The Girl in the Green Sweater (20 page)

At first, Weiss threatened to choke little Pawel if he did not
keep quiet. He said this in an angry whisper from his side of the chamber. My mother ignored this and continued to comfort my brother. Finally, Weiss stood and walked in a stooped-over fashion to where our group was sitting. My mother noticed with horror what he was holding as he crossed to our side of the chamber. When he reached Pawel, Weiss put the gun to Pawel’s little head and said in a menacing voice, “If you do not keep quiet, I will shoot you!”

We were all frozen in terror over this exchange. Those of us on our side of the chamber could not believe that such a thing was transpiring. Even those in Weiss’s corner were horrified at this turn. I do not think any of us had seen this gun before. It had been well hidden, like my father’s money and other valuables. Socha and Wroblewski carried guns with them, and these we could see clearly on their visits, but no one in our party had ever indicated that they too had a gun, and now one was being held to the youngest of our group. The rest of us were stunned into silence. Pawel, too, which of course was the intention of Weiss’s bullying tactic. Poor Pawel was now too frightened to cry. He was still sick, but now he was also terrified, and my mother collected him in her arms and turned her back to Weiss. She collected me in her arms as well. She could not abide that our fortunes were now intertwined with the fortunes of such a horrible man. She considered him with the same mixture of hatred and revulsion that she had developed for the rats.

After a tense few moments, Weiss returned with his gun to his side of our small chamber. Nobody spoke for the longest time. There were no whispered congratulations for Weiss upon his return to his buddies. There was just silence. My mother rocked Pawel and me in her lap, whispering,
“Cicho, cicho, cicho.”
Ssshhh,
ssshhh, ssshhh. Pawel was shaking a little bit, and she was trying to comfort us the way she used to do in our apartment at Kopernika 12, when our world was so much different from what it was at just this moment.

An hour or so later, my father returned with the water. We could hear him coming long before he finally appeared through the tunnel opening that spilled into our chamber. He could tell right away that something had happened among our group. Probably my mother gave him a look. He handed out the water and came over to where we were sitting. He huddled close with my mother, and she whispered to him what had happened. It was dark, so I could not see his face, but I imagined it was red with anger. I imagined he had never been so angry in his life, that this man should take a gun to poor Pawel’s head and threaten to shoot him for the simple crime of crying in pain and sickness. All this time, I had been waiting for my father to come back through the tunnel. He would fix this problem, I knew. He would take care of Weiss. My father put his hand on Pawel’s head, stroked his hair, and thought about what to do next.

It must have taken an enormous amount of restraint, but my father did not say anything to Weiss for the rest of the day. He did not confront him or challenge him in any way. At least, I did not see him do any such thing, and for years afterward he would say his emotions were exploding in such a way that he did not want the confrontation to escalate. He wanted to choose his response carefully. And so for the moment what he chose to do was nothing.

When Socha came the next day, still my father said nothing. Socha and Wroblewski handed over the satchel with our bread to Halina, and Halina broke off some big pieces for her group before delivering the leftover portion to our side of the chamber. The
sewer workers inquired about this and that, and several of the men answered them in turn. Until it came time for my father to deliver our payment, it was as if nothing had happened. Here was the response he had decided to make: he wrapped a note around the bundle of cash he had prepared for Socha. On it, he hastily wrote the details of what had happened the day before. He told about Weiss threatening Pawel with the gun.

Socha collected the money without inspecting the bundle and disappeared with Wroblewski into the narrow pipe. When they left, there remained the same thick tension among our group that had taken hold the day before, when Weiss drew his gun. Then, about an hour later, we heard again the
slosh, slosh, slosh
of boots approaching us through the mud and water. For the longest time, we heard this noise. A few of the men began to panic, because we were not expecting another visit from our sewer workers. Once again, we started to think we were about to be discovered. No one could think what to do, how to respond, and then Socha and Wroblewski arrived in our chamber for the second time that day, this time with their guns drawn. They headed directly for Weiss.

