“Gestapo”.
“SS”.
“Aktion”.
“Rations”.
“Margarine”.
“Hitler”.
“Dropped dead in the street”.
“Starvation”.
“Palestine”.
“Judenrat”.
“Ghetto”.
“Kropfitsch”.
“Another one”.
“That poor child”.
“Back of the head”.
“Those poor parents”.
There was never any good news outside the tablecloth. Life was a litany of catastrophes, of people disappearing, massacres and the constant struggle to find food.
Not to mention the shooting and the screams outside the window.
When the news was particularly bad, they whispered. They tried to keep me from hearing. I knew it was really bad when there was a deep intake of breath and the sound of a hand clasped over a mouth to prevent a cry from escaping. My ears were my early-warning system. I recognized how lightly or purposefully people walked. I could tell when a new set of shoes or boots entered the apartment. Sometimes they were friendly. But when I heard heavy boots, I knew trouble was imminent.
Beneath the table was my sanctuary. There I stayed and talked to my doll.
“Are you hungry, bubale?” I inquired.
“I’m starving. You must be, too. But don’t worry, Mama’s in the kitchen and she’s cooking potato-skin soup.
“Here it is. Eat it up. Be a good girl, bubale. Tasty, isn’t it? Mmmmmm. Lovely. Come on now. Eat your soup, bubale. It’s good for you.
“I’m sorry there’s no bread today. Please don’t cry”.
Occasionally, I would surface above the tablecloth and go and perch on the knee of my father, Machel, or I’d nestle in the lap of my mother, Reizel. Whenever Uncle James came to visit in the early days of the ghetto, when it was easier to move around, I sat on his knee and twiddled his bushy eyebrows. But usually I stayed under the table because I didn’t have a chair. There wasn’t sufficient space in the four-room apartment and there wasn’t enough furniture to go around.
We weren’t the only family living in flat number five, 24 Krzyżowa Street, Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Jews were forced to share cramped accommodation. In many apartments, instead of five or six people, there were maybe twenty. In others, the numbers might have been as high as sixty or seventy. One bathroom had to service maybe thirty to forty people. I had to eat and sleep under the table because there was so little space. Some people slept on the floor. My parents squeezed together in a single bed. I joined them in the middle of the night if I woke up scared.
If you were lucky, you lived together with friends or extended family. If not, you were compelled to cohabit with strangers you couldn’t bear. I have no firm memory of how many people were there or who they were. The situation was so fluid that the apartment was a constant revolving door of refugees. One day a whole set of familiar faces would vanish. Their disappearance would be accompanied by urgent whispers coming from beyond the tablecloth. It didn’t take long before they were replaced by others. Perhaps by even more people. The atmosphere inside the apartment would change. It was not always an improvement. I could sense it under the table.
We were stuffed like mice in there.
The Nazis created the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto in December 1940. Jews were banned from the main part of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, an industrial town in Central Poland, seventy miles southwest of the capital, Warsaw. They were required to identify themselves as Jews by wearing a white armband adorned with a blue Star of David. Failure to comply was punishable by death.
The Germans severed the electricity supply as one of their first strictures. Depriving us of a key component of modern life was another snip of the scissors cutting us slowly and painfully to death. There was no sewage system either. We were ordered to hang curtains or screens at windows that overlooked Aryan neighborhoods. The sense of isolation and segregation from the outside world was reinforced with every new restriction. Not only were we no longer supposed to look at our Polish neighbors, we were also denied sunlight as we were pushed back toward the Dark Ages. The Poles were ordered to block windows that overlooked the ghetto so they wouldn’t see what was happening and inform the outside world. Mind you, significant numbers of Poles in Tomaszów were anti-Semites. Some of them might have taken pleasure from our suffering. At least the curtains denied them that.
Initially, my mother, father and I lodged with my grandparents in Ko´sciuszko Square, which, before the war, was a relatively smart address in the heart of the town’s commercial district. At first, the ghetto had three sections and people could move between them, although they were banned from leaving the outer confines without a permit. Twelve months later, the Germans forced Jews from two of the ghetto’s districts into the third much smaller section. This had a perimeter they could seal off far more easily. The sense of claustrophobia intensified. We were kicked out of our home in Kościuszko Square and were more than grateful when another family that we already knew took us in at 24 Krzyżowa Street.
During the three and a half years I lived behind the ghetto walls — if “lived” is the right word — I rarely breathed fresh air. I spent almost all my time inside, for the simple reason it was too dangerous to be outside. My air smelled of boiling potato skins. Not even boiled cabbage.
By 1941, more than 15,300 Jews were squeezed into the ghetto. The prewar community was swollen by over 3,500 refugees from neighboring shtetls, or small towns. The ghetto was horrendously overcrowded. Conditions were unhygienic.
Apartments were breeding grounds for disease. In the latter half of that year, a typhus epidemic ravaged the ghetto. So many of the community’s doctors had been murdered that any surviving medics struggled to contain the outbreak. The Germans transferred 600 Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki to other ghettos in nearby towns to try to reduce the spread of infection. Those people were effectively exiled from Tomaszów and warned not to come back. Thirty-three Jews defied the order, made their way back to Tomaszów and were executed.
Sometimes, when I came out from under the table, I’d look out of the window and see lines of steel-helmeted Germans marching with rifles sloping on their shoulders. Their stout knee-length boots struck the cobblestones in unison, creating a sound that radiated strength and irresistible superhuman force. The vibrations traveled up through our building and into my stomach. And then I would duck back down beneath the tablecloth.
In my child’s mind, I regarded the table as my safe haven, although in reality, it was a cell. A prison within a prison. No matter our age, we were all inmates. And the walls of our prison were constantly closing in. Jews were eliminated at every stage. All the time, the Germans shoehorned more prisoners inside, squeezing every one of us, physically and psychologically, to the limits of human endurance. And beyond.
In towns across Poland and all the territories the Nazis conquered, Jews were forced into ghettos that were prisons in all but name. Ghettos were the first stage of the Nazis’ master plan to eradicate the Jewish race. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto, a sprawling city within a city where 420,000 Jews were incarcerated and starved behind high walls and razor wire. A quarter of a million of them were rounded up in the ghetto in the summer of 1942 and gassed. The Warsaw Ghetto is synonymous with courage and resistance because of the uprising in the spring of 1943, when 700 underequipped Jewish fighters held crack German troops at bay for almost a month. But Warsaw was not the only city where such a place existed.