The Daughter of Auschwitz, page 2
“Tola, it’s me. Mama,” she said, with a bigger smile.
I was incredulous.
Is that really my mama? I wondered.
I jumped down from the bricks and ran up to her. I felt a smile spread across my face from ear to ear. It was the first real happiness I had experienced in months.
She crouched down, held my face and looked me straight in the eyes. Then she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. I hugged her back as tightly as I could. She smelled like my mama. It truly was my beautiful mama. Prisoner A-27791. My mama.
“Listen to me, Tola. They are rounding up people to walk to Germany. All the way to Germany, hundreds of miles away,” said Mama. “Look at me. I’m going to be shot. I’m going to die. I can’t walk. Look at my feet.” She pointed downward.
Mama wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were swathed in rags. They looked as though they had been bandaged in a hurry. The undersides were saturated, and moisture was leeching upward. Chafed red from the cold, Mama’s calves and ankles were swollen, a sure sign of starvation. The camp was full of scarecrows and skeletons.
“Maybe you will make it. You might survive the march. But this is not a world for children. I don’t want you to survive alone. So let’s try to hide. There’s a chance we can survive together. And if we die, we’ll die here together. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Mama. Yes, I will,” I replied.
Ever since I was born, I had inhabited a world where being Jewish meant you were destined to die. It was perfectly normal to be asked to die. All Jewish children died. And I always did what Mama said. Mama always told me the truth. I trusted Mama. I didn’t trust anyone else. Mama told me the truth because knowing the truth could save my life. That’s what Mama said. And she repeated it. In the ghetto. In the labor camp. In the cattle car. And before we were separated in the concentration camp.
Although she had spoken of dying together, Mama lifted my spirits by saying we had a chance of living, if I followed her instructions. As always, she was being truthful. Other parents might have tried to hide the truth in such circumstances. Not my mama. She believed that information was power, and it could save my life.
For months I had been alone. There had been no one to protect me. I always thought I would die alone. Whatever death was. But now I had someone who cared for me. I would do whatever Mama asked. A wave of relief washed over me as I realized I was no longer alone. Mama said nothing. She took me by the hand and led me out of the barrack block.
We were hit by the smell of burning. The sound of wood crackling, spitting. Was it a huge log fire? More than anything, I was desperate for any kind of warmth to unfreeze my body. But then Mama squeezed my hand and I forgot about the cold. The sky was full of smoke. The fire was close. It was loud and made me nervous. Woodsmoke mixed with other smells. Something oily. The black stuff they put on roads and roofs. And there was something else. The rotten smell of garbage being burned. Tons of it.
Mama’s head jerked left and right and back again as she looked for potential trouble. Hand in hand, we walked briskly through the snow in silence. She seemed to know where she was going. I knew I had to be as quiet as possible. Making a noise could get you killed. Mama didn’t need to say anything. Her urgency transmitted itself to me. I was electrified by the adventure. My hunger pangs vanished. Mama’s love made me feel safe and secure. The rags on her feet squelched with every step. I didn’t register the snow seeping through my thin white lace-up shoes straight to my sockless feet. I only felt the warmth of Mama’s hand and her love coursing through my very being.
I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing. For the first time ever, there were no SS troops or their German stooges blocking our path. Briefly, as we crossed gaps between the buildings, I caught glimpses in the distance of soldiers in trench coats, corralling prisoners and preparing for the march to Germany. The Nazis seemed to be cursing and screaming orders.
I was almost exactly a year older than the war. I had never known freedom. My survival depended on my ability to judge the mood of my captors. Despite their brutality, I knew that ordinarily the Germans were terrifyingly composed. This morning they had been verging on hysteria and fired point-blank at wretches who were too slow to obey.
