In the Sewers of Lvov (14 page)

Everyone knew the danger the two men were in, but there was nothing they could do.

‘As the rains got worse, my father got more and more worried about Uncle Kuba. The pipes became filled with water,’ Kristina recalled. Perhaps an hour later, they heard the sound of someone approaching. Chaskiel Orenbach emerged from the tunnel, alone.

‘His face was long and sad. He slunk against the wall and it said everything that needed to be said. He wept and explained that Kuba was no longer with them,’ Paulina remembered.

According to Chiger, Orenbach told them, ‘While Kuba was filling his jug, a sudden fresh influx of water surged through the pipe they were in and carried him away.’ Orenbach claimed that he too had fallen into the torrent and only managed to crawl out with great difficulty. He also claimed later that because he didn’t have any dry clothes to change into he remained cold and damp for weeks. He saw this incident as the cause of his subsequent tuberculosis.

For the Chigers, Kuba’s death was a tragic loss. Kristina was deeply fond of her uncle. Apart from the fact that Kuba Leinwand had been a tireless helper, especially in looking after the children, he had also been the last link with Chiger’s sister. For years, Chiger reproached himself for not having refused Kuba’s offer to fetch the water. His final word on the incident was of little comfort:

He had slipped into the Peltwa during the first minutes in the sewers. An hour or so later, he had fallen in and I had to drag him out with my belt. Now when he did not have to face the river again, he perished in the same waters – the waves of destiny.

It must have seemed at this time that they were stumbling from one catastrophe to another. After a journey through the flooded tunnels to fetch water one day, Chiger sat down and wrenched
off his water-logged boots. Being made of felt, they willingly absorbed water and resisted all attempts to dry them out. He began massaging his swollen feet and, to his horror, discovered something missing. Before entering the sewers he had strapped a precious gem between his toes as a precaution against losing it. The gem, worth a great deal of money, had been a kind of insurance policy against the unexpected. Something that would have sustained their existence for months, if necessary. His feet had become so swollen and water-logged that the strapping had disintegrated and he’d lost everything when removing his boots. The lamp was brought over and they searched everywhere, but the gem was not found. Chiger concluded that it must have been lost on a previous occasion when he had been too tired to notice.

Feeling wretched and depressed, he took his cheap felt boots and a pair belonging to one of the children, and hung them out to dry. Immediately above their heads, in the centre of their little cavern, was a shaft that led up to a manhole. It had never seemed a threat before because Socha assured them no one would ever have any reason to enter the sewer from that point. At the top of the shaft, the manhole cover allowed in a faint chink of sunlight and a little dry air. Chiger hung the boots under the manhole cover where they had a better chance of drying out. They were left there throughout the night and into the next morning.

The men had just returned with the morning’s supply of water and were waiting for Socha and Wroblewski, when the sky, quite literally, fell in on them. Without any warning there came the sound of heavy steel grating against concrete and a shaft of sunlight poured down from above. Someone had lifted the manhole cover. They froze. It was their worst possible nightmare. From above their heads they could hear voices. Polish voices, not German. Someone was talking about investigating. He was speaking about having seen something through the grate of the cover and was now brandishing his discovery, a pair of felt boots. Margulies recalled that, though blinded by the daylight, ‘We pushed the women and children into a corner and quickly made a plan.’ No one dared make a sound. The light didn’t spill far down the shaft, so they suspected they had not actually been seen. They waited.

‘If they come down, we’ll grab ’em and knock ’em down. Then dump them in the water – finish,’ whispered Margulies.

Like a bad dream they heard the sound of someone descending the shaft, his heavy workman’s boots clanging on to each step on the way down. As the intruder stepped into the little cavern, he was completely blind in the inky gloom. Margulies had picked up a shovel and waited. The intruder took out a match and lit it, but it offered him no help.

Margulies brought the shovel around with all his strength and clubbed the unsuspecting intruder across the back of the head. He let out a cry, of both terror and pain and immediately threw himself back up the ladder. He scrambled towards the street screaming at the top of his voice, while those down below gathered up everything they could possibly carry and began their flight. Margulies and Chiger shouted, ‘Run, run!’

