The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (18 page)

‘But let’s make it quick – just an hour or so.’ I agreed, glad that she would be with me. We took nothing but my coat and the puppets, leaving a short note for my mother and Aunt Cara. When we reached the hospital and pushed open the heavy doors we knew instantly that the nurses had nothing more to give the children than a kind word here and there. It had been many weeks since our last visit and to see the hospital in such a state was devastating. It stood like a lighthouse among the crashing waves, still a refuge of sorts, but with no medicine or bandages and very little food.

There were only five children on the TB ward who remembered us, and now all the children lay three to a bed. They were so thin I couldn’t imagine what was keeping them alive. But even then we raised some smiles as the puppets performed their tricks, and despite their weakness the children still wanted to play with the puppets themselves. I glanced at Ellie. I had not seen her smile much in recent weeks, but here she was, animating the puppets, playing with the children, even the occasional giggle spilling from her lovely mouth. I felt light-headed – maybe it was hunger – but having her there with me seemed the greatest gift in these dark times.

We stayed much longer than planned – how could we see some children but not others? – so it was the afternoon before we headed back. Everywhere was so quiet. Where once an overcrowded ghetto had buzzed with people and life, there now stood a ghost town. We scurried along deserted streets in a wild zigzag. When we turned into Orla Street we saw it immediately: some houses were smouldering, newly torched, and the front door of our hiding place gaped open like a toothless mouth.

We raced upstairs. The apartment door stood ajar and there was no trace of Mother or Cara. The apartment seemed untouched but the newspaper had been ripped off the windows and lay scattered across the floor. The two battered suitcases were gone and so were their coats. There were no neighbours to bear witness to what had happened here, only the bare rooms and a kitchen table that had been ours for some weeks. Mama’s scarf lay draped over a chair, dark red like a fresh wound. I moved towards it slowly, like wading through deep water, picked it up and held it in my hand.

I remember the silence between Ellie and me as we faced each other in the small flat. An eerie, electric pause, as though a large storm would break at any moment. Then her fists began to pound me like hail, releasing the storm. God, she was strong!

‘Why did I come with you this morning, why? Why did we go? Maybe we might have heard them coming, could have hidden. All of us together.’

I stood stock still, letting her fists rain down on me, my arms hanging by my sides like strangers. I could hardly feel her blows and there was a strange comfort in the rhythm of Ellie’s ‘why’ followed by a blow, then another ‘why’, followed by another blow. I would gladly have stayed there for ever, but eventually her blows diminished and it was Ellie’s sobbing that woke my own despair. We sobbed in each other’s arms, clinging to each other like a shipwrecked couple. When we finally emerged from this embrace, weary and beaten, we ran to the
Umschlag
. It was deserted.

I can’t remember much about the next few weeks. We hid in another flat, scurrying about like stray dogs, searching out any scraps of food that people might have left behind. We huddled together at night, holding on to each other for dear life. I couldn’t bear talking about our mothers, but Ellie never stopped.

‘They’re gone, Mika. They’re dead, I know it in my bones. How can the Germans get away with this?’ She sat up, her eyes on fire.

‘Damn it, doesn’t the world know what’s happening to us? And what about the people on the other side of the wall? They could see into the ghetto, they saw us being taken away.’ I stayed silent, my heart frozen like a lake in winter. But at night all I dreamed about was Mama: I’d see her standing at the stove, stirring soup, humming. As I approached her she’d turn, smile at me. ‘Ah, my prince!’ But just as I was about to come closer, her face would change – her lovely features fading away. First her mouth, then the nose, her deep brown eyes, until her face resembled nothing more than a clean white surface. I’d wake up screaming, disoriented. Only when Ellie stroked my damp forehead would I calm down. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mama. What happened to everyone after those cattle trucks? Where did the rats take them?