I didn’t wince in the face of murder. I had witnessed violent death for as long as I could recall. I had learned to suppress my emotions. What scared me were the German shepherds and their savage, frothing jaws. Straining at the leashes of their handlers, those awful dogs were bigger than I was. When Mama and I had arrived at the platform and got down from the cattle car back in the summer, I had seen the dogs chasing people along the rail tracks in the direction of the chimneys and the smoke.
I never looked in the eyes of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military corps, which contained the Third Reich’s most fanatical Nazis. I had managed to avoid their fury for more than half a year. Mama had taught me well: “Whenever you pass a German, always look down or look away. Never catch their gaze. Never ever look them in the eye. They hate it. It makes them angry, and they’ll lash out. They might even kill you.”
I saw their black riding breeches, the smart, highly polished boots—those SS jackboots that came up to the knees. I saw their swagger sticks, the daggers hanging from their belts, their death’s-head symbols and trigger fingers. I looked as far as their shoulders and their epaulets. I might have seen an Iron Cross on a chest or around a neck. I thought this was the uniform worn by all the non-Jewish men on earth. But I never looked at their faces. I had, however, stared into the eyes of the dogs. And they stared right back. They slobbered and drooled and snarled and growled and flexed the sinews in their necks. The dogs wanted to sink their teeth into my flesh and rip me to pieces.
Mama gripped my hand and made sure we stayed close to the low wooden buildings. We were on the northwestern side of the extermination camp, better known as Birkenau, which was formally part of the Auschwitz complex. On our right, we had cover from buildings that comprised the male infirmary. On our left were row upon row of barrack blocks separating them from the camp’s entrance gate—the Gate of Death—where prisoners were gathering for the exodus. As stealthily as she could, Mama shepherded me southward. We headed toward the railway line that had brought us to Birkenau six months earlier.
Truck engines throbbed in the distance, some setting off, others idling. Commands shouted into bullhorns competed for attention. Once or twice, Mama pulled me into the lee of a building, and we crouched as low as we could get. We were desperate to be invisible. Although we were some distance from the watchtowers on the perimeter fence, I knew that if the guards spotted us, they would open fire or alert soldiers below. And if we were caught, we would be forced into the line. Surrounded by the men and their dogs. Unable to escape the march that Mama said would kill her.
Where possible, we ducked into shadows and rode our luck. The density of the barracks helped to shield us. But more than anything, we were helped by the Germans’ panic. The Russians were coming. They weren’t far away. The vengeful Russians. The Nazis were in such a hurry to flee that they didn’t notice that prisoners A-27791 and A-27633, the girl with the white lace-up shoes, were making a break for it.
An adrenaline rush heightened my senses. My ears and nose told me almost as much as my eyes. What was missing was the stench that had hung over the camp ever since we had arrived. That sickening, lingering aroma. The sulfurous, bad-egg shtinkt—the stink of burning hair blended with roasting flesh that flew up the nostrils, fastening itself, limpet-like, to nerve endings and memory alike. For once, I didn’t have that nauseating taste in my mouth.
Today was much noisier than yesterday when I had been outside by myself for a few minutes. I had been intrigued by the silence from the other children’s hut, two buildings down the row from ours. It was eerily quiet, and so I’d peeked inside, despite the risk of upsetting the block elder in charge. But I wasn’t challenged. The building was empty. The children had simply disappeared.
As I clung to Mama’s hand, I found I couldn’t ignore the cold anymore. I wished I had some mittens. I had seen a pair of gloves attached to a string by a girl’s coat in the barrack next door. My fingers were freezing. I really needed some respite from the cold. Scavenging was the norm. It was an essential part of survival in this place. It wasn’t the same as stealing. But I hadn’t taken the gloves. As soon as I could speak and understand, I had been taught to be honest and kind. The girl to whom they belonged might need them if she returned; although I knew in my heart she wasn’t coming back. Still, I didn’t want to benefit from her death. And so I’d left the gloves hanging there.
