The Girl in the Green Sweater (7 page)

My grandmother, she was furious with me. And the Ukrainian women, they shook their fists and chased after me. They shouted, “You Jewish bastard!” They did not catch me, though—I was very fast—and they did not chase after my grandmother. Perhaps they did not know we were together. I felt so good, splashing them like that, so powerful. It was nothing, just a little bit of water, a little bit of mischief, but it made me feel that I was not so helpless after all. Of course, I got in a lot of trouble when we got back to our apartment, but I did not mind. It made me feel we could stand up to the Ukrainians, to the Germans, to whatever might happen next.

It was good to be a fast runner, especially during one of the actions, when the Germans would come in force and sweep the streets of Jews. At all other times, it was unsafe to move about the city without proper papers, but at these times it did not matter even if you had proper papers. During an action, the Germans would mobilize their entire police force: soldiers, Gestapo, SS. They would go into the apartments where the Ukrainians had told them the Jews were living and drag us out into the street. Sometimes they would throw grenades into buildings if they suspected there were Jews hiding inside. They would capture the Jews and load them onto lorries for transport to the Janowska labor camp, on the hill overlooking town, or to the Belzec extermination camp. Sometimes they would just shoot the Jews right there in the street or take a large group to the Piaski sand pits and shoot them there. It was a concentrated effort, to kill or capture as many Jews as possible, in as short a time as possible, to tighten the grip of terror over the Jews who managed to survive. Following
each action, the surviving Jews were made to move deeper into the ghetto. It was like a funnel. They pushed all the Jews into smaller spaces, until finally there was no place left for us to go.

I can still recall the very first action. At least, it was the first action I remember. We were still living at Zamarstynowska 120, and my mother was home with us at the time. We heard noise on the street outside our window. We heard the footsteps of the Germans bounding up our stairs. We heard them banging on the doors of the apartments below. We heard the cries of the other families as they were pulled from their apartments. My brother and me, we hugged my mother close. She tried to comfort us. She kept saying, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.” But, of course, we were afraid.

And then she did the strangest thing. She started pinching our cheeks. Over and over, she pinched our cheeks. We complained because the pinching started to hurt, but still she kept pinching. She said,
“Cicho, cicho, cicho,”
to keep us calm, to let us know everything was going to be all right. Ssshhh, ssshhh, ssshhh. And still she kept pinching. She explained to us quickly, quietly, that she wanted our cheeks to look healthy, she wanted us to look well fed and well dressed and well mannered. She made sure there was a nice picture of me and Pawel displayed on the table by the apartment door. And all the time she was pinching, pinching, pinching.

Finally, some Germans came into the apartment. They did not knock. They just burst through the door. The man who appeared to be in charge looked around. He did not look like a terrible person. He did not seem much more than a boy. He studied me and my brother. He could see we looked clean and healthy. Our cheeks were so red, from all the pinching! We were wearing nice clean shirts. On top of my shirt, I had my special green sweater. We
stood perfectly silent and still, not because we were so well mannered, but because we were too scared to say anything or to move.

The German, he looked us up and down. Then he noticed the picture by the front door and he compared our faces with the faces in the picture. Then he said to my mother, “Doctor?” They were Wehrmacht, these soldiers—not Gestapo, not SS, just regular German army. Always, they were a little bit easier to talk to, a little bit more human. This was what my parents always said.

My mother shook her head.

“Professor?” the German asked.

Again, she shook her head.
“Nein,”
she said.
“En airbrecht.”
No, I am just a worker.

Once again, the soldier studied us.
“Das en dein kinder?”
he asked. These are your children?

My mother nodded proudly.

He looked at us once more. For the longest time, he looked at us. Then he said,
“Bleiben sie.”
You can stay.

This is how we survived our first action, by another small miracle, by pinching.

The next day, another German soldier came. My mother went at us again with her pinching, and again we were allowed to stay. Where she learned this trick, I never knew. Later that second day, a Ukrainian soldier came through the door, and he ordered us to leave with him. This time my mother’s pinching was not so effective. The soldier told my mother that one of our neighbors had reported that there were Jews living in this apartment, and this was why he came. My mother tried to talk to him, but he would not listen, and as they talked my father returned home. It was a lucky coincidence. Right away, my father began to bargain with the Ukrainian. The Ukrainian decreed that my father could stay
with us children but my mother would have to leave with him since she did not have the proper paperwork. My father asked the soldier to name a price. The Ukrainian asked for 500 zlotys—about $100—which my father happily paid, and we were free for another day.

During the next action I remember, I was with my cousin Inka, who was two years older than me. We were living together at Zamarstynowksa 120 at the time. We had learned to be extremely careful when we were outside playing. Normally, we did not go outside, but in this one courtyard it was felt we would be protected. Still, we were constantly looking, left and right, up and down, fearful of the Germans, fearful of the Ukrainians, constantly listening. Action or no action, it was much the same. Every day, they were killing Jews, taking Jews, punishing Jews. But when it was a big effort, they gave it a name. They called it an action. In the meantime, they did it anyway.

We were like animals, attuned to our environment. Any sudden movement, any unexpected noise, and we would run. And that is just what happened. Suddenly, I heard some German voices, and I looked up and could see some German soldiers. I could hear noise and activity as the people spilled out onto the streets. I told Inka to run, and she did, only I ran a little bit faster. I managed to duck into an alley to hide, but Inka was not so lucky. One of the soldiers caught her and took her away.

I ran upstairs to tell my mother what happened, and we were so upset. Everyone was upset. It was the way of the ghetto, we were all learning. One moment you were with someone and everything was fine, and the next moment that someone was gone and everything was no longer fine, and underneath our sadness was a kind of knowing that something like this was going to happen.

