In the Sewers of Lvov (2 page)

The inhabitants of the ghetto, all of them Jews, had long grown accustomed to the transports passing overhead, day and night. Those filled with soldiers would be headed east, to Tarnopol, to Kiev, to the war. During the winter, these trains became known as ‘frozen meat’. If, however, the train pulled the familiar bleak cattle trucks, they were simply known as the ‘Jewish Trains’.

Most people in the ghetto knew the destination of those trains from stories they had heard from the ‘jumpers’. These were the terrified creatures who had squeezed out from a cattle truck and jumped, stark naked, from the train. Those who survived the fall, or the shots from guards on the train, or being captured and delivered up to their guards, those who had survived all that – and some did – made their way to the ghetto where they sought sanctuary. Their descriptions of what was happening had forewarned those who had wanted to listen.

Cutting through the northern suburbs of the city, the trains would eventually emerge into the countryside to the east, then branch off to the north – for Belzec, a journey of less than two hours. They said the ground all along the line to Belzec was littered with the bleached remains of unsuccessful ‘jumpers’.
¹

* * *

The temperature had already dropped on that particular evening in March. On a single blast of a whistle, down on Peltewna Street groups of women appeared at doorways and began to file towards the centre of the street, while down towards the railway bridge, a small orchestra would begin a rousing march. The bright strains of clarinets and cymbals echoed discordantly. The orchestra had been an ‘improvement’ introduced by one of the ghetto’s previous commandants, SS Obersturmführer Heinrich.

The last stragglers stumbled out of the buildings and drifted down towards the orchestra, watched by armed soldiers standing at intervals along the road. The women, slightly stooped with malnutrition and clutching their loose-fitting clothes about them, shuffled into a ‘brigade’, a squad of about fifty, while a young man in a nondescript peaked cap, one of the Jewish police, a capo, paced up and down shepherding them into place. The same scene took place every day, morning and evening, there in the shadow of the railway bridge.

Beneath the bridge, the street was barred by a pair of large wooden gates, crowned with barbed wire. Stretching from the gates, along the line of the railway in either direction, was a wood and barbed-wire fence some ten feet high. It ran up to the bridge over Zamarstynowska Street, followed that street north to Graniczna Street where it turned left and re-crossed Peltewna Street and continued in a lazy arc back towards the railway line. By March 1943, there were 9000 souls living behind the fence.

Once the brigade had been counted, the women shuffled forwards, past the little orchestra, through the opened gates and out into the street. In her account of that day, Paulina Chiger recalled that she had not seen her husband before she was summoned to the brigade. But before leaving she had spoken with her seven-year-old daughter Kristina, leaving strict instructions where she and her younger brother were to hide if there was trouble. It had been rehearsed many times; at the first sound of footsteps, Kristina would grab young Pawel, who was only four years old, and push him into a suitcase which she then slid under the bed. Then she would dash to the corner where her mother’s dressing gown hung from a nail, and hide behind it. As she waited, Kristina
counted the seconds until she could get to Pawel before he suffocated.

The women walked down the centre of the road, their escorts marching along the pavements on either side. As this wretched column moved along they were jeered at by groups of men, or laughed at by children playing in the street. They marched on, heads bowed, clutching their coats tightly round their shoulders. It was not uncommon for an emboldened passer-by to leap at some unfortunate in the column and snatch their coat or jacket. It was not a criminal offence to steal from a Jew.

They marched through the heart of the city to the Schwartz und Comp., a garment factory on Uichala Street. There were a great many enterprises that had flourished on the labour of these people. Leder, Pelz-Galenterie Le-Pel-Ga, Hazet (a confectioner), Rucker (meat canning), Staedtische Werkataetten (municipal utility shops), Reinigung (refuse collection and disposal), Ostbahn (railway workshops) and others. At Schwartz und Comp. they produced military uniforms. In the summer, thousands of light green shirts, jackets and trousers; in the winter the uniforms were white. More than 3000 people, mostly women, laboured in two twelve-hour shifts to fulfil their quotas. They worked over peddle machines or conveyor belts under the eyes of managers who maintained efficiency and discipline with a rubber club.

