The Girl in the Green Sweater (30 page)

With this hostile stranger among us, a virtual prisoner, I realized for the first time that we were prisoners, too. I had not thought of our circumstance in just this way until just this moment. Tola, he could not go anywhere. His hands were tied and he was held at gunpoint, against his will. And the rest of us, we could not go anywhere, either. Our hands were not tied and we were not being held at gunpoint, but we were prisoners just the same. We, too, were being held against our will.

I did not think to share this observation with my father and the others. I did not think anyone would appreciate the observations of an eight-year-old girl. Instead, I kept quiet and silently prayed that things could go back to how they were. Whether I was praying that things could go back to how they were before the war,
before the initial Soviet occupation, before the German occupation, before our time in the ghetto, before the final liquidation, before our confinement in the sewer, or before Tola’s arrival had upset the fine balance of the life we had finally made, I could not say. I was not self-aware enough to know the full extent of my deepest thoughts, only that I, too, was restless, a prisoner of my own unfortunate circumstance.

O
ne day in July, Socha arrived in our chamber with a report that the Russians had captured the city of Tarnopol, less than a hundred kilometers east of where we were sitting. We were overjoyed at this, because it meant the Germans were indeed retreating, confirming the accounts my father and the others had been reading in the newspapers. For over a year, we had been praying for this, dreaming about it, willing it so. We thought now it would be only a few days more before we, too, were liberated. Such was the momentum of the Russian army, and such was the strength of our fervent hope. But our happiness was short-lived, because only two days later Socha was back with a revised report. This time, it was revealed that the Germans had recaptured Tarnopol. It was a dispiriting turn. Furthermore, we learned that
while the city had briefly been in Soviet hands, hundreds of Jews who had been in hiding came out from their shelters and started to celebrate. When the Germans regained control, these hundreds of Jews were swiftly exterminated.

To experience the joyful prospect of liberation and then to have it suddenly revoked struck us as particularly cruel at a time when we were particularly vulnerable to such cruelty. The turnabout reminded me of the cat-and-mouse games the ghetto commander Grzymek used to play with my father, telling him first he was free and then he was not free. The news played with our emotions, and already we were in a fragile state. The arrival of the prisoner Tola had upset the fine balance of our underground community, and our will to live was slowly leaking from our pores. Probably we saw ourselves through Tola’s disbelieving eyes, and the picture that came back was one of weakness and desperation. What had once been our shared strength was now, to someone like Tola, merely stubbornness and leftover will. We had made the best of a bad situation, this was true, but more and more it seemed that the bad situation would prevail. And so to have this bulletin of such great elation be so quickly defl ated with a bulletin of such great tragedy was especially damaging to our spirits.

Nobody could say whether it had been a strategy on the part of the Germans, to lull the Soviets into victory on the streets of Tarnopol and at the same time coax the Jews out of hiding. Or maybe the Germans had been truly defeated and then gathered their resources and resumed the fight. However it happened, whatever it meant, the way the Germans recaptured the city left us wary of any future positive reports. It was a difficult paradox: we could not trust the Russians to win this fight, and yet without a Russian victory we were doomed to an eternity in this underground place.

And then a strange thing happened. Jacob Berestycki arose early one morning and asked who among our group celebrated a birthday in July. It was an odd question, as if from nowhere. In addition to his religious beliefs, Berestycki believed in the power of dreams to help see into the future. However, he was also a pragmatist. He was all these things taken together, and on this night he experienced a dream that he felt would tell our fate. In his dream, he saw a vision of an elderly rabbi with a long white beard. The rabbi said, “In July, you will all be free.”

We discussed this dream, over and over. We pressed Berestycki to share the details: who else was in the dream, what were they doing? We could not agree what it might mean, if it meant anything at all. Berestycki took it on its face, that we would be free in July. My father took it as an omen, that our liberation was indeed coming. Chaskiel Orenbach dismissed it as nonsense. Someone suggested that it was a dream of wish fulfillment, an indication only that Berestycki was hoping to be rescued sometime soon. Even Tola, our headstrong prisoner, had an opinion. Already he thought we were foolish, to live like animals in our underground chamber. Now he thought we were foolish on top of foolish, to give such careful thought to something as inconsequential as a dream.

I did not venture an opinion, but I liked that an elderly rabbi with a long white beard had something to say about our future. It did not matter that it was an elderly rabbi in Berestycki’s imagination only. It was a rabbi, after all, and Berestycki was a grown man, after all. I liked that between the two of them someone had taken the time to consider our circumstance. It made me not feel so all alone.

Still, we could not understand what had prompted Berestycki
to inquire about our birthdays, because there was nothing in his dream to require this information. Berestycki himself could not say, only that it was the first thing on his mind when he awoke.

We planned to ask Socha what he thought the dream might mean when he arrived later that morning with our daily delivery, but the hours passed with no sign of our sewer workers. The next day, there was no sign of them again. Of course, this became the new topic of our group discussion, what had happened to Socha and Wroblewski. It was more important than Berestycki’s dream, because it was not like Socha and Wroblewski to stay away from our chamber for two days in a row. Only once or twice in the year we had been in the sewer had Socha not come to us for such a long time. Something must have happened, we all agreed. Perhaps the Germans had announced a curfew to keep civilians off the streets and there had been no way for our sewer workers to pass undetected into the sewer. Perhaps they had been detained for some reason or other. There were any number of explanations for their absence, and none of them were good.

