In the Sewers of Lvov (20 page)

Socha had taken to delivering some reading material to help them pass the time. Chiger gratefully received thick bundles of crossword puzzles torn from all the newspapers Socha could find. Both Chiger and Halina spent a lot of time writing poetry. Halina wrote much romantic verse ‘… expressing in a youthful way her dreams and ambitions’. Chiger’s poetry took the form of satire. It was that aspect of his character that others recalled with most affection. His ability to find humour, to find a joke in every situation, even at the darkest moments. His poems retold incidents that had happened to them all, turning their recent past into a series of anecdotes. None of these poems have survived and Chiger himself didn’t record any in his account. What he does mention, and others recollect also, were the little cabarets of song, satire and poetry they used to present as an after-dinner treat. Staged in the right-angle section of the basin, under the glare of a pair of carbide lamps and before a captive audience perched on the simple wooden benches.

He also used to while away the hours with young Halina, playing a game they called ‘Intelligentsia’. They would write down a long word and try and see how many other words they could make up out of the letters of the first. This resulted in many arguments about the rules and who had won, which amused some and annoyed others. Paulina recalled: ‘I had no time to play these games. I had my husband to look after and the children. I wasn’t alone like Halina, Klara or Jacob, I had a family …’

Though Halina seems to have been a somewhat precocious adolescent, argumentative and perhaps set apart from most of the women, she was nonetheless much loved and cared for. If she was often at odds with Chiger or Berestycki, the arguments apparently were never allowed to become serious. Chiger was also not entirely without his dark side. His temper would often get the better of his good humour and when he did become angry, it was not a pleasant sight. The most important influence in tempering any disagreements seems to have been Berestycki. In fact he had a great soothing influence on everyone’s tempers, employing
his quite renowned ‘Hasidic witticisms’ to quell the rages.

However, there was one man in particular whose personality became extremely difficult to contend with. Although Orenbach was no more than a metre and a half in height, his character more than made up for it. Somewhere deep within his experience there had developed a strangely cruel, at times even monstrous, character. His rows with Chiger and Margulies were legendary and sometimes went on for weeks. He seemed to set himself upon a particular opinion and found it impossible to accept another’s point of view. ‘Chaskiel was always right. He never agreed with anyone and he never let us forget it,’ recalled Margulies. His tempers sometimes turned into uncontrollable furies, leaving him shaking with rage, which terrified the children, especially Kristina: ‘I hated him. He was a sadist. When we were in the cavern beneath Our Lady of the Snows, I had to sleep between my father and Chaskiel. I used to dread the night, having to sleep so close to him.’

His daughter, born after the war, described his character:

He was very difficult. He argued with everyone, this little one and a half metre man, always arguing. And he could be very violent – physically. But he was also very generous. He gave away his suits and shirts to people who needed them and sometimes he would come home with total strangers, to give them shelter. I think he just needed to be loved.

Orenbach had lost both his wife and three children before the liquidation of the Julag. After the birth and death of Mrs Weinberg’s baby, Orenbach had started looking after the woman. It was an odd attachment, he short and irritable, she tall and quite disarmingly beautiful. Though Orenbach claimed to have taken to Genia in order to protect her after her ordeal, some of the others saw the relationship the other way round: it was he that clung to her. Whatever the case, there was considerable sympathy for Genia Weinberg and her troubled relationship with this man.

After one particular bitter row between Chaskiel and Korsarz, Kristina and the others managed to extract some small measure of
revenge. Though the subject of the argument had long been forgotten, Orenbach had typically refused to have anything further to do with Margulies. He even refused to speak to him. Now, Margulies had done a little barbering before the war and one of the duties he willingly undertook in the sewers was to give everyone a regular haircut. Orenbach had begun to look quite shaggy and, though he was embarrassed by his appearance, he refused to allow Margulies to cut his hair. So Kristina offered to do it.

