[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  Next to the training camp, beyond a wall and a fence, thousands of Jewish prisoners were at work in a forced-labor camp. Some had come from the surrounding countryside, but most were newly arrived from the Warsaw ghetto.

  Jewish women sorted, washed, and mended clothing from the dead, delivered in heaping piles from the killing centers and stored in the sugar refinery in the center of Trawniki. Other prisoners made hairbrushes or winter uniforms for the German army in two factories that Odilo Globocnik had relocated from Warsaw to Trawniki.

  In the early years of the war, fewer than two thousand Jewish prisoners had been confined to the forced-labor camp. By the fall of 1943, the camp population swelled to as many as six thousand.

  In November, a special SS and police unit arrived in Trawniki and instructed Reimer and his comrades to stay inside the barracks. Though Reimer didn’t know it, Heinrich Himmler had ordered the death of every Jewish prisoner at the labor camp, including women and children. He had also called for the killing of Jews at the nearby Majdanek concentration camp and the Poniatowa forced-labor camp—some forty-three thousand people in total.

  Operation Harvest Festival would be carried out as a single, sudden strike.

  Himmler wanted it done quickly. At the Sobibor killing center in 1942, prisoners had staged a daring uprising. Led by the son of a rabbi and a captured Soviet soldier, they killed nearly a dozen German staff and Trawniki guards with makeshift axes and knives, set fire to the camp, and bolted across a minefield fifty feet wide. About three hundred people had escaped to the woods, though many were later captured and shot.

  The ghetto uprising in Warsaw, the longest and largest of the war, had inspired prisoner revolts at Treblinka and in the Jewish ghetto in Bialystok, a city in eastern Poland.

  Himmler was furious. There could be no more trouble, not with the Red Army bearing down on German-occupied territories in the east.

  At dawn at Trawniki, the SS and a particularly violent German reserve police battalion surrounded the perimeter of the forced-labor camp and marched the prisoners to a point just outside that was marked by zigzag trenches cut into the fields, six feet deep and four feet wide. Under orders from the SS and police, they were forced to undress at gunpoint near the edges of the pits.

  From inside his barrack, Reimer peered out the window. The SS played music over speakers, but he could hear the machine guns and the groans and cries of the prisoners just before they were gunned down by a firing squad. Desperate mothers clutched their children. Bodies big and small tumbled into the trenches. A struggle. A young Jewish man was trying to get away. Gunfire. The man crumpled to the ground, dead.

  The shootings lasted long into the evening, and when it was done Trawniki men searched the grounds of the camp for anyone still in hiding. Soon, a small detachment of Jewish laborers was brought in for clean up. The Jewish men were told to use a piece of railway track to carry bodies out of the trenches and then burn them in batches. The women, many of whom had been found hiding in the camp during the massacre, were permitted to live to sort and mend the clothing of the dead.

  It took three weeks to burn six thousand bodies. When the work was done, Trawniki men helped shoot the last of the Jewish laborers.

  ON THE SAME day as the massacre at Trawniki, eighteen thousand Jewish prisoners at the nearby Majdanek concentration camp were ordered to roll call, shot behind field number five, and burned in trenches. Most had been among the Jews who had survived the ghetto uprising in Warsaw.

  No Trawniki men were at Majdanek at the time, but at the Poniatowa labor camp, just west of Lublin, they performed perimeter duty as fifteen thousand people were forced naked into trenches and shot over the bodies of the freshly killed. As gunfire erupted, some Jewish prisoners had refused to come out of one of the barracks, and the Germans set fire to the building, picking off the prisoners as the flames drove them outside.

  By then, the Nazi plan for occupied Poland was complete. More than 1.7 million Jews had been murdered, and currency, gold, silver, watches, jewelry, and property collected from the dead.

  To hide traces of the crime, the killing centers were dismantled, buried bodies exhumed and burned, fields plowed over. At Belzec, Trawniki men planted small firs and wild lupines. At Treblinka, a manor house went up, surrounded by trees and fields. Sobibor was the last to close. It was bulldozed in the spring of 1944, and over the bone fragments and ashes of the dead, the Germans planted rows of pine trees.

