The Girl in the Green Sweater (6 page)

In museums, you can see photographs of the dispersed Jewish families of Eastern Europe, put out on the streets with all of their worldly possessions. This is the picture we must have made, the four of us, shuffling along Kopernika Street with no clear destination. My father must have known where we were going, but he did not say. We were going, just. And as we walked, Pawel started to cry. I did not like that he was crying. My parents were nervous, because we were out on the street and vulnerable, and their nervousness became my own. I kept whispering to Pawel to be quiet. I was thinking about Baba Yaga, thinking about my dollhouse, thinking about our dog, Pushek, whom we had to give away. It was a lot for a little girl to keep on her mind.

Still, my baby brother kept crying, and so my whispering grew louder. Soon, I was yelling at him to go to sleep. I was so angry. I started shaking his stroller, I was so angry. Finally I said, “Close your eyes forever, already!”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I felt so terrible. I was six years old, my brother was two, and I knew this was not something a sister should wish upon her baby brother. Probably, under normal circumstances, this is something a sister might say to her brother all the time and it would be nothing, but these were not normal circumstances. I knew this was not something you say when the Germans
and the Ukrainians are taking Jewish children off the streets, when they are liquidating the city. My words hung there in the bright afternoon sunlight, stinging me, making me feel guilty.

Mercifully, my parents did not hear—they were a few steps behind—and I did not tell them. Pawel must have heard, because he immediately stopped crying, or maybe he quieted because of the tone of my voice. He never said anything. He was so young, but he was speaking in full sentences, so he might have said something. But he was quiet. Suddenly, I leaned into his stroller and started kissing him and hugging him. My parents, looking on, must have wondered what had come over me, but I did not say. Already, I had my inside life, the thoughts and dreams and hopes and fears I did not share with anybody.

M
y father did not know how miserable the conditions would be for us at Zamarstynowska 34 until we arrived. He had arranged the room through the Judenrat, a Jewish council that operated like a kind of relief organization for the Jewish community. There were Judenrats all across Poland. It was an organization of Jews, for Jews. In one way, it offered relief and support and an important link for Jews anxious to keep connected to one another; in another way, it offered the Germans a kind of bridge between the Nazi government and the ghetto population. The Germans encouraged this arrangement, because they were able to use the Judenrat to communicate with the Jews and to keep us organized, but at the same time it was a useful resource for the Jews as we struggled to survive. My father always said it was a confusing
irony, that an organization dedicated to helping an oppressed and persecuted people could at the same time be used to make it easier to oppress and persecute the people it was meant to serve. It was like a helping hand, except that the same hand that lifted you up might also hold you down.

Yet for certain things, like finding an apartment and helping to locate family members and other Jews, the Judenrat was a valuable resource. Someone gave my father the address on Zamarstynowska Street and a man’s name: Bahrow. That is all. I do not even know if we ever met this man, Bahrow, but we were meant to ask for him. He would tell us where to go. We walked for a long time, maybe a half hour. I was happy to be outside in the bright sunshine. I had missed the fresh air, but I wanted to know where we were going. It was a long walk for all of us, with all of our things.

There was a bridge that crossed Zamarstynowska Street at the center of town; in a few weeks, the bridge would mark the entrance to the Juden Lager—or Ju-Lag, for “Jewish Camp”—the ghetto area where the Jews who had not been killed or sent to the camps were forced to reside. It would become like a camp itself. Zamarstynowska 34 was located on the near side of the bridge, outside the area that would soon be our ghetto. I looked to the other side of the bridge and wondered what horrors were waiting for us there. I wondered how it could be any different, any worse. Our side of the bridge was bad enough. Even a small child knew to be anxious and afraid.

How we got to Zamarstynowska 34 was another in our long list of small miracles, because it was indeed a small miracle that we found any place at all. Palace, hovel . . . it did not matter. Everyone was desperate for a place to live, so we were lucky to have a roof over our heads. My grandfather had been elected one of the
local representatives of the Judenrat, and he knew someone who lived in the building, so he helped my father with the arrangements. We did not know what to expect. What we found was a horrible, dimly lit room, overcrowded with displaced Jewish families. There was one bathroom for maybe twenty people. We were all refugees of one kind or another, thrown from our homes and stripped from our lives.

We were assigned to one room with three or four other families. All these years later, I do not remember the first thing about these families. There must have been some children among them, but I do not recall playing with anyone. There was no real atmosphere for playing. I played with my brother, Pawel. We invented little games we could play in our heads. I told him stories. Always, we were talking, talking, talking. Sometimes we included Melek in our talking. Already I had brought little Pawel into my imagination and introduced him to my friend, and together we were in our own secret world.

We did not take any toys with us when we left our apartment on Kopernika Street. No dolls. Nothing. All I had were the clothes on my back—my cherished green sweater knitted for me by my grandmother—and a change of clothes in the one suitcase we all shared. There was nothing to do but sit and wait for my father to get back. Each day, there was someplace he had to go, to work or to find food. Each day, we waited for him. He was very careful, leaving the apartment. The Ukrainians controlled the streets. He would go through back alleys to get where he was going. Sometimes the Judenrat would arrange a special place where Jews could get food and basic supplies. Word would spread among the Jewish community, and the men would zig and zag through the back streets to avoid capture. Sometimes they did not make it back.

