The Girl in the Green Sweater (2 page)

I remember our piano, an August Förster, and the German officer who claimed it for himself. His name was Wepke, and he came to our apartment to pick what he wanted from our few remaining nice things. This was how it was, all over Lvov, all over Europe. The fine things of the Jewish people became like a flea market for the German officials, the SS and Gestapo. They picked clean our leavings before we could even leave them behind. This officer Wepke sat down to play our piano, went over the keyboard, rubbed his hands over the fine wood casing, announced that it was one of the finest instruments he had ever seen. I imagine it was. He played beautifully, like a maestro.

I remember hiding in a crawl space beneath our window ledge. Sometimes it was the Germans who came looking for us. Sometimes it was the Ukrainians, who in many ways were worse. My father was handy with tools, and he made us elaborate hiding places, behind false walls, in the backs of closets, where my brother
and I would go while my father was at work and my mother was sewing uniforms for the German army at the Janowska labor camp on the hill overlooking town. My father built a false front beneath our window and closed my brother and me inside, sitting on potties for when we had to go. There was no room to move and hardly enough air to breathe. All day long, I worried what would happen if my father did not come home, if he was taken off the streets like so many other Jews. If my mother was shot on the long march down Janowska Road. Who would free us from our special hiding place? Who would even know we were there?

I remember huddling with my family and some men we did not yet know in the basement of one of the ghetto barracks, when a round-faced Polish sewer worker named Leopold Socha agreed to look after us in the underground tunnels and pipes beneath Lvov, to help us find a place to hide, to bring us food and supplies. Poldju, as my father would call him, was a reformed thief and an observant Catholic who believed that in protecting us from the Nazis, he would find redemption. He was kind and generous, with a bright, wide smile that seemed to light our dismal barracks. He saw our salvation as his salvation, but it was also an opportunity.

I remember the simple green sweater my grandmother knitted for me when we still lived in our grand apartment at Kopernika 12. My father’s mother. His parents were divorced, his father remarried, but this was my natural grandmother. Always, she liked to knit for me, only I was not always such a good girl. I liked to disturb her knitting. I would take a spool of wool and run with it and hide. Or I would take out the last rows, where she kept her place with the needles. And yet somehow she managed to make me some nice things, despite my mischief. She made nice things for everyone in the family. It gave her great pleasure. This sweater
was my favorite. It had a delicate lace neckline. After she was taken in one of the actions, it was even more precious. I wore it constantly. When I put it on, it felt as if I were wearing one of her warm hugs. That I managed to keep the sweater all during the war was just another of the small miracles that found me and my family—and that it stands now on permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is a tribute to the struggles of all Jewish children during the war, as well as to the child I used to be.

I remember the night of the final liquidation, the last action. It was May 30, 1943. Already, more than one hundred thousand of the Jews of Lvov had been transported to concentration camps or killed. I remember the sounds of the commotion and chaos, the shouting and the confusion. I remember the sheer black terror. Around midnight, the Germans started pulling people from their ghetto barracks and herding them onto the trucks that would take them to the Janowska camp or to the Piaski, the sand pits north and west of the city where Jews were lined up and killed. There was our group of a dozen or so, desperate to avoid capture, scrambling to fit through the hole my father and the other men had painstakingly dug. Another few dozen were so desperate to escape, they entered the sewers through manholes on the street. Together, we spilled into the sewer, hoping to find sanctuary among the rats and the filth.

I remember the small, dank cavern where we sat for our first three days underground. It was miserable. There were spiderwebs so thick that they could slow the rats that seemed to occupy this space in droves. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. We would get used to the rats, and they would get used to us, but we were not so used to one another just yet. The walls were slick
with the sludge and dampness of the sewer. Tiny yellow worms covered every surface. The smell was fetid and dank and awful. There was mud and small puddles of wastewater at our feet. The only place to sit was on the wet ground or on two large, misshapen stones.

I remember the dysentery we all suffered those first weeks underground. My brother and I suffered most of all. The constant diarrhea, the nausea, the disorientation. My mother had the idea that if we did our sickness off to the side, we would somehow keep our hiding place more sanitary. It was as though we had to fool ourselves into believing we were still human.

I remember how each day one of the men crawled nearly two kilometers through a maze of small pipes, some only forty centimeters wide, the handle of a kettle clenched between his teeth to collect drinking water from a fountain dripping from the street above. The kettle filled, he would retreat backward, because there was not enough room in the pipe to turn around, and in this way we would each receive three-quarters of a glass of water each day. My parents did not drink their share and gave it to us children instead because we were so sick, but they were sick, too.

I remember, some weeks in, a disagreeable man in our group became so enraged at my brother’s crying that he threatened to shoot him. His name was Weiss, and he thought he was in charge. He got it in his head that my brother’s crying could be heard on the street above.

I remember the
slosh, slosh, slosh
of Socha’s boots as he trudged through the water on his way to our hideaway each morning. The echo of the pipes told us he was coming, along with his coworker Stefek Wroblewski. The sloshing meant we would soon have a piece of bread or some news about the fighting.

I remember the dull cries of the baby born to a young woman
some months into our underground odyssey, a woman whose husband had abandoned her after just a few weeks in the sewer and who kept her pregnancy secret from the others. A woman who had already given her infant daughter to a Ukrainian woman during the early days of the German occupation, hoping this would keep the child safe.

