In the Sewers of Lvov (15 page)

Paulina came through with the children and immediately stepped across to the adjacent compartment and settled down on the floor. The men arrived and began to explore the place thoroughly. It was impossible to stand upright, which meant the ceiling must have been little more than a metre and a half high. In
the wall immediately opposite the Seventy, about a metre from the ground, another pipe emptied rainwater from the street. This ran down the wall, across the floor and out the Seventy. To the right was an area filled with earth and rubble. The walls, built of closely masoned stone, were mouldy and covered in cobwebs.

Apart from the flow of rain water, the rest of the floor was dry. In fact, Paulina remembers that it was the only dry place she’d seen in the sewers.

The men got down to discussing the relative merits of the place. Some were for it, others against. Socha did his best to sell the place, because, quite simply, he was running out of alternatives. Seeing he wouldn’t get a straight answer from the men, he came over to Paulina sitting on her own with Mrs Weiss and the children: ‘He laughed and smiled at me. “What do you say Mrs Chiger?” I turned to him and I said, “Socha, it’s a palace. It’s a palace!”’

‘I have one more request, Mr Socha.’ said Paulina.

‘What is it?’ replied Socha.

‘Like you, I believe in God.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have always lit candles, even in the ghetto, even in the camp.’

‘Candles?’

‘On Friday I light candles, on Friday evening. Could you bring me candles so that I can light them at the beginning of the Sabbath?’

According to Paulina, ‘Socha embraced me. He was very devout. He said, “I love believers. I’ll bring you candles every week.”’

At sunset on Fridays, or whenever she could judge it to be sunset, Paulina lit her candles, covered her eyes and whispered to herself, ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath light.’ Every week, throughout the rest of their ordeal, Socha brought Paulina candles for Friday night.

The men returned to the room beneath the Church of Our Lady of the Snows and retrieved everything that had been left there. Stoves, jars of pickled cucumbers, barley, coffee, blankets, saucepans, buckets, cups and plates. With their shovels they scraped the walls and floor of their new sanctuary and did what they could to keep the place tidy.

A bucket was allocated for human waste, which someone dragged down the Seventy and emptied into the Peltwa each morning. Then they set off with a separate bucket to collect fresh
water. They produced a basin for washing and each morning everyone washed their hands and faces and, once a week, stripped down and bathed completely. Socha brought them another lamp and with it a regular supply of carbide to fuel it. The lamp was suspended from the ceiling and blazed away, day or night. The old carbide lamp had been the standard form of illumination on most carriages and motor vehicles before the war. Carbide, a compound of carbon, when placed in a vessel with a little water, undergoes a chemical reaction which produces the gas acetylene. This is collected at the top of the vessel and fed to a small flame. The light produced from this flame, a soft yellow flare, was enough to see by and was relatively safe. Each morning the base of the tank was unscrewed and the used residue at the bottom dumped in the corner with all the rubble. Fresh carbide had been stockpiled in various locations throughout the sewers before the liquidation. When that ran out, Socha brought fresh supplies along with some kerosine for the stoves, and left it at some predetermined spot in the tunnels, where one of the men would go and collect it.

The business of collecting water also changed. Socha found another location that was closer, though far more difficult to get to. Despite the difficulty, the water supply was good and constant. They had to crawl down the Seventy and then into a Forty that travelled under the length of Serbska Street up to Rynek, the main square where the town hall stood. They then turned left down another Forty, which ran directly under the fountain of Neptune. Beneath the public fountain, where each day women queued with buckets and pitchers to collect the day’s supply, water drained directly into the sewers.

Collecting the water was an exhausting and tedious exercise. It was usually carried out by two people and invariably one of these would be Klara. They would squeeze themselves into the Forty, one going backwards and the other forwards. The bucket was dragged, or pushed between them. According to Klara, ‘You had to crawl on your stomach and manoeuvre with your elbows.’

They fashioned a special handle on the bucket which could be looped over someone’s head, so they could drag the bucket with
them. Having filled their bucket they would shuffle slowly back under Rynek, where above them Ukrainian peasant women stood selling bunches of dried herbs and wild flowers. They crawled under Serbska Street to the junction with Bernadinski Square, named after the monastery on its eastern side. There, in the street above, fresh green lawns sheltered by plum trees provided a welcome resting place for pedestrians. The storm basin where they were hidden was directly beneath Bernadinski Square.

