The Girl in the Green Sweater (23 page)

In this way, Socha was like the puppeteer of our group. He recognized our individual strengths and characteristics and put them to use for the common good. This was the most important thing,
he always said, the good of the group. He wrote everything down for us so we would not forget our roles, and by our first week in the Palace you could not recognize the group we now were from the group we had only recently been. We were like our own little functioning society, and our trusted sewer workers were our benevolent rulers. I use the word
benevolent
because despite the exchange of money it really seemed a kindness, what these men were doing for us. They were devoted to our safekeeping. Every day, they were putting themselves and their families at great risk, and the money was not so great that the equation was not also balanced with compassion. In Socha’s case, there was also the matter of redemption. The money alone could not justify the chance he was taking.

I use the word
ruler
because Socha and Wroblewski were very much in charge of every aspect of our lives. We survived at their pleasure. We looked to them to arbitrate our petty disputes, to ease our concerns, to cure our ills. It was as if by their very freedom they held every authority. Leopold Socha, our guardian angel, and his sewer worker colleagues would determine our shared fate.

We no longer saw Jerzy Kowalow, but he too was busy on our behalf. Every time Socha and Wroblewski came to the Palace to meet with us, Kowalow was standing watch on the streets above, ready to signal his colleagues in some manner at any sign of trouble. He was just as vulnerable, just as exposed, as the two men who actually crawled through the pipes each day to bring us bread and supplies, and just as invaluable. Usually, he signaled the others by tapping on the pipes in some kind of code, but sometimes more direct intervention was required. On one occasion, Kowalow noticed a German officer watching the sewer entrance Socha and Wroblewski were intending to use. Kowalow proceeded to place
scraps of wood through the manhole opening, as if he were following orders to do so. Then he returned to the sewer through another entrance to warn his colleagues to exit the sewer by some other opening to avoid suspicion.

Without Kowalow, we would never have come across this place we now called the Palace. Without Kowalow, we would never have located the source of our freshwater. Indeed, Kowalow located a new source of freshwater for our group to reach from the Palace, and the men reported that it was somewhat farther than the journey had been from the old hiding place, but at the same time the journey was easier—the pipes were not so narrow, there were not so many sharp turns, and the way was not so arduous. Now we were not limited to three-quarters of a cup of water each day; the water was more plentiful because the source was easier to reach and the men could make more than one trip and they could carry more than one kettle. They would crawl to an area beneath the Fountain of Neptune, just below Glowny Rynek, the main marketplace in the city. At first they would have to mark their way as they crawled, to ensure that they returned by the same route, but after a few days they knew the way by memory. The long daily trips for water would be the most difficult chore after our new hiding place had been thoroughly cleaned and established, but it was one the men accepted gladly. Sometimes Klara Keler would accompany one of the men on this long trek, though the women usually stayed behind and saw to the cooking and cleaning.

The cleaning consisted of removing the mud from the walls and trying to remove some of the mud that was piled at our feet. Also, it involved organizing the area that would serve as our kitchen and putting our pots and pans and our one Primus stove into good working order. And it included the scrubbing and drying of several
old planks of wood, which Socha and Wroblewski had discovered in a chamber beneath the Nazi headquarters. Socha escorted my father and a few others to this place, and together they rummaged through the left-behind wood. There was too much to carry back, so the men made additional trips to complete the hauling. The wood they brought back was so wet that the men could not do a good job of drying it before we had to at last put the planks to use. We placed them on stones, in two rows of four boards each, and in this way they served as benches during the day. At night, we pushed the planks together and used them as beds for sleeping. This was important because the “beds” provided the adults with the only opportunity they would have in our chamber to stretch to their full height.

The remarkable thing about these boards was that they were so damp when the men collected them, and within weeks they were completely dry. Indeed, everything was damp upon our arrival. The walls were dripping with moisture. But as we sat on these boards, and as we lay on them, the heat from our bodies dried the wood. Indeed, the heat from our bodies soon dried everything—the walls, the floor, the air around. In the beginning, we could even see the vapor from our own breath form little drops of moisture, but soon the air itself was dry as well, and in this way we were like a living science experiment, confirming that so many bodies in such a small space could not help but have this effect on our self-contained environment.

We knew the difference between day and night only by our routines, by the timing of our sewer workers’ daily visits. We had two carbide lamps, which we used to light our small space, but for long stretches, when our work for the day was done, we would remain in darkness. For most of the day, we would sit on our improvised
benches. Pawel and I would engage each other in games of imagination. Or he would play with the rats. We lost our fear of these underground creatures and grew used to them over time, as my father had predicted. Pawel in particular was fascinated by the rats, and there were three or four of them in his acquaintance he called by name. I tried to learn their names and their personalities as well, but I did not have the patience of my little brother in this regard. I could not tell one rat from the other.

The adults in our group had a harder time adjusting to the rats than the children. The rats were not interested in us. They were interested only in our food. Infection was probably a worry, but who had time to think about such things? The worry was all around—the contaminated air, the wastewater, the close quarters. To Pawel and me, they became like family pets. To the adults, they were more like tolerable pests. A great swarm of tolerable pests. Several times, Pawel and I would attempt to count the rats in our view, as a way to pass the time, and always we would lose the count and have to start over. During the night, they would crawl over us as we slept, and we also got used to this in time. Sometimes I would wake up and one of the rats would be licking my ear or staring at me as if waiting to play. I could never tell if this was one of Pawel’s friends or just another from the group, so I always smiled back at the rat before gently shaking it away. Somehow I felt we had intruded on their space and that we were meant to get along.