I remember these things and so much more. The fire that almost suffocated us. The flood after the spring thaw that almost drowned us. The times we were nearly discovered. The prisoner who joined our group in the last days of our confinement. There are good memories, too. The satires my father would write for us to perform, to keep our minds from our situation. The joking and the laughter. The unshakable bond that developed among the few of us who made it to our final hideaway, a place my mother called “the Palace” because there was room for me and my brother to stand, room for us to cook, room for us to bathe once each week. There was not a lot of room, of course, but room enough. Most of all, there was the affection we all came to feel for Leopold Socha, who continued to look after us long after our money had run out and we could no longer pay him.

I remember hearing the bombs of the Russian aircraft, when the front reached Lvov and the newspaper accounts we were by now receiving reported a coming end to the fighting. And still we worried that the bombs that would hopefully free us might kill us first instead, trapped as we were in our underground burrow, beneath the very streets that were the target of the bombing. Indeed, those final days were a mix of jubilation and terror, we were all so anxious about what would happen next.

I remember the day of our liberation, when Socha led us to a manhole opening and coaxed us up the iron ladder to a courtyard,
where a crowd had gathered to greet us. After so much time underground, without a sliver of daylight, I could hardly see. I was wearing my precious green sweater, which must have looked like a rag. Probably we were all a sight! Our clothes were tattered, our bodies dirty and withered and broken. The day burned orange, like a photographic negative, and it would be a few days more before my eyes could adjust. It was like something out of science fiction.

I remember how we struggled after liberation, as my father looked for work, as we tried to find a home, and to build a life out of no life at all. All this time, we thought that if we simply outlasted the Germans, we would be okay, but it was not so easy. We had nothing. I remember going to school with shoes made from newspaper because we could not afford proper boots. I remember being told by school administrators that it might be better to pretend that I was not Jewish after all. I remember my mother baking latkes for my brother and me to sell on the street after the war, to earn extra money. I remember moving from Lvov to Krakow and eventually to Israel, where it sometimes seemed that every other person on the street had a number burned into his or her skin from some concentration camp or other, where almost every Jew had an unbelievable story of survival to match our own, where almost no one would speak a word of the Holocaust.

Yes, I remember. . . .

L
ike a princess. That is how I grew up, like a character from a storybook fable. At least, that is how I grew up for a while. I was born on October 28, 1935, at a time when Lvov was one of the most vibrant cities in Poland. It was a magical place, a Renaissance city, only it was not the best place to be a Jew. There were over 600,000 people in Lvov in the middle 1930s, including about 150,000 Jews.

We were Jewish, of course, but we were not terribly religious. We observed the Sabbath. My mother, Paulina Chiger, always lit the candles. We celebrated Passover. But we did not go to temple. On the High Holidays we would go, but the rest of the year we observed at home or not at all. We would light the
Yahrtzeit
candles on the anniversary of a death, but we would not always say the
prayers. We were Jewish by tradition more than we were Jewish by faith, yet a strong sense of Jewish identity ran through our household. That came from my mother’s side of the family. My father’s side did not believe in God. They considered themselves Jewish, so they also had that strong identity, but it was more of a heritage than a religion. They were Socialists and Communists. They were more concerned with social justice. They would not be treated like second-class citizens. In their minds, I think, the thought that all people are created equal was a way to lift the Jews to level ground. You see, even before the war, the Jewish people in Lvov were sometimes made to suffer, usually at the hands of the Ukrainians. People today, they do not talk about this. Or they do not remember. But it was so. My father told me stories about how he used to walk through certain parts of the city and Ukrainian boys would lash at him with razor blades taped to long sticks, tearing at his clothes. He said it was like a game to these boys, taunting and intimidating the Jewish men who crossed their path. This was not the only discrimination my father experienced, yet it is the example that has stayed with me.

I did not know of such things as a small girl. All I knew was that we lived in a grand apartment and that I did not want for anything. I had fine clothes, wonderful toys. My maternal grandmother used to bring me souvenirs from Vienna, where she would go on buying trips for her textile business. She brought me a lovely silk robe, which I remember wearing constantly. I used to jump up and down on my parents’ bed, wearing this robe. Jumping with me was my imaginary friend, Melek. This Melek, he was my constant companion. I talked to him. He answered me. Later, when we were in the sewer, he kept me company. I do not know how I came to invent this Melek, how he got his name. It was a nonsense
name, Melek. It does not mean anything in Polish. It was just a name. Melek. Together we laughed and laughed, jumping on my parents’ bed.

My grandmother also brought me beautiful dolls and a spectacular dollhouse, with a kitchen and furniture. I had the whole set, all the different rooms, all the proper pieces. Today, a dollhouse like that would cost thousands of dollars. It was my most prized possession, and I would lose myself in my imagined world of that dollhouse, inventing fantastic little lives for the people who lived there. The people who lived in my dollhouse were not Jewish or Christian, Polish or Ukrainian, Russian or Hungarian. They were just people, and they were happy with their nice things, their nice furniture, their nice families.

In my imagination, the dollhouse was on a charming street in Lvov, not far from our apartment at Kopernika 12, in the nicest part of the city. This was my reality corresponding to my fantasy. Our building on Kopernika Street is still there, and the street is much the same, but it is darker now, more dreary. It is different from the picture I have carried in my mind for so many years. The colors have all changed. The trees that line the street no longer appear to bloom. Or perhaps they do and I no longer see it. Maybe it is because I cannot look at the city the same way I did when I was a child, when it was filled with fine, happy things. Maybe it is because of everything that happened there, and how violently and suddenly everything was taken from my family, beginning with our apartment. We had four bedrooms, with a nice entry hall, a big dining room, a kitchen, two full bathrooms, and two entrances, one for the labor and one for our family and guests. There were wrought-iron gates opening out onto the street, balconies overlooking the street in front and the courtyard in back, and a vaulted
ceiling on top of the interior stairwell, throwing light onto the entryways of each individual apartment.