The Girl in the Green Sweater (18 page)

There was also the money. After all, it was Leopold Socha who put the price on his kindness. It was Socha who came up with the fi gure of 500 zlotys per day. It was a lot of money, to be sure, but he had to use some of it to purchase bread and our other essential supplies and to divide what was left between Wroblewski and Kowalow; so the money alone could not account for his generosity. Some months into our confinement, when our money would
finally run out, it would be Socha who would convince his colleagues to continue with their protection. It might have started as an opportunity, but in the end it would become a lifeline. He would come to consider it his life’s work, helping us to hide in the sewer, protecting us from the Germans, returning us to the rest of our lives just as he hoped to return himself to the life he had nearly squandered as a young man.

It must have been difficult for the adults in our group to remain hopeful, considering our dreadful position. For me and Pawel it was not so difficult because we were in the dark. This is an appropriate phrase, because for most of the time we sat quietly in the dark and also because we did not know what was going on. My mother was still distraught over what might have happened to her father. My father, he was distracted by the change to our plan. He had not been preparing to spend so much time in such a small, disgusting space, with such a group of terrible people. He may have been thinking that we would have been better off in the original bunker he had prepared by himself beneath the ghetto command.

Of course, I did not like our present situation, but I was also hopeful. It is a child’s nature, I believe, to think positively, to be encouraged toward a happy outcome, and even after everything my family had endured, I was still in this one respect a child. I did not have it in me to think we were doomed. Do not misunderstand: I did not like it very much, sitting there in the sewer, but I did not mind it so terribly much, either. Not at first. A little bit later, I would mind. A little bit later, I would become sullen and noncommunicative; that is how much I would long to breathe fresh air, to play with other children, to return to a normal life. My
nature would change. As I remember it, this change to my outlook happened some months after we went into the sewer. As my father remembered it, though, this change happened straight away. Either way, it happened. I went from a happy, good-natured little girl to a hardened, desperate creature; my time underground would go from a necessary adventure to a hardship. But in those first days and weeks, all I cared about was that I was with my parents, that my family was together.

I did not know most of the other people in our group just yet. I had not even seen their faces in the darkness, but I would begin to know some of them by their voices and by the unreasonable demands they would make on Socha and Wroblewski. For the first time, listening to the disquiet of our new companions, I realized how difficult it was for them to sit quietly and uncertainly in the darkness. For me, it was not so difficult. After all that time in hiding, I did not think it was so bad. My parents were near, and this was enough for me. I was not yet conditioned to think in worst-case scenarios, so I trusted my parents to see me and Pawel safely through. There was nothing else to consider.

Our dark, dismal quarters were only a little bit better than the elliptical tunnel where we had been staying those first few days. The mood of our group, however, was little improved. This second place was more like a room than a tunnel. We were not pressed so tightly together. It was also wet, fetid, and cold, but there were places to sit. There were stones here and there, and this was where we sat—me on my father’s lap, Pawel on my mother’s. I cannot imagine that it was comfortable for my parents, sitting on those stones hour after hour, but it was better than standing, better than squatting among the rats in the film of dirty water at the curved bottom of the pipe in our first hideaway.

The rats were one of our biggest problems in the beginning. We would eventually get used to them, but during these first few days we were still somewhat frightened and disgusted by them, so my father and some of the other men positioned themselves over our group with sticks, and they were constantly swatting at the swarm of rats at our feet. The men worked in shifts, so that there was almost always someone assigned to chase the rats, but of course this was a futile exercise. The rats were everywhere! The swatting would cause them to scatter, but then they would return. The effect was like a crash of waves against the shore; the water would go out and then it would come back in again. Eventually we realized that we could no more chase the rats from this chamber than they could chase us, and my father took the philosophical position that we would have to adjust to each other.

This new chamber was located beneath a church called Maria Sniezna. Maria, Our Lady of the Snow. I remember thinking this was a good omen, to hide beneath a church. We were Jews, of course, but it made me feel protected. As though God were watching over us. Our God, their God . . . it did not matter. My mother would come to regard Leopold Socha as our guardian angel, and already he was watching over us in the shadow of the Maria Sniezna church, helping us to stay alive. My father remembered that on June 10, 1943, just a few days into our stay in this new place, the churchgoers above celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi. He remembered that from our underground bunker we could hear the sounds of the procession, the ceremony, the voices of the children singing. In his journal he noted that I was saddened by the apparent contrast between our lives underground and the lives overhead. I must have expressed to my father that I wanted to be outside, gathering flowers and playing with the other children.

My father knew precisely where we were in relation to the streets aboveground. He knew this church and the surrounding square. Underground, he was not always so sure how to get from place to place, but he was proud of how well he knew the streets and buildings of Lvov. He took such enormous pleasure in this. I was proud of my father, too. He was also our guardian angel. And he knew so much! About so many things! My father could tell you when this church was built, when that road was expanded, when this part of the sewer was finally covered. Whatever you wanted to know about the city, he would tell you. He would come to know the underground pipes and tunnels as well as he knew the streets and alleyways of Lvov, but in the beginning Socha had to draw him a map.

The chamber beneath the church was about ten meters by twelve meters. At the bottom of the far wall, there was an opening to the pipe that was our only safe exit. On the other end of the chamber, above our heads, a manhole led directly to the street. There was an iron ladder bolted to the wall, reaching to the manhole cover, and we sometimes used this ladder to hang our few things, to dry our clothing if it was wet, to keep any extra food from the reach of the rats on the floor below. We were so close to the church and its surrounding square that we could hear the people talking on the street above our heads. We had to remind ourselves to keep very quiet in this underground space, because of course if we could hear the sounds from above, then we could be heard from below. I could hear the children playing. Always, they were playing. This was how we could tell day from night. If we could hear the children playing, it meant the sun was shining.