  Six weeks before the November massacre, Himmler had transferred Odilo Globocnik back to his birthplace, Trieste, where, as higher SS and police leader for northeastern Italy and German-occupied Slovenia, he set in motion a new operation to deport Italian Jews to Auschwitz.

  In Trawniki, Reimer started making plans for a new life after the war, when he would settle in Nazi Germany. In 1944, he applied for German citizenship and was recommended for immediate naturalization.

  “Applicant is 100 percent German descent and is totally immersed in Germanness,” the examiner wrote. “He makes a very good impression.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Amchu?

  Southeastern Poland

  1944–1945

  The ride out of Warsaw was killing him, Feliks Wojcik thought, as he struggled for air on a train car meandering to who knows where—a labor camp, a killing center, an execution site. One hundred people were sealed in tight, with no food or water, no place to sit, barely enough room to stand. The darkness was impenetrable, the kind behind closed eyes.

  The upper window of the car was covered with barbed wire. Feliks, bleeding on the head, shaking from fever, itching with lice, nevertheless climbed onto the shoulders of others for a glimpse of the passing world. He could see two guards, one at the beginning of the train and one at the end, and miles and miles of wounded countryside, bombed-out train depots, and crumbling stone farmhouses.

  The train shuddered to a stop before a stretch of destroyed track. Feliks could see no one in the fields outside, and he wondered whether the whole country was hiding or dead. For two days he stood there, pressed against the bodies of strangers, certain that he would surely stop breathing before he ever again stepped into daylight. But the train rambled on to one last stop. North? South? Feliks wasn’t sure.

  Barely a week had passed since a German bomb had torn through the building where Feliks had been hiding in a rented apartment with Lucyna, his wife of two years, on the Aryan side of occupied Warsaw. Lucyna had been able to live in public because she had false papers that identified her as Lucyna Stryjewska, a single Catholic woman with blond hair and blue eyes. Others like her were scattered about Warsaw, Jews who had paid sympathetic priests for the birth certificates of dead parishioners.

  While Feliks and Lucyna’s younger brother, David, had crouched inside the walls of the apartment building, Lucyna had boarded city buses with Polish women. She had learned Catholic hymns. She had attended Sunday mass, sitting side by side with pious, pleasant congregants who she was certain would have turned her in to the Gestapo for the single sack of sugar that the Germans were offering as a reward for captured Jews.

  Some of Lucyna’s neighbors had taken to the streets to celebrate when German forces, led by a famous commander named Jürgen Stroop, burned the Jewish ghetto to the ground. “The Jews are frying, and all the cockroaches together with them,” one had declared as a flash of fire spread across the night sky.

  Lucyna could barely nod, thinking about the people she had left behind when the Polish Underground had helped her escape the ghetto with Feliks and David shortly before the uprising.

  On the Aryan side of Warsaw, Lucyna’s biggest challenge was finding food. She had three mouths to feed but needed to appear as if she were buying for only one. She shopped at different markets, bringing home potato flour and beans at different times of day with money that Feliks had scraped together by selling a suitcase of old clothing from Lublin. At night, when it was time for dinner, Feliks and David crept from their hiding place behind the toi
let, where Feliks had fashioned a double wall with a hole behind it, barely large enough for sitting.

  Lucyna had worried most about her brother, who wore the shell-shocked gaze of an orphan. They had lost their father in the last days of the Lublin ghetto, and their mother and Feliks’s parents and sister had been deported to the concentration camp Majdanek.

  Perhaps they had been put to work, Lucyna and Feliks thought. Perhaps they had been sent farther east, to a new Jewish settlement. Lucyna and Feliks could only hope, pray to God in the middle of the night when the world was still and there was space to imagine the tight, safe embrace of a parent, the soft whispers in Yiddish.

  Mishpocheh, mishpocheh. Family.

  If only David had been able to live outside the walls, where there was fresh air and light, but he had been circumcised like all the other Jewish boys, and German soldiers had been known to make suspected Jews drop their pants for inspection. Lucyna and Feliks decided it was safest to keep David hidden away.

