Clara's War (6 page)

 

When the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there was a burst of optimism that died within weeks. The American involvement changed nothing for us in Zolkiew. By February 1942, there was nothing left in Zolkiew with which to bribe the SS. The commandant had bled us dry. On 25 March, every category-C man and his family was herded like swine down the mansion-lined street that led to the train station. The cattle cars were waiting for them. The Nazis were sending them to the camps. Mama saw it all. She told us that the streets were red with blood. Those not moving fast enough were shot on the spot. From the balcony of the biggest mansion on the street, the wife of the head of the Gestapo was pulling out her hair and screaming, ‘Who will pay for this? Who will pay for all this?' She knew there would be a day of retribution. At least a dozen girls I knew from school were on that transport. I didn't know how to begin to mourn them.

Sooner or later everyone would share the same fate as that
of the category Cs. But we didn't know exactly what that meant. Nobody knew where the train was headed. Somebody, I don't know who, hired some peasants to follow the train. They reported back a few days later, telling us that the train had stopped near Belzec, where the Nazis had built a camp in the deep woods. They said they couldn't get near the camp because there were too many soldiers. Although they were still kilometres away, they said they could smell the stench of burning bodies.

There were no more illusions for us. Every family we knew was trying to find a way to get out of Zolkiew, either with false documents, or escaping to Romania or Hungary, which hadn't been overrun by the Nazis. We continued to live our day-to-day lives, but we knew that time was running out. The oil press would not save us for ever. Mania would not let up on Mama and Papa. She drove my parents crazy.

‘Papa, Papa, please, stop…listen to me. We need a hiding place. We need to find a way to get out of here. Papa, please, tell me we'll get out of here…'

My poor father was trying to get papers, trying to find a place to hide or a way out, but without success. I could see the pain in his face as he listened to Mania's incessant demands. ‘Enough! Please, Mania.'

‘Did you find something? Did you find something? Just tell me, just tell me we'll get out.'

‘I'm doing everything I can.'

‘What does that mean? What does it mean, Papa? Does it mean we'll get out, or does it mean we'll die trying?'

She would be waiting for him when he came home from work with an expectant look in her eyes, hoping. Every time someone managed to escape, she would tell Mama and Papa. It wasn't information, but an accusation.

Hiding, escaping, papers cost a fortune. I didn't know how much money we had, but I knew that the underground business had been making the three families rich. The Melmans and the Patrontasches saved their money. But Mama was spending as fast as Papa could make it, buying food and running the soup kitchen to feed the refugees as well as the poorer Jews who had already run out of money. The town was starving. The Judenrat had a soup kitchen, but it wasn't enough for Mama, who started one of her own. We had a gigantic pot, almost as big as the stove, which we usually used to boil our sheets to make them white. Every day Mama would make soup in this giant pot with buckwheat groats from my father's press and whatever else she could buy and put it out on the back porch above the stairs. Mania and I were her helpers. The hungry came, lining up for hours before the soup was ready.

Mrs Mandlova, one of Mama's closest friends, saw the crowd outside our door and cried, ‘Salka, the Gestapo!'

Mama simply said, ‘If God wants to strike me dead for feeding the hungry, then let Him.'

My father begged, argued, reasoned, but she was stubborn as Dzadzio, although she would always deny it.

Mania and I now devoted all our time to helping other Jews. School had become a luxury since the category-C transport. There was a war and we could not sit in the false security of our house while other Jews suffered. Over the course of the winter and spring, there were more and more transports. Soon there was a train every day that would pass through Zolkiew on the Lvov–Lublin line. After each train
skoczki
–jumpers–would wander into town. Teenage boys patrolled the tracks near the station for injured jumpers. Those who were near death, sometimes with broken bones protruding from their skin, were taken to Pepka Fisch. But often the jumpers had perished in the fall;
entire families would be found scattered over hundreds of metres; sometimes dead mothers were found with living children in their arms.

