Back In The Ghetto
“Going back to the policemen, some of them thought, ‘Well, if I am going to be a policeman, I will be able to help my family. I would have enough food. I will be able to do this and that and the other thing.’ Some, I really didn’t know anybody because as I say, we were always those refugees. We were not part of the Jewish community in those communities. Of course, there were some who were really thieves, and G-d knows, robbers and the lowest element before the war who became policemen and then they were riding high. And maybe they thought because they had such wonderful relationships with those Nazis who were ruling at that particular time in this particular place, that they are going to survive – that this Nazi is going to help him.
“Anyway, so it depended on who was who. And then of course, another thing. Very soon it developed also when nobody wanted to become a policeman, because when the conditions were getting harsher and harsher, one knew already that Jewish lives, everybody is marked for death. What the Germans did, like they did very often in the concentration camps with those sonderkommandos… One fine day they took the whole contingent of policemen and called them in for some kind of action. I’ve seen it once in Miedzyrzec Podlaski. It was the most shocking thing. Here they gathered the whole contingent of policemen, whatever there were, let’s say 50 or 30, I have no idea. They don’t know what they called them for, they are calling them to do some bidding for them, and they just lined them up and just gunned them down. Then they came back to the Judenrat, the Jewish council, and requested 30, 40, or 50 more young men to become policemen.
“When one thinks of this, how… how absolutely incredible… That’s why it’s so difficult to judge when talking about why didn’t people resist. ‘Why didn’t you fight the Germans?’ Why? Who fought, who could fight the Germans! Of course, one could sabotage certain things, but it was… I think in the case of the Jews, just remaining alive was sabotaging the Germans, if it was at all possible.
“So back to those policemen. There were still some policemen when I came back to the ghetto. And I was there for a couple of days, two or three days, and we were just waiting to see what’s happening. And one day in the street I met Eshte, the girl I had worked with on the roads. This was another thing. At the beginning the German’s were saying – this was another one of those lies, ‘Everybody has to work for the German war effort and if you will be working, then you are not going to be deported.’ There were all kinds of… One time it was the white card, the white certificate of work is going to be the best. That means if you have a job doing the thing that the Germans need very badly, let’s say like in this Miedzyrzec in the tanneries because they need all this leather for shoes, for boots, or the roads are being destroyed because there is so much traffic on them, and so people working on the road. Anyway, it was always not easy to get this thing. People were fighting for it. People were bribing members of the Jewish council to get them a card.
“So this Eshte is the one whom I met at the ghetto, and we were working together on the road at one point before one of those deportations. So when she saw me… She was surprised to see me, because apparently, she knew that we were taken away – my mother and I. So I told her how I happened to be back now. Her sister was also at that time still alive. Her mother wasn’t there anymore. Her mother was taken away. They hid and they survived this one deportation.
“She was always a little bit hysterical. ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to save ourselves?’ And she was always really quite forceful and aggressive. She really didn’t want to die. I would say, I think I was probably more resigned to it. So I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything. I am waiting for the next train.’ Then she says, ‘We have to do something. You know, I like to ask you a favor. I heard that one of the…’ I mentioned already this German employment office where the Poles had to register to go to Germany. So she says, ‘And in this German employment office there were Polish employees working there.’ She says, ‘Somebody told me that one of those employees,’ whatever his name was, Navrofski, ‘that if you bribe him, he may give you false papers’ – those working papers for Germany. So I said, ‘Look, you are talking to me about money. I am totally penniless. I don’t have anything.’ But she apparently still had some jewelry of her mother’s. So she says, ‘But if I go to him, will you go with me?’ You always feel a little bit safer, you know, two people. I said, ‘fine.’ Then she says, ‘Well, we have to get hold of a policeman.’ You see, you cannot get out of the ghetto, but a policeman has the right to go out in the line of duty. So absolutely you had to have a policeman go with you, because then nobody would stop you in the street. He wore his uniform and he was authority, I mean, represented authority.
“Finally, she met me a day or two later and says, ‘I have someone, let’s go.’ So the three of us walk out and the policeman asked us… At the beginning, let’s say six months before, nobody would talk about it openly what you are going to do – to try to bribe somebody to survive. But this, now everything was out in the open, everybody knew, and this was the last day, the last day of prayer for us. So she told him, and we go.
“We come to the house of this Pole and he’s not home. We talk to his wife. And, again, the same thing, so you don’t even have any secrets anymore. In front of his wife, Eshte told her what we came for. And she says, ‘Well, when my husband comes back from work, I will tell him. So if he’s interested…’ She must have known already, ‘If he’s interested, he will…’ And she asked her where she lives in this ghetto.
“We are walking back and on the way we pass a house, and the policeman says to us, ‘You know, in this house lives another Polish employee of the Arbeitsamt. If you are already out of the ghetto, why don’t you try him, maybe he will do something.’ So we ring the bell, and a young, very handsome man opens the door. Sort of, you know, he looks at us with a little cynical smile on his face. He says very politely, ‘Yes, what can I do for you?’ And Eshte, she started a little bit emotionally, ‘Well, you are our last hope to save our lives.’ And he stood and he looked at us and he says, ‘Well, won’t you come in.’ And we go in. He asks us to sit down. And we sit down. I think he offered us a cigarette. I don’t remember. Of course, we both didn’t smoke.
“So we started talking and I think to myself–you know sometimes you have this instinct. And I think to myself, what does he care, I mean what does he care … Thousands of Jewish girls are being killed. So I thought to myself that maybe this is not the right approach. You know, let’s not play on his pity. And I said, ‘Look…’ I mean, I am not saying to make myself very smart, but because this bears on the thing. So I said, ‘I am convinced that you are not particularly interested in saving two Jewish girls. But my friend was told so and so, and is there a possibility for us to go to Germany for money? And if yes, how much would it have to cost and what does it take?’ He looks at us and he says, ‘Well, you couldn’t pay me for it. I wouldn’t do it for anything. It would jeopardize my life, it would jeopardize my job, it would jeopardize my wife, and I am recently married,” and blah blah. And he talks, ‘And I wouldn’t do that.’ But, he looks at me and he says, ‘You know, you don’t look Jewish,’ whatever, ‘If you like to try to come to the employment office and volunteer, and if nobody is going to ask you too many questions, and if nobody would suspect that you are not a Pole, they will prepare your papers and they will send you off, and you will save your life, and it won’t cost you anything.’ I said, ‘What difference does it make, I well… Well, I may.’ But then he says, there’s another thing,’ which I want to go back to.
“When we were still in the first ghetto in Skierniewice, I think I mentioned to you before I had my cousin who was so instrumental, he got lost, but he made for all of us – it was like little birth certificates – some fictitious names and this was actually the name which I was carrying all the time. That I was a dressmaker, the daughter of somebody else, a house that already had burnt down in Skierniewice in this ghetto that couldn’t be traced. And this thing he always had admonished on my sister and I, ‘You should always have it with you.’ And I had it right here in my bra, or my slip, or what have you. I will show it to you.
“So he said to me, ‘Don’t you have…’ So we started talking and I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I used to travel as a non-Jew with my sister, but she is dead already.’ And he said, ‘Did you ever have any documents?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have this thing, but I’ve never shown it to anybody because if I did…’ And I took it out, and you know from those two, three weeks of having it here, and perspiring, and in the train, it was all rumpled up and all. He says, ‘Give it to me.’ I was so surprised. Right then and there and he took it, and he took a piece of paper and some glue, or whatever, and straightened it out and glued it down it should look good. And he says, he looked at it and says, ‘Well, I think you better don’t show it to anybody, but just in case, have it at least looking presentable.’
(To be continued)