What began as a simple exercise, developed into a delightful little piece of theatre. Having agreed to allow Krisia to clip his locks, Orenbach brusquely indicated with his finger where she should start. She placed Margulies’s shears at the appropriate point and as she began to clip away, she sang a familiar Russian folk song. The song, now forgotten, gradually ascends in scale, and as she sang higher and higher, she also ran the shears higher up Orenbach’s scalp. The others sat about watching this, trying their best to control themselves. When she had finished, Orenbach was virtually bald.

Gradually it became clear that time was as much their enemy as the elements. Paulina started teaching Kristina the alphabet and Socha borrowed one of his daughter’s early reading books for her to practise with. Kristina later declared: ‘I never forgot the first page,
Anna ma Kota
– Anna has a cat. There was a little drawing of the girl and her cat …’ Socha also found a partly damaged prayer book amongst the ruins of the ghetto, which he gave to Halina. Klara recalled:

I think Halina had a book, perhaps one or two books. We didn’t have any knitting or anything to occupy our hands. We just sat around and talked a lot. We told stories, about ourselves and what had happened. We had to do something to occupy ourselves, otherwise we’d have lost our minds.

Naturally many of the. hours were devoured with long and detailed accounts of each others’ lives. Curiously, it was Socha’s stories about himself during his morning visits that turned out to have been the greatest revelation. To their utter amazement, the
gentle, beaming round-faced man admitted that before he had taken up his commitment to them he had been nothing less than a common criminal. Chiger recorded Socha’s revelations.

Little is known about his parents except that he’d come from a very poor background and been forced out on to the streets to fend for himself at a very early age. He had begun stealing from the age of ten and had been arrested for theft on countless occasions. He claimed that in nearly all cases when he’d fallen into the hands of the law it had been due to bad luck or betrayal. If he had learnt one thing from his career of crime, it was the value of loyalty.

As he got older his criminal exploits became more daring. He remembered having had his name and picture in the paper after a particularly notorious bank robbery. In fact, most of the others in the room could remember it too and their incredulity turned to horror.

As Socha talked further he began reeling off more of his exploits, causing his audience more and more distress. He admitted to having been in prison three times – but only because someone had betrayed him. He also claimed he had never himself betrayed anyone else: ‘I would rather take the blame, than implicate others.’ It probably explained why he was so familiar with the inside of Lonsky prison.

He also mentioned a particularly daring theft at a jewellery store in the district down by the main railway station. Paulina could hardly believe it.

‘That was my aunt and uncle. That was their jewellery store.’

There was a great deal of nervous laughter.

‘They never caught us. The crime has remained unsolved, until today.’

Socha’s purpose in revealing so much of his sordid past was to try and explain his devotion to those around him. He claimed that he was motivated by a need for redemption. According to Chiger:

It was repentance for all the crimes he committed during his very stormy and unethical past. It was contrition, a plea for the
forgiveness of God. It was his greatest mission … [There had been] a metamorphosis in his soul, as he witnessed the tragedies that had befallen the people from the Julag. He believed it was a way of snatching his sins from his soul, just as he was snatching us from certain death.

The Chigers believed these explanations completely but they never understood just how much Socha had been tempted. After he had returned the gold and jewels Chiger had hidden, Socha found an opportunity to speak quietly with Berestycki. Apparently using Berestycki as a kind of father confessor, Socha admitted that the moment he’d laid his hands on the fortune his first instinct was to take it. He claimed that he had decided to keep it and never return, but was tortured by the thought of them alone in the sewers. Right up to the last moment before returning to the sewers, he still didn’t know what to do. Berestycki was of the impression that Socha never did fully understand why he was carrying on with it.

One thing is certain, his past career had fully prepared him for this secret work. Moreover, he was politically active as well. He was a socialist, a patriot and a member of the secret National Army. Though he had links with a number of partisan groups, he had little sympathy with the communists. In political terms, he barely distinguished between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. He claimed they were equally responsible for the rape of his country.

One morning Socha crawled through the Seventy and surprised Krisia and Pawel by removing from his bag a handful of snow. Winter had settled in and it was time to make some form of major preparation for the months ahead. Socha had secured from a Ukrainian farmer a large cart full of potatoes, enough to last them well into next year, if they could be brought down to the sewers. He talked the proposition over with the men in the basin. They decided that the quickest way to dispose of them was to dump the lot into a manhole in the street. But how was Socha to do this without attracting suspicion? They came up with a truly artful solution.