Mania and I started to work with Pepka. I had learned a lot during my time in the hospital the year before. As soon as I was able to get around, I had wandered the hospital following the nurses, trying to be useful, watching and learning. When I started with Pepka, I wasn't squeamish like some of the other girls. I was soon doing the work of a nurse. The stories the jumpers told were simply too horrible to believe or comprehend. Yet the truth was sitting before me, bloodied, terrified, broken. There was a death camp at Oswiecim, a small town less than 150 kilometres north-west of us. A report on the radio claimed a million Jews had already been killed. Special SS death squads were murdering thousands of Jews at a time. I listened to the stories that fell from their lips like poisoned prophecies.

Pepka was tireless and quickly earned a good reputation. Some jumpers had been told to try their luck near Zolkiew because they had heard about the hunchbacked nurse who was as good as any doctor at setting bones. We learned to make splints and bandage and clean wounds. One day my friend Genya Astman came running to the house and said I had to get to Pepka's right away. A jumper named Hela Ornstein and her mother were there. I couldn't believe they were alive after jumping off a train. Mrs Ornstein's face was half torn away. Genya's family took the two of them in.

 

In June 1942, Josek and Rela had a baby boy. Handsome Josek, the family Don Juan, had surprised us first by marrying a plain girl with a big heart, and then again last winter when they had announced Rela was pregnant. We were stunned that anyone
would think to have a child. But no one said a word to her. Their son was named Moshele. The baby was healthy and blond with blue eyes. We couldn't resist having a small family celebration, and a
bris
eight days later to circumcise the child, as is prescribed by our law. My mother had baked a honey cake, the traditional sweet to celebrate a birth. A sweet life; that's what the honey cake was supposed to ensure. The party was lavish. If we had known, if only we had known what would come, we would never have celebrated his
bris
and marked him as a Jew. He could have easily passed for an Aryan, and then he would have been spared.

We all loved the baby and couldn't get enough of him, especially Mania and I. There was something about the way he looked at us, just happy to be held by someone who loved him, so content and unaware of the hell he had been born into.

Things were grim. Papa hadn't been able to find a way for us to escape, so he was now searching for someone to hide us. I took refuge with my girlfriends whenever I could. Giza Landau lived several streets away, and it was too dangerous for her to come and visit. But there was Genya, Libka, Muschka and Klara Letzer nearby, and still alive. One day at Genya's house, we realized that we were the last of our group. We had already lost so many friends, and we were discussing which one of us would be next to die. We mourned the fact that we had nothing, not one photo, to remember our friends by. We decided to go to Mr Domanski and get our pictures taken to have something to remember each other by. We wanted a token of our friendship to survive the war, even if we didn't. But as I left my house to go to the studio a boy called me a dirty Jew on the street. I was terrified and went back inside. When we eventually went, Mania schlepped along with us. She didn't want to miss anything, even
having what would perhaps be her last photograph taken. We decided not to dress up, but we braided each other's hair. We had a group picture taken as well as individual portraits of each of us. Mr Domanski had the prints for us the next day. I was shocked at the picture. I had been trying to smile, but I wasn't. It was the only picture of me in which I wasn't smiling. We sat in Genya's living room and exchanged the pictures, writing our names and the date on the back. We thought about writing a message on each picture, but what was there to say?

Papa hadn't been able to find anyone to help hide us. Neither had the Melmans or the Patrontasches. Having run out of options, the three men decided they needed to build a temporary hiding place in the crawl space under the Melmans' house. Their house was the biggest of the three and would hopefully be able to hold all of us. Mr Patrontasch, who was a wonderful carpenter, built a jigsawed trapdoor in the bedroom's parquet floor. When the door was in place, the seam, like the opening to a Chinese box, was impossible to find. The crawl space was too small for the grown-ups to enter so Mania and I, and Igo Melman and Klarunia Patrontasch, who were both eight, inched our way through the tight space. Our job was to hollow out a passageway to the far corner of the house where we would be able to dig a pit large enough for all of us to hide in.