Socha demanded that Weiss turn over his weapon. Then he turned to Weiss’s comrades and demanded they turn over any weapons they might have been hiding. I think he collected another two or three guns. Then Socha pulled Weiss close and said, “I am saving only Chiger and his family. You are here by a lucky accident. If I see that even one hair has fallen from their heads, you will be killed.”

He said this calmly, but his voice was thick with disgust. His message was clear.

Socha collected the other guns and made to leave, but not before consulting with my father in the corner. During this consultation,
I believe he gave my father one of the confiscated guns, to keep for our protection, but I never saw a gun among my father’s possessions, and he never wrote about it in his journal. In any case, from that moment on, the dynamic in our chamber was changed. Weiss was quiet after this incident. He and his friends were still disagreeable, but they were no longer in charge. They still complained, but they no longer had a real platform for complaining. Nobody listened to them. And Halina Wind was no longer the queen.

My father called our group a collection of fortunates among the unfortunates, but of course we were not so very fortunate. Indeed, we had the bad fortune of beginning our underground odyssey during the rainy season in eastern Poland, and in 1943 there were heavy rains throughout the month of June. This made for treacherous conditions in the sewer, as the pipes filled with the water from several storms.

The conditions in our own chamber remained much the same as they had been upon our arrival. Unsuitable, but little changed. Our small hiding space was dark and dank and disgusting, although I imagine most small chambers connected to the sewer system were also dark and dank and disgusting. Yet from time to time, the men would talk longingly about the first hiding place they had prepared, back before we had descended into the sewer from the ghetto bunker. They remembered that it had been swept clean and that there had been a little bit more room to stand and to move. The women had never seen that first hiding place, so they had no basis for comparison, but they agreed anything would have been better than this small chamber beneath the church of Our Lady of the Snow.

For several days, they expressed their displeasure over our surroundings to Socha when he arrived with our daily bread, and finally Socha reported that Kowalow had discovered a new place for us to hide, a short distance downriver from our present position. It was too dangerous, they determined, for us to double back to that initial hiding place, but this alternative location might be an improvement. This was welcome news to everyone in our party, and almost immediately the men set about inspecting and preparing the new place. Socha and Wroblewski delivered supplies to help make this new place more habitable. My father took one of the first shifts, and he spent hours and hours cleaning and building a comfortable place for us to sit, removing the mud and silt, and when he returned to our small chamber he was exhausted. He was pleased with the progress he and the others were making, but it was a tiring effort.

Upon my father’s return, it was determined that it was his turn to retrieve the water for our group. He dutifully prepared to go, along with Korsarz and Chaskiel Orenbach, until my uncle Kuba very graciously offered to take his turn for him. In fact, Kuba insisted, and after first refusing, my father finally agreed to let Kuba go in his place.

This was already the third or fourth week of June, the middle of the rainy season, and we were in constant danger of the rainwater flooding our underground hiding place through the sewer pipes and of the Peltew overflowing. Because of this, Kowalow had developed a new route for our group to travel in order to get to our freshwater supply. This way was more complicated, the sewer workers said, but the pipes were pitched and elbowed in such a way that there was less chance of the overflow water overcoming them inside, so for several days now the men had been traveling
this new route. There was still some danger of flooding, but not so much as before.

It was along this new route that Uncle Kuba and the others set off, while my father stayed back and gathered his strength for the next day’s errands. But it was not to be a restful time. As he was filling his kettle from the dripping fountain, poor Kuba was engulfed by a torrent of water and carried off in its flow. This was how forceful the current of rushing rainwater could be, that it could carry a grown man through a length of pipe and toss him to the rising river below. According to the report from Berestycki, the men did not see this rush of water coming at them. Already, there was water in the pipe as they crawled, and they were displacing so much more of it with their three bodies, but the current was not so fast until the pipe quickly filled and the water pushed Kuba to his death. The other men were approaching from an elbow in the pipes when this happened and so were spared Kuba’s fate.

