At the age of four, I had no understanding of the significance of the exchange between my parents and the Nazi. Years later, however, when I was old enough to understand, Mama broke down in tears and told me about the Gestapo officer sitting at that table.
“He didn’t even open the papers. I killed my sister’s children. I forced them to let go of me. How can I forget their faces? I killed them”.
It was a pivotal moment in Mama’s life from which she never recovered. Until her dying day, she was tormented by hypothetical what-if questions. What if she had said we were a group of five instead of three? Would they still be alive? But on that day, there was no time to dwell on the death sentence imposed on my cousins. Her immediate priority was to ensure that we lived through the next few dangerous hours.
Chapter Five. The Churchyard
We had passed through the first selection process but were far from safe.
In the graveyard, Mama must have felt so alone. Having ensured that we made it past the officer, my father was obliged to leave us and return to the deportation of the Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. People were marched to the railway station. Their shoes and possessions were taken away and they were crammed into cattle wagons.
My father writes that by the end of that day, some 6,000 Jews had been expelled from the ghetto. In just one day, the Nazis transported almost half the Jews of our town on their last journey.
We were just one component of Operation Reinhard, the sick brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. Operation Reinhard was designed to achieve the physical annihilation of every Jew who lived in occupied Poland. Ultimately, it was responsible for the murder of approximately 2 million children, women and men, most of them Polish Jews.
The logistics for Operation Reinhard were devised with chilling clarity. Those who were too old, sick or frail were meant to be shot while still in the ghetto or on their way to the station. These murders were committed because the smooth operation of the extermination camps relied on victims being able to walk from the platform to the gas chambers on their own. Those who couldn’t do that were killed immediately. Ordnung muss sein—there must be order. German efficiency and thoroughness at its most despicable.
That first selection, where my cousins, their parents and most of my mother’s family were taken away, was not the last. The Germans continued to reduce the numbers of people they considered would be useful workers. In the Yizkor book, my father talks of at least two further selections. The first was on that Sabbath, October 31. Papa writes that even those with working papers were detained for a while in a factory, before some of them were sent back to the hospital courtyard, one of several staging posts before the gas chamber.
Somehow, Mama and I, just a four-year-old child, survived that process. Time has blurred my memory, and I have no recollection of being in the factory. So my father’s testimony in the Yizkor book is the most accurate guide to what happened. He paints images I could not begin to convey. “Next day there was a lull in the killings”, he writes, then goes on:
The murderers were doubtless tired after a night of bloodshed. Perhaps some went to church to pray for succor for their handiwork? More certain it is that they went to the inn to get drunk and harbor strength for the next day. Yet the vigil around the barbed-wire fences was intensified to prevent escape.
Here, I’m fairly sure my father is making a reference to himself. One of the main duties of a Jewish policeman was to guard the perimeter of the ghetto, to prevent internees from fleeing. The Nazis used the policemen to distance themselves from their victims and to make their own lives easier. If, indeed, my father was obliged to act as a sentinel by the barbed-wire fence enclosing the ghetto’s remaining Jews, I can only imagine the mental anguish he endured. Every second must have been an ethical and moral minefield. How did he manage to resolve the quandary that being a policeman probably enabled his immediate family to survive, while simultaneously meaning he was obliged to escort his friends, neighbors and other family toward their deaths?
“The tension and the horror into which those remaining in the ghetto were plunged on that day defy description”, writes my father. “Nevertheless — they still hoped the spirit of evil would abate and that they would be allowed to stay alive”.
But any such hopes were crushed on Tuesday, November 2, 1942, when the events of the previous Sabbath were repeated with “even greater cruelty and energy”. As my father writes:
Screaming like wild beasts and with murder in their eyes, the Germans began to root all the Jews from their houses into the morning cold of incipient winter. Feeble old people, men, women and children were all lined up in rows. Horrible was the sight of children aged four to five years, separated from their parents, as they faced their murderers. Thus did Jewish children march to the hospital courtyard on their way to annihilation.
It was then that there was another selection:
The Germans inspected the already authorized work permits of Jews and then decided who would remain in the ghetto and who would be deported. Once more, wives were separated from husbands and children from their parents. Each group stood alone, and woe betide anyone who tried to cross over to another group. A blow on the head from a rifle butt removed all desire to try again.
As I was so young at the time, I can’t remember the exact sequence of events. I can’t be sure whether what happened to me in the churchyard took place on October 31 or on November 2, but whenever it was, it is imprinted in my memory.
We were ordered to kneel and I kneeled close to Mama. After a while, I was able to shift and sit on her lap. She bent over me and whispered words of encouragement in that kind, gentle voice.
“Tola. We will be all right, just as long as you don’t cry out or move. Stay as still as you can”.
In the churchyard, the air was filled with shooting and screams of terror and pain. A massacre was taking place all around us. Mama bent down lower and clutched me even tighter. My face was almost touching the ground. I could feel Mama’s weight on my back. Although she was thin, she was still heavy for me. I couldn’t see what was going on. My ears were ringing. The soldiers must have been shooting with those frightening new guns I’d seen as we’d marched through the streets. They fired bullets much faster than rifles. Mama’s body jerked and twitched involuntarily with every burst. Haunting cries accompanied the metallic churning of the guns. The chemical smell from the muzzles hung in the air and filled my nose.
All the while, through her fear, Mama kept trying to reassure me. She did her utmost to be my physical and psychological shield. Her fragile body was all that stood between me and a hail of Nazi bullets. The Germans were capricious. The slightest irritation and German trigger fingers were liable to twitch and squeeze. Mama was making herself small and insignificant. I felt her anxiety as she sought to avoid drawing attention to herself and, therefore, to me. I took comfort from nestling in her lap. Her touch always made me feel safe.
I could still feel her heart thumping. I can remember the sensation as if it were yesterday. Her body was quivering from fear and the distress of knowing her sister and nieces were going to die, if not already dead. She didn’t make a sound, despite no doubt screaming inside from the pain of her snap decision. Her sister would have watched as Mama removed her children’s hands from her skirt. Mama resisted crying out loud, but I felt her tears tumbling onto my face.