The Girl in the Green Sweater (26 page)

At last he allowed that his money and resources had about run
out. He had given away his valuable gold watch and all his other possessions, and he was down to almost his last zloty. This was a great and looming crisis for our group, but my father did not want to trouble the others with this concern. He kept it between him and my mother, just. I discovered it only because my ears were very much attuned to their secrets.

Finally, my father went to Socha with his dilemma. He did this quietly, away from the others, probably in the bend of our L-shaped chamber. Previously, he and Socha had discussed this eventuality in general terms. Socha had always said that our most difficult time would be when we ran out of money. He had an expression for running out of money that my father often repeated: “When you can no longer pay for the last cutlet.”

My father did not want to consider that we were down to our last cutlet, so he presented Socha with a whispered proposition. He told him about our visit from my father’s uncle on the last night of the August action, more than a year earlier. He told him about the secret fortune hidden somewhere in the cellar of an apartment building. He told him the address and a description of the hiding place.

My father said, “My pockets are empty, but there is money and jewelry outside.”

“What if I cannot find this fortune?” Socha asked.

“You will find it,” my father assured him. “You must.”

The next morning, Socha and Wroblewski arrived with an extra few satchels. In these they carried the coins and jewels and silverware and other fine things they had recovered from the inheritance passed to my father by his uncle on the night he was killed. My father was so happy to see these things when Socha handed them over to him. He did not even bother to count the
money or to make an inventory. He simply handed the satchels back to Socha and said, “You take it. The money, the jewelry, everything. It is of no use to us here. This is our payment in full.”

Socha would not accept this. He suggested instead that my father keep the valuables and that he continue to parcel them out to the sewer workers at the rate of 500 zlotys per day, as before. My father did not understand Socha’s refusal at first, but then he came up with an explanation. He decided that Socha did not want my father and the others to feel indebted to them and that he did not want to encourage his sewer worker colleagues into thinking they had been fully paid and in this way entertain the notion of quitting the job. Whatever Socha’s thinking, this is what my father did, until after another few weeks this fortune ran out as well. This was when Socha finally revealed his true character. He took my father aside one day and gave him some money. He told my father that he was to return the money to him at the end of each visit, at the agreed-upon rate, and that he did not want Wroblewski and Kowalow to know of this arrangement.

My father was astonished by this turn. It appeared that Socha was returning the money he had already collected and preparing to redistribute his share to Wroblewski and Kowalow, in exchange for their continued cooperation. It was as if Socha himself were now paying for our protection. It was a subtle charade. The reason for this, we learned later, was that the three sewer workers were in some disagreement over our continued care. Socha wanted to keep coming to look after us for as long as it was necessary; he was committed to us, no matter what. Wroblewski, with his daily visits, had also developed a close bond with our group. He was uncertain what our fate should be, but without his share of our daily fee, he could not justify the risk to himself and his family. Kowalow, who
by design had no contact with us once we reached the sewer, took a hard view. He wanted to disassociate himself from our group and abandon us to the sewer. Socha told us this after the war. Kowalow allowed that it would be cruel simply to leave us to starve to death and suggested that Socha and Wroblewski put strychnine into our food, which would cause us to asphyxiate.

This was how Socha came to this plan, to quietly deceive his colleagues while continuing to enlist their cooperation. My father was briefly concerned about his complicity in such an arrangement, until Socha pointed out to him that the only one being harmed by the deception was Socha himself. At this, my father could not argue. He could only sigh in relief that we were not down to our last cutlet just yet.

Of course, this deception could not last. Wroblewski and Kowalow figured out what was going on. Wanda Socha also discovered that their savings were dwindling under this arrangement. However it happened, there came a time when we had to consider leaving the sewer. We had no other resources, no other recourse. Socha and Wroblewski arrived one morning and told us they could not continue with our safekeeping. Socha had a heavy heart, we could tell. Wroblewski was also saddened by this development, but there was nothing they could do about it, he said. The men offered to see us safely outside, to a part of the city where we would have a good chance of fleeing into the countryside.