I did not like this place. I did not mind it, but I did not like it, either. What was there to like? It was dark, and foul-smelling, and
wretchedly cold. It was uncomfortable sitting so long on those round stones, and of course there was not enough ceiling height for the adults to stand straight. They had to walk stooped over. Pawel and I could stand and walk about, but the adults were too tall. Even Jacob Berestycki, whom I now noticed had an unfortunate hunchback, could not manage to reach his full height.

The pipe leading into our hideaway had a radius of only forty centimeters, yet my father and the other men had to crawl through it each day in order to retrieve drinking water for our group. It was an arduous task. It seems almost impossible to me now that this was what the men had to do in order to supply our group with drinking water, but this was how it was. Socha estimated that it was about two kilometers to the dripping fountain that was the source of our freshwater, a long way to go when you are crawling, holding a teakettle in your teeth by its handle, in a pipe so narrow that there is hardly room to move. At the other end, after the men reached the fountain, they would have to retreat backward, because there was not enough room in those forty-centimeter pipes to turn around. In the seventy-centimeter pipes you could turn around, but not in the smaller ones. The men would go two and sometimes three at a time to fetch the water, and the round-trip would take nearly two hours—a long way to go for such a little bit of water. Sometimes it was such a tight squeeze, my father would come back with his arms all scratched and bloodied from the hard, sharp edges of the pipe and the bolts that jutted into the passageway. His clothes would be torn.

From time to time, a group of men would make other excursions in search of material and supplies. They did not yet know their way underground so well and could only retrace their steps, so several of these excursions were return trips to our basement
barracks, to the opening they had dug in the cement floor several weeks earlier. There they would find discarded household items like pots and pans, and these articles were as precious to us as jewels. Whatever we needed, we could usually find there, until one of our group became careless. He was spotted one afternoon through the barracks window, rummaging through our left-behind things, by a Gestapo officer. Immediately, the German gave chase, but the men were able to retreat safely to the sewer. The next time they returned, however, they found the basement opening had been covered with boards.

Socha and Wroblewski also used this forty-centimeter pipe, which opened into our one small room. It was the only underground passageway that led to where we were sitting, so there was no other option. My father and the other men were not yet used to moving about in such a tight, narrow space, but Socha and Wroblewski were used to it. This was how they moved about in their underground world, how they got from place to place. Every day, they would bring a little bit of food for our group. Usually, it was just a loaf or two of bread, although my father wrote in his journal that they also brought sausages. I do not remember the sausages, but that might be because I soon became very, very sick and was not interested in eating. I developed a violent case of diarrhea and dysentery that lasted for weeks and weeks, beginning almost as soon as we made camp beneath the church. Pawel, too. In fact, everyone became sick in the beginning, in our small chamber beneath Maria Sniezna, but no one was as sick as Pawel and me. This was when my parents began giving their daily ration of freshwater to me and my brother. They collected their share—three-quarters of a glass—but they would not take a drop; they saved it for me and Pawel and in this way probably kept
us alive. My father wrote later that he was so sick himself, and so thirsty, that he sometimes drank the sewer water to quench his thirst, thinking it could not make him any sicker than he already was. Probably this was not such a good idea, but he did it anyway. He did not think it was possible to become sick on top of sick. No one could determine if we were sick from the germs in the freshwater, from the food, or from the bacteria in the air, but it was a debilitating, exhausting sickness. Disgusting, too, although I cannot say that our diarrhea and nausea contributed in any meaningful way to the waste that was already all around.

For many years, I remembered that Pawel was sickest of all during these first days and weeks and that my parents were frantic with worry about his health, but when as an adult I finally read my father’s manuscript, I realized I was the sick one. I was so disoriented, so dehydrated, that I placed the worst of my sickness on my little brother. Already, I had spent most of the previous four years taking care of little Pawelek, protecting him, collecting his hurts, that to carry the full force of our sickness must have seemed to me my due.

In addition to food, Socha and Wroblewski would bring us supplies—carbide, for the lamps they had given us to use; tools and materials, so that the men might improve our living conditions; medicine, if one of our group was sick. One day Socha brought a curative for Pawel, who was suffering from some angina and strep throat. This was my mother’s diagnosis, and she wanted him to have some medication. Socha and my father, however, were worried that if Socha went too many times to the pharmacy, it might alert the authorities, and we could not afford to arouse suspicion or have Socha followed. He actually went to the pharmacy, but then he turned around and left without
trying to purchase anything because he was so worried, and the next day he came back to our chamber and asked my mother if there was something else he could bring for my brother. She suggested a home remedy known as a gogel mogel, which was popular among Jewish families across Eastern Europe. The precise recipe changed from family to family, from region to region, but my mother made it with eggs and sugar. The mixture was said to be very good for the throat. She mentioned this to Socha, who promised to return the next day with the ingredients.

A few hours later, however, we heard a clamoring in the pipe that opened into our chamber. Someone was coming! My father stood by the opening with a stick, thinking this might be an intruder, and then through the opening we saw Socha. This was such a surprise! He had not wanted to wait a whole day to deliver the remedy for Pawel, so he had gathered the ingredients and crawled once again through the forty-centimeter pipe for the second time that day. He had crawled with four eggs tucked carefully inside a handkerchief, which he had knotted on the sides and carried in his teeth, like a St. Bernard. Can you imagine? Crawling through several kilometers of pipes, carrying such a delicate thing as four eggs with his mouth, to make certain they would not break. This was why my mother thought of Socha as our guardian angel—and soon enough the rest of us would think of him in this way as well.