Coming from our grand apartment, where even under the Soviets we were able to meet our essential needs, this was a big change. At Kopernika 12, our comings and goings were not so restricted. Our living conditions were not so miserable. The conditions at Zamarstynowska 34 were terrible. Filthy, foul-smelling, suffocating. There was no furniture, except for maybe a few mattresses and some chairs. My father was working as a carpenter and had access to tools and materials, so he built a table, which we shared with the other families. There was one window, but my mother would not let me near it. Also, I was not allowed to go outside. This, of course, was not such a big change for me, because I had not been outside during the German occupation except to make the long walk to Zamarstynowska Street, but at least at home I was able to look out the window. Without my window, I would not know what was going on outside unless news of it was brought inside, and usually my father would not bring such news home with him. He and my mother tried to protect us from our dire circumstances, but I was learning to eavesdrop on their hushed conversations. Sometimes my parents spoke to each other in Yiddish if they did not want me to understand what they were saying, but eventually I learned to speak Yiddish. Eventually I heard everything.

I was very unhappy. We stayed in this room for only about a week, but that is a long time when you are six years old. My mother, too, was unhappy. She was used to having her own things, running her own kitchen, arranging her family’s schedule, but here we could only follow the motions of everyone else. Here we could eat only when my father was able to bring home some food.

Here we could bathe only when it was our turn, and only with cold water. And here my mother would have to go back to work. This
was probably the biggest change for me and my brother. We had gotten used to having our mother near, and now she would have to go to work each day like my father, and we would have to wait nervously for her return as well.

We could not stay in Zamarstynowska 34 very long. Soon my father moved us to another apartment. This second apartment was also on Zamarstynowska Street, Zamarstynowska 120, and it was a little bit better. This time, we were on the “ghetto” side of the bridge. We had to cross through a gate to reach the ghetto. At the checkpoint, we had to present papers and say where we were going. Some families were detained if they did not have the proper paperwork or if the German soldiers working the checkpoint decided for some reason they could not pass, but we were lucky. One of the soldiers hit my father on the back with a leather whip, but my father said it was not so bad. He said a lot of people suffered much worse.

Once we crossed into the ghetto, things did not seem any different to me. In fact, this next apartment turned out to be bigger, less crowded. The man who rented us our new room was also a carpenter. Perhaps this was how my father came to know him. He had a woodworking shop in the basement. I can still smell the fresh wood shavings. The smell filled the whole building, and it made me feel clean, brand new, like a fresh start. Even today, when I smell fresh wood shavings, I am taken back to that woodworking shop in the ghetto. It is a happy sense memory, even though it was not a happy time.

We stayed at Zamarstynowska 120 from February 1942 until August 1942. The conditions there were a little bit better than at Zamarstynowska 34. At first we lived with my aunt and two cousins, all in one room, until one day my uncle came and took his wife
and children to Warsaw. I liked this second apartment on Zamarstynowska Street because there was a courtyard in the back of our building, and my mother would sometimes let me go outside to play. This was a great treat. There were fresh mushrooms growing just beyond our courtyard, in a field behind our building. I had never seen fresh mushrooms. At first, I thought they were big white stones. I had to ask my grandmother about the stones when she came to visit, and she explained that they were mushrooms and that we could eat them. This was so surprising to me. We collected some of the mushrooms and brought them home to eat. I could not believe it, eating those big white stones. They had no taste, but I convinced myself they were delicious.

I had begun to pay a lot of attention to food. Before the Soviet occupation of 1939, I did not care about food. As I have written, sometimes I would not even eat, just to torment my poor nanny. But now food was scarce and precious, so of course I ate. I did not like being hungry, which was why my discovery of the mushrooms was so special and why I remember it. I also remember how I used to peel potatoes for my mother, to prepare for our dinner. I used a knife, because we did not have a potato peeler, and my father taught me how to shave the skin so slight, so thin, so I did not waste a bit of potato. In the beginning, I would peel and my father would watch, until he thought I had mastered it and could be trusted with the task. I peeled those potatoes so carefully, it was almost as if I were whittling. I did not waste a bit. It was a habit I could not break, even long after the war, when potatoes were once again plentiful. To this day, someone seeing me in the kitchen peeling potatoes will wonder how I learned to do such a thin, fine job of it.

Now that I was allowed outside to play, I could see the reality of our situation up close and firsthand. One afternoon, through an
opening in the fence behind our building, I saw a group of Ukrainian teenagers beating up an elderly Jewish man. They were hitting him with sticks. The man was not resisting. He was screaming in pain, calling for help, begging for the teenagers to stop. After a while, the Ukrainians grew tired of the beating and walked away, but the man continued to moan. I ran upstairs to tell my mother what I had seen. I thought maybe she could help this poor man. I did not know how to help him myself. My mother, what could she say? What could she do? She was very upset about it, but at the same time she told me not to pay attention to such things, to mind my own business, because getting involved in something like this could only lead to trouble. This was not the kind of person my mother was, not the kind of person she wanted me to be, but this was how the war had changed us, how the Germans had changed us. The Ukrainians, too. If we tried to help this man, the Ukrainian boys might take offense and start beating us with their sticks.

We did not have running water at Zamarstynowska 120. For bathing, yes; for drinking, no. We had to go outside to a pump, and I would sometimes go with my grandmother. This was our special time together. My grandmother would carry the bucket when it was empty, and I would carry it back when it was full. I liked that I was big enough to help in this way, and on this one day, returning to our apartment with a full bucket of water, I noticed two young Ukrainian women approaching us on the street. They did not look as though they meant us any harm, but they were Ukrainians. In my head, I decided to blame the women for the way those Ukrainian boys beat up on the old Jewish man in the courtyard. It had just rained, so there were puddles in the street. I stopped by one of the biggest puddles and waited for the two
women to approach. Then, just as they came close, I jumped in the puddle and splashed them with water.