  They had been living on the Aryan side of Warsaw for several months when Lucyna and Feliks heard that the Germans, in exchange for German POWs, were allowing Jews to buy travel documents and leave occupied Poland. It was an unexpected opportunity, a chance to escape to neutral countries, mostly in South America, and Lucyna had made her way to the gathering point at 29 Dluga Street. Several hundred Jews who had abandoned their hiding places were already camped out at the Hotel Polski, buying passports with Polish zlotys or gold.

  The transports had no room left for adults, but the Germans were promising to take Jewish children to Switzerland. Lucyna thought of her brother, whose plump face had grown gaunt. She could scarcely imagine sending him alone, a boy of eleven with no family, no money. But at least he would be safe there, no longer hungry, free from the darkness and the walls. It seemed an impossible choice.

  “Go,” Lucyna’s father had said when he pushed Lucyna, David, and Feliks through the barbed wires of the nearly empty Lublin ghetto, a lifetime ago. “Go and see what you can do for yourself.”

  Of course, David had to go. Lucyna found a suitcase and scrounged together some money to buy her brother new trousers and shoes. At the hotel on the morning that the transport was scheduled to leave for Switzerland, she clutched his small hand.

  “I’m going to write to you,” David promised. Lucyna watched his brown head, bobbing among the others, disappear inside a truck crowded with children.

  It didn’t take long for Lucyna and Feliks to get word from the Polish Underground. The children had been taken to a concentration camp in Hanover, Germany. The Germans had set a trap to entice Jews out of hiding in Warsaw, and now the last of Lucyna’s family was gone.

  OF ALL THE people that Lucyna and Feliks had met on the Aryan side of Warsaw, it was a janitor at their apartment house who grew suspicious. He had come up from behind Lucyna in the market, flanked by two Polish police officers.

  “We heard that you are hiding Jews.”

  Lucyna protested, but the officers demanded to search the apartment. She fought panic, thinking about Feliks, in the dark behind the double wall. He had instructed her to knock loudly on the apartment door if there was ever any trouble, but a conspicuous knock would most certainly make matters worse.

  The janitor and the police officers followed Lucyna back to the apartment. “We know that there are Jews here,” the janitor insisted.

  “There’s nobody here.”

  “Open the door.”

  Lucyna thought quickly. “I lost my key.”

  She knocked twice instead, hoping to warn Feliks. One of the police officers called a locksmith, who showed up moments later and pried open the door. The threadbare apartment was utterly still.

  “We’re coming back at four o’clock,” one of the officers promised.

  He took Lucyna’s identification papers and slammed the door behind him. Lucyna stumbled to the sliding door in the bathroom to call for Feliks. Their entire existence depended on Lucyna’s false identity, and now her papers were gone.

  I am nothing, Lucyna thought. I am dead.

  The police officers never returned. On a streetcar a few days later, Lucyna’s purse was stolen with what little money she had left. She had been on her way to see a Jewish friend from Lublin, who was also living on the Aryan side of Warsaw with false papers. Lucyna was sobbing by the time she arrived at her friend’s apartment.

  “My God. What’s the matter with you?”

  Lucyna turned from her friend to the unfamiliar Polish man in his forties who had asked the question. “You’re so young,” he said. “You can’t be so desperate.”

  “Right now, I have no means of survival.” Lucyna told the story about the janitor, the locksmith, the stolen purse.

  “You know what?” the man said. “You look very well. You look like an Aryan. Why don’t you want to work a little?”

  “Work?” Lucyna replied. “What can I do?”

  “I can get a job for you. I can help you out.”

  Sometime later, Lucyna would learn that Feliks Cywiński was a career officer in the Polish air force who considered helping his neighbors a Socialist imperative and a moral obligation. He had hidden Jewish families in apartments around Warsaw and sold his own house to rent properties for additional space.