Socha loaded up the cart with all the potatoes and then with a bag of chalk he dusted them all over with the white powder. Then he wheeled the cart to a manhole, right in the middle of the junction between Serbska and Watova Street. There he lifted the cover and began pouring the potatoes straight down the hole. Just as had been expected, people began crowding round. They couldn’t understand what he was doing.

‘Are you crazy? There are enough potatoes there to feed my family for six months.’

‘This is a crime, you must be stopped …’

But Socha was at his most officious.

‘Stand back, don’t touch. These are all condemned. They are unfit for human consumption.’

Even when two Germans approached to investigate this apparently flagrant waste, Socha was equal to the challenge.

‘They have been dusted with lime, don’t touch them. They are condemned. I have instructions to dump them straight into the sewers.’

‘Condemned?’

‘Don’t touch the lime, you’ll be burned. Stand back please …’

To retrieve this manna all Margulies and Berestycki had to do was crawl down the Seventy that ran under Serbska Street. They brought all the potatoes and stored them in the basin. Naturally the rats feasted for days, but eventually they became bloated and lost interest. It was a change to see their obsession momentarily diverted from the bread.

December and January were desperate and sombre months. Time passed tortuously slowly through the heart of winter, pushed along by hours and hours of conversation which often turned into reverie. Stories from their pasts, incidents that tumbled forth and helped to strengthen the bonds of this ‘family’. For the telling of stories served to do more than just devour the time. It was an opportunity to take stock of their lives, to remind themselves of who they were, where they had come from, and how they had come to be huddled under the streets of Lvov. Doubtless they heard the same stories from some people again and again, while others revealed nothing at all.

Halina’s story was told both in poems that she composed in her solitude and with countless anecdotes. She enjoyed regaling an audience gathered round the bubbling soup.

Halina had been born Fayga Wind, in 1922, in the town of Turka, about 120 kilometres south-west of Lvov, in the northern foothills of the Carpathian mountains. She was the only daughter of Joshua, a watchmaker, and his wife Hannah. Joshua had a reputation within the town as a deeply religious Hasid, whose opinion, we are told, was sought on all matters by the townsfolk. Within an extremely conservative and orthodox Jewish community, Joshua had taken the highly improper decision to send his daughter and two sons to the best private school in Turka, the secular Josef Pilsudski Gymnasium.
¹⁴
The young Wind was the only Jewish girl in the school and, though she made friends with many of the Christian children, there was nonetheless deep resentment amongst her classmates about her being allowed to graduate.

Her younger brother Leon had briefly studied at the University
at Lvov, but after having endured violent attacks against his presence, he emigrated to the United States, where he studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Early in 1939, he wrote to his sister Fayga, urging her to apply to the Seminary’s Teachers’ Institute. She applied and was admitted. By September 1939, when she had finally received her passport and was ready to leave, German forces had already swept across the Polish border and were still advancing as Soviet forces approached from the east. The Winds were woken by the sounds of bombardment, as German aircraft reached Turka before the Soviets. According to the Wind account: ‘They looked out their window to the courthouse on the hill. The courthouse janitor, standing on the hill with a rifle, was shooting at an airplane, as people mocked him in the street. For Fayga, he would become symbolic of Poland’s disintegration …’

The Germans left Turka to the Soviets, who occupied it and the rest of eastern Poland until June 1941. When the Germans returned, the Nazis introduced the same regime of imprisonment and murder that had been practised throughout the rest of occupied Europe. By the autumn of 1942 there were but three Jewish families left in Turka: ‘Zeeman the tailor, Brohner the shoemaker and Wind the watchmaker.’ By then, these three families had come to realize that they too would soon be killed and decided to try and send forth one of their number, in the hope that they might survive. Fayga was chosen as she spoke excellent Polish and knew the Catholic prayers from school. She would assume a new identity, leave the town and somehow try and escape.