The factory was kept running twenty-four hours a day, and a worker who failed to meet the quota was kept there fourteen, sixteen hours until it was completed. Despite the regime at Schwartz, it was one of the better places to work and there was always a queue outside to fill any vacancies. The alternative to employment was certain deportation.

A young girl of seventeen, Klara Keler, found herself assigned to the Schwartz workforce. Her father and brother had been taken many months before and had died in the Janowska camp. A little later, Klara had witnessed her mother’s execution – shot dead before her eyes. So Klara and her younger sister Manya were left to fend for themselves. Almost immediately, they were separated and Klara was taken to the Janowska camp. In her
account, Klara remembers having to stand in the centre of the parade ground with hundreds of other women, while an officer marched amongst their ranks ordering each to step either to the left or to the right.

Like countless others who had stood on that piece of ground, Klara had no idea of the significance of these orders. Except that on that occasion, there was someone close by who understood what was happening – who knew the rules. As Klara watched the officer moving slowly down the line towards her, she felt a stiff kick in the back of the leg. Then, she recalled, a woman whispered to her from behind.:

‘Tell them you can sew,’ she was told.

Klara looked over her shoulder at the woman behind her.

‘Tell them you can sew.’

‘But I don’t know the first thing …’

‘Just tell them you can sew!’

Klara did as she was told and the guard lent into her.

‘Do you have your own machine?’

‘We both have machines.’ The words had come from the young woman behind her and Klara nodded in agreement.

‘Yes, I have a machine.’

‘To the right.’

The two of them were taken back to the ghetto. Her new companion was a woman called Esther. When Klara and Manya were reunited they moved in with Esther and her family, who lived in a block of workers’ dwellings they called the ‘barracks’ near the gates to the ghetto. Though her new neighbours seemed a pretty rough-looking crowd, the two girls knew they were safe.

A sewing machine was found for Klara, which had to be donated to Schwartz und Comp. in return for employment. Manya never managed to get a work permit and so had to remain hidden in the barracks where some of the men always seemed prepared to hide people from the authorities.

In the same brigade was another young woman, stumbling to keep her place. She was called Halina. It wasn’t her real name. She had been born Fayga Wind, but became Halina Naskiewicz, a good Catholic Pole, in an attempt to save herself. For a while it
had worked, and as a good Catholic she had kept out of harm’s way, peering from her room in Lvov at these pitiful women shuffling through the streets to work. The sight used to break her heart: ‘it was excruciating, watching them being led with whips and dogs.’

It wasn’t long, however, before Halina’s deception was discovered and she was forced to join these same women. Confused, bewildered and afraid, she hid her face from the mocking eyes. She had adopted the name Halina, discarded Naskiewicz and now called herself Halina Wind.
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Before the new shift began, the women were addressed by an SS officer from the Janowska camp. The message he had brought was that this would be the last night shift. Other work would be found for them, but that would be the last time they had to make the journey to Schwartz und Comp. during the evening. The news was of little interest.

‘Do they no longer need so many uniforms? What kind of work do they have in store? What else is there to do in this place but make uniforms?’

They laboured before their peddle machines, counting the hours till the meal break at midnight, a bowl of hot soup and some bread. In the long stretch through the night, they glanced up now and again to the frosted windows for a sign that the shift was over. Then, as the grey light of dawn appeared, the same cavalcade of exhausted women returned to the gates of the ghetto. In fact, it was not really a ghetto. Since January it had lost any vestige of being a neighbourhood for free citizens when it was declared a Juden Lager, or Julag. In March, a new notice had been erected at the entrance.

It translated: Jewish Camp, ‘R’ for
ruestung
, meaning munitions, and ‘W’ for
wirtschaft
, meaning economic production. It had effectively been transformed into a concentration camp, a place where the inhabitants slept when they were not at their labours.
The people who lived there had to have employment in an approved enterprise and were assigned to specific accommodation blocks depending on where they worked. If you were without work, you were dead.

