I was two and a quarter when my parents and I entered the ghetto of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. We didn’t have a choice. Resistance was futile. You didn’t argue when guns were trained upon you by the most brutal military machine the world had ever seen.
Still, when I was nearly three and a half, I displayed my own innate spirit of resistance. It was in January of 1941, when the Germans instigated what they called a fur Aktion. They ordered ghetto inhabitants to hand over fur coats so they could be sent to Germany to clothe people on their home front. It was part of a systematic effort to strip us of our valuables. Earlier, they had scoured the ghetto demanding people surrender their jewelry.
Our apartment was raided by thugs in uniform. Mama didn’t possess a fur. But I did. It was a beautiful white fur coat with a hood and white neck ties with fur balls at the end. I was so proud of that coat. It was my favorite possession; and it was so warm. Although I hardly ever got to wear it because I rarely went outside, in a time of utter deprivation, it made me feel special.
The instant one of the German soldiers went to the closet and took the coat off a peg, I became incandescent with rage. I flew at him. I started punching and kicking him. He was a big man, a giant compared to me. But no one was going to steal my prized coat. I had no fear. I just wanted to fight. Mama was shocked. She tried to pull me away. But I wasn’t listening to her. I tried to bite the soldier’s knees and lunged at him. He kicked me away with his heavy boots and then walked away with my most treasured possession. I could have been killed. People were shot for much less.
I recognize that little girl in me today. She was fearless. What other child would do such a thing? I like to think I am still the same feisty creature. The memory of that coat stayed with me. I bought one almost exactly like it for my granddaughter decades later.
The episode with the coat demonstrates clearly that when a child reaches the age of three, they are blossoming into a sentient human being, capable of feeling and understanding sensations, and of processing information as their cognitive abilities begin to fly, although most lack the vocabulary to articulate what they are seeing. That period should be a time of wonder at the simple joys the world has to offer. Marveling at the aerial dance of a butterfly. Recognizing the love of a mother and father and reciprocating. Seeing smiling faces, feeling safe and secure. Falling asleep with a full stomach in a warm bed. Waking up the next morning, excited about exploring another day ripe with promise.
Within the ghetto of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, the only certainty was my parents’ unconditional love. And I knew that I loved them back with all my heart. Beyond them, however, there was nothing but the abyss. Color drained from our ever-withering universe. We inhabited a monochrome world that was always in the shadows. We were mentally shackled together in a collective state of depression. Nothing ever offered a shaft of light or hope. There was no cure. The cavalry wasn’t ever going to ride in to rescue us. The only release was death.
Every new day brought a different form of terror. I remember soldiers coming for my widowed maternal grandmother, Tema, and her brother, whose name I don’t recall. They ordered them to go downstairs, and they shot them in the street. Two dead Jews out of 6 million. Their ages were a death sentence. The Nazis had no use for old people. Anybody over the age of fifty was regarded as ancient by the Germans. I never saw a person with white hair until I came to America. To the Nazis, older people were useless as Zwangsarbeiter (slave laborers) and an unnecessary burden. There was nothing extraordinary about the summary executions of Tema and her brother. Their killers displayed not a flicker of hesitation. The Germans snuffed out my relatives’ lives, and those of others, as casually as a pest controller might exterminate rodents. Because that is what we were to them. Vermin. I can’t begin to tell you how much it hurts me to use that word.
What I still find hard to comprehend all these years later is the absence of conscience and the casual manner in which the murders of harmless civilians were committed, as if this was just another bodily function.
My father put his hand over my eyes and dragged me away from the window. His first instinct was to protect my innocence — because once seen, murders like that could never be unseen and would be forever imprinted in the mind.
I remember the sound of the guns that cut them down, along with the peal of shell casings cascading onto the sidewalk. The screams I heard were so visceral that if I conjure up the memory, I find that they are still ringing in my ears. A chorus of wails seemed to travel all the way from the center of the earth up to the heavens.
But I didn’t hear Mama cry. She manifested shock in a manner unlike other people. She didn’t allow herself that initial explosion of grief. When my father took his hand from my eyes, I saw her. Mama was silent. It was as if all the air had been punched out of her lungs. She was incapable of making a sound. She took all the tears and torment, plunged them deep inside her and never let them out.
A little piece of my mama was murdered that day. With every new corpse, the Germans were killing us all from the inside. I still feel the mourning cloud that descended on our household and the overwhelming sense of impotence. We, as a people, could do nothing to stop these murders, nor the next. There was no retribution. No eye for an eye. They were killing us with impunity.
I lived with the constant fear that my parents would be butchered in front of my very eyes, or that they would disappear and never come back. From the moment I awoke, I was scared that it would be my turn to be killed next. I went to sleep fretting that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
All the while, I was crippled by hunger. When the ghetto was established in 1940, the Germans introduced food rationing. We were supposed to live on just six pounds of bread and seven ounces of sugar per person per month. For most adults, that might have lasted for a week, no more. At first, the Germans prohibited us from getting meat from the butchers. Then they restricted access to bread. Bakers’ opening hours were limited. Mothers got out of bed in the middle of the night to queue for a loaf. They risked being shot if caught in the streets before curfew was lifted. Sometimes they would come back empty-handed. Sometimes they didn’t come back at all. As the months passed, food supplies diminished. A soup kitchen was set up to keep the neediest from starving to death.
I remember having difficulty walking. I was a slow developer, probably because my body was deprived of vitamins at a time when it needed to be nurtured, to grow, to be healthy. I didn’t really walk well until the age of four because of malnutrition. Being stuck under the table for such long periods also probably hindered the development of my bones and muscles. I must have been desperate for calcium, essential for bone density and strength. When I got out from under the table, I would walk around the apartment licking the walls. I must have been intuitively trying to extract calcium from the chalk in the paint. Mama tried to curb this habit.
“You’ve been licking the walls”, she said.
“No, I haven’t”, I replied.
“Yes, you have. Don’t lie to me. I can see the tongue marks. The wall is wet”.
She would smack me. It didn’t really hurt. And at the first opportunity, as soon as her back was turned or she left the room, I’d start licking again.
We were subjected to an ever-worsening famine. The most desperate parents sent their children beyond the ghetto perimeters to forage for food, despite the threat of a death sentence the Nazis imposed without even the most rudimentary trial.