aaron carried the crates they had gotten from the Poles. It was a piddling contribution. No section of the resistance, the various Zionist groups, the Bundists, the left, had been able to make a dent on the Christian Poles. Some sympathy, yes. But little in the way of arms.

Eva Lubin and some others were present as they opened the crates. There were five new revolvers in one, and ammunition for them. There were also grenades.

“How do we start an uprising with these?” Moses asked.

“It’s a beginning,” Eva said. “Let’s start loading them.”

They began inserting bullets into the revolvers.

“If we can kill a few,” Eva said hopefully. “Then get their machine guns, their rifles. To add to our small arsenal. We might make an impression.”

“I’m not sure they’ll oblige us,” Moses said. “The word is they are going to bring in Waffen SS and Lithuanian auxiliaries. A building-by-building sweep. We may be too late with this.”

Moses picked up two guns, twirled them. “I’m not a very convincing cowboy. I wasn’t meant for this sort of thing. Jews and guns don’t seem to go together.”

There was a signal-type rap at the door—two short raps, a pause, then three more. Moses nodded at Aaron to unbolt the door.

Zalman entered, out of breath, covered with dust. He had crawled through mounds of rubble to reach them.

“The SS has blocked the street,” Zalman said.

“The roundup?” Moses asked.

“Yes. Von Sammern’s announced it. The last of the Jews are to come out.”

“But why here?” Uncle Moses asked. “This is a deserted neighborhood. It’s supposed to be empty.”

“They may have followed you and the kid.”

Moses took command. “Pack everything. Everyone take a gun. Grenades in pockets. Hide the crates. We’ll leave by the rooftops.”

As they obeyed his orders, they heard German voices below, boots kicking against doors, orders being shouted.

“Jews out!”

“All Jews out!”

“Come quietly, we mean no harm!”

Aaron ran from the room and peered down the stairway. Far below, on the ground floor, he could see three soldiers kicking in doors. Thus far they had found no one. The building, except for the apartment in which the fighters were hiding, had long been deserted.

Aaron and the others could hear the voices.

“What the hell are we looking for in this dump?”

“Someone said the Yids are supposed to have stolen guns.”

Moses ordered everyone to stay in the apartment. He sent Eva and Zalman and Aaron into closets and the adjacent room. He himself wedged behind the door.

They could hear the Germans outside the door.

“Go on, you’re always bragging what a hot shit you are.”

“Bust it in, they’re only fucking Jews.”

“Think I’m afraid? Afraid of Jews?”

Boots, rifles, heavy bodies slammed against the bolted door. It splintered, gave way. The Germans entered the room.

Moses came from the corner and shot the first man in the face from a distance of no more than a meter. He fell, his face a crimson splotch.

The other two, before they could aim their rifles, were hit by a hail of bullets from Eva and Zalman.

One, less badly wounded, dragged the other out to the stairs.

Zalman took the machine pistol from the dead soldier’s hands. Aaron ran into the hall, threw a grenade
down the stairwell. The soldiers lurched, stumbled, rolled in gray-green heaps to the ground level.

The Jews looked at one another in amazement.

“They ran,” Moses said wonderingly. “My God, they ran. At last I’ve seen it. They bleed and die and they are frightened—like us.”

Aaron flew down the steps and yanked the arms and ammunition belts from the other two soldiers, then raced back up the stairs.

In the room, Zalman made a decision. “All of us out. They’ll be back in force. Across the roofs. I’ll go first.”

Heavily armed now, they fled down the corridor, and climbed the metal ladder to the rooftop door.

All over the city now, sporadic fighting had broken out. Anelevitz himself had led an attack on a party of Germans escorting Jews to the Umschlagplatz. With five grenades, five pistols and a few Molotov cocktails, they had won a partial victory, liberated some Jews.

Still, the Germans managed to deport 6,500 Jews during this January battle. But it was far less than they had anticipated.

All over the ruined city, new leaflets from Lowy’s old press began to appear, to encourage the Jews to fight.

After the firelight at Moses’ apartment, and several other battles throughout the city, some of the resistance fighters assembled at another apartment. There they learned that many of their comrades were dead.
The Germans had been fought off at the Toebbens workshop in the center of the city, but at a high cost in Jewish losses.

In the second flat, Moses’ group was met by others. They distributed the machine pistols and the rifles they had gotten in the first battle.

Aaron, at the window, saw a truck of SS soldiers enter the street. The truck emptied, but this time the Germans were cautious, hugging the sides of the buildings, wary of fire.

Zalman demonstrated the machine pistols to the others. “Don’t aim it like a rifle,” he said. “Just spray shots.”

“I want one,” Aaron said.

