Resistance (28 page)

Every Jew had a right to a certain amount of food allotments. We didn't go to the store individually. One person collected food coupons and through certain channels we were supplied with food. This person saw to it that we should be provided with the food. There was a system, according to which each youth organization was getting a certain amount of food. Some former members of our organization used to come to visit our group, although they lived with their respective families. Many of them were already starving. With some of them we tried to share our food.

Officially, our members would get in the morning two slices of bread, with some substitute marmalade and a bowl of soup. In the middle of the day there was another bowl of soup, usually the same kind of soup, and in the evening again, a piece of bread and soup. The soup was usually made out of grouts, Kasha. Occasionally it came with potatoes, very seldom with a piece of fat. Very rarely was there butter or some other kind of fat . . . I remember that the grouts were of a special kind. They were coarsely ground so that
the husks were swimming in the soup, to eat the soup you had to separate the husks from the grains so you had a wreath around the plate of the husks. Our group had no place to grow vegetables. Only occasionally were we allotted a few vegetables.

Leah's kibbutz had up to twenty members. They all worked hard; the young men were authorized to engage in heavy work on the roads, in factories, and in airports. For some of these jobs, the Judenrat paid them limited amounts of money.

The young women in our kibbutz took on domestic jobs inside the ghetto. In the ghetto, a small minority could still afford maids. There were differences among people. Some would buy food, which was smuggled into the ghetto. People who in the ghetto became immediately pauperized were usually cut off from their professions. Many of them were forced into the ghetto from the surrounding, smaller communities. They were definite candidates for death by starvation. In Poland, even before the war, a large proportion of Jews had been poor. Many of them lived in poor communities. To be sure, the Judenrat and various ghetto organizations tried to help the poor and the starving. However their needs were much greater than the resources necessary for the elimination of death by starvation.

Leah saw her life in the ghetto kibbutz as “an oasis in that horrible . . . cesspool of humanity.” She felt fortunate because she was a part of a fine group of people, whom she valued and looked up to. Her kibbutz comrades gave her a sense of family. Among the leaders of the ghetto underground—the
Å»
OB—were Mordechai Anielewicz, Joseph Kaplan, and Shmuel Breslaw. Among the women leaders in the ghetto, she most vividly remembers Tosia Altman, Miriam Heinsolor, and Civia Lubetkim. Most of these women worked as underground couriers.

Although most couriers were women, one exception was Jan Karski, a Polish courier and an international emissary. He was aware of the precariousness of the women. “The average life of a woman courier did not exceed a few months. . . . It can be assumed that their lot was the most severe, their sacrifices the greatest, and their contributions the least recognized. They were overlooked and doomed. They neither held high ranks nor received any great honors for their heroism.”
⁹
And yet, it was the contributions of couriers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that enabled the underground movements
to coordinate and integrate their efforts. Their efforts contributed greatly to keeping various underground movements alive.

Kibbutz members made concerted efforts to keep order by adhering to a consistent division of labor. In line with established traditions, the young women were assigned to the kitchen. In addition to their internal work, these women had domestic jobs outside their kibbutz. Members of the kibbutz cooperated fully, making their lack of food less demoralizing. They listened to music, sang, and discussed the issues that were of special interest to them.

Comparing the life Leah had in the ghetto kibbutz to that of her family provides a startling contrast. Her father came to the ghetto in October 1940; by the following March he had died from starvation. Leah notes that once he was forced into the ghetto he had no possibility of earning a living. “Terrible hunger settled in my father's house. Sometimes I would run from the kibbutz to see how he was. And it was a sight which I will never forget. I would also run to see my grandmother, whom I loved, because she was my mother substitute.”

Occasionally Leah would save a slice of bread or a boiled potato and bring it to her father. She knew that this would not change much, but it was all she could do. She herself was hungry.

It's not a big deal to share food with others when you have plenty, but it's very difficult to share with others when you are yourself hungry. Very hungry! Gradually my health deteriorated to a point where I fainted and I was taken to a clinic. And, of course, the doctor said that I needed better nutrition, that I should not work so hard. But I could not follow any of these recommendations.

The sight of my father and of my grandmother dying from starvation and the deplorable hygienic conditions are pictures which haunt me till this day. These things happened over half a century ago but they torment me through terrible nightmares to this very day. . . . I would find my grandmother lying in a soiled bed because she had been unable to move from her bed. I remember she said to me in Yiddish, “Look what state I am in.” And I stood there, a young girl, with tears running down my cheeks. I couldn't help it.

Throughout the ghetto, there was widespread starvation. But it takes months before death relieves the sufferings of the starving individuals. Leah remembers how it happened with her father: “One day a girl came to tell me that my father was dead. So, I ran over there,
and there he was in that basement apartment . . . you can't even call it an apartment. He was on the floor in a pool of his excrement. And the stepmother stood next to him. Well, I didn't have much sympathy for her, but that's how it was.”

In 1940, those in the ghetto could still have a burial if they paid the Jewish council fifteen zlotys. For this sum, they would provide a hearse and carry away the dead person. Leah had no money, however. The day after her father's death, in the hope of finding his body, she went to the cemetery. There a huge pile of dead bodies confronted her. They were in different stages of decay. She searched for her father, but did not find him. Horrified, defeated, she turned around and went back to her kibbutz. When she came close to her living quarters, she understood that she could not even share her experiences with her comrades. Many of them had lost different family members to starvation. Others expected to lose more still. She, too, was just as unfortunate with the fate of the rest of her family. They all perished without a trace.