Then, on 21 September, our Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the deportations stopped as suddenly as they had started. There weren’t many of us left. Like everything the Germans did, the action they had orchestrated had been performed with deadly efficiency. And what a plan it had been: put all the Jews into a tiny area and lock them in; leave them to simmer for a long time so that the weak would be rooted out by fever, typhoid, hunger and cold. Let the
Judenrat
distribute the laws; let them make their own armbands. Put the Jews out of sight, out of mind and let the public outside the ghetto slowly forget about them. Then blame the Jews for the diseases, march in and ‘resettle’ them – not to the East, but to the land of the dead: with total confidence that nobody would care enough to interfere.

How the deportations could have happened under the very eyes of the Catholic Poles who had once been our neighbours I couldn’t grasp. Some could see into the ghetto from their houses. They had stood on the sidelines as the Germans herded us into the ghetto in 1940 and then out again to the dirty
Umschlag
in the wretched summer of 1942 . . . hundreds of thousands of individuals: children, men, women, whole families, seven thousand people per day, every day, for weeks. Did they really believe we would be taken to new homes after they saw how we were being treated? Or was it the terror the Germans spread like their deadly gas that paralysed them?

Everything had changed. As if all the life force had been drained from us, Ellie and I trudged through the days without purpose – and yet the sun kept shining. As if to mock us, the weather remained unchanged, untainted. How could the grass still grow in small patches among the grey of the ghetto when all the children were gone? It grew better now than before, undisturbed by so many trampling feet. How could there be such a bright blue sky, when Hannah had been taken without even the comfort of my promise, my ‘yes’, in her little heart? How could some flowers push their way up through the earth when my mama was gone, her window boxes trampled on?

And the indifferent, terrible sun: how dare it burn down, tan my skin and warm my bones, while my mother was being pushed into the cattle trucks? It was in the heat of summer when they took them. Why did they come in summer? The days were longer then, they could work more efficiently and efficiency was everything for the Germans.
Where are you, Mama? What happened to your clothes, your smile?

I used to love the sun, but that summer its blazing shine sickened me.

How can you look down on us as if nothing has happened?
I raged day in and out. The sun should have darkened, but instead she burnt down over the ghetto with relentless force. One day I couldn’t bear it any longer and called the sun to a duel, forcing her to disappear. I was willing to give my eyes for her eclipse – if it meant blindness, so be it. I sat alone in the corner of the backyard of our hiding place and slowly faced the sun directly. I took a deep breath and stared . . . but nothing happened. My reflexes betrayed me and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Instead, I sat with streaming red eyes, sweating, squinting in the glaring light. Only the sun’s shadow, a small dark patch in the corner of my eyes, stayed with me for a while.

It was exactly one week after Mother and Cara were taken.

A
deadly silence hung over the ghetto and a new phase in this gruesome time began. After two months of deportations only sixty thousand Jews remained. When they locked us into the ghetto in October 1940 there had been over four hundred thousand. Where there had once been overcrowded roads drenched in noise, now there was only the silence of a morgue.

One day, posters appeared ordering everyone to report in to the Germans. Ellie and I debated for a while, but we had run out of food and there was little to forage now, so we reported in. And so, for the first time in over a year, we were separated. Men and boys had to sleep in large, shared quarters near the ghetto wall, close to the German factories on the Aryan side in which we were forced to work.

We would gather each day near the
Wache
and then we were marched through the gates towards the Aryan construction sites and the few factories that were left. Someone was making big money from our tired bones and wretched souls. Most of the work was back-breaking, but at least we received some food, and crossing to the other side each day brought new opportunities for smuggling.

Ellie, like many women, was sent to the
Toebbens-Schultz
shops on Nowolipie Street and ordered, for twelve hours each day, to clean and repair German uniforms that had been sent back from the Russian front.

‘You know, many of the uniforms are like sieves, full of holes, torn and so bloody,’ Ellie told me one evening with a smile. It was heartening news. Something was clearly not going well for the rats on the Russian front and our women did the shoddiest job possible on the repairs.

