The Girl in the Cellar

by Gerda Krebs Seifer

  Janina would often take me with her to church, telling me to stay in a side chapel, while she went to meet with her lover in another part of the church. Kazimierz Tarasiuk had stopped going to church long ago, so Janina knew he’d never catch them there. She also knew that I wouldn’t tell him what had happened in the church; my life depended on my keeping mum.

  My life did not change a great deal after Pan Tarasiuk’s return. He tried to work around the house and he looked for jobs, but in the war-torn Lwów, businesses had ceased operating and everything was at a standstill. Somehow, the Tarasiuk family managed to survive, having saved some money my father had sent before he left the ghetto, as well as her earnings from the meat plant. She often was able to bring home animal blood, kidneys, brains, or a tongue—meats I’d not eaten before the war, but we were all hungry, and I prepared them well.

  The Germans advertised that young strong Poles were needed for jobs in Germany; all German men and boys had been drafted into the army. Jurek decided to go to Germany to seek work. Once he left, we didn’t hear from him.

  Gerda’s false identification photo as Alicja Szumlanska

  Gerda’s cousins Lila (left) and Irka Oberhard, Zygmunt Schwarzer,

  and his girlfriend, Renia, in Przemysl

  Gerda holding baby Andrew and Cesia

  Zdzich Tarasiuk, Gerda’s “brother”

  Janina Tarasiukowa, Gerda’s “mother” (after WWII)

  * * *

  6 I was placed in a grade that would be considered 9th or 10th grade in an American high school.

  7 I believe Uncle Henryk’s parents died on the long train ride, while Henryk ended up in a labor camp in the Urals.

  8 There were no washing machines back then, no hot water in the pipes, no clothes dryers. And what about those cute little Gerber jars with delicious peach, bananas, or applesauce or tasty green spinach, orange carrots that one feeds charming plump little babies today? Baby food in glass jars did not exist in those days.

  End of the War

  The newspapers were full of propaganda. News trickled in, but it was hard to know if it was true. We knew that the Nazis were losing the war, and that the Russians were moving westward, but we did not know whether to believe reports of concentration camps, gas chambers, and ovens. How could human beings commit such atrocities? Even by the spring of 1945, Germans were “relocating” Jewish remnants to camps, and young German soldiers continued fighting and dying at the front. Still, I held out hope that I’d soon reunite with my father and other relatives.

  And then a day came when the Nazis were gone! The war was finally over. There was no excitement, no happiness in “our” family. The only way it affected me was in knowing the Nazis had been defeated and that I’d survived. Life had not changed; we continued living the way we’d been living under Nazi rule, only now we were again under the Soviet regime. The same terrible conditions remained: bed bugs, lice, loneliness, little to eat, and nothing to look forward to. I contacted the International Red Cross, leaving my address and inquiring about the whereabouts of my father and other relatives.

  I looked through the window and saw two people walking down the street, both pale, their knees buckling under them. I realized they were Jews who must’ve been in hiding for a long time. Now that they were out, they could once again enjoy sunshine and learn how to use their legs, having spent months or years sitting in one position. Jews had been hiding in forests, cellars, sewers, holes, and bunkers. They depended on non-Jews who knew their hideouts and were willing to supply them with food and other necessities. Those who were hidden had to pay for food and other expenses and often when money had run out, the help ended. Many of those victims had to come out of hiding and most likely were caught and killed shortly afterward.

  I thought that from that point on, there would be world peace, people would respect one other, life would return to normal, and there would be no more wars. How naive and foolish I was! Tarasiukowa wanted me to remain with her family. After all, I was both daughter and slave to her; she’d never find another servant like me. Having lived with Tarasiukowa for over three years, I was completely isolated from any other Jews. I felt I had to stay with Tarasiukowa until my family was found through the Red Cross.

  I anxiously awaited news from my father. I hoped that a family member would try to contact me. After many weeks, I did receive a reply from the Red Cross that my cousin, Zygmunt Schwarzer, had miraculously survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. He was living in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing, Germany, ironically a former summer camp for Hitler Youth.

  I didn’t realize that immediately following the war, dozens of Jewish agencies had sprung up in every large European city, helping survivors reunite with family members who had been scattered throughout countries during the war. I’d been disconnected from any Jewish contact for a long time.

  Apart from finding my family, the most important purpose in the nearest future was to go back to school to complete five lost years of my education. But it was too soon for such notions; for one thing, schools had not yet reopened. And certainly, no one in the Tarasiuk household mentioned or thought about education. The situation remained as it was; I was stuck.

  Tarasiukowa had her own plan: to collect any and all of my parents’ valuables, hidden in Przemyśl with Christian friends before our move to Lwów. She was in a hurry to recoup payment for keeping me. She didn’t acknowledge all the duties I’d performed for her family as reparation. Even so, I felt I owed her everything I could recover, since payments from my father had ceased. In fact, I was happy to give her all of these possessions. She had saved my life. For that I was very grateful.

  Most of the valuables had been left with the headmistress of the Gimnazjum I’d attended. The headmistress had been my father’s client, and my parents trusted her completely. In the summer of 1945 Kazimierz Tarasiuk and I traveled to Przemyśl to the home of the headmistress. I knew that the headmistress had hidden oriental rugs, a Singer sewing machine, my mother’s fur coat, other clothing, paintings, fine china and objects that the Soviets and Nazis hadn’t gotten their hands on.

