In the Sewers of Lvov (21 page)

On 10 November, the young nineteen-year-old, stepped out of her family house. She was now Halina Naskiewicz. She carried false papers that claimed her parents’ names were John and Mary, and wore a medallion of the Virgin that her mother had given to her. Her father urged her to try and get to America, ‘… survive … and tell the world what happened.’

Halina took the train to Lvov where she rented a room from a Mrs Szczepaniak, a widow with two daughters. Living in the Aryan district, she daily witnessed the parade of brigades of
workers from the ghetto or the camp, to the factories and back, wretched groups, clothed in rags and almost dead on their feet. While in the evening, she listened to Mrs Szczepaniak complain, ‘Oh my God, have they not finished them all yet?’

On Christmas day a priest came to the house to celebrate Mass in the front parlour. As she knelt with the others to receive Holy Communion, Halina committed a venal sin. She reached out to take the host in her hand instead of, as she was a woman, allowing the priest to place it on her tongue. The indiscretion led to her capture. Mrs Szczepaniak ordered her from the house, giving her another address she could move, to but when Halina arrived, Ukrainian police were already waiting for her. She had been betrayed.

Though she declared her name was Halina Naszkiewicz again and again, the police beat her and took her along to the Commissariat. There she underwent the same ordeal, but now before an officer who applied a whip rather than truncheons. The officer was determined to extract a confession and thrashed her again with the whip, while Halina continued to declare herself a Christian. Finally, when she was almost exhausted with pain, the officer presented her with her death certificate to sign. Halina thought, ‘He’ll beat me until I do … they’ll kill me anyway.’ She signed.

Then she was taken to a cell where she slept fitfully, listening to the screams of others. With the dawn she was woken again and ordered outside. There she joined a group of ‘false Aryans’ who were being loaded on to the little open tram waggons that ran down the tram tracks. They were driven through the town to the gates of the Ghetto, unloaded and marched inside to the prison on Weisenhof Street.

Her first impressions were recorded: ‘Inside the stench was unbearable. The place was filthy, the people like shadows. Buckets served as toilets. A guard told her, “It’s your turn to empty the buckets.”’ Halina took hold of a bucket of excrement and walked down the corridors. Ahead of her she could see daylight from the courtyard; someone had left the main door wide open. There being no sign of any guards she walked out into the
courtyard, still carrying the bucket. She looked around herself and saw that she was alone. It was a beautiful day, quiet and still. She put the bucket down and walked straight for the gates to the prison and slipped outside.

Out in the streets of the ghetto, she pressed herself against the walls and waited. The streets were empty. Though she did not know it, everyone was either at work, or in hiding. Halina walked slowly down to Peltewna Street and from there headed towards the railway embankment. In the prison, the alarm had been raised and the dogs had been alerted. Terrified and still dazed with pain, she pressed herself against another wall; it was the barrack under the shadow of the railway line. Suddenly she heard a voice speak in Yiddish.

‘Come in! Come in!’

A man had slipped out of a doorway and taken her by the arm. Halina was now even more terrified.

‘You’re from the prison.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They’re already coming for you. Come inside.’

Halina refused. She had no way of knowing who to trust any more. Then she heard the voice of an elderly woman.

‘Come in, don’t be afraid.’

Uncertain what to do, she allowed herself to be led inside, down a corridor, into a room. There she met another man, short and agile, who introduced himself as Jacob. The two who had led her off the street were Weiss and his mother. Still terrified of some retribution, Halina complained that she wanted to get back to the prison, but she was finally reassured.

‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Berestycki. ‘You can stay with us. We’ll get you the correct papers so that you can work.’

Finally reassured, Halina agreed to stay. Weiss and his wife found space on their floor for her to sleep beside their daughter and the old woman. She was visited every day by Berestycki, who brought her food – and eventually the papers of someone recently deceased; occupation: Seamstress. With these papers she had automatically joined the ranks of women who daily marched to and from the Schwartz und Comp. factory. She was alive, she
had work, she had a place to stay and the company of Jacob and Weiss’s family. That had all taken place a year ago …
¹⁵

Every Friday, when Socha collected his money, he reminded them in a somewhat unnerving way that their financial resources were finite and that he and his fellows would eventually have to cease their visits.