After ten minutes or so, we reached the building Mama had been seeking. She pulled me inside. The block was a women’s infirmary, although there was precious little medical equipment to be seen. It was a staging post between life and death. Scores of beds were occupied by the dead and the dying. In their haste, the Germans had abandoned them. The room reverberated with moans and women sobbing.
Mama went from bed to bed, shaking the outlines of the blankets. Sometimes a woman twitched. Where there were signs of life, Mama moved on. I couldn’t work out what she was doing, and I was too scared to ask. Mama checked every bed, putting the back of her hand on corpses.
“That one is cold,” Mama said, resuming her search.
And I finally understood what Mama was seeking. She reached beneath a blanket and touched another body. This one didn’t move. But it was still warm. The woman had only just expired.
“Tola, listen to me,” said Mama. “You have to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, there’s a risk you’ll be killed.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Take off your shoes and climb into bed.”
I unlaced the white lace-ups as quickly as I could. The bed was higher than the bunk I normally slept in, and I needed help to get onto the frame.
“Get under this blanket, cover yourself and lie down facing the floor. You’re going to lie next to the woman and I’m going to cover you so that nothing is visible. Not your feet or your head. You must lie here very quietly. Not a word out of you. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Do you hear me? I will be the only person who’s going to uncover you. Nobody else.”
She leaned in closer.
“You must breathe toward the ground. You stay there and do not move. Do not move. You stay there until I come to get you. Do you understand?”
“All right, Mama.”
Mama’s word was the law. Ignoring her could be fatal.
My bed companion must have been about twenty years old. She was not unlike hundreds of corpses I had seen. Bags of contorted, jagged bones held together by skin. Skulls with mouths locked in silent screams. The dead woman was pretty. And definitely younger than Mama.
“Put your arms around her,” Mama commanded.
She maneuvered my head beneath the corpse’s armpit and entwined our legs. Then she pulled up the blanket so the dead woman’s head was just showing.
“I’m leaving now, Tola,” she said. “I have to go and hide as well. But I won’t be far away. I will come back and get you. No matter what you hear, do not move until I return. Under any circumstances. Do you promise?”
“Yes, Mama. I promise.”
I did exactly as Mama said. I barely moved. I wasn’t afraid of the corpse. Why should I be? The pretty woman was dead and couldn’t hurt me. She was a friend who might save my life. My protector. So I followed Mama’s instructions, hugged the dead woman and waited.
At first, the corpse was warm. I was grateful for that. Feeling returned to my feet after tramping through the snow. But slowly, slowly, the corpse became cooler. I lay there listening, taking shallow breaths and waiting. I wondered why the pretty woman had died. I presumed it was hunger.
I was extraordinarily calm. A strange kind of peace came over me. I relaxed and began to visualize a doll with a green face. Not a complete doll. Just a head. I’d seen it sticking out of the mud as we ran. I didn’t know whether the head and body had become separated. Or whether the body was still attached to the head beneath the mud. I’d wanted to pick the head up. But we hadn’t had time to stop.
The head had friendly eyes and a kind mouth. I wanted that doll’s head. I didn’t have any toys here in the camp. I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know what playing was. Life was just about surviving. But I wanted the doll’s head to talk to and to keep me company. What pretty eyes she’d had.
My eyes began to feel heavy. I felt safe. Mama was nearby. The adrenaline from our adventure out in the open had subsided.
Then I heard the boots.
CHAPTER TWO
BEYOND THE TABLECLOTH
Jewish ghetto, Tomaszów Mazowiecki,
German-occupied Central Poland.
1941
Age 2 and 3
My domain extended all the way under the kitchen table. The boundaries were defined by the ragged borders of a cheap cloth, draped over the piece of furniture that was the beating heart of life in our overcrowded home in the ghetto. Beyond the tablecloth was the world of adults—and their lopsided war between Nazi persecutors and oppressed Jews. When in residence in my personal realm, I rarely saw the grown-ups’ faces—from my perspective, the outside universe only existed from the knees down. But I heard them talking, and I made it my business to work out which voice was coming from which pair of legs.
