A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (5 page)

After a while, my father went to look for our belongings. He found some bags and dragged them back to the field. Here we were
soon joined by others from our group. “What now?” was the question being asked, and “Where are we?” Nobody seemed to have
any answers, and except for my father, no one in the group spoke Polish. He soon learned from some passing farmers that we
were not far from Sandomierz, a town some two hundred kilometers east of Katowice.

We stayed overnight in a barn, and then our little group began the trek east to the Russian border, sometimes in hired horse-drawn
wagons and other times on foot. The roads were teeming with civilians and soldiers. Like us, most of the civilians were trying
to get away from the invading Germans. Every day there were more people on the road. We slept in open fields or in barns and
made little progress in our move east. The farmers would charge us for the use of their barns and sell us food. Often, the
barns would already be rented out by the time we got there, and then we would have to sleep outside. Some farmers were kind
to us; others were not. The latter frequently called us bad names. Here I first learned that we were
“Parzywe Zydzi”
— Scabby Jews.

There were rumors that German spies were everywhere. My father heard that the public was being warned by the Polish government
to be on the lookout for German spies. Our little group was suspect because, except for my father, its members spoke only
German. With increasing frequency, my father would have to explain who we were and show our English travel documents to suspicious
Polish officials. After a while, only he would go out to the villages to buy food for our group and to get the latest news.
I would sometimes accompany him. There we would listen to a radio or talk to the farmers. The information we would bring back
seemed always to be the same: “Things don’t look too good. The Germans are advancing; the Polish army is retreating.”

Every so often, my father would speak with somebody who had recently come back from Russia or had news from there. Here too,
the story was usually the same. “Terrible things are happening in that country. Not a good place for foreigners; many of them
are being sent to Siberia.” Nobody in our group wanted to believe these reports since we had hoped to escape to Russia. Finally,
my father decided to see for himself; we were not very far from the Polish-Russian border. He was back a few days later and
announced that it would be better to take our chances in Poland. I don’t know whether he had actually crossed into Russia
or whether he had spoken to people at the border, but he was convinced that it would be a mistake for us to try to get into
Russia. “Conditions are terrible,” he reported, “particularly for foreigners. A lot of people are getting arrested or deported.
The lucky ones are turned back at the border.”

“If not Russia, then what?” somebody asked, prompting a long and often heated discussion about the fate that awaited us in
a Poland under German occupation. It continued into the night. When I woke up the next morning, the decision had been made.
Instead of seeking to enter Russia, we would try to reach Kielce, a city west of Sandomierz with a large Jewish community
that might take us in.

Little had changed on the roads. They were even more congested. We were being stopped often and asked to produce our papers.
At times, there were tense moments as my father tried to convince Polish military officers that we were not German spies.
The news from the front was not very good, my father told us. It was getting worse every day. The Poles were blaming German
spies for their military setbacks and the rapid German advances.

My father tried to cheer everybody up by telling us that we would soon be in Kielce and sleeping in real beds again. That
was great news for me, but it had little effect on the grim mood that had gripped our little group. I heard someone say that
we did not have much to look forward to. “We will either be shot by the Poles as spies or by the Nazis because we are Jews.
What is better?” one of my adopted uncles asked with a grin, and everybody laughed. After a while, though, nothing seemed
to be funny anymore.

A few days after our decision to walk to Kielce, we began to hear what sounded like a distant thunderstorm. “Artillery fire,”
my father told me, “but it is far away from here. Listen.” And he showed me how, by lying down and pressing my ear to the
ground, I would be able to hear it much better. I had a lot of fun playing this game. More and more Polish soldiers and their
equipment could be seen on the road and in nearby fields. After a while, the entire road was taken up by retreating troops,
at which point all civilians were ordered off the road. We waited and rested in a ditch nearby. It seemed to take hours before
the last of the Polish soldiers had passed. Then suddenly, we heard the roar of approaching engines and saw walls of dust
in the distance. “Tanks! German tanks!” I could almost touch the fear that swept over our little group. But then I heard my
father’s reassuring voice, “Stay calm! Don’t anybody run! Don’t say anything unless spoken to.”