  He advanced Lucyna money, took her to get new papers and introduced her to other men and women in hiding. They passed the time by making hairnets, cutting elastic threads from abandoned inner tubes and attaching them to bits of white fabric that had been dyed bright colors. The nets were a great commodity among Polish women, Cywiński explained, because so many factories were closed and fashion accessories hard to come by. Lucyna could sell them in street markets.

  Feliks didn’t much like the idea of Lucyna traveling alone to outdoor markets, but they needed money for food and a new apartment since their old one had been compromised. From his hiding place inside the walls of their flat, Feliks started making hairbands for Lucyna to sell.

  Under the cover of night, Polish friends helped Lucyna and Feliks move to a second rented apartment. It was smaller than the first, and the only place for Feliks to hide was in a wood-burning stove in the center of the front room. Using a fork and knife, he ripped out the guts of the stove so that he could step inside and squat over a pipe that stretched across the center.

  Feliks had hoped he would never need the hiding place, but one afternoon the landlady stopped by with her cousin, who was drunk and insisting that he stay the night. Feliks huddled in the stove until the next morning, sucking in smoke and fumes, and by the time Lucyna let him out, he was nearly unconscious.

  BY THE SUMMER of 1944 the Red Army was creeping closer to Warsaw. Soviet soldiers were just on the other side of the Vistula River, liberating towns and villages. Lucyna and Feliks watched Jewish men swim across the river, clinging to the cable wires that dangled beneath bridges and dodging gunfire from the Germans. Freedom was only seven or eight kilometers away, but it could have been hundreds, thousands.

  One day, Feliks Cywiński showed up with a warning. “Things are going to be tough,” he told Lucyna. “I want you to prepare food. Money is going to be no good.”

  The Poles were planning massive attacks against the Germans to liberate Warsaw. Lucyna thanked him, certain that she would have been dead without his help. She took all the money she had earned selling hairbands and bought bread and eleven gold wedding bands, a small, portable treasure that she could trade in a pinch.

  When German bombs started falling, Lucyna and Feliks raced to the cellar with their Polish neighbors. Other Jews in hiding crept out from behind the walls, and in that moment—bombs shrieking, buildings burning—Jews and non-Jews huddled side by side, a trembling, unified group of Poles.

  The walls shook and groaned, the stairwell collapsed, and in an instant Lucyna was buried beneath bricks and rubble. Feliks couldn’t get to her, not with his hands. He looked around the cellar, desperate. With the tips of his fingers, he freed two wooden planks from
under the window frames and used them to clear away the debris. He hauled Lucyna out by her leg.

  Though he was bleeding from the head and had shrapnel lodged in his abdomen, he hoisted Lucyna onto his back and carried her to a local hospital. At the first-aid station, Feliks flagged down a doctor.

  He sucked in his breath when he saw the familiar face from the early days of the war. Feliks nodded discreetly at his friend, one of the Jewish boys from medical school in Lwow who had survived the firing squad alongside Feliks.

  “We don’t know each other,” the young doctor whispered and quickly explained that he had finished medical school with help from the Polish Underground.

  He tended to Lucyna, bandaging her face and upper body, and squeezed Feliks’s hand. “Best of luck,” he said and disappeared down the hall.

  The Germans were evacuating Warsaw, and Feliks and Lucyna were directed to a transit camp a few kilometers away. No one questioned their identities, and Feliks began to suspect that all of Warsaw believed there were no Jews left in Poland. In line at the entrance of the camp, a doctor approached Feliks.

  “I’m a medical student,” Feliks said.

  “Why don’t you go to the right?”

  “Why should we go to the right?” Feliks replied carefully.

  “Go to the right. Don’t ask any questions. Go to the barrack named C.”

  Feliks hesitated. From the grim days in the ghettos, Feliks knew that the sick and disabled always died first, garbage to be destroyed. But the other alternative was just as terrifying. Healthy men from Warsaw were being sent to work in Germany, where Feliks would surely be discovered as a Jew. An impossible choice. What would be waiting in barrack C?

  The building, it turned out, held hundreds of hacking, bleeding, moaning people, a makeshift infirmary for the sick and injured.

  “What’s going on here?” Lucyna asked.