The Germans were masters of deception. They wanted surviving Jews to believe that the deportees were still alive. In their final hours before being murdered, some were coerced into writing letters or postcards to relatives saying that they were happy and healthy, laboring in some distant corner of the Third Reich.
My father recalled that people in the Block heard a rumor that a woman on the last train to Treblinka had written a letter saying she was working on a farm in Germany and her children were with her. No one could confirm the rumor, but they wanted to believe in it. The hope it provided was sufficient to keep us all in a state of denial. The survivors refused to believe the implications of the slaughter they had witnessed with their own eyes. It was beyond their comprehension that the Nazis intended to keep murdering us until the Jewish race was extinct.
Looking back, I realize that most of those in the Block were suffering from “the delusion of reprieve”—a condition identified by Viktor Frankl, an eminent Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist from Vienna, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, written after he’d survived three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Frankl writes, “The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad”.
In the Yizkor book, my father records something similar: “…the Jews fooled themselves and grew accustomed to their daily routine, guarding in their hearts the hope of better times to come”.
For Mama and me, that daily routine involved going to the Sammlungstelle. The literal translation is “collection point”. What a misleading euphemism for a repository of all the personal artifacts, photographs, pictures, books and heirlooms of an entire community that had disappeared. Fifteen thousand personal histories stretching back centuries were contained within. Their ties and hats and sweaters and socks and shoes and suits and shirts and skirts each diffused a lingering intensely individual perfume. It was the job of those left behind to categorize and sort the possessions of the murdered Jews, dumped in undulating hillocks on the floor of a disused factory, pack the items into crates and dispatch them to Germany. The owners’ bodies had gone. Their belongings soon followed. Before long, it was as if those people and their families had never existed.
The Nazis were obsessive about not wasting any useful material. As we now know, even bodies weren’t sacrosanct to the Third Reich. Not only did they humiliate us while we were breathing, but they subjected our remains to the ultimate indignity after they slaughtered us. The manner in which they disposed of Jewish bodies defiled every precept of our religious traditions. Jews are obliged to bury a body as close to the moment of death as possible. This compassionate obligation applies to executed criminals, to the fallen on a battlefield, to every human being. To be denied burial is a grievous insult. No doubt that is one of the reasons why, in the extermination camps, the Nazis desecrated the victims of the gas chambers. Our hair was used for stuffing mattresses. Our gold teeth were extracted and melted down for jewelry. The rapacious German war machine demanded that no resource be wasted. Mercifully, at the Sammlungstelle, we were required to process possessions and not human remains.
While we performed our duties, the Germans who weren’t guarding us pillaged the empty homes within the former larger ghetto. They tore down walls and jimmied ceilings in a voracious treasure hunt for jewelry, gold coins or other valuables secreted by the deportees. As they ransacked what they presumed were empty houses and apartments, they found people who were too old, frail or sick to move, or had been missed during the first raid. These poor Jews were murdered in their beds. Once cleared of any salvageable items, the properties were torched. Reading my father’s eyewitness account was heartrending:
The shattered windows gave the houses the appearance of blind people with gouged eyes. The stillness of death hovered over the houses — yet cried unto the heavens. Silence. Silence and death permeated the air, but amid the silence there still was heard the weeping of a little child, torn suddenly from its bed. The parents’ beds also held secrets; they were still warm, the pillows moist with the tears of mothers who cried into them in order not to add to the grief of the anguish of the family.
The guards didn’t oblige me to accompany Mama to the Sammlungstelle, but I stayed by her side all day long, every day, as together we sifted through the possessions. I was too scared to remain in our room by myself. One day, as she was separating boys’ garments from girls’, an article of clothing caught my eye.
“I like that sweater”, I whispered to Mama.
I kept my voice low, so as not to attract the attention of the guards watching over us with guns at the ready. The sweater was white and adorned with small white and pink mock pearls.
Mama took it out of my hands, folded it and placed it on a table on top of a pile of other similar pieces of clothing. She looked at me with those intense green eyes and raised her eyebrows. No words were needed. I knew better than to protest. Mama didn’t speak until we were back in our room in the Block.
“Tola, that sweater you wanted once belonged to a four-year-old girl like you. She is no longer here. And soon, all these clothes will be gone as well”.
I didn’t need any further explanation. From then on, I never coveted another piece of clothing. As she toiled alongside other ghetto survivors, my mother nurtured in me the idea that I should learn to be satisfied with less.
The Sammlungstelle was a petri dish where my strong will and sense of self-discipline grew roots and flourished. My young mind grasped the concept that having less was just a fact. In our lopsided war, a child’s ability to handle deprivation was invaluable. Ultimately, in my case, it might have made the difference between survival and death.
However, that brief conversation with my mother was not just a lesson about materialism and possessions; it delivered a much more profound message about our very existence. Every hour of every day, the Germans chiseled away at our self-esteem and our very being. They sought to demoralize us and break our spirits. Every action they performed was aimed at coercing us into a state of acquiescence, whereby we accepted their definition of us as subhuman. My mother taught me that it was important to honor our dead. In the absence of memorial stones, we could at least treat their possessions with dignity and respect. She was infusing me with the principle that even in the bleakest of times, we must not lose our own humanity, sensitivity and sense of self-worth. My mother was encouraging me to be a mensch — a person of integrity and honor. It was a lesson I took to heart.
Thereafter, even when a beautiful pair of red boots surfaced from beneath a heap, I managed to resist. Despite imagining myself wearing them, I put the boots onto a pile of children’s shoes. I helped organize the clothes. If I found a skirt, I put it on the mountain of girls’ clothes. The same with shoes and boys’ clothes. I spent seven months of my life as a four-year-old slave laborer. Had peace existed, I might have been at kindergarten. But what was peace? I had known only war. I was getting an education in the most extraordinary school of life, and death.
I couldn’t fail to understand the significance of the articles that surrounded us. They were evidence of a terrible war crime. But no investigators would ever come. Would the perpetrators ever be brought to justice? Would we be next to be killed? All these questions hung in the courtyard while the women worked in silence. It wasn’t always possible for them to suppress their emotions, however. Occasionally, someone would cry out as she recognized a garment that belonged to her mother or a child. Yet she carried on sorting. To stop would have tempted execution. We were trapped and grief had no avenue of escape. Our life of drudgery continued for a seven-month stretch.