Another day passed without a visit from Socha and Wroblewski, and our mood darkened considerably. For a few days more, there would be enough to eat. And yet we despaired. As we sat in the evening, my father did not even bother to take out his map and solicit opinions about the war, because there was no new information to add to the last discussion and also because no one could offer a positive report. There was nothing to do but wait and wonder.

When the adults were quiet, I pressed my imaginary friend, Melek, for an explanation. “What do you think, Melek?” I said. “They have been killed?”

“It will be okay,” he said. “They are coming.”

For a fourth day, the sewer workers did not come, and our
thoughts turned to the worst. Had our friends been captured at long last? At the very end of the German occupation? After everything we had been through? There was no other explanation for their continued absence from our chamber. We would have mourned for them, except that to do so would have meant to accept their sorry fate; so instead we prayed. Here again I encouraged Berestycki to do the job for us, because I believed he was closest to God. I said, “Pray, Jacob, pray.” There was the same urgency in my voice as there had been on the day of the great flood, such was my concern for my beloved Socha.

The following morning, July 23, Stefek Wroblewski appeared through our tunnel, as if by some final miracle. It was my mother’s birthday, whether by a great coincidence or a divine hand that had somehow grabbed Berestycki’s dream. We were overjoyed to see our friend, who told us of the fighting in the streets of Lvov. He had been anxious to escape the bombing, and so he sought refuge in the one place he knew the fighting would not find him, the sewer.
Our
sewer. It was like a second home to him, he said. He knew he would be safe with us, he said. And so he came.

Wroblewski had not been in contact with Socha, but he assured us that our friend was safe. Then he offered his account of the fighting. My father and the others tried to place this new information alongside what they already knew and made their own assumptions about the progress of the Russians and the retreat of the Germans. Later that day, with Stefek still in our company, Korsarz separated from our group in an effort to gather more information. He crawled through the pipes to an area of the sewer that would allow him to see and hear for himself the activity in the streets, and in this way he listened to a group of Russian soldiers assessing their circumstance. He pushed aside a manhole cover so he could
see and hear clearly. He concluded that the Russians had indeed captured the city and returned to our group to report this happy discovery.

This was indeed good news, but we were cautious in our rejoicing. We knew what had happened in Tarnopol. Wroblewski, too, was wary of the situation. He decided to return to the streets, to hopefully locate Socha and Kowalow and see about our rescue, but he told us to remain in the Palace until he returned. We did not wish to be so reckless that our premature celebration would lead to our execution, so we agreed to wait.

Tola did not see the point of remaining in the sewer when it was clear to him that the Russians controlled the streets. He became enraged. The men were exhausted from keeping our prisoner silent and still. He kept shouting, “Let us go already! Enough!”

For another few days, there was no sign of our sewer workers. This meant that it had been nearly a week since we had seen Socha, and this was by far the longest stretch of time we had been without his company since we began our confinement. We were filled with worry, but at the same time we were filled with elation, that our liberation would be soon at hand. The two emotions were knitted as one. It was like a birthday gift to my mother, my father remarked, to receive such news on July 23. Now we had only to wait, to unwrap this present when our sewer workers told us it was safe to do so.

And so we waited. There had been no bread or other food deliveries for several days. We were getting by on our stores of coffee substitute and sugar, and these too were getting low. We could not remain in this place, in such a state of agitation, for such an indeterminate period; soon our patience would run out along with our resources. We were too excited to think about food, but in time, of course, we would need to eat.

At this point, we could hear the Russian voices overhead. Where there had once been the playful shouts and cries of children in the square by the church, there were now the stern commands of Russian officers. More and more, we became comfortable with the notion that the Russians were now in charge. More and more, we thought of venturing out into the city on our own, without the guidance of our sewer workers.

Still, we would wait for Socha and Wroblewski until we could not. We tried to keep to our routines. We woke each morning and established our sitting area. We washed. We watched as Berestycki said his morning prayers. We drank our few sips of coffee. The men took their turns guarding Tola, in the same four-hour shifts that had been established on the night of his arrival. Finally, in the early morning hours of July 27, my father took his turn with Tola while the rest of us tried to sleep. When my father completed his shift, he handed his gun to Korsarz. My father was tired and looking forward to a few hours of sleep before the rest of the day got under way. As he slept, we received the summons for which we had been waiting, praying, dreaming, hoping. . . .

Until the end of his long life, my father would say that this was his greatest regret, to have slept through the announcement that the tyranny against us had been lifted and that we were free to rejoin the world that had forsaken us so very long ago. For months and months, he had imagined this, and when it was at last upon us, he was fast asleep.

It was Socha who came for us, only he did not come to us through the usual opening. In fact, he did not come into our chamber at all. He came hollering through the sewer grate above our chamber.
“Chiger! Chiger!” Socha shouted. “You are going out! The time has come! Your freedom is at hand! Everybody out! You are free!”
Chiger! Chiger! Idzcie na gore, wychodzic
—
jestescie wolni!

The words were too beautiful to be believed, but of course we believed them. We were not all awake, but the declaration found us through our sleep and we were awakened soon enough. We ran about our underground chamber in a fit of happiness. Korsarz was shaving while he was guarding Tola. My mother was already awake and beginning to prepare for the day. She shook my father to tell him of Socha’s declaration, and he could not believe he had slept through such a moment.