Warsaw, The Ghetto, Or Where To Go…?
Weren’t you frightened being in Warsaw?
“No, you know it’s a funny thing. I think most of us under stress, I think most people act calmly. I mean when we are put in a situation that there is no way out. I really think so. Because I never did anything heroic really. And when I think of it, those things which we did, my sister and I … But you can look at it from different angles. You can say, ‘What do you mean it wasn’t heroic?’ After all, you were taking your life in your hands in order to support your family. And when you are leaving, you never knew if you are going to be back, nor did your parents. They never knew. And so, the fact remains that every time we did come back it was a big joy and a big kissing and hugging. But you didn’t consider yourself …
“I also think because you knew that your life was so cheap – actually that we are all sentenced to die sooner or later unless the war ended. The fact that a war was going on sort of maintained that hope that things may change. And, of course, sometimes you say, ‘So what if the Germans are winning the war.’ And everybody would say, ‘It doesn’t make any difference, we all will be dead anyway.’
“I remember even one of my father’s friends. He would come in every morning and, I don’t know whether he listened to some underground radio or read the paper or got some news from somebody through BBC from England. I know he would come in, and in Yiddish he would say to my father, ‘Reb Alter,’ my father’s first name was Alter, Reb which as you know, like sir. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘don’t worry, we will bury them.’ And my father would invariably … By then I think he was really quite discouraged many a time, and he would say, ‘Yes, but who knows if we won’t be buried before they are.’
“But still there was a war going on. And then there were rumors. America entered the war and Roosevelt said this, and Churchill said that. And really one knew, because one knew how cheap life was, any Jew … There was not a day hardly that would pass by that you wouldn’t look out your window, if you happened to look out your window or you happened to be in the streets somewhere, some German did not kill a Jew for nothing. I mean, you would just see life was … The line was so thin between life and death. Here you were standing, and some German might have passed by and had a fancy to put a bullet through your head, and he did. This was no crime.”
You said you had dinner with the Pole who met you …
“So anyway, going back to my journey. Then, whatever he was supposed to give me, some papers, I don’t remember exactly what, he did. And the same evening I took the train, and I went back.”
You must have been terrified during those travels.
“It was always like an adventure to a certain extent. But by the time you came, when you got off the train, then you were afraid. You looked around and nobody recognized you, and you are walking the streets of the forbidden parts until you finally got to the barbed wires around the ghetto gate and quickly walked in. And of course, the family, everybody was always sitting and waiting. So that’s what happened.
“In the meanwhile, at the same time in Skierniewice I met my husband. He was just through with architecture school. His brother was a physician in this city, Skierniewice. He perished. So, we became good friends, you know a circle of young people, another girl whom I knew from my school in Lodz who was there also.
“So, when we are arranging for going to … the Germans would tell you, ‘Go there,’ but they didn’t provide any transportation or anything. These were motorized trucks, I remember. So, among the population of Skierniewice, because my aunt’s family, my cousins were known, that part of the family had lived there so many years, my grandparents were there before. So we arranged transportation. The people who wanted to go to the Warsaw ghetto, we would transport to Warsaw. And those who wanted to go to Miedzyrzec, [Mezrich] we would transport there. We went to Miedzyrzec.”
Why would people want to go to the Warsaw ghetto?
“Some didn’t trust, you know, ‘What am I going to do in Miedzyrzec?’ Or ‘I have some relatives, my son lives there,’ or ‘I have an uncle there.’”
But they knew what was going on in the Warsaw ghetto, didn’t they?
“They knew, and yet … Some people had money, so they said, ‘With money I can always …’ Or some had hidden jewels. The fact remains …
“I spent a short time in the Warsaw ghetto, in fact, my husband’s family went to the Warsaw ghetto. Then they smuggled themselves out after a short time. But before going to Miedzyrzec, because of him I went on one of those trucks with my boyfriend to Warsaw. I stayed with some of my friend’s family from Lodz who were in Warsaw.
“You see, it was like when we went to Skierniewic … One of my very best friends, her oldest brother was married and lived in Warsaw. So her brother wrote to the family, however they communicated, ‘Don’t go to the Lodz ghetto. There is no ghetto in Warsaw, come to Warsaw.’ So, this family went to Warsaw from Lodz. And this was, of course, before the ghetto in Warsaw was created. What did we know how far the Germans would go. I mean this was going on for years.”
In the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto, weren’t they taking the Jews away?
“The first deportation was in April of 1942. This was January ’42, deportation wasn’t going on yet. So, no. The family went there before deportation. Three or four months later it started, but they got out. My husband was the youngest in the family, but he was only there and his brother and one sister and his mother. His father died a long time ago. His father died in 1930-32.
“In Warsaw even in the ghetto when I was there – I just stayed for about a week and then I went back. You know, everybody was joking about it because I was moving around, quote-unquote, freely. And as a matter of fact, then those people in Siedlce suggested, if I want to bring something from Warsaw ghetto for them – paint, if I was to smuggle out paint … And several times I did it, but then I got sick with typhus.
