In the Sewers of Lvov (23 page)

One of those forced into vagrancy was a distant cousin of Margulies, Jan Felix. He claimed: ‘We ate what dogs ate. We searched the dustbins for food, I even forgot the word for bread.’

The shortages made it even more difficult for Socha and his wife to feed the people below. Yet no matter how difficult life became, none of the group ever felt that it had become impossible; there seemed to be no waning in Socha’s determination to see it through.

Every so often Socha would take a walk past the Bernadinski Church, just to satisfy himself that there was nothing untoward that might give them away. One day, however, he turned the corner from Serbska Street to be confronted by a chilling sight. A group of people had gathered in the middle of the road and were talking animatedly about the most curious phenomenon at their feet. The snow had melted. What was most curious was that the snow had melted in a curious ‘L shape’, right in the centre of the road. No one had seen anything like it. Old women had gathered and were kneeling down to touch the ground, men shuffled their boots and pulled at their ears. It was most mysterious.

Socha realized immediately what had happened and he turned on his heel and hurried as inconspicuously as possible to the nearest manhole. He clattered down the ladder and made his way to the storm basin, calling to them as he shuffled through the pipe. The group was alarmed at the tone of his voice. When he got inside, sure enough, the two kerosine stoves were blazing away
and Mrs Weinberg was preparing her potato soup, just as usual.

‘Shut off the stoves. You’re making too much heat, the snow is melting!’

‘What?’

‘The snow in the street, just above. It’s all melted!’

The stoves were shut down but clouds of steam still hung in the air. The walls ran with condensation and there was nothing they could do to cool anything down. Socha suggested they put the stoves in another corner of the room, immediately beneath the wall of a block of apartments. They agreed, but it never really solved the problem of the room filling with steam whenever they did any cooking. The room would inevitably warm up and continue to melt any snow in the street above.

In the meantime, Socha returned to Serbska Street to try and dispel any theories that may have taken root. Now the small crowd had been joined by one or two Germans who confronted the man wearing waterproof overalls and thigh boots. They asked the obvious question.

‘Are there Jews down there?’

He remained calm and assured them there was nothing of the kind in the sewers.

‘The Jews drowned or were poisoned long ago. The snow has melted from the heating pipes in the cellar of the apartment house.’ He indicated with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Or perhaps it had something to do with the monastery behind the church. The catacombs run everywhere under the road …’ He left them in no doubt. ‘There’s no mystery, there’s nothing down there …’

The voice of authority, calm and matter of fact. The enquiries passed by and so did the Germans.

These little incidents were the milestones that marked out their journey together. But as Chiger says in his account: ‘I did not keep a formal diary because, although I had the time, our existence was so similar – day after day, that it need not be recounted in that way.’ As he goes on to explain, the only other milestones were the stories told by each one of them in turn, ‘to try and pass
the time of day’. Berestycki’s story was like thousands of others. He had been born in 1910, in the city of Lodz, some 100 kilometres south-west of Warsaw. Like his father before him, Berestycki was a locksmith by trade. After the German occupation, he left the city and went to live in the anonymity of a nearby village, but when the Nazi embrace reached to every little hamlet, he was forced to return to Lodz and take up the work he was assigned to. About the spring of 1942, the Judenrat in Lodz informed him that he had been assigned to the labour authorities in Lvov, where he would be put to work at the railway maintenance shops. He was transported to the Janowska camp and from there he marched out each day with a brigade of workers, to the Ostbahn workshops and back again. It was while he was kept at the Janowska camp that he met Leon Wells, a survivor whose testimony ensured the camp’s immortality in his book
The Death Brigade.

From the camp Berestycki was sent to the ghetto, to work in a maintenance shop supervised by Ignacy Chiger. Margulies recalled:

I remember the day Berestycki turned up in the ghetto. He didn’t know anyone. He was sitting on his haunches in the street, in front of a little fire. He had built it between two bricks and was heating a cup of tea. I spoke to him and he said he was from Lodz. I suggested he come into the ‘barrack’ and I introduced him to Weiss. He regularly took people in off the street and helped get them papers.