I heard snatches of conversations. And key words repeated over and over again, with a mixture of fear, anger and venom. Words that stuck in my mind.
“Gestapo.”
“SS.”
“Aktion.”
“Rations.”
“Margarine.”
“Hitler.”
“Dropped dead in the street.”
“Starvation.”
“Palestine.”
“Judenrat.”
“Ghetto.”
“Kropfitsch.”
“Another one.”
“That poor child.”
“Back of the head.”
“Those poor parents.”
There was never any good news outside the tablecloth. Life was a litany of catastrophes, of people disappearing, massacres and the constant struggle to find food.
Not to mention the shooting and the screams outside the window.
When the news was particularly bad, they whispered. They tried to keep me from hearing. I knew it was really bad when there was a deep intake of breath and the sound of a hand clasped over a mouth to prevent a cry from escaping. My ears were my early-warning system. I recognized how lightly or purposefully people walked. I could tell when a new set of shoes or boots entered the apartment. Sometimes they were friendly. But when I heard heavy boots, I knew trouble was imminent.
Beneath the table was my sanctuary. There I stayed and talked to my doll.
“Are you hungry, bubale?” I inquired.
“I’m starving. You must be, too. But don’t worry, Mama’s in the kitchen and she’s cooking potato-skin soup.
“Here it is. Eat it up. Be a good girl, bubale. Tasty, isn’t it? Mmmmmm. Lovely. Come on now. Eat your soup, bubale. It’s good for you.
“I’m sorry there’s no bread today. Please don’t cry.”
Occasionally, I would surface above the tablecloth and go and perch on the knee of my father, Machel, or I’d nestle in the lap of my mother, Reizel. Whenever Uncle James came to visit in the early days of the ghetto, when it was easier to move around, I sat on his knee and twiddled his bushy eyebrows. But usually I stayed under the table because I didn’t have a chair. There wasn’t sufficient space in the four-room apartment and there wasn’t enough furniture to go around.
We weren’t the only family living in flat number five, 24 Krzyżowa Street, Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Jews were forced to share cramped accommodation. In many apartments, instead of five or six people, there were maybe twenty. In others, the numbers might have been as high as sixty or seventy. One bathroom had to service maybe thirty to forty people. I had to eat and sleep under the table because there was so little space. Some people slept on the floor. My parents squeezed together in a single bed. I joined them in the middle of the night if I woke up scared.
If you were lucky, you lived together with friends or extended family. If not, you were compelled to cohabit with strangers you couldn’t bear. I have no firm memory of how many people were there or who they were. The situation was so fluid that the apartment was a constant revolving door of refugees. One day a whole set of familiar faces would vanish. Their disappearance would be accompanied by urgent whispers coming from beyond the tablecloth. It didn’t take long before they were replaced by others. Perhaps by even more people. The atmosphere inside the apartment would change. It was not always an improvement. I could sense it under the table.
We were stuffed like mice in there.
* * *
The Nazis created the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto in December 1940. Jews were banned from the main part of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, an industrial town in Central Poland, seventy miles southwest of the capital, Warsaw. They were required to identify themselves as Jews by wearing a white armband adorned with a blue Star of David. Failure to comply was punishable by death.
The Germans severed the electricity supply as one of their first strictures. Depriving us of a key component of modern life was another snip of the scissors cutting us slowly and painfully to death. There was no sewage system either. We were ordered to hang curtains or screens at windows that overlooked Aryan neighborhoods. The sense of isolation and segregation from the outside world was reinforced with every new restriction. Not only were we no longer supposed to look at our Polish neighbors, we were also denied sunlight as we were pushed back toward the Dark Ages. The Poles were ordered to block windows that overlooked the ghetto so they wouldn’t see what was happening and inform the outside world. Mind you, significant numbers of Poles in Tomaszów were anti-Semites. Some of them might have taken pleasure from our suffering. At least the curtains denied them that.
