The Girl in the Green Sweater (10 page)

This arrangement was probably a long time in planning. It is surprising to me now that I did not know about it beforehand or read it on my mother’s face. Usually, I could hear my parents talking at night. We were living in only one room, and there was no space for secrets. However it happened, they found time to make the arrangements, and one afternoon a young schoolteacher came to our room to meet me. She had brown eyes and brown hair. She was a very nice woman, but I could not understand why she wanted to meet me. We did not have visitors very often.

My mother explained that this teacher wanted to take me. “She will be like a mother to you,” she said. “You will go with her.”

I understood immediately what they were doing, and I told my mother I would not go with this woman. It was difficult for me to be so strong in my argument because I was only seven years old, but I was fi rm. I said, “I will not go.”

My mother said, “You have to go. There is no other way.”

I said, “I am not going. Whatever will happen to you will happen to me. I do not want to live if it means I will not be with you.”

I did not feel as though my parents were trying to get rid of me. I understood they were trying only to save me. But still I would not go. I would not be saved. I would not be removed from my family. Thankfully, mercifully, my parents listened to my appeal. They did not want to live without me, either, apparently. Looking back, I find it unbelievable that two such caring, thinking, desperate adults would listen to the pleas of a child on a matter such as this, but that is just what happened. They listened. They accepted that what might be an agreeable solution for other families was disagreeable to ours, and after a few minutes the nice young teacher left. I remember she had a warm smile.

It was an impossible puzzle: how to save at least one child, even if it meant breaking up a family, how to do your best when all around there was the worst. I did not understand this then, but I understand it now. It was a difficult time, with no sure or easy path for Jewish families. Each day, there was a new dilemma, another puzzle. I am still haunted, for example, about the circumstances of one particular day. It was early in 1943, during an action that was focused on the children. I was seven and a half. My brother was not yet four. We were living in the barracks in the heart of the Ju-Lag. All over the ghetto, the Germans were going
from apartment to apartment, taking only the children. I imagine that for the Germans this served the double purpose of eliminating a large segment of the Jewish population and at the same weakening the will of the surviving adults.

During this action, my father hid us in the basement, where he had made one of his double walls. Our barracks was a large brick building with a large cellar, and he had fashioned this hiding place in such a way that the basement room where he put it up simply looked smaller than it actually was. You could never tell this hiding place was there, behind the false far wall of the room, if you were not looking for it. The cellar in this barracks building was where people took their things to be repaired, where the men would meet to discuss the situation with the Germans. My mother was working at the Janowska camp when we climbed into this hiding place. There was a small entrance. We had to crawl to enter it, but once we were inside we could stand up straight. There was no light, and we held each other’s hands, for comfort. We were pressed in like sardines, and on the other side my father concealed the opening and closed us in. He put up some tape and some wood and painted over it so no one could tell that anything had been touched.

My father was nearly finished when my mother completed her long march home from the Janowska camp. All the way home, she said, she worried about me and Pawel. She knew the Germans were taking the ghetto’s children and that we were in danger. She went first to our apartment, and of course she panicked when she discovered we were not there. “My children!” she cried. “Where are my children?!”

One of the women we were sharing the apartment with told her my father had taken us downstairs, and my mother rushed to the
basement to make sure we were okay. She was overjoyed when she found us alive and well. Frightened, of course, but alive and well, and she joined us in our hiding place, so my father closed her inside as well. She would not leave us alone at a time such as this. Our fate would be her fate as well.

Again, I did not know this at the time, but there were those three vials of cyanide pressed into my mother’s hand. All the time, she held these vials, thinking that if we were captured, there would be time to place the poison under our tongues and put a quick end to our suffering. Thank God it never came to that.

Some hours later, we could hear the Germans searching our building. It was just one German, as it turned out, but from our hiding place it sounded like an army. We could hear him thundering through the building with his heavy boots and his thick, gruff voice as he talked to himself. He was in the basement for the longest time, and we could hear all of this moving about. We stood very still. We did not make a sound. My brother was still very young, but my father had been hiding us for so long by this point, so many different times, in so many different places, that Pawel was good at keeping still and quiet. I held his hand tight, and he was quiet.

Finally, the German lifted his voice, as in discovery. “Wet wall!” he said. “Wet wall!”
Nass Wand! Nass Wand!

The German soldier had been tipped off by another Jew in our building that we were in hiding and on inspection recognized that the false wall my father had built was a slightly different color from that of the other walls and wet to the touch because the paint had yet to dry, so he took a hammer to the spot and started to bang. I cannot be sure it was a hammer, but there was a lot of banging and commotion on the other side of the wall, and inside
our tiny hiding space we were terrified. Pawel at last started to cry. I think I might have screamed. My mother did not move to hush us, because we had been discovered.

When the German broke through the wall, he seemed more puzzled than angry. He was surprised at the good job my father had done in hiding us, almost pleasantly so, and he stood back from the wall as if to admire my father’s handiwork. The German soldier would not have recognized it were it not for the wet paint, and for a moment I thought he might congratulate us for fooling him in just this way. My mother spoke German, and she understood that the soldier was marveling at my father’s ingenuity. But then he pulled us out and started beating us with a leather crop. He hit me, over and over. My brother, too. We both cried, I think. He hit my mother. She did not cry, and I was proud of her for not crying.

And then, shortly after the beatings began, as if by some great coincidence, my father came home. Probably somebody had gone to tell him what was happening. He saw right away what was going on. He said, “This is my family. Please. Let them go.”

He started to beg. It was not like my father to beg, but he would do anything for his family.

The German, he was curious. About the wall, about the begging. He said, “Why did you hide them?”

My father said, “I hid them to save them. From the action. You are taking all the children.” Then he dropped to his knees and begged again for our release.

