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Authors: Robert Marshall

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #History, #Military, #World War II, #Jewish, #Holocaust

In the Sewers of Lvov (10 page)

BOOK: In the Sewers of Lvov
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On the fourth day, Socha arrived with his food and wanted to talk about the situation. There was no question about it, an obligation towards seventy or more people was overwhelming both him and Wroblewski. He felt like throwing it all in. Instead he decided to discuss the situation with Weiss and the others. The accounts vary as to how they arrived at a solution, but eventually it became clear what had to be done. According to Chiger: ‘Socha agreed to go on, but only with a smaller group. He would lead it to where he and his colleagues had found a place in which a dozen or so people could live.’

He wanted them to make their own selection; those who could best afford to pay for their food and protection, who could be trusted, and perhaps more importantly, those who could form a cohesive group. The rest would have to survive as best they could on their own.

The moment Socha left, the group descended into acrimony as each in turn argued that they had the means to pay for their keep. It was an impossible situation for Weiss to arbitrate. Of course, he knew that he and his immediate colleagues would make up the core of a smaller group. The Chigers would also be included because it was known that they had means. But money would not be the only factor. Weiss had many friends, all of whom looked to him for salvation. Yet Socha had implied that it had to be a group of no more than twelve, if they were to have any chance of surviving.

Relatively little has been recorded of how the little group was selected. Chiger described the debate simply as ‘a great deal of commotion’. There were arguments as to everyone’s suitability, their character, and what they could or could not contribute. By the following day, when Socha returned, they had made a final selection numbering more than fifteen. Weiss, his core of friends, and the Chigers, including Kuba, had selected themselves. The rest had become desperate. Klara Keler had taken hold of Paulina’s arm and proclaimed, ‘You are my mother now!’ She had no other words to express herself. She was completely at their mercy. She was such an unlikely candidate; a single girl without the means to pay for her survival. ‘I didn’t have anything, not
even a handkerchief. Just my coat and what I stood in. So I didn’t have much, just Mundek, who always kept very close to me.’

Her only other ally was Paulina, whom she clung to: ‘… begging Pepa to let her stay with the family.’ According to Chiger, ‘… my wife succeeded in convincing Socha to let her stay and Klara did indeed look upon my wife as a mother.’

Socha noticed that though Margulies had been involved from the beginning, he had not been chosen. Socha had got to know Margulies during the work on the shaft and had no doubts.

‘Take Margulies, you will need him,’ he said.

Weiss had said nothing about Margulies, and Chiger knew nothing about him or his involvement in the project. As far as he was concerned, Margulies was simply ‘… a barber by profession and a trickster by disposition … [who] had been brought by Socha with some others … and had attached themselves almost forcefully, begging us to include them in our group.’

Inevitably the selection process generated a great deal of resentment and it is at this point in his account that Chiger first mentions his doubts about Weiss. He queried, ‘Why had Weiss abandoned his wife and daughter … [and yet brought with him] a young girl – Halina, another woman and his friends the Weinbergs and the Orenbach brothers?’ He had known nothing about the scene in the cellar between Weiss and his wife, nor what Weiss’s feelings might have been after losing his family. Curiously, no one seemed to have enlightened him.

It was also around this time that Paulina first encountered Genia Weinberg.

‘You bring children down here? Are you crazy?’ she said to Paulina. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy?’ she kept repeating.

Paulina returned, ‘What else can I do? Do you expect me to take them up to the street and leave them there? What do you think?’

A nerve had been exposed, not in Paulina but in Mrs Weinberg. She and her husband were two, but the Chigers, including Kuba, were five. Mrs Weinberg also had children, but they were elsewhere now. After the final count, there were
twenty-one selected to leave the main group and follow Socha. ‘It was very sad, but what could he do? He just couldn’t cope with all those people,’ recalled Paulina.

There are no other descriptions of their departure from the rest. With Socha in the lead, they proceeded down towards the main chamber. ‘Walking along the ledge, our group resembled a cavalcade of marching ghosts, led by Socha’s glimmering lamp. In the middle, Stefak Wroblewski strode with his lamp. It seemed an endless journey,’ wrote Chiger.

