As the ledger suggests, there was no financial incentive for joining the police — the only real motivation for the Jews was to obtain information. In the ghetto, information might make the difference between life and death. Mama told me that my father was trusted, presumably by the Judenrat, to get intelligence that might help save his friends and neighbors, and that he could be relied upon to soften German orders. So when he was recruited, together with his friend Aaron Greenspan and several others on February 1, 1942, as life in the ghetto was becoming increasingly perilous, he must have seen it as a way to protect Mama and me. As far as I’m concerned, my father was a hero.
There has long been a casual misconception that the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter — that they were passive and didn’t fight back. That is simplistic and inaccurate. The Jews were certainly overwhelmed, but there was a spirit of resistance across occupied Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Underground movements sprang up across the Nazi empire. There were uprisings in a hundred Jewish ghettos. That’s one in every four. The participants weren’t naive enough to believe they could defeat the Germans, but where they could be, they were disruptive.
By watering down the Germans’ orders, by being kind and humane in the face of unbelievable sadism and by picking up information he thought might help save some people, my father, in his own small way, was a rebel who hid in plain sight. This is the conclusion I reached after reexamining his contribution to the Yizkor book: “In the summer of 1942, there was a spate of rumors that strange things were going on in the towns and neighboring townlets”. He continues:
No one knew what this was all about. Information and communication with the area was totally absent.
We were cut off from the outside world. Any sort of travel to a nearby town or village was strictly forbidden. Mail, all correspondence, and the sending of telegrams ceased immediately after the closing of the ghetto in 1941. The only persons able to go outside the town and into the villages and nearby townlets were holders of the “green armband”. These were collectors of rags, and leather merchants, who bought these materials from the local peasants and supplied them to the factories sequestered by the Germans. These “green armbands” brought news of deportations, removal of Jews from many townlets that were now Judenrein—“cleansed of Jews”—and continuous transports of deported Jews.
But to where?
No one knew. There were rumors that the deportees were sent to labor camps in Germany. The word “concentration camps” was also heard. If people ventured the supposition that the Jews were being taken to their deaths, not only did people turn a deaf ear to them, but they were also branded as madmen. Was it possible that young and healthy people without handicaps would be sent to their deaths?
During prayers in the synagogues, at the time of the High Holy Days, a feeling reigned that something terrible was about to happen. Something compared to which, life in the ghetto was child’s play.
Sure enough, something terrible did happen when I was about four years old. I can place it back to that time because the table in 24 Krzyżowa Street was still my reference point. When I was four, my shoulders reached the tabletop and I no longer had to stand on tiptoe to see what was on it.
The apartment door opened. My father entered and slumped into a chair. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. I remember it as if it happened today. I remember where I was standing and where my father was sitting and where my mother was. Mama was to the left of me and Papa was to the right.
“I took them to the truck. I had to help them climb up”, he said. “The truck was full. Full of old people. They were sitting right at the back next to the tailgate”.
My father was talking about his parents, Emanuel and Pearl.
“We just looked at each other. I saw the look in their eyes. They knew where they were going. I couldn’t save them. There was nothing I could do”.
The Germans must have taken sadistic pleasure in forcing a Jewish policeman to lead his own parents to their death. Two or three days earlier, my father and other men of his generation had been ordered to dig a mass grave for their parents. Papa knew what was coming and was powerless to prevent it. Having repeatedly considered this crime over the years, I have tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that he was able to help them in a small way at the end, just by being there.
But how traumatic must it have been for my father to know that he was unable to save them? If he had tried to thwart the Germans, he undoubtedly would have been killed, and Mama and I would have been more vulnerable than we already were. He was caught between the hammer and the anvil. He was damned whatever he did. Every day presented him with new insoluble moral dilemmas.
In the ghettos and the camps, Jews like my father were compelled to make impossible choices several times a day, every day, every week, every month, every year. As a Jew in occupied Europe, there were no good decisions. There were only bad and worse ones. All you could do was make a less bad decision. Make the wrong one and you were dead, and your family would probably join you shortly afterward. Anyone who has ever faced imminent annihilation knows that you do what you must to survive.
I’m convinced my father didn’t have a choice about becoming a policeman. There was no guarantee that those who enlisted would be safe. The Germans killed some officers within the force, and the Judenrat was obliged to maintain the numbers. It appears he was selected as a replacement officer. I don’t think he would have volunteered. He would only have enlisted if asked to do so by Jewish community leaders who were keen to maintain the best possible standards under the most impossible circumstances. It was a position he detested, because, despite his good intentions, he was required to perform duties that were abhorrent. Jewish police officers had to enforce the orders of their Nazi controllers or put themselves and their families at risk. Plain and simple, it was blackmail.
Honorable policemen like my father strove, wherever possible, to mitigate German orders, or to send people discreet warnings that gave them a chance to save their lives, or at least choose the least bad option. I believe that he did his best to ease the suffering of the Jews of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Mama was his conscience, and she helped him navigate that terrible moral maze.
That day, when my father told us about his parents, not only was Mama internally grieving the murder of family and friends, but her grief was exacerbated by the pain borne by my father, the man she married for love. At the table, Mama tried in vain to console my father while silently putting two more bricks in her invisible memorial wall.
It was hard for me to imagine not seeing my grandparents again, but I had to come to terms with it almost straight away. Today, I struggle to picture their faces. They have faded over the years. The abiding image that keeps coming to me is of my grandfather with a yellow measuring tape around his neck in his tailor’s store in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
But what I do clearly remember are my father’s tears. I recall his sense of resignation. He talked very quietly. He wasn’t surprised that they were taken away to be shot. They lived with the expectation that we would all be killed. My father was numb. The way he and Mama accepted death is very frightening to me today. It shows just how surreal life and death were in the ghetto.
My grandparents were taken to the woods on the outskirts of the town. I have no proof of what happened to them, but I imagine they would have done their best to follow a traditional Jewish ritual when death is imminent. When we know we are about to die, we recite a prayer called Shema Yisrael.