My mother would not go. She said, “We will die here if that is what it comes to, but we are not going outside with the children.”
My zostajemy tu nawet jak mamy umrzec tu razem
.

My father, what could he do but agree with my mother?

The others were conflicted. They knew what happened to the other members of our group when they left the certainty of the
sewer for the uncertainty of the streets. They did not want to split from my family. They had come to rely on my father for his resourcefulness, just as they had come to rely on my mother for her care and concern. They were the leaders of our group, among the men and the women. And yet, without Socha and Wroblewski to bring us our food and other supplies, we would surely perish in our underground chamber. We would become meals for the rats we had spent so long trying to keep from our store of food.

In the end, it was decided that we would not go. Already, my mother had so decided for our family, and now the others were in agreement. We would take our chances in the sewer on our own. It was thought that possibly Korsarz and some of the other men could occasionally venture outside in search of food and return safely to our small chamber. He had done so before, and he could do so again, and in this way we could possibly survive until the Russians occupied the city once more.

Socha and Wroblewski made their final good-byes. It was another tearful time, among many tearful times. We could not begrudge our sewer workers their decision. They had their own families to think about, their own lives. They could not live their lives for us any longer.

I remember feeling very sad when Socha left us for what we thought would be the final time. He had been a stranger to us, and now he was like a part of our family. I thought back to that kindly Aryan schoolteacher who visited our last apartment in the ghetto, who wanted to take me in and raise me as her own daughter. I would not go with her, but I would have gone with Socha. Absolutely, I would have gone with him. It was never discussed as far as I knew, but if it had come to that, it would not have felt as though I were being separated from my family.

It was not like me to think in such dark, gloomy terms, even after everything we had been made to endure, but just then I did not think I would ever see Leopold Socha again. I could not say for certain whether it was day or night outside, but in our small chamber in the storm basin beneath the Bernardynski church, it was our darkest hour.

Happily, our dark hour turned bright the following morning. We rose as usual and removed our sleeping boards and set about preparations for yet another day in the Palace. Berestycki began his morning prayers. Weinbergova boiled water for our coffee. Nobody talked, because we were still intimidated by this change in our fortunes, but then we heard the familiar
slosh, slosh, slosh
of the sewer workers as they crawled through the pipe that spilled into our chamber. We were not expecting Socha and Wroblewski, but who else could it be? For several minutes we heard this noise of approach, but we would not let ourselves become too excited. We were wary because it was possible that, on this first day of our independent existence, we were about to be discovered. It would have been an unfortunate coincidence, but it was certainly possible.

At last, Socha’s head appeared in the opening, and our hearts soared as one.

“Poldju!” my father said with some excitement, using the familiar derivative of Socha’s name. “Where is Stefek?”

“It is only me today,” Socha replied.

“And tomorrow?” my father said.

“Tomorrow we will see,” Socha said.

“Kowalow?” my father said.

“Tomorrow we will see,” Socha said.

This was the last time we spoke as a group about the money and the sewer workers’ decision to continue protecting us. Whatever happened among our sewer workers remained unspoken. It is possible that Socha and my father had a private conversation about the change to our arrangement, but I never learned about it. It was only important that Socha was back to look after us.

In this way, we resumed our plain existence in our underground chamber. The next day, Socha returned with Wroblewski, and there were once again warm greetings all around. Kowalow was once again on the lookout, and once again each day was much the same as the day before, only now and then there was some variation to our routine. There was the time, soon after our money had run out, when Socha and Wroblewski looted a German-run clothing store on our behalf. This was not such an ethical dilemma for Socha, our reformed Catholic and reformed thief, because the Germans had already taken everything from us and he considered it a kind of justice. How he came upon this opportunity, I never knew, but one morning he reported to our chamber and announced that he and Wroblewski had deposited dozens of tailored men’s shirts in a nearby manhole. He told the men how to get to this place. We had been underground for several months by this point, and our clothing was ragged and torn. Socha thought it might improve our spirits if we had some new clothes. Berestycki had been a tailor in Lodz, and I remember how he admired the quality of these shirts. For the next few days, we made an incongruous picture, men and women and children prowling our underground hideaway in fine men’s shirts, until these items too became ragged and torn.