Every fifty metres or so, their progress was halted at the large elliptical tunnels that emptied into the Peltwa. One by one, they had to step down into the rushing water and stride across to where the ledge continued. It would have been so easy to slip in the current and be carried sideways into the river. From the head of the cavalcade, Socha was sending words of warning back along the line.

They turned into one of the elliptical tunnels and proceeded away from the Peltwa. These tunnels, perhaps seven foot high, carried water usually up to about knee depth, but as the group was so tightly bunched down this route, they held up the flow of sewage so that it rose almost to hip level.

They walked on and on, travelling under one city block after another. For most of the travellers, it was their first real opportunity to explore the tunnels. ‘It was just like an underground city – an underground Lvov,’ recalled Paulina. ‘Every house, every street had its own outlet to the system.’

Regularly drenched by unseen cascades from above, they were finally brought to a halt beneath a steel hatch that was bolted shut. Socha opened it and immediately let escape yet another deluge upon their heads. When the flow had subsided, he climbed through. Wroblewski stood beneath and helped each one up to Socha’s outstretched hand, until they had all climbed through the hatch. The next pipe was some four feet high and necessitated crawling on all fours until eventually they arrived at a much larger tunnel which broadened out into a massive alcove strewn with large, crudely hewn limestone blocks, left over from the construction of the central chamber.

‘This,’ claimed Socha, ‘is much more convenient and safer too.’

Exhausted, they staggered about the cavern, looking for somewhere they could stretch out and rest themselves. There was nowhere. Cold and drenched to the skin, they sat on the limestone blocks, gradually surveying their new home. It was dreadful. A cold, damp draft swept over their heads, and at times it whipped up into a fair wind. It howled and whistled through some unseen crack. At their feet, a trench carried a constant flow and rising from it was the unmistakable stench of raw sewage.

‘We are right beneath the Church of Our Lady of the Snows,’ Socha announced, as though their proximity to a place of worship would in some way compensate for the smell of excrement. It seemed that the place he had brought them to was somehow in the foundations of the church. There were municipal toilets in a square nearby, which had been a public disgrace – even above the ground. Every time the toilets were flushed a new wave of excrement passed down the trench and sometimes overflowed across the floor. They settled down on the stones, shivering in a howling wind, while rats scuttled about their feet. So, here was their first home in the sewers: cold, wet, and reeking of shit.

Chapter VI

They calculated that they were only about twelve feet beneath the Church of Our Lady of the Snows. They could hear the daily visits of worshippers and even the murmuring of prayers. The conduit for these sounds was a steel waste pipe, the top half of which was covered only by a wire mesh, and which passed through their space on its way to the waters of the Peltwa. As the pipe seemed to be such an efficient sound conductor, they consequently believed that their own voices would be amplified back through the same pipe and heard coming up through the drains in the church. So they resolved to talk only in whispers.

Each day, Socha arrived with food and, if possible, he brought drinking water too which was shared out amongst the group. Despite this regular supply of food and water, their environment was squalid and many of them soon succumbed to dysentery. The children were the first. Though crippled with diarrhoea, there was little privacy and they were obliged to relieve themselves in a corner of the room. With the regular loss of fluid, they became seriously dehydrated. Fresh drinking water became the most precious commodity and the very limited quantities that could be brought were carefully rationed. The allowance was about half a cup of water per person. Chiger and Paulina refused their rations and passed them on to their children.

‘The dampness in the air was enough for us; we took it in through the pores of our skin,’ recalled Paulina.

The morale of the group plunged further. They huddled together on the cluster of crudely hewn limestone blocks, trying to avoid the chilling draft that cut through the place. The Chigers cradled their children on their laps, whispering comforting words
to them. They slept that way too. There was no space to lie down and so everyone huddled into groups, exploring every possible angle into which they could squeeze their limbs. Soon everyone had dysentery and were racked with painful stomach cramps and diarrhoea. ‘We had a shovel and every so often Margulies would scrape the shit into the trough,’ recalled Paulina.

