In the Sewers of Lvov (27 page)

One by one these creatures of the underworld clambered out into the sunlight, blind and helplessly weak. Tears streaked their faces. ‘Everything around me was red. Red-orange. The faces were red, the buildings were red, the sky was red,’ recalled
Kristina. ‘I saw no colour at all,’ remembered Klara. ‘After the blindness had passed, I saw everything in black and white. And I was ashamed. I was embarrassed, in front of all those people. I had just that one coat for the whole fourteen months, I looked so shabby. I was embarrassed.’

When Berestycki emerged he was so lame he had to be helped to one side and laid down on the concrete floor. They were all without shoes and their feet were covered in bleeding sores. Orenbach weighed less than thirty-eight kilos when he emerged. The tall, tragic beauty he clung to, a few kilos more.

Klara, overwhelmed with joy, threw herself at Paulina and kissed her gratefully. ‘Thank you for saving me. Without you …’

Pawel, when finally he could bear to look in the light, saw this crazy red-coloured world filled with space, air, and faces. He threw himself into his mother’s arms and buried himself in her warmth. ‘I want to go back. I want to go back, I am afraid,’ he cried.

In tears and choking anguish, he searched for the familiar. Above their heads was an oddly shaped polygon of bright red sky, and everywhere staring faces, stunned, disbelieving, silently shaking their heads. And there, in the midst of all the chaos, Socha stood proudly, staring his fellow countrymen in the eye.

‘This is my work. All my work. These are my Jews.’

Once the news had spread, people came running down to Bernadinski Square and crowded into the narrow hall to try and catch a glimpse of the creatures from the sewers. The little courtyard became packed with people straining to hear the story. Standing in their midst, Leopold Socha patiently told and retold his account for those who would listen. A pair of Russian soldiers who had been sitting on the lawn in front of the Bernadinski Church barged through the throng to investigate and the story was told once more. They had entered the sewers on the 1 June 1943, and emerged on 28 July 1944. It had been fourteen months.

Meanwhile, the ten sat on the concrete or staggered about, shielding their eyes from the light. Tola had escaped into the crowd almost as soon as his eyes could cope with the light. (Eventually he returned to the army but died during the campaign in Germany.) The concierge became infected with the miracle that had taken place beneath her feet and declared before the audience that she had often been puzzled by the smell of fried onions.

‘Mrs Weinberg’s soup!’ Socha confirmed.

‘I always thought it was from food that had been thrown down the drains. I never thought anyone was actually cooking in the sewers.’ This was greeted with ripples of laughter and the incredulous shaking of heads. They had become, for the time being, specimens to be pointed to and gazed at. ‘We emerged like cavemen. We had nothing. Our clothes nothing more than rags and our appearance frightened people,’ wrote Chiger.

For many of those creatures of the underworld, the return to the street was just too much and they became emotional.
Uncontrollable tears mingled with cries of relief as they hid their faces from the piercing stare of the unbelievers. They had emerged from one ordeal to be thrown into another. Socha and Margulies both realized that everyone needed to find shelter from the curious. Socha had learnt that the building had been occupied by the Germans, but was now vacated. The two of them climbed the stairs to the first floor to investigate. They found the rooms empty but locked. They also found one solitary German soldier who had been left behind by his compatriots. He was a non-combatant, a war artist in fact, whose job it had been to record the great Russian front. The concierge knew about him.

‘He’s harmless,’ she told them. Harmless and terrified at the sight of Korsarz as it happened. Ignoring the hapless German, Margulies broke the lock on the first room and went inside. There were three adjoining rooms and a furnished kitchen. It would be ideal. However, as they moved back into the corridor they were confronted by a Russian officer with a large ring of keys.

‘What are you doing here? These rooms have been confiscated,’ said the Russian.

‘Yes! By us!’ replied Margulies.

The Russian brandished his keys, but when he tried two or three in the lock, he could not open it.

‘You have keys to nothing!’ exclaimed Margulies. ‘These are all our rooms – the lot!’