That was in the autumn of 1942, Berestycki was about thirty-two and, like most of his generation, confronted with the daily threat of extinction.

Perhaps one of the best storytellers amongst the group was Korsarz Margulies. He kept them entertained for hours with his tales from the early days of the war. If Margulies had not been forced to become a black-marketeer, he would probably have followed his father’s trade as a land agent, or perhaps continued as a travelling salesman for his sister’s factory, selling children’s clothes from shop to shop.

All of that was changed in the autumn of 1939. By midnight on 1 September, the day the Germans launched their attack across the Polish border, Lvov had already received its first air attack and in the morning, railyards and factories were still blazing. Air raids followed every night and within a fortnight, German troops had penetrated to within sixty miles of Lvov. Though Poland’s defences had been swiftly overwhelmed, there were a few spirited pockets of resistance. None more heroic than the garrison led by General Sosnkowski, who had been charged with the defence of Lvov. However, just as German supply lines began to be over-stretched and heavy rain had turned the fields into quagmires, Poland’s last hopes were extinguished. At 6.00 a.m. on 17 September, the Soviet Union launched its own attack from the east. At 2.00 a.m. the same morning, the Soviet government had communicated to Berlin a request for ‘the German Air Force not to operate’ in the area of Lvov, as the Red Air Force would begin bombing in the morning. There was nowhere for the Polish armies to retreat to; all that was left was for the large city garrisons to hold out as long as possible. By 22 September, Red Army units had reached that city, to find it all but surrendered to the Germans. A young First Secretary of the Soviet Ukraine, Nikita Krushchev, described the scene.

If the Germans had had their way, they would have entered the city first and sacked it. But since our troops had got there ahead of them, the Germans were careful not to show any hostility towards us. They stuck to the letter of the treaty and told us … ‘Please! Be our guests! After you!’
¹⁶

The German forces withdrew and the Soviets occupied the city. Poland had been carved up between her two neighbours.

Under Soviet occupation the city was inundated by Russian and Georgian soldiers. They were like peasants let loose in an exotic bazaar; polite but dazzled by the quantity and variety of produce in all the stores. They would enter an establishment and ask if it was permissible to buy a pair of boots, and, if it was, then was it permissible to buy two pairs, or four, or six. They would take as many as they could carry. Money was no obstacle.

By mid-October 1939, the city had commenced the required programme of socialization and thousands of Soviet officials and their families arrived to organize the transformation. Large industrial complexes were nationalized as were apartment buildings and the apartments within. The management of the factories was replaced with Soviet technocrats. Small trading establishments were allowed to continue, but Margulies’s sister was forced to close her factory. There would be no market for children’s wear.

Nevertheless, a black market flourished. The Soviets opened their own government stores and stocked them from whatever suppliers they could find. Margulies and some friends, a Ukrainian and his sister, decided to take advantage of the situation. They opened a barber’s shop. His friend knew of an empty premises near the prison. They knocked the lock off the door, and moved in. Soon they had the establishment up and running.

‘He cut the men’s hair, she cut the ladies’. I did all the soaping up and the finishing off,’ Margulies told them. Within a month Margulies had learnt the basics of the trade, but the entire exercise had really been set up as a front to provide an official trading premises, with the documents to go with it, through which they could shift black-market goods. Business was good for everyone as just about every razor blade in Lvov had been bought up at the beginning of the occupation and no more were to be had anywhere. The black market did extremely well, but eventually, Margulies was ordered to report to the Soviet Railway Co-operative to find work. Apart from his duties in the Cooperative, he also had to attend hours of deadly boring lectures on the principles of collectivization and worker control. Margulies had endured more than an hour of one of these lectures when he decided that life was too short and slipped away. In the morning he was ordered to the commissar’s office to explain his absence. Margulies explained to the man behind the desk, ‘Halfway through I got terrible stomach ache and went to the toilet. When I came out, the meeting was over and everyone was gone.’