In the meantime, the intruder emerged into the street yelling, ‘There are Jews in the sewers! There are Jews in the sewers!’

He ran to his colleagues to tell his story. It was true, just what everyone had suspected. Jews in the sewers. They’d all heard rumours, whispers, but this was proof. The simple Polish worker was prey to all the most ignorant fantasies about the Jew in his community. Among the most commonly held convictions was the belief that if you could discover the Jews’ hiding place, there you will find their treasure. It had a naive quality not too dissimilar to the myth about Irish leprechauns. So it was the anticipation of jewels and gold that excited the men in the street, not any duty they might have had toward their Nazi occupiers to report their discovery.

Beneath them, the group had already begun to take flight. They felt they knew the sewers sufficiently well to put some distance between them and the cavern, and then they might have a good chance of not being discovered again. The fifteen stumbled along together, down treacherous paths and ledges still flooded with the summer rains. They turned into a tall elliptical tunnel that had a narrow trough, less than ten centimetres wide at the base. It slowed their progress, forcing them to walk along the trough placing one foot in front of the other. Chiger carried
Krisia on his back, while Paulina bore Pawel. Suddenly she came to a halt. One of her wooden shoes had become wedged fast in the trough and would not budge. She lunged forward, twisted her ankle painfully and could not move. She called out to her husband for help, while Korsarz, ahead of everyone, urged them on.

Chiger turned round, ‘Get up, Pepa, get up! We can’t stop now …!’

He tried to dislodge the shoe but it would not give. It and Pepa were stuck fast. In the distance they caught sight of a light. Some lanterns ahead. As they came closer they heard Socha’s voice calling out to them. ‘What are you doing here?’ they asked him. He’d already heard the news from his colleagues in the street, he said, but hadn’t expected them to be so far from the cavern. It had been another sewer worker who had discovered them. Apparently, he had returned with some of his colleagues but the place was already deserted. But from the evidence they saw all round them, stoves, pots and pans, there was no doubt any longer. Everyone knew there were Jews in the sewers.

‘There’s no point in going back there. We’ll have to find somewhere else,’ Socha explained. He already had somewhere in mind. But first Pepa had to be removed from her shoe. The shoe was unfastened, she was lifted on to Socha’s back and then carried down the tunnel. Chiger finally wrenched the stubborn clog out of the trough and followed behind.

Socha led them down a difficult and confusing route and finally paused at the entrance to a Forty. They had to crawl through it to reach their next sanctuary. Each in turn was lifted up to the pipe and helped along the way. There is a simple rule understood by ‘pot-holers’ and sewer workers alike: if your head and shoulders will squeeze through, everything else will follow. Progress was good, until Genia Weinberg squeezed into the Forty. She had managed to get herself halfway in when suddenly she got stuck.

‘Crawl, crawl forward!’ they begged of her. She could not move. No one could understand it. Her coat was perhaps too thick and heavy.

She became frantic, not being able to move one way or the
other. She knew the reason to be something far more substantial than an overcoat and was terrified in case the others discovered the truth. Finally, Margulies took hold of her legs and pushed her painfully through the pipe, just sixteen inches wide.

The place that they came to was described by Chiger as a sort of cave with rough-hewn walls and an uneven floor. It was somewhere within the foundations of a building but still very close to the surface. Once they were all inside, they realized that they could clearly hear conversations from the street. If they could hear what was being said above them, surely they would be audible at street level. Socha acknowledged that the location would not be suitable, and set off in search of somewhere else.

They had not spent one full night in the cave when he returned with news of yet another location. Another journey, through tunnels and pipes. By now, most of them were beginning to recognize certain landmarks and could vaguely discern their location in relation to the streets above. Somehow their spirits rose on this apparently endless search. Kristina remembers being carried on her father’s back down to the main chamber where the Peltwa flowed:

Suddenly we came to a very large space. It seemed like an underground boulevard. It was light, bright and so, so big. I found it quite shocking, but I was so terribly happy that I started singing.

