The Testimony    (4 page)

Fortunately, I was tall for my age, and with my long, plaited hair coiled on top of my head I did look older.

Before we were ushered inside the labour camp we stayed with my aunt and her family who lived in Lodz. My two cousins, boys aged seven and nine, were quiet and buried themselves in books all day. Uncle would not let them go out. Initially I attended a school, but only briefly—either because the school was closed or because my parents thought I would be safer among adults.

I have a clear recollection of an incident that happened shortly before we went inside the ghetto. Jews were free to move about the city but had to wear the yellow Star of David on armbands and lapels. We were often rounded up in the streets by German soldiers and ordered to carry out various menial tasks, such as fetching their luggage and army supplies, or pushing carts or trolleys.

Early one morning Mother and I were pulled out of the food queue by a soldier and taken to a nearby school. He took us to the top floor and ordered us to move desks and benches from three classrooms and stack them in the fourth. He forced the door of the cleaners’ cupboard, and told us to clean up the rooms when they were empty. We were to wash the floors, windows and staircase. He said we were to wait until he returned to inspect it, and would then issue us with further instructions.

We finished in the afternoon and waited there for a long time, obviously forgotten. Then we heard people leaving other floors and the building being locked from outside. Mother called out of the window and an army officer came up. He asked Mother how long we had been there. Not for the first time I noticed the surprised look on a German soldier’s face when Mother’s perfect and, I think, elegant German was heard.

He took his rifle off his shoulder and I moved close to Mother, convinced that he was going to shoot us. But he put the rifle on the floor, took chocolate from his pocket, offered it to us and began a long conversation with Mother. At that time my grasp of the German language was not adequate to understand what was said. I remember him pacing the floor as he spoke, his voice impassioned, as if delivering a sermon. Mother looked at him, sad and surprised.

It was now after curfew hour. He escorted us home, explaining our presence to armed patrols on the way. At the door he apologised for the delay and bid a polite farewell.

Mother often related this incident. He had told her that the human race must be purified of inferior elements. Achieving this required courage, organising skills and efficiency. Germans possessed these skills, as well as a highly developed culture and superior physical characteristics. He quoted poets and philosophers in support of these views.

This dogma was not new to us. The shock was to hear a civilised, polite and well-educated human being believe and proclaim it without reservation. We preferred to think that such views were held only by a small, evil clique that followed a lunatic leader.

But to implement this systematic ‘purification’ there needed to be a sizeable army of enthusiastic and sadistic murderers. Even Father, the wise pessimist, puzzled how Germany, such a literate nation of culture and sophistication, had produced this army of monsters. There never seemed to be any shortage of them.

I recall conversations from that time when everyone seemed to believe that the war would last only a few months because the Allies would soon join and defeat Hitler. Father contradicted them, pointing out that Germany, with its heavy industry, was now well armed, had Poland as its food bowl and Jews and Gypsies as slave labour. The war would be protracted, he said. I was offended on his behalf when he was called a black crow, the symbol of pessimism.

We moved into the ghetto shortly before the gates of the surrounding barbed-wire walls were closed, on 1 May 1940. The area was known as Baluty, the industrial, inelegant part of Lodz. We were allotted one room in a first-floor flat in Limanowska Street. The kitchen and bathroom were shared with families who occupied other rooms. The window in our room looked out on a functioning tramline that traversed a part of the ghetto. The barbed-wire walls ran along the gutters on both sides of the street. I later wondered whether there were other streets in the world where the middle belonged to the free and the pavements to the imprisoned.

Further down this street a high, arched, wooden footbridge connected both pavements and allowed the tram to pass beneath. When the guard was looking the other way, many a gob of spittle landed on the passing tram.

I trudged up and down that bridge twice each day on the way to and from work at a factory where hats and various accessories were made. Mother worked in a clothing factory, Father worked in a place where empty food containers such as barrels, crates and hessian bags were cleaned, sorted and counted before being sent back for the delivery of the next food ration. Father’s skill as a bookkeeper was utilised there.