As the tanks approached — they advanced toward us on the road and across the fields — we were enveloped in dust and smoke.
One of the tanks stopped near our group, and a young soldier, his body protruding from the open turret, his face covered in
soot, yelled over to us in German, wanting to know who we were. After some hesitation, somebody answered that we were Jews,
and another added, “German Jews.” “Nothing to worry about,” he yelled back. “The war will be over soon, and we’ll all be able
to go home again.” He waved at us and the tank moved forward. These very reassuring words brought us temporary relief. People
began to joke and laugh again. But as fate would have it, they turned out to be the kindest words any German would address
to us for a long time to come.

Notwithstanding what the young soldier had said, for us the war had really only just begun. We continued toward Kielce. Near
Opatów, some thirty kilometers west of Sandomierz, a wealthy Polish farmer allowed us to stay in one of his barns. He and
my father would go off to talk for hours at a time. My mother would always worry until my father returned, and then the two
of them would whisper a lot. I later learned that the farmer and some of his friends were in the process of forming a Polish
resistance group to fight the Germans. They wanted my father to join them; they needed people who spoke German and Polish
and had military experience. We would not have to worry about food or a place to stay, and a way would be found to get us
false identification papers. My father and mother talked about this offer for days. Eventually, my father turned it down.
They were both very sad that they had to make this decision. The problem was that my father and I, because of our features
and light hair color, could have passed for Poles. But my mother spoke no Polish, and her wavy dark hair and brown eyes would
have given her away as a Jew. “Poles can smell a Jew a mile away,” my father said, “and sooner or later somebody will denounce
us to the Germans.” As a family, we could not pass ourselves off as Poles and expect to get away with it for long, and breaking
up the family was out of the question. We continued our trek west to Kielce.

It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect. We could do little more than
hope that things would get better. That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that
we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve. But what else could we do but hope? That, after all, is human nature.

WE LIVED IN KIELCE
for about four years until we were transported to Auschwitz in early August of 1944.
Lived
is probably not the right word to describe our incarceration in that bleary Polish industrial city, its ghetto, and two different
work camps. Had our train not been bombed in an area where Kielce was the nearest Polish city with a large Jewish population
— it numbered about twenty-five thousand at the time — we would not have gone there; although, in retrospect, it made little
difference that we did not reach another Polish city. The fate of Jews was basically the same in all of them, and life in
Kielce during those years was no worse or better than it would have been elsewhere in Poland.

My first recollection of Kielce is our one-room apartment (kitchen included) on the third floor of an old, somewhat run-down
apartment house on Silniczna Street. The building was part of a four-building complex that surrounded a dirty courtyard. To
reach our house, one had to go through a big gate, which opened onto a noisy street. We were assigned the apartment by the
Jewish community council of the city shortly before the ghetto was established in early 1940. At that time, the German police
(the
Schutzpolizei
) and the Gestapo ordered all Jews to move into the area of the city containing the largest concentration of its Jewish population,
which was also among the most run-down parts of the town. We did not have to move because we already lived there.

Until my father got a job as a cook’s helper in the
Schutzpolizei
kitchen outside the ghetto, we had very little to eat. During those early days, food could still be bought from the outside.
The more prosperous Jewish families lived relatively well compared to us, since we had hardly any money, even after my mother
sold almost all her jewelry. In his new job, my father would return home every evening with a large canteen of food. He usually
hid pieces of meat under the mashed potatoes and vegetables he was allowed to take with him. By midafternoon each day, my
mother and I would already be waiting for him and our one good meal. From time to time, we were invited by wealthy families
in the neighborhood to join them for a Sabbath meal. I remember looking forward to these dinners because of the food. But
I also dreaded them because they were always preceded by what seemed to me to be interminably long prayers.