The world-weary commissar listened to this unlikely story and decided to humour Margulies. He described his very great disappointment,
for Margulies had missed being awarded a prize.

‘A prize? For what?’

‘For your work …’ The Commissar took out a 1000-rouble note and held it out before him. ‘We were going to present you with this wonderful prize, which we would have been delighted to see you donate to the defence of the Soviet Union.’

Margulies could barely contain himself. The absurdity of the Russian’s gambit only inspired his contempt.

‘You would give me a 1000-rouble note?’

The Commissar nodded.

‘Listen!’ continued Margulies, ‘Every week I give money to the Soviet Union. I pay fees, taxes, commissions, everything. The day I get 1000 roubles from the Soviet Union I will not give it back again. I put it in a frame and hang it above my bed!’ Thankfully, both men shared the joke.

Margulies claimed he didn’t mind the Soviet occupiers. He had found ways and means to get round the system they had tried to establish. Indeed, for most people, it was not a harsh occupation, though the Ukrainian population were intimidated and the nationalist elements in particular ruthlessly persecuted, imprisoned and transported.

The situation was reversed, however, when at midnight on the 21 June 1941, the Germans launched their surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Within six days, the Soviets began what they hoped would be a disciplined and orderly retreat from Lvov. However, their plans were frustrated by Ukrainian fascists who blew up bridges and mined the streets to delay the Russians’ escape, while snipers operated from anonymous windows. The last of the Soviet units left Lvov on 30 June and by the early hours of the following morning the first German units had arrived in the suburbs.

When the Germans made their triumphant parade into the city, they were greeted with cheering Ukrainian crowds that had lined the streets. The streets were decked with brilliant red and black swastikas and, above the two towers of the town hall, the swastika and the blue and white Ukrainian flag flew side by side. The Ukrainian population saw, at last, the arrival of a liberating
army. Civilized, ordered and surely committed to the establishment of the long-awaited independent Ukrainian state. The Ukrainians volunteered in their tens of thousands to take up arms with the Germans against the great Bolshevik enemy. They also took up the racial policies of the Nazi and joined in the persecution of the Jews.

‘The Germans are our enemies’ enemies; so the Germans are our friends,’ explained a Ukrainian friend to Margulies. These events had taken place more than two and a half years ago and by 1944 an independent Ukraine was as much a myth as it had ever been.

Margulies did his best, throughout the German occupation, to keep his head above water. His stories of the various deals he had run and the risks he had taken under the Germans’ noses, were just as enthralling, if not quite so amusing, as his stories of outwitting the Russians. The Germans soon closed the barber shop and pounced on his merchandising. He was imprisoned for having tried to purchase a quantity of pilots’ warm, long underwear from some Luftwaffe officers. He spent many months in Lonsky prison and his account of it rivalled any other.

Despite never having managed to get the correct papers that would have allowed him to live in the ghetto, Margulies found a room in the barracks. From there he got work at the large cloth co-operative Textalia, where, despite being an illegal worker, he did a good trade selling duplicate copies of the badges worn by the legal workforce. These little patches worn above the heart and bearing the legend ‘W.R.’ (denoting that the wearer was engaged in work for the Wehrmacht), were conveniently manufactured, and duplicated, at the co-operative. ‘We sold hundreds of them …’ declared Margulies.

He had also established a reliable trade in fresh produce from the Ukrainian farmers. Taking his friends’ clothes, money, jewellery – whatever could be spared – Margulies would seek out the farmers and trade the merchandise for food.

On one occasion I was returning to the ghetto with a bucket filled with fresh eggs, but first I scooped up a layer of horse droppings and laid it over the eggs. You see, I knew what
would happen. The Ukrainian policeman says to me in the street, ‘What have you got there?’ I hold the bucket of horse-shit under the man’s nose and tell him to see for himself. Then I am quickly into the crowd before he has time to think about it.

As life within the ghetto deteriorated, more and more people resorted to trading their belongings for food. Margulies was appalled at how trusting some of his colleagues could be; standing at the ghetto gates laden down with their finest clothes, trousers, jackets, shirts.