In addition to the clothes, the sewer workers managed to steal a number of other items from this store, fabrics mostly, which they
fenced on the black market and converted into money to buy our daily supply of bread and other necessities. Here again, there was no ethical dilemma, only opportunity. It was a way for the Germans to underwrite our cost of living. This was as it should be, Socha said. This was only fair.

There was the time our sewer workers came upon another windfall—a truckload of potatoes. It was winter, and there had been talk throughout Eastern Europe of a potato shortage. My father had read about it in the papers. This was of some concern to us because potatoes were a cheap staple of our diet. Socha, too, was concerned. The more money he and his colleagues had to pay for our upkeep, the less they would have left over for themselves, and already Kowalow and Wroblewski were not happy that there was no longer any money. When Socha came upon this truckload of potatoes, he thought he could get them down to the Palace and save himself and Wroblewski the trouble of carting the small bags of potatoes they brought on a regular basis, as well as the money from not having to buy any potatoes for several weeks or more.

He was alone at the time, and he located a manhole where he thought it would be dry underneath, and he set about dropping these potatoes to the sewer below. They were bundled in sacks, about two pounds each. After a while, a group of Germans came by and asked Socha what he was doing. They were Germans in authority, probably SS or Gestapo. Socha answered their concerns with authority of his own. One of the Germans stopped him and said, “Why are you throwing potatoes into the sewer?”

Socha said, “They are spoiled. I have been instructed to dispose of them.”

There was enough authority in Socha’s voice that the Germans left him alone to continue dumping the potatoes into the sewer.
When he was finished, Socha closed the manhole and made note of the location. With Kowalow’s help, he drew a map for my father and the other men, describing how to get to this place underground, and the next day my father went with Orenbach, Berestycki, and Korsarz to collect the potatoes. There were too many to carry on one trip, so back and forth they went, back and forth, until all the potatoes were carried to the Palace. Such a mountain of potatoes! Maybe fifty or sixty pounds! We stored them in the space between our two benches and hoped we could eat our way through them before our friends the rats.

There was the time little Pawel slipped on a stone and hurt his leg so badly that it appeared certainly fractured. We did not have any plaster for a cast or any way to make a proper splint, so there was not much my worried parents could do for him. Socha could not attempt to procure such supplies or fill any prescriptions for pain medication without attracting attention, so Pawel could only sit still for several weeks until the bone could heal. My father would carry him to the chamber pot whenever he had to go. Luckily, Pawel was young and in otherwise good health, and the bone healed quickly.

There was the time when a small fire enveloped our close space and nearly accomplished what the Germans could not. Weinbergova was cooking our daily soup when suddenly the Primus stove tipped over and a fire erupted. And it was not just a small kitchen fire, but an open, roaring flame. The benzene used to light the stove had spilled, so the fire spread. It happened in an instant, and soon it was like a raging fireball, which was especially dangerous in our tiny chamber. There was nowhere for the group of us to go. We would have been incinerated or suffocated were it not for the swift action of our group. Immediately, Korsarz and my father
threw blankets on the flames and tried to extinguish the fire. Their efforts were not terribly successful, for one of the blankets took the flame and caught fire itself. Then, one of the men determined that our store of used carbide powder would be a good way to smother the fire. All along, we had been emptying the used powder in a pile at the far end of our chamber, and the men scooped this up and threw it on the flames. This proved effective. At the same time, my mother and Klara covered the small opening that led to the street, thinking only to prevent the smoke from escaping and giving away our location, but this action had the unanticipated effect of closing off a source of oxygen to this chamber and making it difficult for the fire to breathe. Both courses of action, taken together, allowed us to put out the fire, but not before we experienced some difficulty breathing ourselves. Our hair and eyelashes were all singed from the flames, our faces blackened from the ash and soot, our routines momentarily upset by the chaos we experienced until the fire was under control.