Socha also helped to improve their sleeping arrangements. He knew the location of some timber which he claimed could be fashioned into beds. However, collecting the timber would involve a highly dangerous expedition, one which Korsarz revelled in. Socha took Margulies, Chiger and Berestycki on a long journey. Setting out to the west, they crawled beneath the square where stood the statue of the great Polish poet, Adam Miskievicz. There the pipe ran into an elliptical tunnel, in which they could walk upright a short distance to the Peltwa. They crossed the river at one of the little bridges and then followed a tunnel that ran under one of Lvov’s great boulevards, Kopernica Street. At the far end of that, past a cinema and the main post office, they took a turn to the left, towards the Lonsky prison.

This infamous location had been used by the NKVD during the Soviet occupation between September 1939 and June 1941. When the Germans arrived they made great play of the appalling atrocities the Soviet secret police had carried out behind its walls. For the benefit of Nazi cameramen, Jewish labourers were filmed carrying out scores of corpses and stacking them up outside. During the Soviet occupation the corpses had been Ukrainian nationalists; under the Nazis, they were Jews and communists. Since the building had been commandeered by the Gestapo, it had been turned into a place of unqualified brutality and deprivation.

Way down in the foundations of the prison the Germans had constructed a bomb shelter, with an exit into the sewers. ‘The bomb shelter had become flooded with sewer water,’ according to Socha, ‘… [and so] it was abandoned.’ The entrance to the bunker was a heavy steel door, in the centre of which was a large wheel that controlled a compression lock. ‘We were standing
right underneath Gestapo headquarters. We didn’t know what we would find inside.’ recalled Margulies.

Socha turned the wheel, heaved against the door and went in first. If he was discovered, he could at least claim to have some authority to be poking around in sections of the sewer. When he emerged again a little later, it was just as he said it would be – abandoned. Inside, the room was in some chaos. The floor was under several feet of water. There were stacks of shelves that had collapsed and a number of simple wooden bunk beds, partly submerged under mud and water. Everyday flotsam bobbed about on the oily black surface.

For Chiger, it was a treasure-trove. For Margulies, there was the particular thrill of plundering the very bowels of the Nazi police headquarters. There was far too much wood to carry out at once; they would have to make a number of trips. They lifted out some of the bunk beds, broke them down into smaller pieces, then made the long journey across the city to the Bernadinski Square.

The planking was filthy with mud and completely waterlogged, but it was still invaluable. They decided to construct a large communal bed in the longer of the two compartments by wedging two or three beams crossways between the walls, then laying the planking lengthways up to the end. The waterlogged timber was initially very uncomfortable and probably unhealthy to sleep on, but it was either that or the floor. ‘At least now we could stretch out properly for the first time. It made a big difference,’ wrote Chiger. ‘We knew our body warmth would eventually dry out the timber, which it did.’ He went on to speculate: ‘But did that mean that our bodies absorbed all the moisture? It was probably what happened, in which case terrible harm was done to our internal systems.’

During the daytime, the centre planks were removed, creating a galley between two opposite benches and, as the room was so low, they spent most of the time seated on these benches.

So gradually a daily routine emerged. They rose late in the morning and each took turns to wash in the water that had been left over from the day before. Berestycki would take out his
tefillin, enwrap his arm with the leather thong, whisper the first verse of his devotions, then strap the little box against his forehead and intone the rest of the morning prayer. The carbide lamps were cleaned out and relit. The waste bucket was emptied and two people set off to fetch the day’s water. On their return, perhaps an hour later, Paulina would take the oldest piece of bread and cut it into equal parts for everyone. She had assumed the role that had previously been Halina’s.

Mrs Weinberg made coffee, sometimes sweetened with a little sugar, which they drank with their bread. The ersatz coffee, a mixture of chicory and cocoa solids, was stored in air-tight tins and replenished every two or three weeks. They never saw any milk, which, in any case, would have been impossible to keep fresh.