It was high summer and hot in the crawl space. There was no ventilation, so we were dressed only in our underwear. Mania and the other children always ran around in their undergarments through the baking hot days of summer, but I was modest and never took off my dress. Not once. But I had no choice now, it was just too hot otherwise.

We dug for two weeks straight with our hands and then with pots and pans and shovels. My hands looked like those of a peasant, raw with blisters and broken fingernails, dirt wedged
under the nails and tattooed in the lines of my palms. We had to dig to Mr Patrontasch's exact specifications. We couldn't take the dirt outside, so we had to lay it out evenly all over the rest of the crawl space. We worked by the light of kerosene lamps, which fought us for every molecule of oxygen. There were times I almost passed out. There were times I wanted to stop and weep. There were times when the dirt walls seemed to be caving in on me while I dug. I wished I was dreaming and would wake up with the lovely breeze of a summer morning cooling my sheets and pillow. But this wasn't a playhouse and I was no longer a child.

We were proud of the work we had done and yet looked at it with terror. The bunker was three metres square and a metre and a half deep. There was just enough space for the ten of us to lie next to each other. In the event that anyone should become aware of the trapdoor in the bedroom floor and enter the crawl space to look for evidence of people hiding, Mr Patrontasch designed a cover to disguise the underground bunker perfectly. First he constructed a square of wood, three by three metres square. On each of the four sides he attached planks a third of a metre deep, which made the cover look like an empty sandbox. We then filled the box with dirt and, when we were done, placed it over the bunker. It fit exactly. Once it was in place we couldn't tell the cover from the dirt floor. We had built a tomb. Inside it we placed matches, candles and water.

 

Our time was running out. Some nights Papa would come home from the factory almost in tears. The fact that Mama continued to spend money on the soup kitchen threw him into a panic. Mania and I would be in our beds, listening to the same argument, again and again. It was an argument born of despair rather than anger. The words weren't spiteful or meant to hurt; I had
never heard Papa's voice so desperate. He was worried about our future and having the means to save our lives. ‘Salka, Salka, you're killing me. As fast as I make it, you spend it. And more!'

‘We should eat when someone's hungry?'

‘The Judenrat runs a soup kitchen.'

‘Oh well, we both know that there's not enough to go around. They do the best they can, but their soup is like water. I don't think you'd sit still and be happy if all Clara and Mania had was a bowl of watery soup a day. And what about the dozens of families too proud to beg? To go to the soup kitchens? They should go hungry too? Why? Because the men would rather see their children starve than accept charity. You'll make more money.'

‘Salka!'

‘No more “Salka”! If God wants to strike me dead for feeding the poor, then let Him. In fact, I dare Him to!' It was what she said to anyone who suggested she stop.

That was the end of the argument. Papa knew there was no talking to my mama. My aunt Giza had said that she was a
tzadakess
, a righteous person, and God would protect us because of her.

Once they stopped yelling and everything went quiet, Mania and I would fall asleep. Me in the same thick, dark mahogany bed that was as sturdy as any ship, under the same goose-down comforter that was so light it seemed to float like a cloud when you shook it out to make the bed. Mania lay in the little baby bed, in which she looked like a big doll. We looked out through lace curtains at our fruit trees. And despite the fact that we lived in a different world during the day, sleeping side by side brought us close in a way in which words are almost superfluous, perhaps even redundant. How could nothing, nothing be out of place in this house and outside the world be so upside down?

Mania wanted to talk. ‘I've been thinking about going to the nuns. Lots of our friends have already gone.'

‘I know.'

‘We'll be safe,' my sister argued. ‘Mama and Papa want us to be safe.'

‘I know they want us to be safe. But I'm not sure about going to the nuns.'

Mania was capable of making big decisions, of rash actions, of decisive and independent thought. I was used to living in this protected cocoon of a world where Mama and Papa made all the major decisions for me. I was content not to question because I knew they loved me and had my best interests at heart. But now, in this ever-shifting world, Papa seemed overwhelmed. To go with the nuns would mean perhaps to lose them, perhaps for ever. ‘I don't know. I don't know if I want to leave Mama and Papa.'