Sometime in 1941, through the efforts of Joseph Kaplan, a member of the Hashomer Hatzair, a group of young members were sent to the Zarki farm, located close to Czestochowa. As a group, they moved to Zarki to farm the land.

Some members of the Hashomer Hatzair moved to Zarki legally, others illegally. Leah was one of those who had welcomed the opportunity to exchange her ghetto existence for farm work. To her and to some of her comrades this experience promised more and better food and possibly preparation for a future life in Palestine. The Zionists viewed farm work as a preliminary step in the preparations for future jobs on farms in Palestine. Sadly, the long-range hopes that emanated from Zarki never happened. Eventually this entire experiment was dissolved, and its Jewish participants were scattered into a variety of directions.

Before this happened, however, at Zarki Leah fell in love with Jurek (Arieh) Wilner, a bright and tragic star of the Jewish underground. Leah tried to recollect how their lives touched at Zarki:

I don't want to claim that I was his fiancée. It was not official at all. . . . In those days everything was temporary. We didn't know what the next day would bring. Arieh (Jurek) came to Zarki in the spring of 1942. I met him and fell in love. Maybe we were ten days or two weeks, together. I don't know. In those days two weeks
was a lifetime. . . . Now from a distance . . . I ruminate . . . about those times. . . . I search for images of those who were close to me, boyfriends and girlfriends . . . the face of Jurek Wilner stands out vividly among them. I see him as young, handsome, with light hair . . . when we met, Jurek was on his way to Bendzin and he stopped at Zarki for a few days. My enchantment was instantaneous. For me, he expressed all that was beautiful, energetic, and pulsating with life.

I can say this today that I still smell the grass on which we rested, close to each other, in the vegetable garden. I see how he chewed on a blade of grass, smiled, lightly absorbed in an examination of the sky, sprinkled with scattered clouds. I patted his blond hair, enraptured by the youthful magic of love. He spoke little, probably determined to unwind from the many burdens he carried. His eyes contained an overall weariness. With a full open mouth he breathed the country air. This was followed by the incredible sweetness of his kisses. How I longed to stay with him forever. His smile and caresses meant life which, for me, pressed so tightly to him, took on a happy glow, despite the raging war.
¹⁰

At the start of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Wilner. This happened on the Aryan side, where he acted as a courier and had passed for a Christian Pole. Leah received a letter from her friend Tosia Altman, also a courier, who wrote about Wilner's arrest, insisting that for safety Leah had to change her living quarters and switch jobs. One could never be sure if and when, under torture, Jurek would break down and divulge secrets, which could lead to Leah's arrest. Leah followed Tosia's suggestions.

Later on, through underground sources, they learned that Wilner, although severely tortured, had divulged no secrets. His close friend Henryk Gradowski, a member of the Polish Scouts organization, miraculously saved him. Gradowski not only risked his life to save Wilner, he insisted on bringing him to his home on the Aryan side. But Wilner refused this friend's generous offer. Instead, he was determined to join his comrades in the Warsaw ghetto. With them he wanted to fight. With them he wanted to die fighting. As we saw in
chapter 2
, preparations for an uprising began in earnest in Warsaw after the massive summer deportations of 1942. At that point, the Jewish resistance groups knew about the mass shootings of Jews in Ponary and the mass gassings in Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Chelmno.

Leah managed to reach the Warsaw ghetto a week before the start of the uprising. Her first stop brought her to Wilner's dwelling. Here she found a totally changed man. Wilner seemed half asleep. Worse still, he gave the impression of having neither the will nor the strength to talk or to communicate in any way. Unable to recapture even a glimmer of their past closeness, Leah left his place without uttering a word. She was, however, eager to stay and fight in the ghetto. But her underground comrades wanted her to return to the forbidden Christian world. They argued that the ghetto underground lacked arms and would not be able to supply her with a gun. Besides, as a courier who spent most of her time in the forbidden Christian world, she lacked the training of a guerrilla fighter. She could be more useful to them from the outside, by procuring guns.

Disappointed, Leah returned to the Aryan side, where she tried to reconnect with the few underground contacts she had. On April 19, 1943, a week after Leah's departure, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began. It was the first urban, armed rebellion initiated and executed by the Jews and it unexpectedly grew into a fierce struggle. For some on the outside, the fighting ghetto turned into a growing spectacle. Large crowds of onlookers surrounded the ghetto as it burned, and Leah became a part of this curious crowd. “On the outside I stood there with a smile on my face. Yet I continued to cry on the inside. I went there . . . every day. I was driven to this place by a force.” What drove her repeatedly to the ghetto was fear for her friends and for the man she had fallen in love with, and continued to love.

Jewish underground members and specifically couriers such as Leah would slip in and out of the ghettos. As long as they could return to it, they retained a sense of belonging. But with the Warsaw ghetto transformed into a heap of ruins, all that came to an end. Leah, for whom the Warsaw ghetto was home, described how she felt when this happened and she had to live alone in the Aryan world: “With nobody to console you, with nobody to tell you it's okay, it will be better, hold on, you are in total isolation. Total loneliness. You know you are among people, and yet you are like an island. You have to make life-and-death decisions all by yourself . . . you never know whether your choices would be successful or not. It is like playing Russian roulette with your own life. And it is not one incident; it [was] this way from the moment I came to the Aryan side. Day after day.”
¹¹

FIGURE 5.2
Many couriers carried false identification cards. This one, issued in the name of Stanislawa Wachalska, was used by Vladka Meed during her work as a courier for the underground. Her tasks included obtaining arms for the
Å»
OB, finding hiding places for Jewish women and children, and assisting Jews already in hiding with food, clothing, documentation, and medical care. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Miedzyrzecki Meed)