The ghetto commander was SS Obersturmführer Grzymek, a German national from the Sudetenland. His predecessor, Heinrich, had lasted but a few months before contracting spotted typhus. Grzymek’s arrival had utterly transformed their lives because of his insane obsession with cleanliness. He insisted upon the highest standards of hygiene for everyone. Throughout the Julag he had erected posters proclaiming:

CLEANLINESS AND ORDER!

ORDER AND CLEANLINESS MUST BE MAINTAINED!

ORDER ABOVE ALL!

He patrolled the streets himself, entering the buildings to inspect each home while the inhabitants were at work. A smear of grease on a pane of glass, scraps of food, a heap of ashes in the stove would be cause for retribution. Grzymek was homicidal. For a tuft of stubble left unshaved he would shoot you himself; for an untidy room he would deport all the inhabitants; for the first hint of disease he would execute everyone in the building and raze the pitiful shell to the ground. His lunatic behaviour sent the population into frenzied devotions of washing, sweeping, polishing whatever they were forced to call home.

That morning, as the women returned from the last night shift, they shuffled through the gates much earlier than usual. Klara recalled, ‘It was five o’clock and something was happening.’ Their escorts gathered into a group like a collapsing concertina and stared ahead of them. Something was definitely happening. Gradually the women saw too. Up the street, soldiers were cursing and barking orders above the sound of children’s cries. They were taking the children.

Commandant Grzymek, with a detachment of the SS and swarms of Ukrainian militia, was rounding up the children of the ghetto.

Everyone froze for a moment as they slowly took this in. A number of large flat-bed trucks was parked at the top of the road, on to which they were loading the children. Grzymek himself paced back and forth barking orders. Occasionally he would point up the street, a shot would snap through the noise and someone would fall. Meanwhile the soldiers herded small groups towards the trucks. Klara’s account recorded the brutality: ‘Some were dead, some were shot. But the way they just picked them up and threw them – like you would throw a piece of meat.’

Klara saw the wounded and dead simply dragged by their feet through the street. The women watched in horror as their children were taken by an arm or a leg and swung off the ground on to the back of the truck.

Finally some of the mothers made a desperate dash towards the trucks, screaming the names they had given their young ones. Some climbed on to the trucks, some were halted and then thrown on to the truck with their children. Grzymek was in complete control. There would be no chaos – though the screams and the sounds of weeping seemed to rend the heavens. Klara stood with a small group of witnesses, terrified by what played out before them. She glanced at the soldiers that were standing beside them. ‘Even the guards who had come back to the ghetto with us were silenced. They just stood still,’ Klara recalled.

At the top of the street, the hysteria continued unabated. In their panic to find their loved ones, most of the mothers avoided the trucks in case they found what they were looking for. Instead they ran straight into their homes, to the safe places where they had left their children the night before. They burst through doorways, opened cupboards, looked under beds, while an endless chorus of children’s names rang down the alleys, up the stairwells and across the roofs. The bed clothes were still warm, the chairs had been tipped over. The children were gone.

Paulina Chiger came into her apartment and found it empty. Her cries joined with the others as she looked again and again in the wardrobe and the suitcases under the bed. She returned to the corridor and went down the stairs, to the workshop in the basement. Ignacy, her husband, was the foreman there, supervising
the mending of furniture and anything else in the ghetto that needed repair.

‘Where are my children?’ Paulina asked.

The terror was there too, on the workmen’s faces. There was no sense in trying to be calm.

‘Ignacy? The children!’;

‘There, in the bunker.’

One of the men stepped forward. ‘In the bunker. Here.’

At that moment her husband appeared, took hold of his wife and led her roughly towards the corner. He had constructed another of his ingenious hiding places behind a false wall. It was no more than a foot wide and simply made that part of the cellar seem smaller. There was a disguised entrance to one side which Ignacy removed and pushed his wife through. Breathless, she groped in the dark until she felt the familiar shapes of her children. Their hands reached for her but they didn’t utter a sound. Paulina stifled her panting and in the brief pockets of silence, could hear the breathing of others.