And I remember once when I worked a night shift and visited my father at work during the day, I saw workers scraping every bit of food out of the barrels before they washed them. They gave me a lick or two of some sweet and sticky stuff, probably the ‘marmalade’, a luxury we had for a while that was made of carrot or beetroot fibre left after the extraction of juices. There was such processing in the north of Poland, and the refuse was sent to camps and prisons, Father was told.

My place of work was a large room in the basement. Two small windows near the ceiling reached street level but, covered in grime, they denied daylight. The walls and floor were of stone, as in any proper dungeon. It was here that materials for hats, such as long rolls of felt, were dyed, steamed, stretched, stiffened and shaped. The acrid dyestuff simmered in large metal bathtubs; steam issued continuously from boilers; the floor was wet and slippery, light and fresh air minimal. We all looked like witches, with eczema, red eyes, and skin stained in multicolour. But all this was overshadowed by the constant threat to life, the unpredictability of the next moment and the hunger.

My workmates were female milliners. They were tough and rough and full of resentment towards me, a ‘Jewish princess’ who could not even speak Yiddish. Nevertheless, on a couple of occasions they probably saved my life by hiding me under a table covered by a sheet of felt during a sudden inspection of the factory by German police. They said I looked too young and stupid to be of any use as a hat maker. These women had been brutalised by their poverty and awful working conditions.

A year later I was transferred to another section of the building where I embossed leather for hat bands, belts and similar items. Later still I made epaulettes for military uniforms. This involved operating a special machine that embroidered a set pattern with silver and gold threads.

One day I noticed that if one particular thread were cut under the epaulette, it would all slowly unravel into a shaggy clump of loose threads. The image of an immaculate army officer with a disintegrating epaulette delighted me. Here was my chance to sabotage the enemy! I told the lady in charge of this section of the factory, expecting praise for my scheme. She said, ‘Don’t you dare! It’ll be easily traced back and we’ll all hang for your tricks.’ My parents also said as much.

It was the constant threat of mass killings for single, small acts of disobedience—threats that were often carried out—that kept us going meekly towards the gas chambers. This behaviour still puzzles outsiders.

In charge of the ghetto was a former social worker, Chaim Rumkowski, an elderly man given to shrill, rambling speeches in the open square where we had to assemble to hear the latest announcements. He called us either his beloved children or lazy thieves, and was regarded as mad and a megalomaniac. He was the puppet of the German commandant of the ghetto.

We also had to gather in this square to watch public executions: punishments for attempts of escape, some acts of sabotage and possibly other reasons. These executions were public no doubt to serve as a deterrent and to lower morale, and in this they succeeded. The first one I saw, the hanging of six young men, recurred in my nightmares for a while. The German police raided the ghetto periodically to remove ‘unproductive elements’ such as the ill, the crippled, the old and frail, and any children they could find.

There were weekly rations of food, mainly clay-like bread, potatoes—or just their peels, left from German army kitchens—occasional portions of horsemeat and processed sugar beets, left after extraction of sugar. Variations in this occurred when a product no longer regarded as edible outside the ghetto was sent in.

Each factory had a kitchen where hot soup was issued in the afternoon, one ladleful into our pannikins in return for the coupon received from the supervisor. This was the main meal of the day, available only to those present at work, so if you did not turn up there was not much to eat. No wonder that those who fell ill for a while had small chance of recovery without this meal.

We urged the cooks to keep stirring the soup while they dished it out so that the few solid particles—bits of cabbage, potatoes or carrots—were distributed evenly. The soup coupon became a sort of currency, and could be exchanged for other goods.

With the weekly rations it was difficult, but necessary, to divide the food evenly over the week, for a feast-and-famine approach sped up physical deterioration. My parents were very strict about equal daily portions, but mine was always larger than theirs. My protests were to no avail. I was growing rapidly, was more at risk of tuberculosis, so had to eat more and that was that. I felt very guilty about my eating part of their meagre rations, and it led to an incident I’ll never forget.

