[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  “I never believed that Jews could even plant flowers,” a grinning Gestapo officer told Feliks, who had managed to grow blossoms the color of blood. Later, Feliks would say that he feared his reward would be a bullet to the head.

  Lucyna heard talk about the new place becoming a permanent Jewish settlement. Jewish leaders were tasked with official assignments: housing, nutrition, finance, registration, lice control. But the deportations had continued, Jewish police officers and ghetto leaders who thought they had found a way to stay in Lublin taken away with their families. Lucyna dreaded the bloody, brutal process. Is it only a matter of time? she thought grimly.

  THE SHOUTING BEFORE dawn in November 1942 had drawn Lucyna out of a sound sleep. There would be no more Jewish settlement. In the dank shack where her family had been staying, she watched her parents whisper.

  Suddenly, Feliks appeared, pacing in front of them. “Why don’t I take her?” he asked.

  Together, Feliks and Lucyna would hide. Feliks’s father had fashioned a secret space behind a wall that was just large enough for standing, and there was room inside for Lucyna. She looked at her father.

  “Go,” he said sternly. Her mother would head to the hospital, where doctors and dentists might be spared. Lucyna’s father would hide in the attic of his office in the ghetto, and David would hide with family friends. Lucyna looked at her parents one last time, shadows in the early-morning light.

  “Go, honey,” her father repeated. “I’m going to try to take care of your brother and see what we can do.”

  There was no time to protest. Lucyna followed Feliks to his family’s quarters and climbed inside the black, jagged hole next to his parents and sister. Lucyna could barely see her fingers. The air was thick, but coughing or sneezing would surely lead to their capture. She felt trapped, desperate to escape.

  They stood there for eight hours, squeezed tight in the darkness, until someone knocked on the wall and whispered, “You might as well come out now. This is the end of the ghetto.”

  Lucyna climbed out of the hole, blinking in the light. The streets were unnaturally still as she raced back to her family’s shack. She found her father hunched over, sobbing. The Jewish doctors and dentists had been taken to the camp down the road, the terrifying place called Majdanek.

  For the rest of her life, Lucyna would imagine what it might have been like to say good-bye to her mother, what they would have said in that bleak, desperate moment, forced to decide whether to die together or separate for the sake of survival.

  There was more shouting outside.

  Meet in the main square for deportation. You have three days.

  Feliks’s father was frantic. “You are so young,” he told Lucyna and Feliks later that night. “Run away through the barbed wire. At least the two of you will survive.”

  The next morning, under a weak winter sun, Lucyna and Feliks crawled through the fence, hoping to slip past the Ukrainian guards who patrolled the ghetto day and night. Before them lay open fields, the landscape that Lucyna had always known, the comfort of hills and trees. But as they ran she could hear the cries of guard dogs growing closer. Bullets pierced the air beside her ears. She ran faster, ignoring the burning in her lungs.

  She felt the guards closing in before she saw them. Lucyna watched helplessly as a dog mauled Feliks’s calf. Surely, she thought, they would die right there, alone in a barren field now covered with fresh blood. But one of the guards bellowed, “Back to the ghetto! Back to the ghetto!”

  Someone started swinging a leather strap with a spiked metal ball affixed to the end. Feliks tried to shield his face, but he would permanently lose some of the vision in his left eye. They made it back to the ghetto, climbed inside the fence, and found Feliks’s parents and sister, preparing to go to the square for deportation with all the others. Feliks, bruised and bloodied, begged them to reconsider.

  “We don’t want to fight anymore,” Feliks’s father said. After many months in the ghetto, he was skinny and exhausted, no longer the man who had once swum across the Bug River to see his son.

  Lucyna and Feliks went to find Lucyna’s father. He was crouched with David, and Feliks and Lucyna collapsed beside them. From a hole in the wall, Feliks watched his parents and sister walking toward the deportation point, heads bowed, mourners in the November snow.

  Lucyna’s father had one last plan. “I’m going to try to arrange, in the middle of the night, when it’s dark, for you to get through the barbed wire.”