I was incredulous.
Is that really my mama? I wondered.
I jumped down from the bricks and ran up to her. I felt a smile spread across my face from ear to ear. It was the first real happiness I had experienced in months.
She crouched down, held my face and looked me straight in the eyes. Then she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. I hugged her back as tightly as I could. She smelled like my mama. It truly was my beautiful mama. Prisoner A-27791. My mama.
“Listen to me, Tola. They are rounding up people to walk to Germany. All the way to Germany, hundreds of miles away,” said Mama. “Look at me. I’m going to be shot. I’m going to die. I can’t walk. Look at my feet.” She pointed downward.
Mama wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were swathed in rags. They looked as though they had been bandaged in a hurry. The undersides were saturated, and moisture was leeching upward. Chafed red from the cold, Mama’s calves and ankles were swollen, a sure sign of starvation. The camp was full of scarecrows and skeletons.
“Maybe you will make it. You might survive the march. But this is not a world for children. I don’t want you to survive alone. So let’s try to hide. There’s a chance we can survive together. And if we die, we’ll die here together. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Mama. Yes, I will,” I replied.
Ever since I was born, I had inhabited a world where being Jewish meant you were destined to die. It was perfectly normal to be asked to die. All Jewish children died. And I always did what Mama said. Mama always told me the truth. I trusted Mama. I didn’t trust anyone else. Mama told me the truth because knowing the truth could save my life. That’s what Mama said. And she repeated it. In the ghetto. In the labor camp. In the cattle car. And before we were separated in the concentration camp.
Although she had spoken of dying together, Mama lifted my spirits by saying we had a chance of living, if I followed her instructions. As always, she was being truthful. Other parents might have tried to hide the truth in such circumstances. Not my mama. She believed that information was power, and it could save my life.
For months I had been alone. There had been no one to protect me. I always thought I would die alone. Whatever death was. But now I had someone who cared for me. I would do whatever Mama asked. A wave of relief washed over me as I realized I was no longer alone. Mama said nothing. She took me by the hand and led me out of the barrack block.
We were hit by the smell of burning. The sound of wood crackling, spitting. Was it a huge log fire? More than anything, I was desperate for any kind of warmth to unfreeze my body. But then Mama squeezed my hand and I forgot about the cold. The sky was full of smoke. The fire was close. It was loud and made me nervous. Woodsmoke mixed with other smells. Something oily. The black stuff they put on roads and roofs. And there was something else. The rotten smell of garbage being burned. Tons of it.
Mama’s head jerked left and right and back again as she looked for potential trouble. Hand in hand, we walked briskly through the snow in silence. She seemed to know where she was going. I knew I had to be as quiet as possible. Making a noise could get you killed. Mama didn’t need to say anything. Her urgency transmitted itself to me. I was electrified by the adventure. My hunger pangs vanished. Mama’s love made me feel safe and secure. The rags on her feet squelched with every step. I didn’t register the snow seeping through my thin white lace-up shoes straight to my sockless feet. I only felt the warmth of Mama’s hand and her love coursing through my very being.
I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing. For the first time ever, there were no SS troops or their German stooges blocking our path. Briefly, as we crossed gaps between the buildings, I caught glimpses in the distance of soldiers in trench coats, corralling prisoners and preparing for the march to Germany. The Nazis seemed to be cursing and screaming orders.
I was almost exactly a year older than the war. I had never known freedom. My survival depended on my ability to judge the mood of my captors. Despite their brutality, I knew that ordinarily the Germans were terrifyingly composed. This morning they had been verging on hysteria and fired point-blank at wretches who were too slow to obey.
I didn’t wince in the face of murder. I had witnessed violent death for as long as I could recall. I had learned to suppress my emotions. What scared me were the German shepherds and their savage, frothing jaws. Straining at the leashes of their handlers, those awful dogs were bigger than I was. When Mama and I had arrived at the platform and got down from the cattle car back in the summer, I had seen the dogs chasing people along the rail tracks in the direction of the chimneys and the smoke.