At work I heard that a whole loaf of bread could be had for fourteen soup coupons. I decided to save mine and bring home this extra food. I felt light-headed and fainted a couple of times in those soupless days, but the anticipation of the great moment kept me going. It was timed for my parents’ wedding anniversary, when we were to share the ecstasy of a full stomach and for once I would be giving instead of taking. I was going to present it with a ditty I composed for the occasion—‘Tonight we banish one tormentor, tra-la, tra-la,’ etc.—inspired by a popular melodrama. I thought my parents would be overjoyed and we would eat the bread until we were no longer hungry.

But it all went terribly wrong. I did not get a chance to sing my ditty. When I presented the bread my parents gasped, looked at me in horror and there was a long and ominous silence. I was told to explain how and where I got this bread. At first they were relieved to know that I had not committed some foul deed to get it. (Much later I realised that they were thinking of sexual favours, another currency in the ghetto, and had panicked.) There followed a furious reprimand for my going without the daily soup for a fortnight. They said I was a boundless idiot to behave so irresponsibly when health was so precarious.

Never before had my parents reprimanded me so angrily. We had a slice of the bread each on that night and the rest was added to my ration over the next week. I was bitterly disappointed and resentful. A couple of years later Mother referred to this incident and said she knew it had hurt but they had to teach me not to do it again.

My favourite place in the ghetto was the ‘garden’. The tenants in our block of flats formed a working bee to remove the concrete pavers of the backyard and plant potatoes. Someone miraculously obtained turnip and carrot seeds. Sewage enriched the soil, and we soon had a crop of these vegetables, little though there was per person. This crop had to be continuously guarded against theft, and we were rostered for a few hours duty each, outside our working shifts. I was usually on watch at night, and used to meet several young people from next door. Judith, a girl of my age who lived in the next building with her parents, used to join me on my guard duty. We shared memories of a happy past, daydreamed, planned revenge if we survived and talked of books we had read when there were books. We composed abusive doggerel about the Germans or planned perfect crimes against them. And we mocked Chaim Rumkowski. I still recall one such gibe, but it loses rhyme and rhythm in translation: Bells are ringing / Crows are crowing / Mad Chaim the First / Rules over millions.

I enjoyed these meetings. There was an air of conspiracy and defiance, and the Germans were not in control there. It was in the garden that I formed a close and enduring friendship with Judith that lasts to this day, even though she has now lived on another continent for many years.

I remember just one ray of sunshine in that ghetto: there was a comedy performance, a series of satirical sketches, in a large hall. The sketches gently mocked our life, were spoken and sung in Yiddish, performed with the usual black but brilliant humour, and the tunes were simple and catchy. Even the armed German guards present seemed to enjoy it. One sketch was a singsong dialogue between a husband and wife, he asking that from the seven items in their food rations surely she could make a traditional potato pie for Saturday. She intoned that while the soap, paper, salt, pepper, beetroot and vinegar were all right, when she scrubbed the potatoes clean there was nothing left of them. This was a reference to the potatoes rationed by weight, which were rotten and covered by thick mud. I still remember some of the tunes and ditties; we hummed them for months to come. This one and only marvellous escape from doom and misery I remember vividly.

From our windows or the street below, we could watch the passing trams, and this led to musings about the passengers: what did they think or feel on their trips through this prison? Many adults read books or newspapers, or dozed. Some looked at us blankly. Once I saw someone grinning; another shook a fist at me. But children always stood at the tram windows, wide-eyed and mouths agape. What did they think? What were they told about us? Particularly by 1943 and 1944, when we were so skinny and shabby, and so many were collapsing in the streets. Did these clean, secure and well-fed people feel comfortable on these trips?

At first, in the ghetto, to comfort myself, I daydreamed—pleasant memories mainly: the room I had at home before the war, my favourite books, music, flowers, the magnificent park near the school with huge chestnut trees and a lake, holidays at the seaside, swimming, skating, the splendid mountains in the south.