  The first escape had failed, but Lucyna’s father was adamant that they try again. The only other option was deportation. Hours passed. At four a.m., Lucyna’s father crept outside, motioning for Lucyna, David, and Feliks to follow.

  The night was still. Nearly everyone in the ghetto was already deported or dead, and two Ukrainian guards watched them warily as they approached the fence. Lucyna’s father dug into his pockets and pulled out wristwatches, a fountain pen, and a bottle of vodka. Lucyna could scarcely believe he had anything of value left.

  “I have two watches here, and I have three people,” he told the guards. “I want you to look the other way. I want to get my family out.”

  The guards paused. No one moved. Finally, one of the guards nodded. It occurred to Lucyna that the guards could have taken the watches and shot them anyway, but in that moment she could only think about her father.

  “Please,” she begged, pulling on her father’s arm. “Come with us.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I have to be with your mother.”

  He pushed Lucyna, David, and Feliks through the barbed wire.

  “Go,” he said firmly. “Go and see what you can do for yourself.”

  Lucyna took one last look at her father, and for the second time in three days, she took off running. She ran a mad zigzag through the fields with her brother and Feliks, ran in the darkness over frozen earth, expecting the dogs and gunshots but finding only quiet, a frigid dawn in the Lublin countryside.

  A few kilometers up the road, she spotted a Polish farmer on a horse and buggy and asked for a ride into town. The farmer nodded silently. It was an act of great kindness, Lucyna knew, since the Germans were giving away a bag of sugar to anyone who turned in a Jew.

  In the city, Lucyna, Feliks, and David crept toward the home of a Polish woman who knew Lucyna’s mother. “Dear,” the woman sighed after she opened the door and looked at Lucyna. “If you need money, we will help you. But we cannot keep you overnight.”

  Feliks knew a gardener who had worked for his family before the war. Feliks, Lucyna, and David walked in the shadows, knowing that every second spent on the street came with great risk. Feliks knocked softly on the gardener’s door. His wife answered and made the sign of a cross when she saw Feliks, pale and rail thin.

  “My God. Where are your Mom and Dad? What are you doing here?”

  “Can you help me?” Feliks asked.

  The gardener’s wife rushed Feliks, Lucyna, and David into the greenhouse, and Lucyna breathed deeply because the room was warm. They could stay the night, but men who worked in the greenhouse would return the next morning.

  “They would denounce you to the Gestapo,” the woman said, wrapping Feliks in one of her husband’s old winter coats. “They would kill us all.”

  Later, Feliks would ask himself whether he would have done the same, risked his own life to help others, resisting the pull of self-preservation. The night passed quickly. The next morning Feliks called on another family friend, a Polish man who had promised to keep tools and machinery for Feliks’s father. The man slipped Feliks the names of several people who were working in the Polish Underground.

  Back on the street with nowhere to go, Lucyna heard that her father had been shot dead, one of the last Jews in the doomed Jewish ghetto of Lublin.

  Chapter Three

  The Wedding

  Warsaw, Poland

  1942–1943

  Feliks, Lucyna, and David ducked out of the railway station in Warsaw a few
hours after midnight, chins down, shoulders hunched, praying they could pass for Aryans in a city on the hunt for Jews. The streets were nearly deserted, lighted only by the moody, orange glow of street lamps. Feliks was grateful for the darkness. They made a suspicious trio, a man of twenty-two traveling with a sixteen-year-old girl and a boy of only nine, no luggage, no parents.

  Feliks flagged down a rickshaw driver. There was a hotel in the city center where Feliks had heard that Jewish families were hiding from the Gestapo. Would there be space for the three of them? The possibility of being turned away was terrifying. They were 180 kilometers from home, and Feliks barely knew his way around Warsaw.

  He glanced at Lucyna and David, shivering in the night air. How brave Lucyna had been, sitting with her brother on the train as it sped into the night, away from everything she had ever known.

  They had made their way to Warsaw with a few coins that Lucyna’s father had tucked into the pocket of her coat as he urged her to flee the ghetto with David and Feliks. Only a few days had passed, but to Feliks it felt like a lifetime, when he had a mother, father, and sister, and the dull hope that they would somehow survive together in the last Jewish settlement of Lublin.