Moses patted his head. “Wait till you grow up.”

Moses was at the window. He saw the SS men spreading down the street. He smacked a hand in his fist. “By God, the time has come to fight them on our ground.”

As he spoke, four Germans entered the building.

“In the hallway,” Moses commanded. “Fire when I give the order.”

They ran into the corridor, hid in broom closets, behind the stairs—Moses, Zalman, Eva, Aaron, others.

This time the Germans were unable to kick a door in.

They were blasted with guns and grenades from above, and could not return the fire. They staggered back, bleeding and dying, to the street, piled into their trucks and left.

“I can’t believe it,” Zalman said. “They’re going going …”

“They die like anyone else,” Moses said.

There was no doubt about it. The Germans, in that battle of January 1943, were giving up the fight—for a while. They had never counted on Jews firing back.

Later, as the resistance leaders gathered at the headquarters on Mila Street, stories came back to them of the courage—often doomed—of the Jews, who were denying the Nazis their attempt to clean out the ghetto.

Apparently a young woman named Emilia Landau was the heroine who started the resistance. When the
SS invaded the carpentry shop where she worked, she threw the first grenade, killing several SS men. But in the firefight that followed, she was killed.

At the headquarters of Kibbutz Dror, another battle took place—here the Germans were forced to retreat.

And around the Umschlagplatz itself, where my father had once so pathetically tried to save handfuls of doomed people, a score of running battles took place.

Some supplies now came in from a few sympathetic Poles outside the walls. The majority refused to help. There was even a group of Fascist Poles who warned their brethren not to aid the Jews, because the fighting was a ruse—the Jews would join with the Germans to crush the Polish resistance. (Their Fascism did not help them; the Germans intended to stamp them out also and make slaves of those who survived.)

Among the supplies sent in were land mines, grenade launchers, a mortar, and one machine gun.

“At last,” Zalman said.

“Yes,” Uncle Moses said bitterly. “All paid for. Cash on the line.”

Eva asked, “Is there any hope they will join us?”

Anelevitz shook his head. “It is unlikely. They do not want to spill Polish blood in our behalf. We have learned by now. Only we can save ourselves.”

“Save?” asked Moses.

“Yes,” the young Zionist said. “Even if it means we die. We are still saved.”

My uncle cocked his head, gingerly looked at the flat land mine, packed in waterproofing grease. “What does the Talmud tell us about assembling land mines?” he asked. No one laughed.

Anelevitz pointed to the calendar. “Remember the day, January 21, 1943. In the ghetto, we are at war.”

On arriving at Auschwitz, my parents were spared the immediate trip to the gas chambers.

The selection was done at the railroad siding, by an SS officer in immaculate uniform. Those deemed unfit for work were sent to their deaths at once. My parents,
in comparative good health—all these things were relative in the camps—were marched to separate barracks.

Papa was assigned for a while to the camp infirmary, a dismal mockery of a place, some more of that grim German humor. He did the best he could to treat the ill and injured. It mattered little. The first sign of weakness, of uselessness to the masters, and people were marked for a trip to the “delousing” area. Virtually no medicine was available. It suited the Nazis to let people die in the barracks area. It took a load off the four gassing complexes, the forty-six ovens.

My mother worked in one of the kitchens with Chana Lowy.

Although men and women prisoners were kept in separate parts of the camp, my father, as a physician, was able to slip away now and then and visit her.

One day he came with what all felt was remarkable news. One of the medical orderlies who had done some work in the SS barracks had heard the Germans talking in low, saddened voices.
An entire German army was said to have surrendered at Stalingrad
. Not a division, mind you, but an
army
.

Papa tried to cheer my mother up. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk she shared with Lowy’s wife, and sewing. Life in the camps was a nightmare of filth, lice, hunger, foul water, thin soup and moldy bread. She, who had presided over elegant dinners and played Mozart on the Bechstein …

Over her bunk she had placed photographs of Karl and Inga in their wedding clothes, and one of Anna and me. I know the photo. I’m wearing a striped soccer shirt, holding the ball under my arm. Anna’s just kicked my shins because I teased her. But you can’t see it in the photo.

“If they catch you here you’ll be punished, Josef,” my mother said.

“It’s all right. Lowy forged a pass for me. Besides, I’ll say I’m making a call.”

“Josef, you’ve become a daredevil.”

He kissed her cheek. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine. There’s a rumor that a group of us in this
barracks, all who are strong enough, and that would include me and Mrs. Lowy, will be taken to work at the I. G. Farben factory tomorrow. That’s surely good news.”

“Perhaps they need a concert pianist.”

“Or perhaps you could hire me as a nurse.”