They became so thirsty that Chiger and some others drank the sewer water and inevitably became chronically ill. They had lost the stove they had planned to bring with them, so there was no means of boiling the water. He asked Socha if he could bring some alcohol on his next visit, and perhaps an empty tin. He planned to try to improvise a stove. He poured the alcohol into an empty sardine tin, and set it alight. Over the tiny flame he held a cup of water which he boiled and then gave to Krisia and Pawel with a lump of sugar.

In the cavern beneath the church, some of the group set about trying to make the conditions more comfortable. Margulies, Berestycki and Chaskiel Orenbach took the initiative, found their way down to the main chamber and set out on the long walk back towards the ghetto. They passed the same ledges and tunnels, that, less than a fortnight before, had been crowded with desperate people. As they moved forward, they heard nothing but their own footsteps mixed with the roar of the Peltwa. The cries and echoes of all the people who had followed them into the sewers had ceased long ago.

Their journey would take them past the tunnel they had prepared before the liquidation. All their labour spent clearing the debris and constructing benches had been for nothing. The tunnel had been occupied by strangers long before they had arrived. Margulies recalled struggling past the opening, on that first dreadful night, and finding the place full. Now, as he and the others made their first journey back that way, he wondered if they were still there and how they were coping.

As they stepped into the entrance they saw what they’d expected. Some twenty-six people, huddled in the darkness, some way down the tunnel. This forlorn group, led by a doctor, had all come from
the barrack and must have been encouraged to come down by Weiss. They tossed a greeting to each other, but there was little else they could have done. Margulies recognized a few faces. He recalled: ‘They were all seated on the benches we had made. We let them stay there. We couldn’t have looked after them, but we knew they were there.’

Margulies and the others had not come to pay a visit. They were going further. They had decided to return to Weiss’s cellar, partly to satisfy their curiosity but mostly to scavenge for anything that might make their existence more bearable. They planned to get back into the barrack, where there might be something that could be salvaged.

As they approached the spot where the shaft broke through the chamber roof, it seemed both familiar and strange. So much had happened since the night of the liquidation. When they peered back up through the shaft, they could feel a soft draft of fresh air against their faces. It was deceptively peaceful. It was also completely quiet. They climbed towards the draft and miraculously, the iron grate was still in place. If the Germans had got down to the cellar, then they had discovered nothing more curious than a simple drain in the floor. However, as well as the grate, there was the stone slab which Margulies had heaved into the hole in Weiss’s floor. The real test would be shifting the slab.

When they were all inside the cellar, they heaved against the slab, raising it a few centimetres. The light in the room nearly blinded them, yet the lights were off and it was late in the evening. They had already grown accustomed to the dark. When their eyes had settled, they looked again. The place was deserted. Nothing moved. They shifted the slab out of the way and climbed into the room. Everything was in utter ruin. Furniture was shattered, clothes had been ripped into rags, broken plates crunched under their feet. There was nothing worth salvaging and they knew they would have to move on. A wind outside was swinging a window on its hinges, but otherwise, it was silent. Every step they took seemed to announce their presence to the entire district.

To get into any of the other rooms they had to step out into the corridor that ran the full length of the building. If there was anyone
on guard, there would be nowhere to hide, no escape. Gathering all their courage, they peered round the door. The corridor was deserted.

There had been nearly a hundred families living in the rooms on either side and the corridors had once teemed with children. It had never been as silent as it was that evening. Margulies crossed to another room and looked out across Peltewna Street. More desolation. The buildings opposite had been gutted by fire. They were roped off and patrolled by Ukrainian guards. It would have been suicide to step out into the street. Moving as quietly as possible from room to room, they found some plates, cups, a tea pot, some tin bowls, some bed linen and a pillow. And one grand discovery: Berestycki laid his hands on a small kerosine stove. They didn’t search far; they didn’t want to force their luck, and there would be another time. From the window, Margulies could see the Ukrainian guards looting the building across the way. They had brought their families to help. Children were stumbling under the weight of suitcases filled with plunder. Having gathered up their own booty, Margulies and the others slipped back into the cellar and were about to slide the slab back into place, when they heard a noise. They froze and waited. It was the sound of breathing and then a slow, weak shuffle. Whoever it was seemed to be unaware of their presence. Margulies stepped towards the sound and there was a startled cry.

BOOK: In the Sewers of Lvov
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