‘I don’t know what will happen. They will not work for nothing,’ he would say. These reminders would come without warning, ‘like a dark cloud’ casting them all into depression. ‘It will be very difficult when the money runs out and you can no longer pay for the
last cutlet
.’ A curious phrase he used to repeat.

With this sword of Damocles above their heads, they got on with adapting to the new freezing conditions. They burned the kerosine stoves for heat, but were forced to shut everything off every now and again because the stoves were using up all the air. They slept on top of one another to keep warm, and the youngest developed all manner of ways to win favours in order to keep warm. According to the Weinberg account:

Pawel used to sing, inventing the tune to his song, but always the same words, ‘Please, Mrs Weinberg, can I sleep beside you …’ He also used to collect cigarette ends that had been washed down from the gutters. Then he would dry them out somewhere and trade them in return for being allowed to curl up beside her.

As the temperature dropped their little room became very damp. Condensation from their breathing and the regular use of the kerosine stoves meant that the walls ran with water, the floor became soaked and, at night, a thin sheet of ice was formed on the ground. This dank atmosphere suddenly evaporated one evening as Mrs Weinberg set about preparing the evening meal. Chaskiel Orenbach had offered to fire up the stoves for Genia and was sitting crouched on his knees, pumping up the pressure in the kerosine cylinder. Margulies recalled:

These stoves needed careful maintenance. We had a little pin we used to unblock a tiny air hole in the top. And I said to this
fellow Chaskiel – he was bloody stubborn, really bloody stubborn – I said, ‘Chaskiel, when you finish, open the top and let out the air, otherwise the petrol shoots up.

Beside it was a stove already running, and on top a bucket of boiling soup. Margulies continued: ‘And Chaskiel – he, he just didn’t want to listen to me. Eventually it exploded. WHOOSH, out the top – and beside it the naked flame. Suddenly there it was all on fire.’

Chiger, who realized what had happened only after it was too late, was alarmed that the flames and smoke might be seen from the street. ‘So we began to beat the flames with rags and cloth – anything we had available.’

Margulies decided to pick the stove up and carry it across to where they dumped the used carbide. He was halfway across the room, he remembered, with the blazing stove in his hands: ‘Chaskiel picked up some
shmutter
, some pillows or something to dampen down the flames, and threw it at the stove. It knocked the stove out of my hands and on to the floor. The fuel leaked out and the flames took off across the floor and leapt up and up.’ The fire now roared up the walls and arched over their heads. They were trapped in the little chamber, virtually surrounded by fire and about to be consumed. At that point Halina got quite hysterical and tried to climb into the narrow pipe that trickled water from the street. She had presumed it would be some kind of escape. Now Margulies lost his temper: ‘I grabbed her and pulled her away because she would block up the air. She was hysterical, so I hit her. I gave her two or three hits and pulled her away. I said, “Don’t block up the hole.” She couldn’t even remember it afterwards.’

Then Margulies and Chaskiel grabbed the shovel and trowel, scooped up the dried carbide they had dumped in the corner and threw it on to the flames. After countless trips back and forth to the carbide, they succeeded in smothering the flames. When the danger had passed they looked around at each other and saw ghostly visions of their companions. Their hair singed, their eyelashes and eyebrows gone and their faces smeared with soot. For some it was the most terrifying moment of their lives; a
realistic taste of hell. Immediately there were remonstrations.

‘What if Halina had saved herself and deserted us?’ demanded Chiger. In fact, this would have been impossible because the pipe was too narrow to have allowed her to escape. But Chiger went on: ‘Who knows what would have happened to her – and to us – if she had got up to the street?’

However, once the mess had been cleaned up and they were able to sit and reflect, Chiger cheered them up.

‘You look liked smoked herring,’ he declared. ‘Like what the English call kippers. A row of kippers!’