  After a single night in the gardener’s basement, Feliks, Lucyna, and David had trudged along icy streets to Lucyna’s old apartment building in the center of Lublin, where a Polish neighbor who ran a laundry business had agreed to hide the family’s silver and artwork. Before the war, the neighborhood had been one of Lublin’s poshest, with grand apartment houses painted pink and green and yellow, bouquets of poppy flowers in window boxes and doorways. The area had suffered heavy bombing during the German invasion, targeted for its concentration of government offices, and Feliks, Lucyna, and David walked slowly on streets strewn with concrete and glass.

  Lucyna slipped inside the building while Feliks and David watched from the street.

  “My God,” her old neighbor said, gaping at Lucyna from the doorway. “Where are your parents?”

  Lucyna struggled to find the words to describe all that had happened, why her cheeks were hollow and her insides felt numb, why she was suddenly terrified to ask for help from a neighbor who had known Lucyna since she was a four-year-old in knee socks and hair ribbons. She pushed out the words.

  “Can I please have one of the candelabras so that I can sell it and find my way to Warsaw?”

  “It’s all in the attic,” her neighbor had answered quickly. “Come back at two o’clock and I’ll have everything ready.”

  Lucyna saw a flash of hesitation on the woman’s face. It was there and then gone, like the faintest crackle of fallen leaves under footsteps that send hunted animals running. Something didn’t feel right. Lucyna raced outside, breathless, and hid with Feliks and David behind a nearby building with a clear view of the apartment house. Soon, two Gestapo officers drove up and rushed inside. They emerged moments later, pointing and yelling, and split up to search the street.

  There was another apartment house nearby, a place where Feliks knew a shoemaker. German bombs had taken half the building, but Feliks, Lucyna, and David ducked inside and tapped lightly on the shoemaker’s door. His wife answered.

  “The Gestapo is looking for us,” Feliks whispered.

  Since only Lucyna had been seen, the shoemaker’s wife pointed to a curtain in the corner of the kitchen. Lucyna slipped behind it, and Feliks and David sat down at the kitchen table where in better times there had been veal and blueberry dumplings and tea. Feliks could hear the officers bounding up the steps. The shoemaker’s wife stepped into the hallway to shake the dust from a blanket, as if she were busy with a mundane morning of chores.

  “Did you see a Jewish woman running around here?” one of the officers asked.

  “There are no Jews here,” the shoemaker’s wife answered, sounding bored. “They’re all dead.”

  “There was a Jewish lady that we just lost sight of.”

  “You’re welcome to come in. There’s nobody here.”

  The two officers stepped inside the apartment. Feliks stiffened. He could see the tips of Lucyna’s leather shoes peeking out from beneath the curtain.

  A split second later, the officers left. Once again, Feliks, Lucyna, and David had dodged capture. Feliks thanked the shoemaker’s wife, and the three slipped outside, heading north to a railway station in the next town, where they likely wouldn’t be recognized. They needed to get out of Lublin.

  THE CENTRAL RAILWAY station in Warsaw had been partially destroyed by fire and bombs, but Feliks barely noticed the haphazard piles of fallen brick and rocks as he guided Lucyna and David outside. The sleeping city seemed huge and unfamiliar, and he had been grateful when the rickshaw driver pulled up along the side of the road and nodded.

  Feliks gave him the name of the hotel. The driver was quiet, and when he turned off the main road and onto a dark side street, Feliks at first failed to notice. He was settled back in his seat, allowing himself to feel safe under the cover of night. Lucyna sat next to him, bundled in a coat with fur lining. Soon, however, an instinct honed since the start of the war kicked in, a twitching deep in his gut, and Feliks sat forward.

  “Where are you going?” he asked the driver.

  “You know where I’m going. I’m going to the Gestapo.”

  It took Feliks a few seconds to take in the words. “Why would you take us there?”

  “You filthy Jews,” the driver said. “I am going to be paid for you very well.”

