The Girl in the Green Sweater (9 page)

One evening, my mother came home covered in mud. She was crying. I reached for a wet cloth and helped to clean her up. I said, “Mama, what happened? Who did this to you?” She answered only that it was some bad people. Always, she tried to protect me from the truth, but I learned later there was a group of Ukrainian children making mud balls and throwing them at the Jews. This was a game to these children! And my poor mother was made to suffer this torment without stepping out of line.

“Dirty Jew!” they shouted. “Dirty Jew! Good for you!”

One by one, step by step, she was hit by wet clumps of mud. The mud was hard and filled with small rocks and other debris, and it must have stung terribly when it hit her, but more than the pain there was the anguish of the moment, the humiliation. Of course, my mother was not alone in this indignity; the other Jewish workers in the line were also under attack. But my heart ached only for her. More than once this happened. It made me very angry. My father, too. But what could he do about it? Shake his fists and shout? What could any of us do about it but continue on?

I have always told people that fourteen months in the sewers of Lvov was not so bad compared with hiding aboveground with my brother during the days both my parents went to work. Next to this, the sewer was nothing, and yet the people look at me as if I am fooling with them. But this was so. Underground, at least, I was with my parents. Underground, at least, we had one another. I did not care so much how we suffered as long as we were together. Aboveground, alone in the apartment, I had only my brother. We
were children. It was frightening and bewildering, never knowing if my parents would return. I was like a parent and a sister to my baby brother, but this was too big a job for such a small girl. In this way, I had my childhood taken from me. The Germans, they did not take me, but they took a part of me. This part.

All the time, we discussed with my parents what to do when we were alone. What to do if I heard the Germans coming. What to do if there was an action. What to do if my father did not come home. What to do if my mother did not return. What to do—God forbid!—if both my parents were taken. My parents had us very well trained, because all around us other parents and children were being taken out into the street. All around us, families were being separated. So every night my mother would lay out a set of clothes for me and a set of clothes for Pawel. If we heard anything during the night, we were to jump into our clothes and run. Or hide. My mother would help Pawel to get ready, and my father would help me. That was the plan. At the end of each day, I would slip out of my cherished green sweater and lay it out at the foot of my bed or on the floor at the foot of my mattress, the arms opened wide and waiting for me to slip them back around me. Sometimes we did not even bother to take off our clothes. We slept fully dressed, ready to flee. Always we slept with one eye open, one ear listening.

After we left Zamarstynowska 120, we moved frequently. Sometimes we moved because my father arranged for a better, safer place or a place where we knew somebody. Sometimes we moved because the Germans had taken our building and we had no choice. Each day, when my parents were out, Pawel and I would sit quietly and wait for them to get back. For me and my brother, this was terrible—to be left alone, for so many hours, when all around us people were being pulled from their apartments
and out onto the streets. Pawel may have been too young to dread those long hours the way I dreaded them, but I was anxious enough for both of us.

In one of the apartments we moved to after Zamarstynowska 120, my father built for us a special hiding place beneath our window ledge. It was good for us that he was handy with tools, that he had access to materials, and that the Germans would not question him if they caught him with his supplies because he carried the proper papers and wore the correct letter. The special hiding place was like a small compartment directly beneath our window ledge. It looked only like an extension of the ledge itself, and my father fashioned a false wall extending beneath the ledge, which he painted over so you could not see a difference against the rest of the wall. Behind the false wall, he removed a layer or two of bricks, to give us more room. He had to finish the wall from the outside, sometimes with nails to keep the opening closed, sometimes with a fresh coat of paint, so we could not escape unless my father came home to free us.

The people in the ghetto came to know my father as handy and capable of building good hiding places, and soon they called on him to make such places for them in their apartments. This he always did. But it was in our apartment that he worked hardest and longest. It was for us that he saved his best work: little closets inside our closets, false walls in the back of our wardrobe. You would have had to be a detective to discover some of his hiding places. In the bathroom of one apartment, he built a special hiding place for all our important papers and some jewelry. Probably the papers and the jewelry are still there, because I do not think my father ever went back to claim them, and certainly no one could have found them. The space he built for us beneath the window
ledge was very ingenious, very clever. There was hardly enough room for my brother and me. You would have never imagined that you could fit two small children in such a space. We sat close, face-to-face, as if we were still babies in my mother’s belly. My father placed two potties in the space for us to sit on, in case we had to go to the bathroom during the day. If there was talk of an action, or if there had not been an action for some weeks and my parents were growing worried that it would soon be time for another, we would climb inside this space before my father left for work in the morning. Then he would close up the wall behind us and move a big heavy table in front of the window, for camouflage.

I do not remember if my father built any airholes into this false wall so that Pawel and I could breathe inside, but I believe now that he must have. Always, he thought of everything. But if there were any airholes, they were concealed even from us, because it was pitch-black inside our tiny space. My brother and I could not see each other. We could only hear each other breathing. This was comforting at first, but as the hours passed it became also terrifying. To hear only your breathing, only your brother’s breathing, louder and louder, all day long, with time moving so slowly that it might have stopped. The noise was so loud, I could not hear the prayers inside my own head. Even my imaginary friend, Melek, was silent underneath such a noise.