“My husband was in it at that time, although he wasn’t my husband then, he was my boyfriend. And one of my friends lived there. This was a small ghetto, which they liquidated then, too. My friend Emily lived not far from one of those walls, the ghetto walls. So, a couple of times … When I think of it, what one did. It isn’t any sense that I was a great … or did some great thing. So maybe three or four times I did it. I came to Warsaw. I walked over to the wall. Of course, I was being sort of coached. The first time I did it I wasn’t sure that I am going to succeed.
“There were several gates for the Warsaw ghetto. This was one which was supposed to be a little bit easier. I was told to come to this gate. So, I came to the gate and there was a German policeman, German guards, Polish policemen, and a Jewish policeman. And I … I really didn’t have the nerve. I didn’t think of it as nerve … and I come over and I say, ‘I have to go to the ghetto. Some Jews owe me still money and I have to get my money back.’ And before they looked, I walked through.
“Then I would buy this paint, and at night I would climb through this wall and my husband, he would be there those evenings special. These were, I don’t know if they were gallon or five-gallon cans – two of them – whatever colors he wanted. See, because before the war, this was my mother’s cousin, they had one of the biggest paint stores in this thing, and now they were not supposed to have it anymore. But you know, if somebody smuggled, apparently this would sustain them.
“So we would let those big cans with a cord over the wall. I climbed over the wall, it was always in the middle of the night, maybe two o’clock in the morning, hoping that nobody is going to notice it. And then when I was over on the other side of the wall, I would pick up those two cans, very heavy, and walk to the railway station and take the train to Siedlce, and then delivered the paint, rested a few days, then went back to Warsaw.
“Then one time I didn’t feel well. I came back to Siedlce and I think there is something wrong, I am getting sick. I think this was in ’42, before Passover. So, I took the train and went to Miedzyrzec Podlaski and I got sick with typhus. I was quarantined in some little hospital, I remember that, and I was … it is such an irony. I was the only one in my family who had typhus and I am the only one who is alive … and everyone is gone …
“I don’t remember how long I was in the hospital. Then I came home. This was another thing. You know, when I think of these little vignettes, and I think now there were years when I didn’t even think of it – busy in raising the family – but now all those little details … I remember when I came back from the hospital, there we lived already in this ghetto in Miedzyrzec, one room, and it was part of our undoing. Well, it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was like a, like a storefront so you didn’t have windows. If you wanted some air, you had to open this door. It was like a heavy glassed-in door. Once upon a time it must have been a store.
“I remember, I don’t know where my mother would get it every morning. Well, I looked like death, and everybody was saying I look like a Madonna: pale and my hair was flowing and I, really, I was barely alive. Every morning she would go out and I don’t know from where or with what money and whoever had it, she would bring me an orange to eat. This was supposed to bring back my strength. This was in Miedzyrzec Podlaski.
“Then I stopped going, stopped smuggling this paint. This was springtime, this was all in ’42. And then came summer and somebody – you know, here I was a young girl, and I don’t know, some friends maybe – somebody said, ‘Would you like to help out in the ambulatorium?’ By then very many young men were taken away to the camps, to the war camps. I remember when I started out, my two brothers … One day when I came home, I was told that my two brothers were taken. I felt such a loss, such a void, and I thought to myself, you heard before this one was taken, that one was taken, but when it’s your own brothers, it’s just … like a knife. I remember I used to keep a diary, of course, it’s all gone. And so, at that time I even wrote about it, how it affected me so. Even so, I don’t even know that we were so close, especially with the boys. They were religious Jewish boys, they really didn’t have very much in common with their sisters, I mean they sort of … Anyway, so there we were. Things were getting worse.”
This was all in Miedzyrzec? There wasn’t a ghetto there?
“No, we were not living in a closed ghetto, but actually, after the first deportation they made a closed ghetto. At that time, as I say, we lived in a storefront. This city, I think was one of those cities which, like in so many maybe South American cities, there was a very well-to-do section: nice trees with a park with squares, apartment houses maybe two and three stories high – three was probably the highest – and then there was that area that was called ‘Shmulevizna’ for some reason. And that’s where the proletariat, the poor people, the ones who were working in those tanneries, that’s where they lived.
“By the time we came there we had very little left, we could consider ourselves … And besides, who had the money? So, most of those of us who arrived – some had more money, some less – we found the only rooms which were available. That was in this part called, ‘Shmulevizna,’ and this was later on when they made the ghetto, this was part of the ghetto. But we had to move because this house where we lived, it was not in the ghetto. Then I started working in this ambulatorium.”
What actually was an ambulatorium, a hospital?
“It was like a walk-in clinic, actually, that’s what you would call it. People from hunger and … Of course, speaking of the typhus, people were dying like … Every morning you would see – it was called Judenrat, it was the Jewish government; it is here like they collect the garbage – you would see those people with two or three wagons going around and collecting bodies of the dead who died at night from typhus or from starvation, or the ones who were killed in the street by the Germans. Every morning … arms hanging and legs … But this was a daily sight I think in every ghetto during that … Those scenes, I don’t know, it is very difficult to describe them really, and, of course, they disappear from your mind. But they are always there somewhere, and now when I talk about it, I can just see those things …
(To be continued)