During October, Socha had been impressed by the way the group had observed their important religious festivals. In fact he had joined them to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. So when Christmas came, he was keen to share
his
most important religious festival. These celebrations, and they found innumerable other little occasions to observe as well, were usually brought to life with a little vodka. They had first shared a drink on the occasion of Paulina’s birthday, which had been in July. A typical celebration would begin with Socha lacing their coffee from a bottle he kept in his coat pocket. Inevitably, one tot led to two or three more. The Catholic’s taste for the hard stuff was considered a little imprudent, especially by Paulina who thought it at the least socially unbecoming and at worst, downright dangerous. Chiger claimed that he was not keen on vodka, but admitted that, in the interest of the group’s overall security, he was sometimes obliged to ‘drink as much as a half-litre in one gulp in order to prevent Socha and Wroblewski from getting drunk and perhaps accidentally talking loosely on their way home’.

Of course, neither Socha nor Wroblewski were drunks, but they were of a social group where alcohol played an important part in their daily lives. It is a matter of pride amongst heavy drinkers that they can hold their drink, and it’s unwise for the uninitiated to suggest otherwise.

On one unfortunate occasion, Paulina, Mrs Weinberg and the children were seated on their own, around the corner from the rest of the group, who were enjoying the Polish national drink.
None more so than Socha. Paulina became alarmed at Socha’s state and motioned to Berestycki to come and sit beside her. When he was close by she whispered to him that perhaps he should try and talk with Socha.

‘Jacob, I don’t think they should drink so much. They will be going out soon, they must be careful.’

Unfortunately, she’d spoken too loudly and the good humour suddenly vanished. Socha rose to his feet and turned on Paulina. He said nothing to her directly but summoned Wroblewski to his feet and informed him in a voice that could be heard by everyone that, in the light of what he had just overheard, he would no longer enter the basin whenever the food was delivered. In future, they could crawl through the Seventy to collect it at the other end.

‘Mrs Chiger doesn’t trust us. She thinks we’re drunk!’

The following day, and the day after, Socha whistled from the other end of the Seventy and Margulies and Berestycki had to crawl through the pipe to collect their bread. The situation continued like this for a number of days and it soon depressed them all greatly. There could not have been a more dramatic example of the power of Socha’s presence and conviviality, than when they were deprived of it.

According to Paulina, ‘What could I do? He was so proud. The situation was terrible. The men, Jacob and Chiger, talked amongst themselves and decided I had to apologize to Socha. So, I agreed to go with the two men when they collected the food.’ Paulina crawled into the Seventy, following Margulies and Orenbach. When she emerged at the other end, Socha was in the process of handing the food across to the others. He stared at the figure struggling through the opening.

‘What are you doing?’ He turned, absolutely furious, upon the two men. ‘How could you do this? How could you let Mrs Chiger crawl through this terrible pipe? Mrs Chiger, this is terrible what they have done …’

Paulina’s appearance had not only surprised him, he was embarrassed and completely disarmed. He took refuge in an attack upon the men, who stood there completely nonplussed.

‘How could you make a woman crawl all this way . .?’

‘But Klara crawls …’

‘Mrs Chiger is a woman and a mother! Now, back you go, all of you!’

Without having been given a chance to explain, Margulies and Orenbach climbed back into the pipe and were followed by Paulina and then by Socha and Wroblewski. Once inside the room, Socha’s fury knew no bounds. ‘He gave them hell,’ recalled Paulina.

‘I will never forget this. Mrs Chiger, why did you let them make you do this?’

‘You were angry with me. I couldn’t live with that. It could not be so. We love you very much, you are the most important man to us – and you would not come and see us.’

Socha, doubtless deeply moved by this testament, turned again upon the men.

‘I will never forget this. How you could let a woman and a mother – a mother of two children …!’

But Paulina interrupted this continuing attack upon the menfolk.

‘Socha! I apologize if you thought I was calling you a drunk.’

This had a welcome effect. Socha seemed prepared to listen further.

‘It was just for our common good. That’s all I was thinking of, I wasn’t trying to criticize you. I saw Stefak drinking and drinking and I was afraid that when you went out …’