My father put me down, and while I was walking I trod on a hatpin. It went straight through my foot and although I was bleeding a lot and I must have been in pain, my spirits were so high I didn’t seem to care about it. I bent down and pulled the pin out again and carried on.

Once they’d left the main chamber they seemed to be climbing higher, closer to the street. They came to a halt at a very difficult location, beneath a large manhole. They were at the junction of three large storm pipes that joined at the edge of a large shaft, right at their feet. This shaft went straight down to the level of the river, perhaps another metre and a half below, where it emptied. Above their heads was a large hinged cover which was opened during the winter so that snow from the streets could be swept
straight into the sewers. In the side of this wide snow shaft, again above their heads, was the entrance to a chamber that Socha claimed ‘would be dry and somewhere you could remain indefinitely’.

He helped the first man through, handed him the lamp and then one by one the rest followed. All of them climbed through but one, who had decided that was the moment to quit. It was another whose name has not been remembered. He told Socha he had had enough and wanted to return to the street. ‘I have some Aryan friends who will give me shelter,’ he claimed. He bade everyone farewell and Socha and Wroblewski led him out. He was never heard of again.

This, their fourth sanctuary in less than seven weeks, was easily the worst. The best that could be said for it was that it didn’t flow with raw sewage. But it was not dry, in fact the walls were smooth with slime from a constant stream of water. There were two incoming storm pipes trickling water, which flowed out again through the pipe that had been used as an entrance. Through these pipes, a cold wind howled all night long. The ceiling was constantly wet and water dripped on to their heads. The penetrating cold and the renewed company of rats reduced their spirits to rock bottom.

They were still tired and in pain from the chase the night before, as well as being hungry and becoming soaked through. Paulina slept huddled over her children, allowing the constantly dripping water to fall on her back. When they stirred again in the morning, their muscles ached from the damp. They all agreed it was impossible. When the sewer workers arrived with the food, Chiger broke the news Socha was dreading to here.

‘We had a dreadful night.’

‘This place is impossible. We just can’t stick it.’

‘We must try and find somewhere we can stay for a long period of time.’

Socha conferred with Wroblewski and decided to talk it over with Kowalow. ‘He knows the sewer system better than anyone.’

Kowalow thought about it and then agreed to show them somewhere worth looking at. They set out for the fifth time in
search of somewhere to live. From the accounts that are currently available, the original group of twenty-one seems to have been whittled down to thirteen. Yet at this stage there is a contradiction, because the same accounts state that as they set out for their fifth hide-out, they were a ‘family of eleven’. There is unanimity about the numbers originally selected to be sheltered by Socha, and about how many there were at this stage in the story. Yet no one can account for the loss of the other two; casualties of time and memory. So, as they set off, there was Ignacy Chiger, his wife Paulina, their daughter Kristina and son Pawel, Jacob Berestycki, ‘Korsarz’ Margulies, Klara Keler, Halina Wind, old Mrs Weiss, Chaskiel Orenbach and Genia Weinberg.

This time Socha took Krisia on his back, while Chiger carried Pawel. It was a shorter journey, to a spot very close to the cavelike place. They were led to the entrance. Chiger recorded in his memoir: ‘It was very difficult to reach. It meant taking hold of a steel bar embedded in the wall and heaving up into a cascade of water coming from a Seventy.’ They were then instructed to crawl through the pipe as far as it went. Chiger found the difficulty that presented itself somewhat reassuring: ‘If we found it hard to reach, then so would someone trying to find us.’

The others looked at each other with great misgivings and hauled themselves into the pipe. They crawled along, allowing the flow of water to pass between their hands and knees. By comparison with other pipes they had known, the Seventy was quite spacious – nearly two foot six in diameter. At the other end they found themselves in a narrow room, about five meters long and about one and a half metres across. Adjacent to the pipe they had just crawled through was another compartment, again about five metres long, creating a kind of L-shaped room. In fact, what they had been brought to was called a storm basin or catch basin, usually constructed at the base of a hill to help regulate storm water.