A Close Call
“You have no idea – and this is not a very pleasant – how full of lice I was. I thought I will never get rid of them. Under my arms – we didn’t shave, I think most of the women still don’t shave – round my genitals… I was eaten up alive. I was, you know for the first few weeks I really was afraid someone would discover that I am…That is where the typhus came from. We were just – from the lack of hygiene, from the lack of the facilities to wash yourself, and from the lack of soap. We were lying sometimes for… In this attic or then, whatever. You have no idea, I thought I would never get rid of those lice. You were catching them, and you were killing them literally by your fingers. It took me a few weeks until I finally felt that I am really clean. This was awful. I was afraid that somebody would discover that suddenly a louse is walking on me and know I am a Jew.
“Anyway, at this Catherina Hospital – it was called Catherina Hospital, it still exists, I am sure. Although maybe not, it was bombarded. That’s another thing. We were there four Polish girls and four Ukrainian girls. Kaska, the little one… Anyway, all those seven girls worked in the kitchen.
“And another thing, coming back to the Poles. In that hospital there were hundreds – these were all slave laborers, most of them. There were also German girls who were assigned to it, and they had no choice. If they were assigned to work in the hospital, they had to work in the hospital. I mean they were cleaning girls like we were. But all the other nationalities were one notch higher than the Slavic nationalities.
“We had to wear a letter ‘P.’ I still have one of those letters, I can show you also this. For us there was a curfew until seven o’clock. The others were allowed. As Poles or Ukrainians we were not supposed to have any quote-unquote relationship with any Germans, ‘verkehr’ which means also ‘traffic’ in German. We were actually given instructions, but all the other nationalities like the Belgium and French and Norwegian, G-d knows, Hungarian, from all the countries, Austrian, they were considered almost as good as the Germans, and they were allowed. They didn’t have any curfew. They didn’t have to wear any letters. We were not supposed to go to the theatre, to the opera…
“And working in the kitchen was considered one of those lower… What’s the difference if you vacuum a room or peel potatoes in the kitchen? But anyway, there were those big kettles to wash, and all those seven girls worked in the kitchen. And I was sure that now I am going to be assigned to the kitchen. And the next morning, one of those – what’s her name, Paulina – she came, and she said, ‘I’d like to assign you to floor,’ whatever they called it, the second floor of the building, number six, which was internal medicine. There was another girl who was working with me who was German, and actually up to today, she taught me how to clean. She was one of the best workers, and I had no idea. I just followed her and did everything what she showed me how to do: to scrub the floors, to bring the… It was really, I think, one of the best places to work in the hospital. Why she assigned me there, I don’t know, but it’s always a silly thing.
“Most of the others – there were two of them – one was very young, one was maybe fifteen years old, I don’t know, she shouldn’t have even come there. She probably wanted to… Then she became a little prostitute there. The two others – one was from a city, and one was a peasant girl. The Ukrainians, all four of them really, you know, heavy peasants. I don’t even know if they knew how to read and write, maybe, but they were very, very primitive girls. Although, for some reason, although you couldn’t hide in a sense who you were … I spoke German pretty well. I spoke German in a literary manner because you learn it in high school. And somehow it was coming through.
“So I worked in this, and actually, needless to say, I’m coming from the ghetto and from the deportation, but even under normal war circumstances, I really had it very good when I think of it now. Food, as much as I wanted, and good food. I was treated very well, of course, I was behaving in an absolutely perfect manner. I was polite; I was kind; I was helpful; and I tried not to attract any attention by anybody whatsoever.
“In Stuttgart I met quite a few Jewish girls. Now let me get to this. We were working every day like from seven until two and then we had an hour break. And then we had to go… We were really, I mean those of us working on those floors, we were really not doing any cooking or any serving. You know the Germans are so well organized. This was probably also one of the reasons why they could fight the war for so long. The work was so divided and so well organized. We, the cleaning girls, in the morning – here was this big kitchen – we brought whatever was assigned to this floor. There were maybe thirty patients or so, and we brought the food for this floor. We did not distribute the food; the nurses did. We were to just go in and bring the dishes back to the kitchen. We vacuumed the floor; but we did not clean the wash basin, the nurses did this. We did not make any beds; the nurses did this. We did the bathrooms in the afternoon. It was so perfectly divided everything, to the minute. We had about an hour’s time in the afternoon, and then we had once a week, we had one afternoon free. Every two weeks we had a Sunday free.
“So that first free Sunday which I had, happened to be a free Sunday for this young girl. So she says to me, do I want to go and meet some of her friends, her Polish friends. Of course, you have to make friends with the Poles, I mean you have to. So we go.
Where do her friends work? They work in an old-folks home. So we go. We come and they were off this afternoon, or whatever, it was a break, whatever. They are both in their room. We come in and I take a look at those two girls, and I think to myself, well, we’ll find out, and I am absolutely sure that they are Jewish. But this little Polish girl, she has no idea.
“We started talking and they asked me, again, and again my story. I talk to them, and I ask them where they are from and we talk a little bit and we hope we are going to see each other again, and okay. And we leave. Now, when I said that I am from Miedzyrzec Podlaski – there were a few girls, one now in Chicago with whom I was now in Washington D.C., became one of my best friends, and this Marina, she is the one from this altersheim, she lives now in Florida.
“When she heard I’m from Miedzyrzec Podlaski, she knew already… this Genna and her sister Franca and another girl from Miedzyrzec, Hanaka. See, I arrived in June and all those girls, they arrived already in November and December of ’42. So they already made contact one way or another and they knew each other. Genna worked in a restaurant at that time. Franca worked in a hotel.
“Marina, the one from the altersheim… Hanaka, she was born in Miedzyrzec; Genna, she was born in Miedzyrzec. Of course, I was a refugee there in this ghetto. Marina told them about me when she saw them. And she says, ‘Look, this girl came, and she says that she is from Miedzyrzec Podlaski,’ And they are trying to see me, to find out if I am a Pole from Miedzyrzec. If an authentic Pole, then they are afraid of me, I could denounce them as Jewish. If I am a Jewish girl from Miedzyrzec, who am I, they wondered.
“So anyway, when the girl took me there, I met those two girls who were not from Miedzyrzec, who worked in this altersheim. But they in turn knew two girls from Miedzyrzec. And when I said to them that I am from, that I arrived from Miedzyrzec, they wanted to warn those two others that someone had arrived from Miedzyrzec and that they should try to find out who I am. If I am a Pole, then it is dangerous for them. If I am a Jew, then they probably know me. They wanted to know who I am. So anyway, we were supposed to meet again, or they were supposed to come to my hospital – those two whom I met – and I didn’t know anything about the others.
“One day, I forgot how it was, we met again, and they said they had some other friends here who they would like me to meet. And one day they called me – this was really a funny scene. They called me from the office one afternoon when I had a break, that I had visitors. And this hospital was very nicely situated, like in a big park, a little bit like the Veterans Administration here in Los Angeles. And there were trees here and trees there. And when I was coming down from my room, I had the same thought. If they are Poles, they may know me. They may know I am not from Miedzyrzec. If they are Jews, I don’t know if they would know me or not. But in the ghettos, the faces one already…
(To be continued)