Socha returned to the courtyard and began shepherding his flock towards the stairs. ‘How long do you think you will sit here? You will be a lady again, just as you were before,’ he told Paulina. ‘See, you already have a room …’

‘My wife and I and the children occupied one room, the “Pirate” and Jacob the second room, Halina and Klara the third, and Chaskiel and Mrs Weinberg the fourth. Stefak had already begun collecting furniture – chairs, tables, beds and bedding,’ recalled Chiger. Paulina took Kristina and Pawel up to the window and opened it, though their eyes were still stinging from the blood-red light.

‘Breathe the air,’ she said. ‘Breathe deeply the fresh air.’

As they stood there, Paulina looked down upon the street and the small piece of grass opposite, where a crowd had gathered. There, standing in the street, was an old friend. Chiger looked over his wife’s shoulder and agreed: ‘They were old friends of ours from the athletic club.’ It must have seemed a hundred years ago.

‘Mischa! Mischa!’ Paulina called from the window. Her friend looked up and then tugged at her husband’s sleeve. They both stared up at the vision at the window.

‘Pepa? Chiger? Is it you?’

The couple pushed their way through the crowd and up the stairs. When they got to the room they stared at the frail shapes silhouetted at the window.

‘The children?’

‘Here. Alive. We are all here.’

‘But Chiger?’ they said. ‘We always knew you would make it. You were too clever …’

Chiger recalled the great kindness offered them:

They had with them a bottle of vodka and some kielbasa which they shared with us. We celebrated and rejoiced in seeing each other again. As we drank they told us that they had heard that Pepa and the children had been dragged away by the SS … Later they returned with more food. Over the next few days we had many visitors, most of them strangers. One woman brought honey, another brought bread …

All the people were amazed. ‘I heard that you survived with two children …’ they would say. ‘I heard the story of the children from the sewers …’

The process of healing was a slow one. For some, there would never be a full recovery. ‘Mrs Weinberg was never the same. She was not a well person from the day we left the sewer. Very highly strung and emotional, but would sit on her own in complete silence. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her,’ recalled Klara.

Genia and Chaskiel moved out of the apartment block to
another part of the city. Though they remained in touch with the group, they rarely saw them again.

The rest of the ‘family’ stayed together for some time while they found their strength and the courage to walk the streets again. But before they could begin to think of the future, Chiger’s group had to re-learn the basics. They got used to sleeping in beds again and moving about in a room where the ceiling was nearly three metres from the floor. After four years of isolation they had to get used to walking along open streets and through a community no longer encouraged to treat them like base animals. The most dramatic change in their lives was the simple fact that the night lasted only until dawn, and that the day did not end with the dousing of a lamp, but with a bright golden sunset. Some old habits, however, they were obliged to keep up. Like lentil and potato soup.

As the rooms were being furnished, Chiger and Socha had returned to the sewers to retrieve everything that might be of use; stoves, jugs, pots and pans. Chiger wrote: ‘We left behind only those things which were of no use, like rags and torn newspapers which had served as pillows. Socha brought his wife and child to meet them. Wanda, of course, had shared in helping to save our lives.’

In the months that followed, they had other visitors too. Leon Wells had survived the Janowska camp and, while walking the streets of Lvov, ran into his friend Berestycki:

We had worked for a while in the same shop, he as a mechanic and I as an assistant to a plumber. He was on crutches; his feet were as abraded as mine had been. We embraced each other and he invited me to his apartment nearby. I went with him. Berestycki cooked a meal for me at his apartment. When he gave me the steaming plate of cereal, it smelled awful. He was still using the leftover supplies from the sewer, which had spoiled and had also been penetrated by the terrible sewer odour.

Over this meal Wells was introduced to the others and told the story of their escape to the sewers. Berestycki also offered Wells somewhere to stay. He claimed that there were plenty of abandoned
apartments in the floors above, which had been sealed off by the Russian police. ‘Without much hesitation we decided then and there that we would break the seal. After all, what could they do to us?’ recalled Margulies.