Soon, I too found a way to get some food and on rare occasions even a little money. Because religious Jews are not allowed
to work on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays, they may not perform most household chores on those days, including lighting
ovens and fireplaces and turning on lights in their homes. These chores had in the past been performed by non-Jewish servants
or Poles hired for that purpose. When these people were no longer allowed to enter the ghetto, I was asked by some of our
neighbors, who knew that we were not observant Jews, to perform these functions. That is how I became a
Shabbat goy
(a Sabbath gentile). I liked doing these chores, not only because I was paid for them but also because in that way I got
to know many families in the neighborhood and was able to see what their homes looked like and how they lived. I was fascinated
by the appearance of the very orthodox Jews — their long
payess
(sideburn locks), their
tzitzit
(cloth fringes), their black hats and caftans, as well as the
talaysim
(prayer shawls) and the
tefillin
(phylacteries) they wore on their arms and foreheads when praying. But the majority of the people in the ghetto were not
orthodox and dressed just as we did.

Once all Jews had been moved into what became the Ghetto of Kielce, the area was surrounded by walls and fences and guarded
by Jewish and Polish police as well as the
Schutzpolizei
. There were many children in our neighborhood, and I soon had lots of friends. In those early days, some Poles were still
allowed to come in, mostly to sell vegetables, milk, and firewood. When winter came, Polish farmers would enter the ghetto
with their horse-drawn wagons to sell firewood, which was very expensive. We kids would wait for them and jump on the backs
of the wagons, hoping that the drivers would not see us before we had a chance to grab some of the wood and run off with it.
If a driver saw us, he would try to slash at us with his long whip. Sometimes he would succeed, despite the avoidance techniques
we developed over time. Besides needing the wood, we had a lot of fun playing this game, particularly since our parents, while
not approving of our wagon jumping, were always pleased to get the few pieces of wood we brought in.

Another game I remember playing with my friends was hiding in the empty field behind our apartment complex. There, from time
to time, we could watch the Polish peasant women urinate in a standing position, with their legs spread out but without lifting
their long skirts. At some point we would whistle or bang on a can in the hope of startling them and making them change their
stance — with the predictable results. We would then run away laughing, while the women would hurl terrible Polish curses
at us.

Once, two of my friends and I found a leather box of
tefillin
used by religious Jews in their prayers. Somebody had told us never to open such a box, that it was a sin to do so, and that
God would strike down anyone who took out the little piece of parchment it contained, with its Hebrew inscription from the
Torah. But we had also heard that if you found that piece of parchment and put it under your armpits, you would be able to
fly. Well, we had quite a dilemma on our hands: we wanted to be able to fly but were afraid of God’s wrath. Eventually, and
with trembling hands, we cut open the box, expecting lightning to strike us right then and there, but nothing happened. At
this point, one of the older boys very cautiously placed the parchment under his arm and readied himself for takeoff. Again
nothing happened. Then, one after the other, we each tried the same maneuver. The result was the same. Disappointed but still
afraid of God’s punishment, we threw the box away and promised not to tell anyone what we had done.

In Poland, the expression
Yekke,
a somewhat derogatory term of ridicule, was applied by Polish Jews to German Jews who spoke no Yiddish or Polish and who,
because of their appearance or demeanor, were thought by many Polish Jews to look more like gentiles and to be naive in matters
of business. To Polish Jews, my mother was a
Yekkete
(a female
Yekke
), and when she and I walked down certain streets, we were frequently called
Yekkes
by the children in those neighborhoods. Once, while walking alone on one of the streets where I had previously been with
my mother, I was surrounded by a group of boys my age and somewhat older. They began to push me around, made fun of my clothes,
and kept calling me “
Yekke putz, Yekke putz,
” the latter being a bad word I had been told never to use. I managed to run away but promised vengeance. My opportunity arrived
soon, when a few days later I saw a boy walking with his mother on our street and recognized him as one of my tormentors.
I raced up behind him, gave him a push with all my might, and ran away. He fell and cut his lip. When his mother saw the blood,
she began to scream and wail, hurling vile Yiddish and Polish curses at me, my family, and my descendants. I could hear her
from the far side of our courtyard where I was hiding. My mother was very mad at me when she heard what I had done, and told
my father. I expected to receive a severe spanking, but after hearing the whole story, he said that it was good that I was
learning to defend myself, and while he did not approve of my hitting the kid from the back, it was too late to do much about
it.