After Inka was taken, I thought I would never see her again, but later that day I saw her. I heard some commotion in the street and I looked out our window. There, on the lorry, pressed together with dozens of other Jews, I could see Inka. She was with my grandmother—my father’s mother, the one who knitted me my cherished sweater. I did not know until just then that the Germans had caught my grandmother in the same action.

At some point, my grandmother looked back toward our window. Probably she knew I would be looking. She knew I would be frightened for them. I do not know that she saw me, but she imagined I was there, so she waved. Just a little twist of her wrist, just for me, just in case I was looking. Probably she did not think any of the soldiers guarding the lorry would notice, but one of them did. Probably he did not like that this woman was waving to someone. That she was smiling. That she was being brave. So he hit her. With the butt of his rifle, he hit my grandmother, and Inka reached to comfort her, and that was the last time I saw either one of them.

After that, I did not go outside.

Already, I was learning that there was no room in our lives for tears. Later, when we were hiding in the sewer, so close to the street where children were playing, I could not cry because my tears would give us away, but here, watching my cousin and grandmother being taken to their certain deaths, I was all through with tears. My parents were trying to be so brave, so strong. They were so focused on keeping the four of us alive that to mourn too deeply for those we were losing might take away from that focus. They did not have to speak these things to me. We were all sad, to think what had happened to Inka and my grandmother, what might be happening still, but there was only so much time for sadness, so we put it out of our minds. Not because we did not love them or cherish
their memories. Not because of any kind of disrespect or detachment. No, it was because there was no longer any room for crying. Also, you could not openly demonstrate your sadness. Not in the ghetto, not any longer. Why? Because all around everyone else was experiencing their own sadness. We were all watching our friends and our family members being taken to slaughter. At any other time, we would have been collapsed in grief, but at this time we could only hope that we would not be next.

My mother was not in control of her emotions. She had a small breakdown after the first actions, after losing her mother-in-law and her niece. (Her sister-in-law, Inka’s mother, was also killed in this same action, we later learned.) She was normally a very strong person, but this was too much. She stopped going to work, for a time, and stayed in hiding. My father did not even tell me and my brother she was hiding. He was afraid that if the Gestapo came to search our apartment, we might accidentally give her away. She was hiding in the sofa bed. My father folded her up inside and covered the opening with a blanket. Every morning, I thought my mother had gone to work for her regular shift, but she moved instead to this sofa bed. All day long, I thought I was at home alone with my brother. I became suspicious only when I heard my father talking to an empty room. He was standing in the doorway, talking, talking, talking, and no one was there.

I said to my father, “Who are you talking to?”

He said, “No one, Krzysha. I am just trying to gather my thoughts.”

Later, I could hear him still talking. It was almost comical. This time he was asking the room for advice: what to do about the children, what to prepare for dinner, what clothes to put out for us. This sounded so strange to me, to hear my father talking about
such details to an empty room, until finally I heard my mother’s voice in answer. It was coming from the sofa bed, and she was telling him what there was to eat.

This went on for a few days, until my father could convince my mother that this latest action was over and that she would be safe, but even I could see my mother was changed by what was happening. She became very superstitious. One day, Pawel announced that in his dreams he saw the Germans coming back to our apartment, and so she retreated once again to our sofa bed. Sure enough, another German soldier came to our apartment the very next day—and once again, we were spared.

Little Pawel’s premonitions came into play another time as well. Like a lot of Jewish women in the ghetto, my mother had begun carrying vials of cyanide, which she meant for us to swallow in the event we were captured. This was to be our last resort. The Germans would not take us alive, she vowed. She carried three vials: one for herself, one for me, one for Pawel. Presumably, my father carried his own. My mother had taken to carrying these vials pressed beneath her watchband on her wrist, and one of them happened to break one evening as she was preparing something for Pawel to eat. My mother did not know at first that the vial had broken, but somehow Pawel knew not to eat. How he made this connection, I will never know. My mother tried to force him to take a bite of whatever it was she had made, but he would not open his mouth. Over and over, she tried to force him, but he would not eat. He started to cry. Usually, he was very good, and he seldom cried, but here he was, crying. We could not understand it.

Of course, I did not know anything about these vials of cyanide, and Pawel, he was too young to understand, yet on some level he must have known something. Finally, my mother noticed
the vial had broken and that the cyanide had surely spilled into Pawel’s food. She raced over to him and covered him with hugs and kisses, and from that moment on she believed he might be a kind of prophet. He was only three years old, yet he dreamed the Germans were coming back, and he knew not to take a bite of the poisoned food. For the rest of the war, my mother would ask him, “Pawelek, the Germans are coming?”

I do not really believe my brother was psychic, but we were all changed by these first few actions. We were all broken, bent, beaten—so much so that my mother was willing to believe my little brother could see into the future. In this way, you could see how we were being psychologically defeated by the Germans. My father always talked about this. First, he would say, our freedoms were taken from us by the Russians. We were separated from our lives and fed all of the Communist propaganda and made to feel we were no longer human. Everything went from a straight line to a crooked path, and nothing was as we had known it to be. Next, after the Russians, the Germans continued with our dehumanization. We were reduced by what we were being made to endure. We were made smaller. Because we could no longer feel for the loss of our loved ones. Because the liquidation of our Jewish population was all but inevitable. Because we began to believe it was our fate and we were helpless against it.

I did not need to be an adult to recognize the feelings underneath this type of thinking. I could see that I had been changed by what was going on. I could see that where I would have once cried for my grandmother, I could now only shudder and wince and take a deep breath and move on. And for this, I blamed the Germans. I blamed them for making my mother weak and afraid, even if it had been for only a few days. I blamed them for taking my
grandmother and my aunt and my cousin—and, soon, for everyone else they would take from my family. Most important, I blamed them for taking away my tears.