  If he had been alone, Feliks might have given up. His parents and sister were probably dead, and the thought of begging for his life seemed altogether exhausting when his bones ached and his head throbbed, too many months of hunger and hard labor, the minute-by-minute threat of violence. But he had Lucyna and David with him, so he thought quickly.

  “How much can you get paid? Look, take whatever we have. We don’t have much, but whatever we have is yours.”

  “No,” the driver said. “You have to go.”

  “What do you care whether we live or not?”

  The longest pause.

  “You can take my rings,” Lucyna pleaded. “You can take my watch, whatever we have.”

  The driver maneuvered the rickshaw to an abandoned shack on the side of the road. Feliks stripped off his coat and boots. He handed over his fountain pen. Lucyna turned over her watch, ring, and purse. She took off the coat with fur lining.

  “Please,” Lucyna said, “leave us here.”

  The driver took everything and slipped away, leaving Feliks, Lucyna, and David on the side of the street in the middle of the night in occupied Warsaw. The safest place to go was the Jewish ghetto, where Lucyna had an uncle.

  At least we’ll die among Jews, Feliks thought as they crept toward the center of the city, the night air closing around them.

  THE WARSAW GHETTO sat behind ten-foot walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass. As they inched toward it, Feliks decided that sneaking in seemed just as dangerous as sneaking out. A group of Jewish men passed by, bound for a long day’s work somewhere in the city. Among them was a familiar face. A friend of Feliks’s father.

  This way, he motioned, and Feliks, Lucyna, and David followed him inside the massive gates.

  After Warsaw’s four hundred thousand Jews were forced into the ghetto in the winter of 1940, Jewish leaders created underground schools, newspapers, libraries, youth movements, a symphony orchestra. Rabbis delivered weekly sermons about faith and suffering. A clandestine network of Jewish organizers documented births and deaths, going about the business of life in fastidious fashion. But soon the Germans slashed rations to less than two hundred calories a day, and the black market for potatoes and cabbage dried up.

  The ghetto had grown crowded with filthy children who huddled under blankets, bare feet sticky from mud. They waited in line with spoons and bowls for a ladle of soup made from radish scraps. Orphaned girls carried orphaned babies. The streets stunk of the dead, whose bodies had been stripped naked for
their clothing and covered with newspaper.

  By the time Feliks, Lucyna, and David arrived, hundreds of thousands of the ghetto’s inhabitants were already gone, deported by the Germans. Looking around the three square kilometers of misery that made up the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Feliks decided it might have been better to have been shot.

  They found Lucyna’s uncle easily enough. He wasn’t short on money, and while other families slept twenty to a room, he was living in a house with only his wife and infant daughter. He offered Lucyna the attic and Feliks and David the kitchen floor. There was no offer of food, and on the first night in the ghetto, Feliks went to bed hungry.

  The next morning, Lucyna’s uncle announced that Lucyna and Feliks would be married.

  Feliks was drawn to Lucyna, who had a heart-shaped face and a smile that softened ever so slightly when she whispered to her brother or tugged on the beige wool scarf that her mother had given her in the last days of the Lublin ghetto. On mornings without deportations, Feliks and Lucyna had even teased each other and laughed together, nurturing the heady beginnings of a crush.

  Now all they had was each other and the powerful pull of shared memory, of Feliks’s family marching to the deportation point in the Lublin ghetto, of Lucyna’s father standing in the snow at the gates, urging his children to run. But to Feliks, talk of love and marriage seemed altogether frivolous in a place where sewage overflowed into squalid streets and bellies churned from hunger.

  Lucyna pleaded with her uncle. “I just lost my parents.”

  “If you are going to be together,” her uncle replied firmly, “you have to get married.”

  “Just to think about marriage,” Lucyna said, “is the last thing on my mind.”

  Her uncle was adamant. The nearest rabbi had typhus, but her uncle found another rabbi and borrowed a dress from a neighbor. The impromptu wedding ceremony of the young couple from Lublin drew a small crowd, and after Lucyna and Feliks toasted with a mouthful of wine that seemed to appear out of nowhere, a woman came up to Lucyna. She had been a friend of Lucyna’s mother. She took Lucyna’s bare hand.