Adults are less fortunate. In my experience, they suffer far more, because they understand more. I know that because of what happened to my beautiful, wonderful, brilliant mama, whose light was extinguished prematurely. To this day, I cherish her memory, not least for her courage and the wisdom she imparted.
I lost my innocence in the Jewish ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, the moment I looked beyond the tablecloth.
Throughout the early years of my childhood, evil was riding on my shoulder every step of the way. As far as I’m concerned, the common postwar German excuse of “I was just following orders” has no validity. So many chose the dark side.
Chapter Three. And then They Came for Me
One of the maxims of the Holocaust was that first they came for the intellectuals. In reality, they kept coming back just in case they missed some. The SS guards took their time getting to the front door of one of the brightest people in my family. But, just as inevitably as death itself, they eventually turned up in the spring of 1942 and took away Uncle James (he of the bushy eyebrows), married to my wonderful aunt Helen, my father’s sister.
Uncle James was a German Jew. He was a lawyer with a fine mind, and I idolized him. Sitting on his lap and playing with his eyebrows is one of my sharpest first memories. Uncle James had thought that he might be useful to our jailers. He hoped his language skills might save him, securing him work as an interpreter. Poor Uncle James. Like so many Jews, he was deluded. To the Nazis, all Jews were expendable. They didn’t need translators. They weren’t having conversations that required Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew interpretations. They were issuing orders in a language understood by every race on earth. Violence.
Even now, eighty years later, I don’t know precisely how Uncle James’s life ended. But having read various historical accounts, I suspect he was shot outside his home. I just hope his death was instant and painless. I know that his wife, Helen, wasn’t there at the time. She was younger than he, with an enchanting elfin face and a beautiful smile. Helen was about eighteen years old, and like everyone else of her age, she was a forced laborer, possibly in a textiles factory hitched to the German war effort. It was a small mercy that Helen was absent when they came for her husband. She would have done anything for her family. She might have been killed there and then. But her time would come and not in a manner or place that one might imagine.
I remember my father coming back and telling me in the gentlest way possible, “I’m afraid you won’t be seeing your uncle James again. He’s gone and he won’t be coming back”.
I was really upset. I loved Uncle James very much. He was such a handsome man. His murder was part of my ghetto education. Although I was only three and a half, I was learning that people just disappeared. You had to get used to it, along with the numbness that accompanied the feeling of helplessness.
Uncle James’s murder aligns with a series of raids on April 27 and 28, 1942, by the German Security Police. They conducted an Intelligentsia Aktion and rounded up lawyers, doctors, members of the Jewish police and the Judenrat, the Jewish council or administration that nominally ran the ghetto but which had to acquiesce to German demands. Many of the victims were shot for “trying to escape” as they were being arrested. Over the course of those two days, 200 people were murdered.
Mama didn’t cry when Uncle James was killed. As ever, she hid her tears behind an invisible veil. With each new murder, a memorial stone was cemented on top of her spirit. Uncle James’s was laid next to those of her mother and uncle. The cenotaph being constructed inside her mind grew with every passing day. It weighed her down. She was slowly drowning.
As spring turned to summer in 1942, the Germans once again tightened the screws on the ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. I know this because every European Jewish community eradicated in the Shoah has a Yizkor, a book of remembrance. Containing photographs of and tributes to the dead, and written mostly in Yiddish and Hebrew, the Yizkor books were a postwar attempt by survivors to reconstruct and honor the history the Germans tried to wipe out. Included are descriptions of individual tragedies, acts of heroism and revelations about the names of tormentors and criminals.
Ever since I’ve lived in Highland Park, the black leather-bound Yizkor book of Tomaszów Mazowiecki has been in my collection. For decades, it sat untouched in my bookcase. But in the summer of 2021, I took it from the shelf once more and braced myself.
Yiddish was the language of my childhood. I stopped speaking it when my father died, but lately, I have been studying the language again. I found that I was able to read the Yizkor book with ease. It was as if I was reliving my early life and it was mesmerizing.
My father wrote seventeen pages of the Tomaszów Yizkor book. There, he portrays the destruction of the ghetto and the accompanying slaughter. So graphic are his descriptions that his contribution to the Yizkor book has become a cornerstone of the history of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto.
My father knew what was going on, because he was a member of the Ordnungsdienst, the Jewish Order Service or police force. The Germans had ordered the Judenrat to establish a police force in late 1940. Their role was to maintain order, to guard the internal border of the ghetto and to stop people escaping. It was also part of the Nazi strategy of sowing division among the Jewish population. Baruch Szoeps, the first chairman of the Judenrat, was beaten to death by the Gestapo for refusing to cooperate with the Germans. His successor, Lejbusz Warsager, determined it would be wiser to comply.
In ghettos throughout Poland, Jewish councils reluctantly concluded that if they acceded to some of the German demands, they would have a greater chance of saving their people. The councillors might have managed to preserve some lives, although as history sadly demonstrates, all they did was delay the inevitable genocide. The Nazis had no intention of responding with mercy to the Judenrat’s gestures. But how could anyone have imagined that people from a cultured, modern, intelligent country like Germany were planning to exterminate another race? Germany, the birthplace of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, of writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was simply unthinkable.
Members of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki Judenrat were highly selective about which men they chose to be police officers. Some councillors instructed their sons to join. They also sought out men from “good” families. The Judenrat was determined to exclude types who might be either violent or corruptible. According to a Judenrat wages ledger discovered by archivists in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, my father was paid twenty-five Polish zlotys a month. The salary was effectively worthless at a time when food and other staples were difficult to find because the Germans controlled the supply chain.
In the black market for Poles, people paid fifteen zlotys for a loaf of bread weighing 2.25 pounds. But in Jewish ghettos, the black-market rate more than doubled to thirty-two zlotys. Bear in mind that as part of the Nazi campaign to wipe us out, Jews only obtained a third of the rations that Poles were getting, and so black-market prices for Jews were twice as high.