I never looked in the eyes of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military corps, which contained the Third Reich’s most fanatical Nazis. I had managed to avoid their fury for more than half a year. Mama had taught me well: “Whenever you pass a German, always look down or look away. Never catch their gaze. Never ever look them in the eye. They hate it. It makes them angry, and they’ll lash out. They might even kill you.”
I saw their black riding breeches, the smart, highly polished boots—those SS jackboots that came up to the knees. I saw their swagger sticks, the daggers hanging from their belts, their death’s-head symbols and trigger fingers. I looked as far as their shoulders and their epaulets. I might have seen an Iron Cross on a chest or around a neck. I thought this was the uniform worn by all the non-Jewish men on earth. But I never looked at their faces. I had, however, stared into the eyes of the dogs. And they stared right back. They slobbered and drooled and snarled and growled and flexed the sinews in their necks. The dogs wanted to sink their teeth into my flesh and rip me to pieces.
Mama gripped my hand and made sure we stayed close to the low wooden buildings. We were on the northwestern side of the extermination camp, better known as Birkenau, which was formally part of the Auschwitz complex. On our right, we had cover from buildings that comprised the male infirmary. On our left were row upon row of barrack blocks separating them from the camp’s entrance gate—the Gate of Death—where prisoners were gathering for the exodus. As stealthily as she could, Mama shepherded me southward. We headed toward the railway line that had brought us to Birkenau six months earlier.
Truck engines throbbed in the distance, some setting off, others idling. Commands shouted into bullhorns competed for attention. Once or twice, Mama pulled me into the lee of a building, and we crouched as low as we could get. We were desperate to be invisible. Although we were some distance from the watchtowers on the perimeter fence, I knew that if the guards spotted us, they would open fire or alert soldiers below. And if we were caught, we would be forced into the line. Surrounded by the men and their dogs. Unable to escape the march that Mama said would kill her.
Where possible, we ducked into shadows and rode our luck. The density of the barracks helped to shield us. But more than anything, we were helped by the Germans’ panic. The Russians were coming. They weren’t far away. The vengeful Russians. The Nazis were in such a hurry to flee that they didn’t notice that prisoners A-27791 and A-27633, the girl with the white lace-up shoes, were making a break for it.
An adrenaline rush heightened my senses. My ears and nose told me almost as much as my eyes. What was missing was the stench that had hung over the camp ever since we had arrived. That sickening, lingering aroma. The sulfurous, bad-egg shtinkt—the stink of burning hair blended with roasting flesh that flew up the nostrils, fastening itself, limpet-like, to nerve endings and memory alike. For once, I didn’t have that nauseating taste in my mouth.
Today was much noisier than yesterday when I had been outside by myself for a few minutes. I had been intrigued by the silence from the other children’s hut, two buildings down the row from ours. It was eerily quiet, and so I’d peeked inside, despite the risk of upsetting the block elder in charge. But I wasn’t challenged. The building was empty. The children had simply disappeared.
As I clung to Mama’s hand, I found I couldn’t ignore the cold anymore. I wished I had some mittens. I had seen a pair of gloves attached to a string by a girl’s coat in the barrack next door. My fingers were freezing. I really needed some respite from the cold. Scavenging was the norm. It was an essential part of survival in this place. It wasn’t the same as stealing. But I hadn’t taken the gloves. As soon as I could speak and understand, I had been taught to be honest and kind. The girl to whom they belonged might need them if she returned; although I knew in my heart she wasn’t coming back. Still, I didn’t want to benefit from her death. And so I’d left the gloves hanging there.
After ten minutes or so, we reached the building Mama had been seeking. She pulled me inside. The block was a women’s infirmary, although there was precious little medical equipment to be seen. It was a staging post between life and death. Scores of beds were occupied by the dead and the dying. In their haste, the Germans had abandoned them. The room reverberated with moans and women sobbing.