For me, these long, endless days in our hiding places were the worst part of the war. Absolutely, this was worse than losing our apartment at Kopernika 12. Worse than losing all of our fine, nice things. Worse than the beatings we sometimes suffered or that we were made to watch. Worse than the fourteen months underground in the stink and waste of the sewer that was still to come.
And it was not just one time. Many times we were made to crawl inside a hiding place and wait for my parents to return. In one apartment, my father made our hiding space in the kitchen. In another, the bathroom. And always, we were so scared! Our tears would run without noise, we were so afraid to make a sound. We could hear the footsteps of the Gestapo as they made their inspections. This happened frequently. We were not allowed to lock our apartment doors. Anyone could come in, at any time. There was a characteristic sound to the footsteps of the Gestapo, with their heavy boots. There was no mistaking it. In and out they would come. Gestapo, SS, Wehrmacht . . . they all took their turns.

My brother, he was also scared and crying silent tears. I held his hand and whispered to him that everything was going to be okay. He was so good, so brave. I tried to be good and brave like Pawel, but there was no one to hold my hand. There was no one to tell me that everything was going to be okay. All I could think was what would happen if my father was taken from the streets before he could make it home. What it would be like to be left inside this small space.

Sometimes, when there was no talk of any action, we would not have to hide. My parents would just leave us in the apartment. We were not to go outside, of course, and I was to stay away from the window, to make sure no one could see me from the street below. I learned to tell which noises were to worry about and which noises were okay. If I heard a suspicious noise, we were to hide. I used to stuff poor Pawel into our one brown suitcase. This was not a strategy I discussed with my parents beforehand, but a course of action I came upon myself. One day I heard the Gestapo marching up our street and into our building. I saw the suitcase underneath the bed. I thought this would be a good place to hide my little brother.
He was barely able to fit, but if he curled up in a tight little ball, I could close the lid. He did this without complaining. Then I slid the suitcase underneath the bed—it was so heavy!—and stepped into the closet behind one of my mother’s robes, careful that you could not see my feet sticking out on the bottom. In the closet, holding my breath because I was afraid the sound of my exhaling would alert the Gestapo, I counted out the seconds before Pawel would suffocate. Usually, I would wait for a full minute or more after the disappearing sound of the Germans’ characteristic footsteps, before escaping from my closet and rescuing Pawel.

For months and months, this was how things were—and I prayed constantly for a time when my family could be together, all the time together, without my brother and me being left on our own. It would not happen the way I prayed it would happen, but it happened just the same.

W
ith each action, the ghetto became smaller, our situation more precarious. There was no end to our suffering. We went from a city of 150,000 Jews, to a city of 200,000 after the Germans and the Soviets divided Poland in 1939, to a city that now could count us in the tens of thousands. Our numbers were dwindling—and so was our resolve.

Here is just one example of how we were weakened. When we were still living at Zamarstynowska 120, the Ukrainian militia discovered a cache of fur coats in the attic of our building during a routine inspection. The coats did not belong to us, and they did not appear to belong to any of the other families currently occupying the building, but somehow my father was considered responsible. The soldiers determined that we had to pay a fine of 7,000
zlotys—about $1,400 at the time—as punishment for having these coats. If we did not pay, they said, they would take my father. Of course, we could not allow this to happen. My parents had money, my grandfather on my father’s side had money, but this was a lot to pay for the crime of living beneath an attic full of someone else’s fur coats. But we paid the fine. After all, this was what our money was for, to buy us our continued freedom. It did not matter that the Ukrainians kept the coats and probably sold them on the black market. It did not matter that the punishment did not fit the crime, because in fact there was no crime.

Here is another example: on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the ghetto commander, Grzymek, issued a special work order requiring all Jews to once again clean the ghetto. He ordered the men to their knees, to scrub the cobblestone streets, to pass the day that should have been spent in meaningful prayer in meaningless toil. Naturally, they knew it was an insult to require Jews to work on Yom Kippur. The work itself was an insult, so they added insult on top of insult and hoped to weaken us in this way as well.

In one important way, Grzymek and his cohorts nearly did succeed in breaking my family. Like all Jewish parents in Eastern Europe, my parents worried how to keep their children safe. It was a constant concern. My parents knew that many other Jewish families had placed their children with non-Jewish families and hoped in this way that their children could survive the war undetected. Some of these arrangements were permanent and some were meant to be temporary, with the children to be returned to their true families as soon as circumstances allowed. These were the so-called hidden children of the Holocaust, and they were great in number. Usually, there was some payment involved, some money that
passed from the Jewish family to the non-Jewish family to be used for the child’s safekeeping. Sometimes there was an additional payment or exchange of property, to compensate the adopting family for the risk they were assuming in taking in a Jewish child. Many Aryan families were put to death for harboring a Jewish child; many more were sent to prison just for suspicions of the same; more still lived in fear of being found out. Some of these situations were successful, and some ended in the discovery by the Germans of the deception. Very often, the children were so young that they did not remember their biological parents and grew up without ever knowing the circumstances of their adoption; many did not even know they were Jewish.

Some months into the German occupation, my parents looked into making just such an arrangement for me. I did not know about it at first. They began making discreet inquiries until finally they located a woman who was willing to discuss the matter. The woman they found wanted only me, not Pawel. It was difficult to find a family willing to take in a boy, because of course all Jewish males were circumcised and therefore easy to identify as Jews. But with girls it was not so easy to tell, Jewish or not Jewish. This was why so many of the surviving “hidden children” were girls.