During the following year they found work and some stability to their lives. Halina found a job in the office of the railway department and in turn helped the nineteen-year-old Leon Wells find work there. Everyone found some way of earning money. Chiger got a job with the district sports authority which, though unpaid, provided him with tickets he could exchange for food. Paulina baked potato pancakes and sold them on the street. They made a fortuitous discovery of a large barrel of German army boot-polish, which they scooped into smaller tins and Kristina and Pawel sold on the street for a few kopeks. Margulies thrived doing what he was best at.

Within two months they were back on their feet, putting their lives back together. Leon Wells moved to another apartment and Berestycki moved in with him. ‘Berestycki was a very easy going fellow,’ wrote Wells. ‘He worked, if one could call it that, at the tourist office and … by fixing locks and doing some plumbing. He would never do more than he needed to for his daily expenses.’ According to Wells’s account, Berestycki had soon rediscovered his love for life. He was determined to go to a dance every night and being short and dark he was naturally attracted to tall blondes. And he had a system: ‘To go dancing, one had to buy at least one beer, which cost five rubles. Berestycki would buy one beer, and then take the glass home and sell it the following day on the black market for five rubles. He would then be all set for the next evening.’
¹⁷

In September, Paulina queued up at the public school to enrol her daughter for first grade. Paulina had to answer a long series of questions about the child, and when she answered the question concerning religion, there was a long pause while the clerk sought advice from the superintendent.

‘Not possible. How could this be? Hadn’t they all been annihilated?’

* * *

Throughout that first year they scratched a living while waiting for their repatriation. Lvov was, of course, no longer part of Poland, but of the newly extended Republic of the Ukraine – part of the Soviet empire. Under the new regime, it quickly became obvious that there was no hope of retrieving any of their property. The brief period of Sovietization that had begun in 1940 was taken up again with a vengeance as soon as the machinery of government was in place. Under the circumstances, most Poles sought permission to travel across the new border, to where they imagined they would find a post-war society more to their liking. The Soviets were obliged to let them go.

The first to leave was Berestycki. With him on the same train to Lodz were Chaskiel Orenbach and Mrs Weinberg, now more tragic than ever. The two of them had worked hard to save as much money as they could, to try and ‘buy back’ Genia’s last surviving child. She had given the baby girl to Ukrainians for safe keeping, before entering the ghetto. They had made contact with the foster parents, but at the rendezvous under a railway bridge where they had agreed to hand over the money for the child, they had been cheated. They were glad to see the last of Lvov.

When Berestycki returned to Lodz he was appalled. The little chap had somehow imagined that what had happened in Lvov was some terrible perversion, exclusive to that city. When he discovered the same and worse had been visited throughout Poland – and upon all the occupied countries – he could barely comprehend it. Jacob met a young friend from his old neighbourhood, a survivor from Auschwitz, and they were married.

By the new year, those still in Lvov began noticing the more unhealthy aspects of the Soviet system. People’s pasts were being investigated for evidence of any pre-war anti-Soviet activity. Many were being tried and imprisoned. Socha, a most patriotic Pole, suddenly informed the Chigers that he was taking his wife and child to Przemysl, just inside the Polish border. The Chigers too, began to suspect they were under investigation, for any Jew who had survived the German occupation had become an object of suspicion. In February, they slipped quietly across the border
and went to live with Socha and his family. And just in time: ‘Korsarz later told us that a few hours after we left Lvov the KGB had come to arrest us. They sealed off our apartment and searched the railway cars,’ wrote Chiger.

After three weeks the Chigers left the Sochas in Przemysl and moved to Krakow. In April 1945, just before the end of the war in Europe, Halina also left for Poland where she made plans to emigrate to the United States of America. The last to cross over were the Margulies family. Mundek and Klara had been married and already had a son. They settled in the town of Gliwice and were joined by Socha and his family. Within a matter of a few months the survivors had been scattered across Poland, though they kept in touch. Letters and money were passed back and forth and through this network the various families were able to find some small way of expressing their gratitude to Socha. They all contributed to the purchase for Socha of a small bar in Gliwice. It was something he had always wanted, his own little place, his own small business. ‘It made him very proud,’ recalled Paulina.