Mama went from bed to bed, shaking the outlines of the blankets. Sometimes a woman twitched. Where there were signs of life, Mama moved on. I couldn’t work out what she was doing, and I was too scared to ask. Mama checked every bed, putting the back of her hand on corpses.
“That one is cold,” Mama said, resuming her search.
And I finally understood what Mama was seeking. She reached beneath a blanket and touched another body. This one didn’t move. But it was still warm. The woman had only just expired.
“Tola, listen to me,” said Mama. “You have to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, there’s a risk you’ll be killed.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Take off your shoes and climb into bed.”
I unlaced the white lace-ups as quickly as I could. The bed was higher than the bunk I normally slept in, and I needed help to get onto the frame.
“Get under this blanket, cover yourself and lie down facing the floor. You’re going to lie next to the woman and I’m going to cover you so that nothing is visible. Not your feet or your head. You must lie here very quietly. Not a word out of you. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Do you hear me? I will be the only person who’s going to uncover you. Nobody else.”
She leaned in closer.
“You must breathe toward the ground. You stay there and do not move. Do not move. You stay there until I come to get you. Do you understand?”
“All right, Mama.”
Mama’s word was the law. Ignoring her could be fatal.
My bed companion must have been about twenty years old. She was not unlike hundreds of corpses I had seen. Bags of contorted, jagged bones held together by skin. Skulls with mouths locked in silent screams. The dead woman was pretty. And definitely younger than Mama.
“Put your arms around her,” Mama commanded.
She maneuvered my head beneath the corpse’s armpit and entwined our legs. Then she pulled up the blanket so the dead woman’s head was just showing.
“I’m leaving now, Tola,” she said. “I have to go and hide as well. But I won’t be far away. I will come back and get you. No matter what you hear, do not move until I return. Under any circumstances. Do you promise?”
“Yes, Mama. I promise.”
I did exactly as Mama said. I barely moved. I wasn’t afraid of the corpse. Why should I be? The pretty woman was dead and couldn’t hurt me. She was a friend who might save my life. My protector. So I followed Mama’s instructions, hugged the dead woman and waited.
At first, the corpse was warm. I was grateful for that. Feeling returned to my feet after tramping through the snow. But slowly, slowly, the corpse became cooler. I lay there listening, taking shallow breaths and waiting. I wondered why the pretty woman had died. I presumed it was hunger.
I was extraordinarily calm. A strange kind of peace came over me. I relaxed and began to visualize a doll with a green face. Not a complete doll. Just a head. I’d seen it sticking out of the mud as we ran. I didn’t know whether the head and body had become separated. Or whether the body was still attached to the head beneath the mud. I’d wanted to pick the head up. But we hadn’t had time to stop.
The head had friendly eyes and a kind mouth. I wanted that doll’s head. I didn’t have any toys here in the camp. I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know what playing was. Life was just about surviving. But I wanted the doll’s head to talk to and to keep me company. What pretty eyes she’d had.
My eyes began to feel heavy. I felt safe. Mama was nearby. The adrenaline from our adventure out in the open had subsided.
Then I heard the boots.
CHAPTER TWO
BEYOND THE TABLECLOTH
Jewish ghetto, Tomaszów Mazowiecki,
German-occupied Central Poland.
1941
Age 2 and 3
My domain extended all the way under the kitchen table. The boundaries were defined by the ragged borders of a cheap cloth, draped over the piece of furniture that was the beating heart of life in our overcrowded home in the ghetto. Beyond the tablecloth was the world of adults—and their lopsided war between Nazi persecutors and oppressed Jews. When in residence in my personal realm, I rarely saw the grown-ups’ faces—from my perspective, the outside universe only existed from the knees down. But I heard them talking, and I made it my business to work out which voice was coming from which pair of legs.