Very quickly, our group became like a family. Socha was our true leader—a benevolent ruler, to be sure, but also an inspired leader. It was a wonderful thing, the way our spirits lifted each morning when he arrived with our delivery. Previously, we had been a divided group, with divided loyalties and agendas, but now Socha put himself in charge of almost every aspect of our lives. I do not think any
of the men in our group wanted to take on a leadership role for themselves; however, as a practical matter, when the sewer workers were not among us, it appeared that my father was now in charge, and my mother by extension became a kind of figurehead for the women. Already, my father was responsible for paying our fee for protection and safekeeping, but he also seemed in charge of other matters. The others came to value his opinion and to look to him for guidance. He was the most attuned to events in the outside world and to a possible timetable for our liberation. And he was among the most resourceful of our group and one of the hardest workers.

It was my father, for example, who fashioned a way to store our food and keep it from the hungry rats. He made a small shelf where he thought we could place some of our perishables. This worked for a time, until the rats discovered the bread on the shelf and managed to reach it by crawling along the stone walls. After this, my father had the idea to place crushed glass along the surface of the shelf, like a minefield protecting our scraps of bread, and in so doing, he hoped it would be difficult for the rats to cross the shards. The glass came from some bottles that had been discarded in the sewer. This too worked for a time, until the rats discovered a way to shimmy beneath the shelves by gripping the edges with their outstretched claws and moving upside down until they could find a toehold in the stone wall and lift themselves to the surface above without stepping on the broken glass. They were so clever! So persistent! On one occasion, I watched with my brother and father in disbelief as a pair of rats attempted to transport an egg without breaking it. One rat lay on its back with the egg on its belly while the other rat pulled its partner along by the tail. Such ingenuity!

The rats were always getting into our food, so my father devised a storage system for the potatoes, coffee substitute, and sugar
Socha and Wroblewski would now bring us with our daily bread. We stored these items in tins, in the hollow beneath our makeshift benches. We also stored our bread in this way, but the rats would somehow manage to get into the bread. Always, we would eat the stale bread first and in this way keep the freshest bread on hand. If it was kept too long, it would grow moldy from the dampness. Also, we wanted to keep an extra supply of bread in store in case our sewer workers could not make a delivery to us for a period of time, although usually it was a race with the rats to see who could get to the bread first. It was not until my father fashioned a kind of bread box that he could hang from the ceiling that we were able to keep the rats from our bread—a welcome innovation as far as our group was concerned. Pawel and I were especially pleased with this contraption because we enjoyed watching the rats attempt to reach the bread box. This was our entertainment.

On most days, then, our routine went like this: we awoke from our sleeping boards in the morning and rearranged the planks to make our improvised benches. We did this hurriedly, as if we had someplace else to be. We were determined to be civilized, to lead a productive existence in our underground home. Jacob Berestycki, our lone observant Jew, used this time to say his morning prayers. Somehow, he had his tefillin in the sewer. His tallith, too. I had never seen these items before, and I did not know their purpose or their meaning. I had been to synagogue only a few times before the Russian occupation, and I was so young that it never registered to me what the men were wearing. I imagine Berestycki carried the phylacteries with him as we fled the ghetto on the night of the final liquidation. Every day he wrapped his arm with the leather straps and placed the box against his forehead and began to chant. This was very meaningful to him, and it was meaningful to us as
well, for this was the reason we were here, after all, because we were Jewish. He prayed throughout the day, and from time to time one or more of the other adults would join him. I remember the Palace as such a spacious area, but in truth it was a small room, so we offered Berestycki the respect and solemnity he required to complete his prayers, and this was how we participated. This was how we were Jewish.

We sat quietly in small groups as Berestycki said his prayers, and then we took our turns washing in the basin that we had positioned at the far corner of our chamber for just this purpose. Socha and Wroblewski would occasionally bring us small buckets of rainwater that we could use for washing. Sometimes we collected the runoff water from the street above, and once we determined that it had not mixed with the wastewater, we used this water as well. The rainwater was not suitable for drinking or cooking, but it was okay for washing. From time to time, if there was enough water, we would brush our teeth, using our fingers and some salt. Once each week, usually before supper, we would take a proper sponge bath using water that had been warmed on our Primus stove, and I remember feeling so refreshed and revived after I was clean. This was when I would change into the fresh underclothes that Socha’s wife, Wanda, would boil and clean for us, also once each week, and for a moment I could fool myself into believing I was like every other girl in Lvov, scrubbed clean from a warm bath, wearing fresh clothes. It felt so good! I could close my eyes and pretend I was someplace other than this mud-filled chamber, surrounded by vermin and raw sewage. I could close my eyes and imagine I was in a field of flowers.

For breakfast, we would have the coffee substitute and sugar and a small piece of bread. After breakfast, we would straighten
our compartment and wait for Socha and Wroblewski to arrive. This would become the highlight of our day. The longer our confinement, the more we looked forward to these visits. In the beginning, the sewer workers would not stay more than a few minutes after making their deliveries, but once we were in the Palace, once our living conditions were more tolerable, they began to stay longer and longer. It became more like a visit than a delivery. Initially, our benefactors said they were taking the time to rest before making the return trip through the pipes, but they kept extending these rests until they were an hour and longer. Eventually, these visits would continue for hours, until Socha and Wroblewski would have to leave and we would return to our plain existence.

Soon they started to bring sandwiches with them, which they ate with us. Always, Socha would share his sandwich with me and Pawel. This was a fine treat. Wroblewski would share his sandwich with Klara and Halina. And as we ate, everyone would talk. It was during these talks that we learned of Socha’s dubious background. It had never occurred to my parents that our safekeeping was in the hands of a reformed thief, but they came to admire Socha all the more for the way he had managed to turn his life around. Even the story about how he robbed our family’s antiques store did not upset my parents, because they saw this as another time, another life, another Socha.