Ellie and I did not see much of each other those days, although sometimes in the evenings I would slip out to the women’s quarters next to our barracks or she would come to mine. Short, stolen moments; little pockets of time. We still couldn’t talk about our mothers, and the comfort we found in each other’s embrace was like a droplet that evaporated quickly in the heat.

How could we go on living like this, drained of all life, hollow to the bone? My nights were filled with endless horrors: my mother’s face disappearing, me trying to catch up with the trains, running with burning lungs through the ghetto streets, screaming without a sound leaving my mouth. In the factories, the dark days stretched endlessly, devoid of hope and meaning.

But somehow I did go on, kept working with my head down, attending to the menial brain-numbing task of putting together rough brushes to keep the German Reich clean. After a time I looked up at the boys and men next to me and soon discovered young men, just like me, who were fuelled by a fierce craving for vengeance. One day Henryk, a young Jew from Cracow, leaned towards me.

‘Mika, go to the toilet – now,’ he whispered. ‘Look in the corner near the window. There’s a piece of paper hidden in a crack. Go and read it. Don’t forget to put it back.’

I did as he said. He needn’t have worried about hiding things too well in our draughty toilets – the rats would never search there. I pulled out the tightly folded piece of paper and smoothed it out.

‘A Call to Arms! Brothers and sisters! We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter. It is better to die in battle as free people than to live at the mercy of murderers. Rise up. Fight till your last breath!’

It was a reprint of a manifesto by the poet Abba Kovner, written in December ’41 when we had all been asleep with false hopes. Before the deportations. I shivered, but the message plunged deep into my heart.

And so I became part of a group that had formed in those devastating weeks after the deportations, the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation. What an amazing bunch of young people, most of us aged between thirteen and twenty-two, including quite a few girls and women too, all burning with a desire for revenge. We met secretly in our quarters in the evenings. Now we needed to organise our resistance for the last fight, we had no time to mourn the people we’d lost and nothing more to lose.

One night a Polish resistance courier arrived at our barracks, dishevelled and stuttering. He stood as pale as a ghost in front of us, forcing himself to speak. We drew close around him, holding our breath. He’d been in the cattle trucks and had managed to throw himself out just before they reached Treblinka, how he didn’t say. Maybe he squeezed through a window, made a hole in the bottom of the truck? He followed the railway lines all the way to the camp, hiding in a nearby forest for days, observing the trains. Crowded cattle trucks arrived daily at Treblinka, spilling out their human load before rattling back empty towards Warsaw after only a few hours. Retching from the terrible stench of the black, thick smoke that hovered above the forest, he finally understood why none of the trains ever brought food or other supplies: the dead don’t need to eat. There was no resettlement, only extermination.

Somehow, half starved and mad with grief, he made it back to Warsaw, determined to seek us out and destroy any last illusions about the fate of the Jews. The news spread like wildfire. Extermination – this had been their plan all along, to kill us like vermin. Some of us had known this instinctively, known it in our bones, but this witness changed everything. Now, we had to act.

Whatever happened to that broken man? The one who made it back from that hell with the weight of that knowledge on his shoulders . . .

Shortly after this a top-secret mission got under way to smuggle a map of Treblinka, drawn from the man’s reports, to the Allies, hidden in a shoe. Miraculously it made it through to England, but by the time the Allies finally arrived in Treblinka, nothing was left: the Germans had covered their tracks with the same efficiency with which they had operated the camp. They had blown up all the gas chambers, excavated the dead and burnt them down to dust. The forest had then taken over again. All of this I only heard much later.

We gathered and planned during the long nights. I made a new friend in the factory called Andre, a tall man a few years older than me, a talented violinist who used to play in Warsaw’s symphony orchestra. Like me, he too burned with a desire for revenge. He had lost everyone in the deportations: his parents, two sisters and his grandfather. But it wasn’t Andre but an older man, Alexei, who began to talk about weapons. He had been a history teacher in the old days and although his eyes and words were full of fire, his voice was soft and steady like a river. None of his family had survived the previous months.