I heard snatches of conversations. And key words repeated over and over again, with a mixture of fear, anger and venom. Words that stuck in my mind.
“Gestapo.”
“SS.”
“Aktion.”
“Rations.”
“Margarine.”
“Hitler.”
“Dropped dead in the street.”
“Starvation.”
“Palestine.”
“Judenrat.”
“Ghetto.”
“Kropfitsch.”
“Another one.”
“That poor child.”
“Back of the head.”
“Those poor parents.”
There was never any good news outside the tablecloth. Life was a litany of catastrophes, of people disappearing, massacres and the constant struggle to find food.
Not to mention the shooting and the screams outside the window.
When the news was particularly bad, they whispered. They tried to keep me from hearing. I knew it was really bad when there was a deep intake of breath and the sound of a hand clasped over a mouth to prevent a cry from escaping. My ears were my early-warning system. I recognized how lightly or purposefully people walked. I could tell when a new set of shoes or boots entered the apartment. Sometimes they were friendly. But when I heard heavy boots, I knew trouble was imminent.
Beneath the table was my sanctuary. There I stayed and talked to my doll.
“Are you hungry, bubale?” I inquired.
“I’m starving. You must be, too. But don’t worry, Mama’s in the kitchen and she’s cooking potato-skin soup.
“Here it is. Eat it up. Be a good girl, bubale. Tasty, isn’t it? Mmmmmm. Lovely. Come on now. Eat your soup, bubale. It’s good for you.
“I’m sorry there’s no bread today. Please don’t cry.”
Occasionally, I would surface above the tablecloth and go and perch on the knee of my father, Machel, or I’d nestle in the lap of my mother, Reizel. Whenever Uncle James came to visit in the early days of the ghetto, when it was easier to move around, I sat on his knee and twiddled his bushy eyebrows. But usually I stayed under the table because I didn’t have a chair. There wasn’t sufficient space in the four-room apartment and there wasn’t enough furniture to go around.
We weren’t the only family living in flat number five, 24 Krzyżowa Street, Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Jews were forced to share cramped accommodation. In many apartments, instead of five or six people, there were maybe twenty. In others, the numbers might have been as high as sixty or seventy. One bathroom had to service maybe thirty to forty people. I had to eat and sleep under the table because there was so little space. Some people slept on the floor. My parents squeezed together in a single bed. I joined them in the middle of the night if I woke up scared.
If you were lucky, you lived together with friends or extended family. If not, you were compelled to cohabit with strangers you couldn’t bear. I have no firm memory of how many people were there or who they were. The situation was so fluid that the apartment was a constant revolving door of refugees. One day a whole set of familiar faces would vanish. Their disappearance would be accompanied by urgent whispers coming from beyond the tablecloth. It didn’t take long before they were replaced by others. Perhaps by even more people. The atmosphere inside the apartment would change. It was not always an improvement. I could sense it under the table.
We were stuffed like mice in there.
* * *
The Nazis created the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto in December 1940. Jews were banned from the main part of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, an industrial town in Central Poland, seventy miles southwest of the capital, Warsaw. They were required to identify themselves as Jews by wearing a white armband adorned with a blue Star of David. Failure to comply was punishable by death.
The Germans severed the electricity supply as one of their first strictures. Depriving us of a key component of modern life was another snip of the scissors cutting us slowly and painfully to death. There was no sewage system either. We were ordered to hang curtains or screens at windows that overlooked Aryan neighborhoods. The sense of isolation and segregation from the outside world was reinforced with every new restriction. Not only were we no longer supposed to look at our Polish neighbors, we were also denied sunlight as we were pushed back toward the Dark Ages. The Poles were ordered to block windows that overlooked the ghetto so they wouldn’t see what was happening and inform the outside world. Mind you, significant numbers of Poles in Tomaszów were anti-Semites. Some of them might have taken pleasure from our suffering. At least the curtains denied them that.