The bread too, would not last for long in the damp and musty atmosphere. The slightest morsel would attract the rats who made it impossible sometimes to eat a meal in peace. First, the bread was kept in a metal container with a lid held down by a stone. But the tenacious beasts still managed to get at it. Hiding the bread under the planks was tried, but this didn’t work. Surrounding the bread with broken pieces of glass from bottles washed down into the sewer was ineffectual – the rats ignored the glass. Finally, the iron canister was suspended from the ceiling and this proved to be the solution. It also provided the children with hours of innocent entertainment, as they watched the rats going through the most exhaustive acrobatics, trying to reach the canister of bread.

They decided only to eat bread that was two or three days old, in case Socha was unable to make a delivery every day. This meant the bread was always mouldy. No matter, they simply cut away the white fungus on the crust and ate what was in the centre. After breakfast, they would sit together and talk, and wait for Socha. While they did this, they occupied their hands with the daily ritual of removing lice from their clothing. It was painstaking work, running their fingers up and down their clothes, and then plucking the lice, which they fed to the rats. Old Mrs Weiss had been lousy before they had entered the sewers, and now they were all infested. Paulina used to tend to ‘Babsha’, as they called
the old woman. By now she had become quite somnolent, spending almost the whole day in her bed, her thoughts in some far distant place.

Then the familiar shuffles would announce Socha’s arrival. The sight of his beaming face, illuminated by a row of shining teeth, became something of a symbol of his beneficence. ‘He was like a guardian angel, just for me’ recalled Kristina. ‘Something sent from another world to keep me safe.’ The fresh bread was placed in the canister and then he and Wroblewski would share coffee with them. Invariably Socha would share some of his lunch with the children. Kristina described their meals:

He used to give my brother and me some of his cold pork sausage. I shall never forget the taste. It was so good, so tasty. He gave us each a small piece and I remember that I used to have a big piece of bread in one hand and the pork in the other. I’d try and make the meat last for a long time, so I’d take a big bite of bread and then a very, very small bite of the pork. It was so good.

In the meantime, everyone would gather round to hear the news. Rumours, gossip, fragments from the various underground movements: ‘We were his captive audience. Huddled around him, eager for every morsel of news.’ wrote Chiger. And Paulina recalled: ‘Sometimes he used to stay for two hours, before going off to do an eight hour-day in the sewers.’

Socha also used to bring copies of
Das Reich
, one of the few newspapers that was published in abundance. Despite the distorted reports of the progress of the war, the Nazi rag was still devoured from cover to cover. Chiger used to take a macabre interest in the words of one of its columnists, Werner Lojewski, who wrote with almost hysterical superlatives about German victories in the east and, in particular, against the evils of the so-called ‘Jewish conspiracy’. It must have seemed curiously unsettling to be reading this material, while hiding just beneath the conquerors’ feet. Sometimes they also received copies of the
Polish People’s Army
which, hardly surprisingly, contradicted
Das Reich
in all respects except the publication date.

Around midday they sat down to a lunch which, like the evening meal, usually consisted of soup. Genia Weinberg had taken on the responsibility for cooking. Her speciality was a potato soup. She began by frying onions, if she had any, then adding potatoes and water and boiling the mixture until the potatoes could be pulped. The soup was often enhanced with lentils or barley, which Socha seemed able to get fairly easily.

Chaskiel Orenbach loved the potato soup and taught everyone how to turn it into two separate courses. First by drinking the liquor – the ‘soup’ – and then by mashing the potatoes and whatever happened to be in with them – ‘the main course’.

The purchase of regular supplies of food posed a number of problems for Socha. ‘We were worried in case he got caught buying so much food,’ explained Klara. ‘We told him to buy it from different shops in different neighbourhoods, so as not to arouse suspicion.’ But running about from shop to shop was something he had little time for. He had to employ someone else, and the most likely candidate was his wife Wanda. But letting Wanda into his secret posed a problem. Wanda, though ‘an active and energetic woman’, was temperamentally completely different to Socha. Like the majority of working-class Poles, Wanda had no sympathy for Jews. ‘Go to your Jews,’ she used to say to Leopold when out of patience with her husband, after being included in the secret. Socha explained, ‘I told her not to breathe a word to anyone about what she knew. She doesn’t know where you’re hidden so you’re safe. Besides it will do her no good to tell anyone. If the Germans ever hear that we are sheltering Jews, she will hang too.’