The German became so frustrated with my father’s begging that he took the butt of his rifle and bashed him on the head with it. The German, he was just a boy. He hit us like he was supposed to, like he was following his orders, but it was not like he meant it. It hurt, but my father said later it could have hurt a lot worse.

It was my mother who came to our rescue. She had a small handbag with her, and it was filled with food. Sardines, ironically, and some bread and biscuits. She did not know how long we would be shut inside our hiding place, so she had come prepared. She too must have sensed that this young man was uncertain of his role. She handed the bag to the German soldier. “Here,” she said. “Take this.” Then she handed him the gold watch from her wrist.

The German studied the watch as if it were a prize, and after a moment or two he said, “I will give you a choice. One watch, one child.”

My poor mother, how could she choose? She was horrifi ed. This was the difficult choice she could not be expected to make, the difficult choice she nearly made with the teacher who came for me, the difficult choice Jewish mothers were undoubtedly making all over Poland. She said, “These are both my children. I cannot take one and leave the other to die.”

My father, too, was outraged at the suggestion. He could not choose between his children. He held out a photograph of me and my brother and shouted, “You see, they are both my children! You cannot make me decide!”

My father was bloodied from the blow to his head, but he kept begging for mercy, for our release. He believed that he could get what he wanted by the strength of respectful argument, by reason. He urged the German soldier to take him and to leave his wife and children behind. This was a choice my father could make, a choice he could die behind.

The young soldier seemed to consider this option, and then he quickly rejected it. He waved his hand in a dismissive way and said, “Stay!”
Bleiben sie!

And so we were given a reprieve. My mother was so overjoyed
by this sudden show of kindness on the part of the German that she invited him upstairs to our apartment for something to eat. I did not understand this at the time, but I know now that she wanted to repay his kindness. She also wanted him to stay for protection. She could see that he was human after all. Also, she knew that if he left, there would be others coming to look for us. She knew that as long as the young German soldier stayed with us in the apartment, we would be safe.

Our apartment was on the first floor, directly above the basement, so we went upstairs. My mother was so happy that this latest threat had passed, almost giddy. She asked the German what he wanted to eat, and he answered that he wanted eggs with onions.
Ein mit zwiebel.
Even today, whenever I catch the smell of scrambled eggs and onions, I think back to that tense night in our kitchen, in that overcrowded apartment. I remember the German soldier who swung at us with his leather crop, who told my mother to choose between my life and Pawel’s, and the way my mother and father managed to turn him from our enemy to our protector, to find the kindness beneath the cruelty.

My mother went to the kitchen and scrambled some eggs with onions for the soldier, and of course we all followed. She made him a heaping plate—six eggs, as I recall—and we settled in to watch him eat. As he ate, we could look through our kitchen window to the courtyard below and see that it was full of people. Jews, mostly, and they were frantic and frightened. All of our friends and neighbors had been emptied from their homes and onto the streets, where they were lined up in the gutter and waiting to be herded onto the transport. Some of them had already been shot, but most were just waiting or looking hysterically for their loved ones. Up and down the street, I could not see any
children. They had already been taken away. All that was left were their grieving parents and grandparents, who were themselves about to be taken away.

Somehow, my mother managed to spot her cousin in the crowd, from the safety of our kitchen window. She pulled from her belongings another fancy watch and handed it to the German. She said, “Now
I
will give
you
a choice. One watch, one member of my family.” Her German was perfect, so she was able to plead a convincing case. She pointed to her cousin and said, “That woman out there, that’s my cousin. Go and bring her back to us. Please.”

The German, with his full belly and another fine watch for his trouble, went downstairs and called the name of my mother’s cousin, but she was too afraid to respond. She thought the man was just singling her out and that to follow him would be to go to her death. She did not know he was trying to save her. She did not know that her cousin, my mother, had sent him. She did not know that all she had to do was stand in answer and she would be led to safety. And so she sat with all the others and refused to acknowledge the soldier when he called her by name.

We looked on from the window, unable to help her, unable to signal that it was okay for her to go with this man, that it had been prearranged, and after a while the German simply gave up and left her in the crowd. And of course the Germans did come and take her away, and we never saw her again after that. But our German soldier came back to our apartment. He stayed with us a while longer, protecting us, sharing our food, talking to my father about how he had built this or that hiding place.

Soon after the transport was gone, a few thousand of our friends and neighbors dead or on their way, we heard some muffled crying from the kitchen window. Always, after an action, there would
be a time when those who had been in hiding would get the courage to go outside and see what the Germans had done. And now, after our ghetto had been cleansed of virtually all children, I could hear these particularly sorrowful noises through the walls of the apartment and up on the roof. I looked outside, and everyone seemed stunned, ashen. It was, I realize now, the face of grief. And along with that face came something else. When I stepped away from the window, I heard a loud thud. It sounded like a sack of potatoes hitting the pavement below. Then I heard another loud thud, another sack of potatoes. I raced back to the window to see what might make such a noise, but my mother stopped me. She did not want me to look. She did not want me to see the grieving mothers, their children now taken from them, jumping to their own deaths from the roof of our building.

Our German soldier stayed with us until early that evening, when the other Germans left and the action subsided. For a few days or weeks, it was calm. For a few days or weeks, we felt secure. But then, every few weeks it was something else.

Somehow, my father’s actions during Joseph Grzymek’s grand procession had placed him on the mind of the SS Obersturmführer. Since then, they had many encounters, with the ghetto commander trying to get the better of my father and my father trying warily to outsmart his adversary. It was unusual for a German of such authority to pay attention to a Jew of such little consequence, but in my father’s mind they became like rivals. Back and forth they went, as in a chess match. Grzymek had the advantage, of course, because he stood with the strength of the German army, the Gestapo, the SS.