I cannot say who was more devastated by the news when Berestycki and Chaskiel Orenbach returned to our small chamber a short time later, me or my father. Certainly, my father felt guilty that Kuba had gone on this mission instead of him. Also, he loved Kuba, who had been married to his sister. He was our one surviving link to my father’s family. I liked him, too. He was funny and kind and generous. And in an environment where my father could not be sure which men he could trust, it was good to have a trusted soul like Kuba among us. From time to time over the years, my father even questioned whether Kuba’s death was an accident. This was how underhanded he felt Weiss’s group could be. He trusted Berestycki, but he did not dismiss the prospect that Chaskiel Orenbach might have participated in some way in Kuba’s drowning. My father could never prove this, but he always suspected that Weiss
and the other men were somehow responsible, and underneath this suspicion was the responsibility he placed on himself, for allowing Kuba to take his turn retrieving the water.

My grief was of a different sort. Mine was over what Kuba’s death represented, as much as for the loss of Kuba himself. Kuba’s death filled me once again with sadness over what had happened to my cousin Inka, his daughter. It put the picture in my mind once again of my grandmother waving to me as she and Inka were being carted away. It represented the fate of my entire family. And it signaled that probably this was what would happen to all of us. In turn, we would all be swallowed up by the water or we would succumb to the dysentery or we would meet some other terrible fate. We were trapped here, I realized, and the only escape was death. I was not being fatalistic in my thinking so much as realistic, and even at seven years old I could see we were in a terrible situation. Kuba’s death made me realize this more than anything, but of course I could not say anything to my parents or to anyone else. I could not cry about it. I could only place these thoughts as part of my inside life, alongside the other things I kept to myself and struggled to understand on my own. To talk about them might have been too upsetting for the others to hear. I could talk about these things with Melek, my imaginary friend. I could say, “Melek, I am scared.” I could speak these words, in a tiny whisper. I could imagine Melek would stroke my hair and take my hand and tell me everything would be okay. He could tell me these things, but I was not so sure I could believe him.

Socha was also upset to hear the news about Kuba when he and Wroblewski arrived the next day with our bread. The sewer workers had liked Kuba. He was a good man. He was a part of our family, the family Socha was meaning to save. Together, we discussed
how this was Kuba’s fate, to drown in the Peltew, because already he had fallen into the river on two other occasions when my father was able to rescue him. Now, at last, he could not, and so we became a group of twenty.

I was not the only one to react to Kuba’s death with such foreboding. Soon after, the two young women who remained unknown to me and my family asked Socha to escort them from the sewer. They were beaten down by our living conditions and now terrified that they would meet the same fate as Kuba. They felt claustrophobic, they said, and would take their chances aboveground; so Socha and Wroblewski led them to a manhole where they could escape undetected and hopefully make their way to the outskirts of the city. Socha made arrangements for the two young women to seek refuge with an Aryan family in his acquaintance, but the women were captured and killed by the Nazis almost as soon as they left the sewer.

This did not deter the group of three young men from pursuing the same course. They, too, asked Socha and Wroblewski to lead them from our chamber to the streets above, only their plan was to escape into the forest and meet up with the resistance movement. They could not last another day in our stinking underground prison, they said, but they were also immediately captured and killed.

Socha delivered the news of what happened to our former companions with great despair, because he did not like to see his efforts coming apart in this way. We were a group of desperate Jews, banded together, and despite the tensions and differences among us, we were all connected to one another in a kind of shared hope.
However, we were now a group of fifteen, and my family could only hope that these tragedies might in some way still the protests of the remaining malcontents in our group—Weiss, Weinberg, and the two Orenbachs. They no longer had any real power in our underground community, but they continued with their complaining, and even after learning of the fates of these others, they quietly discussed an escape of their own. However, they did not dare ask Socha to escort them from our chamber, because they knew he did not trust them. Probably Socha would have shot them before allowing them to escape to the city streets, where they could give up our location and identify our kindly sewer workers as conspirators and traitors.