In the Sewers of Lvov (4 page)

‘I will never forget the fear I had, being alone there with my little brother. Sometimes we were on our own all day. We didn’t cry. We weren’t allowed to cry and when we heard something, we hardly even breathed. The fear was unimaginable …’

In fact the Julag had become riddled with hiding places. Not, by any means, all Chiger’s work. It seemed as though everyone had constructed disguised bunkers and false cavities in the backs of cupboards, under floor-boards or in ceilings. One of the most ingenious had been built in a cellar beneath a kitchen, where a false wall had been constructed providing a space of some three metres by ten, but with no access to it from the cellar. The entrance was through a hole in the ceiling, that is, through the floor of the kitchen above. In fact, through a cast-iron stove. To get into the bunker, the iron top of the stove, the grates and ashes, had to be lifted and slid to one side. Then the fugitives lowered themselves through the body of the stove, through the floor and down a rope into the cavity below. The last one down slid the cast iron top and grates back into place.

As if Grzymek’s patrols weren’t enough for the Chigers, a few weeks after the March Action, Untersturmführer Gebauer paid a visit to Schwartz und Comp. He was the second-in-command at the Janowska camp and his visit meant only one thing, he needed more labourers. The women were assembled outside, while he marched between them directing them to the left or the right. There had been rumours that the factory would soon be closed down and now Gebauer’s presence seemed to confirm it.

At the end of the counting, Paulina found herself chosen for the camp, and was marched with about 500 women down the Janowska Road. At the end of the day, Chiger was given the news and with it, small comfort. The women had not been transported permanently, but would return to the Julag at the end of each day and be marched back to the camp in the morning.

The regime inside the Janowska camp bore no resemblance to the Julag in town. Fritz Gebauer shared responsibility with his superior, Obersturmführer Gustav Wilhaus, for creating that regime. Apparently there was little love lost and much less co-operation between these two men, yet together they had succeeded in creating an establishment that had no rival in eastern Poland. Conditions behind the tall brick and concrete walls were so nightmarish, that the men who had created them acknowledged the hopelessness of the place with their own black humour. Just inside the gates, Gebauer had erected a scaffold from which a number of nooses were slung. Each morning, he suggested to the workers that whenever it became too much for anyone, they had his personal permission to climb the scaffold and put his or her head inside the noose. Many took this option.

Wilhaus was something of a sportsman. He rode the grounds of his establishment on horseback with a favourite Alsatian at his heels. It was not uncommon for him to be seen on the front porch of his house with a rifle, shooting at people on the parade ground as though they were ducks in a shooting gallery.

In April the tension was raised higher than usual by stirring news from Warsaw. There were rumours of a revolt in the ghetto. On 19 April 1943, underground elements in the Warsaw ghetto, armed with rifles and light machine-guns, began firing upon German guards. Having raised the Polish Flag and the Jewish Star of David on the roof of the tallest building in the ghetto, the declaration of defiance was made. Rumours and then rumours of rumours filtered down through the various partisan groups at bay in the countryside about the heroic uprising in Warsaw. Soon a band of perhaps twenty young men in the Lvov Julag began collecting weapons and ammunition and storing them in the bakery.
The news had also sent a frisson of unease through the rulers of the Julag. SS General Katzmann, head of the SS throughout Galicia, sent orders for greater vigilance throughout the province and Grzymek’s patrols were increased.

With the tension almost at breaking point, Chiger continued obsessively in his search for places to hide his family. One morning in April, he had assigned Berestycki to work with him in and around the barracks by the main gates. They made an odd couple, the little man cantering beside the tall, broad-shouldered Chiger. Ignacy had been something of an athlete in his youth. His large, noble head sat proudly upon a frame which, though withered with malnutrition, still retained some vestige of his active youth. Yet the spark of amiability had dimmed from his eyes. According to the Berestycki account, Chiger seemed harder, more diffident. Like many people in the Julag, Chiger had generated about himself the air of a man determined to survive. ‘He was remote, difficult to talk to,’ was Berestycki’s impression.

Looking around themselves, Chiger and Berestycki would have seen a shell of a community. Before the war, the Jewish population of Lvov had been more than 100,000. By June 1941, that had swelled to 160,000 with refugees from the west. From the best accounts available, by the spring of 1943, that number had been cut down to just 7000 with perhaps another 4000 in the Janowska camp.

As they strode together, Berestycki summoned the courage to speak.

‘You know, Chiger, it is no longer safe to build bunkers.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t you think you’re taking a terrible risk?’

Chiger remained aloof.

‘Look, I know you’ve built a number of bunkers for your family. I uncovered one of them myself. If I know where they are, so do others.’

‘What of it?’

‘It’s not a safe thing to do. You cannot trust people like you used to. Information can be sold.’

Berestycki was not a man to threaten. He was a pious Chasid
with a temperament born of simple honesty. But he was sharp. He had a talent for examining a problem and seizing upon the solution.

‘I have a better plan …’ he continued, ‘… but we have to trust each other.’

Berestycki explained to Chiger that right beneath their feet was the perfect place to hide – the sewers. Looking down Peltewna Street, they would have seen a line of manhole covers running straight towards them. These led down to the Peltwa, an underground river from which the street took its name. All the city’s sewers ran into the Peltwa.

None of this would have been news to Chiger. Before the turn of the century, the Peltwa flowed through the heart of the city like an oily canal, into which ran untreated sewage. The stench during the summer was unspeakable. Then, around the turn of the century, an Italian engineering company constructed the present sewer system. In the course of which they diverted the river underground, through a massive chamber that ran the length of the city. It emerged again some distance north of the Julag perimeter and flowed out into the countryside.

It had been common during an
Aktion
to see people lifting a manhole in the street, trying to escape to the Peltwa and eventually to the open countryside. But it was a pointless exercise, for the Germans stationed guards at the opening to the river and picked off the fugitives as they emerged. Chiger knew that the Peltwa was no escape, but Berestycki was convinced the sewers might be a refuge.

‘I have an idea of building a tunnel down to the Peltwa – to the sewers, where we can hide. We find some part of the sewers, make it habitable and we could hide there for weeks.’

According to Berestycki, Chiger was unimpressed with the suggestion, but the little man persisted.

‘We need to build an access that can’t be seen from the street. Something we can disguise after we have gone. I know just the place.’

The Berestycki account claims that the discussion continued cautiously and though Chiger was not keen on the idea, he
‘allowed himself to be convinced’. This runs at some variance with Chiger’s own account and rather than arbitrate between the two, I will offer the reader both. According to Chiger: ‘I decided to see if one of my plans might have a chance of succeeding. The plan was for us to try to escape to the sewer. My friend Berestycki agreed that this might work and we began to discuss how we should go about it.’

In Berestycki’s account, however, Chiger’s co-operation had been sought because if the shaft was to be built, Berestycki needed to be excused from his work. He implied others were involved when he claimed, ‘We couldn’t do anything without Chiger’s permission.’

Here is Chiger’s account again: ‘We included in our discussion a man called Weiss. We planned to dig a tunnel from his room down to the sewers where we would look for a dry shelter.’

Weiss’s room in the barrack had been calculated to be directly above the line of manholes. Weiss was also Berestycki’s neighbour. According to Klara, who shared a room next door, ‘Weiss was a tall, thin man with blond hair’, whom she found ‘quite frightening’. The barrack where they lived was one of a pair of one story terraces built at right angles to Peltewna Street. They were really simple workers’ dwellings, constructed by the city authorities before the war. Inside, a long corridor ran the full length and leading off this were perhaps fifty, simple two-room apartments. Since the ghetto had been created, entire families had been forced into each room, sharing the public bathrooms with perhaps two hundred others. There was no gas, little electricity and water had to be fetched from a stand pipe outside. Cooking was done on small kerosine stoves, if they had one, amongst the mattresses and other possessions. Weiss shared the room with his mother, wife and daughter, and the young woman from Turka named Halina Wind.

Berestycki had not explained more than was necessary to Chiger, about Halina and one or two others living nearby being illegal residents. He and Weiss had made a habit of providing shelter and forged papers for any unfortunates that came their way.

‘Halina had escaped from the Weisenhof prison and so Weiss and Berestycki had taken her in,’ wrote Chiger, who was then introduced to Weiss and his immediate family. In his account, the project was developed exclusively between himself, Berestycki and Weiss: ‘The three of us began to plan the project, knowing that Weiss’s room would be a safe place from which to work.’ However, it is clear from other accounts that there were many more people involved, and perhaps it says much for the secrecy that enveloped the project that Chiger knew nothing of the others. It also seems probable, at least from the Berestycki account, that he and Weiss had been discussing the idea for some time before mentioning it to Chiger. Once the maintenance supervisor had been involved, his contacts with the others were kept to a minimum. According to the Berestycki account: ‘In the beginning, they were afraid of each other as well as what was outside. They had not learnt to trust each other yet.’

Over the next few days, Weiss held a number of secret meetings in his room, from which the simple idea was transformed into a complex operation. As Weiss provided the location for the shaft and therefore assumed greater risk, it was appropriate that he also assumed command of the project and responsibility for enlisting the help of others, such as two engineers, whose names are now forgotten, who also lived in the barrack. They were recruited to conduct surveys of the sewers and try and solve the obvious technical problems. They slipped down a manhole at night with a torch and sketch pad, and made crude drawings of the lay-out. They described a large vaulted chamber through which flowed the Peltwa and into which a number of smaller ‘channels’ emptied. It was recommended that they dig from one of these channels, up towards Weiss’s room. This would have solved the problem of disposing of the soil from their diggings, but then their calculations would have had to have been absolutely precise, if they were to surface at the right spot. It would clearly be easier to dig downwards, but how to dispose of the earth? The problem was solved with the discovery of a shallow cellar beneath the barracks’ floor. It was
not really a cellar, more like a deep crawl-space amongst the foundations, deep enough to work in. Once under the floor, they could dig the shaft unnoticed. Chiger recalled the plan they all agreed upon. ‘We decided to dig down through the floor of the cellar beneath Weiss’s room and, by carefully measuring, aimed for a dried-out side channel of the Peltwa, where we could hide.’

Another recruit was a friend of Berestycki’s, Mundek Margulies, a remarkably quick-witted and resourceful man. He had helped run a small barber’s shop before the Germans had captured Lvov and had since found work at Textalia, a textile co-operative. He was remarkable in that he had never had the correct papers to live in the ghetto, had been marked down for deportation to the death camps long ago and yet had survived and indeed flourished. Although he marched to Textalia every morning, he did very little work there for he knew almost nothing about textiles and little more about barbering. To most people in Julag he was one of the most resourceful black-marketeers. Margulies had a reputation for being able to get hold of almost any commodity through sources on the other side of the wire. He bartered or traded textiles or leather from the co-operative; suits, coats, silver or other valuables from his fellow inmates, in return for fresh eggs, milk, cheese, razor blades – anything he could lay his hands on. If you needed it, Margulies could get it. He operated just outside the gates, usually dealing with Ukrainian farmers and traders. Weiss approached Margulies:

‘We need someone we can trust. Someone with a few brains, a little orientation, understand?’

This short, robust fellow with powerful arms and a tenacious will to survive would be an essential asset if the project was to succeed. Margulies soon met some of the others who were involved: Shulim Weinberg and two brothers from the town of Radzyn named Chaskiel and Itzek Orenbach. Margulies also recalls seeing Chiger at one of Weiss’s meetings, though Chiger doesn’t mention this.

The first priority was to construct an entrance to the cellar in Weiss’s room. To do the work properly, they needed the right
tools, which is where Chiger came in. He explained: ‘Since Berestycki and I worked together in the Julag, we were able to work out the plans and get hold of the necessary materials without being discovered.’

Chiger also ‘covered’ for Berestycki when he was at work in Weiss’s room. They cut out a rectangle of floor boards and then took a stone slab, in fact a paving stone from the street, to put in their place. It gave the impression that there was nothing but solid earth beneath. A rug and a table were placed over it just in case. Once beneath Weiss’s room, Chiger constructed another of his partitions, made of wood and plaster, to disguise their diggings, should anyone get into the cellar from another route. Then they began digging. Weinberg’s beautiful wife Genia recalled the ingenious method of working in Weiss’s room.