  The summer of 1945 was extremely hot. The roads were full of Soviet trucks and carts with horses, people going east and west, uncertain about where to move. Przemyśl was about 200 kilometers from Lwów. We didn’t have luggage and walked with the crowds. My shoes pinched and the road was full of ruts and holes, dust and rocks. After a time, I took my shoes off and walked barefoot. Suddenly I noticed blood oozing from my foot; a stone must have cut the back of my left heel. The only thing I had to stop the bleeding was a handkerchief, so I tied it tightly around my foot. Amazingly, despite the filthy road and lack of dressing or antiseptic, my wound didn’t get infected and healed after a few days without any treatment or dressings, forming a deep scar, a reminder of our crazy trip to Przemyśl.

  We had no idea how long it would take us to get to Przemyśl, and my limp slowed us down. We tried to hitch a ride with Russian truck drivers, and after many attempts, we got lucky. A Russian soldier stopped his truck and told us to climb into the back; he was headed to Przemyśl. I was grateful to be able to finally sit and nurse my foot. When we got to Przemyśl, we thanked the Russian soldier and left him.

  I took Pan Tarasiuk to the house where I used to live. There were no familiar faces and I didn’t knock on any doors. I didn’t even find out who occupied our old apartment. It was an odd sensation seeing the house so neglected and unkempt. The walls inside were cracked and in need of paint, the wooden doors were faded and peeling, the corridor floors were full of holes. Some of the windowpanes were broken or missing. Getting a new glass was out of the question. It made me sad, remembering how lovely and well kept the building had looked before the war. We walked around the city, not quite knowing where to go or whom to speak to.

  At one point, we were standing in the midst of a crowded Rynek, marketplace, people milling about, trying to see if, by chance, they might encounter survivors, their own families, or people they k
new before the war—any familiar face. As we were standing there, a young man came up to me and asked if I was Gerda Krebs.

  “Yes!” I answered, though I didn’t recognize him. I hadn’t heard my true name spoken aloud for more than three years. Hearing it spoken aloud gave me a strange sensation—as if I’d returned from another life, another existence.

  He continued, “I know what happened to your father. Do you want to know?”

  I was shocked hearing this information, especially because this was Przemyśl not Lwów. How could a stranger know anything about my father who lived in a different city?

  “Yes, of course,” I replied.

  He then told me that my father had rented a room on the “outside,” in the Aryan section of Lwów and had hoped to use that “secret” room after the ghetto had been liquidated of Jews. Apparently, some men had begged my father to take them with him, to save their lives. As my father was leaving the ghetto for good and had always been a generous man, he had agreed. “Because your father did not look Jewish, he was the only one who dared to leave the room to search for food for all of them. While he was on the street, a Pole or Ukrainian must have recognized him and pointed a finger at him.”

  Without waiting for me to speak or react to his startling revelations, the young man turned in the other direction and walked off. I didn’t know his name; didn’t know how he knew my father or how he’d recognized me. It was a mystery. But I was devastated by his account, and I feared he’d spoken the truth. I knew then that I’d never see my father again nor learn who the young man was and how he knew all these facts.

  That afternoon, I went to see a doctor in town. His name was familiar to me from years before. He had opened an office in the Rynek. He asked me in. We went through his waiting room, which contained several odd chairs only. It was bare otherwise. Next we entered into the examining room that contained an ancient X-ray machine, an examining table, and a couple of chairs. We spoke for a while, telling each other how we’d survived, and though we were total strangers, I felt a strong connection with him. A Catholic woman from Przemyśl had hidden him, he said, and at war’s end, he’d married her. There were many cases like his, where a hidden Jew married his or her “savior,” usually a young Polish man or woman who’d forfeited their own safety. In fact, the doctor had known my parents; unfortunately, he had no information for me about them or about others in town I’d known.

  Another thing I learned from the doctor was that my ex-headmistress no longer lived in Przemyśl. She and her husband had moved to northwestern Poland. I obtained their new address—I don’t remember how or from whom.

  Pan Tarasiuk and I returned to Lwów with empty hands. Lwów had been a lively, cosmopolitan city before the war, one of the largest in Poland, but it had turned into a derelict ruin, its buildings heavily bombed or obliterated during bombing. The roads were full of holes, there was no electricity and no services whatsoever. People had to cope the best they could.

  Janina wanted me to collect the hidden items from the director of school. She gave me money for a railroad ticket to travel to northwestern Poland. I traveled all night, arriving in town the next morning. It didn’t take me long to find the house with the name of the headmistress. I rang the bell full of anticipation to see the woman I’d admired and respected. She opened the door slightly, recognizing me at once. She was very surprised to see me, perhaps thinking I’d been murdered along with so many other Jews by Nazis or their collaborators. She didn’t ask me in. She didn’t even offer me a glass of water. She barely kept the door ajar. She told me that before she moved to her new place, she’d mailed the trunk with my family’s belongings to people in the Carpathian Mountains for safekeeping. She wrote an address on a piece of paper, and closed the door.

  I stood in front of the closed door. I didn’t have the presence of mind to invite myself inside. I walked away, realizing that the reason she kept me outside was that in all likelihood our carpets were on her floor, our sewing machine was in her room, our paintings were hanging on her walls. She didn’t want me to see anything. I knew better than to go back and argue with her; I couldn’t prove that she was lying. The country was in total chaos, and there was no law to protect the innocent. One had to depend on human decency and honesty, and there was precious little of that.

  Janina was relentless. She sent me to the mountains to find the people who had supposedly received the trunk, but that trip, too, proved fruitless. No one seemed to know anything about it. I wrote many letters to the headmistress, who eventually replied, as if I were bothering her, that my parents’ valuables had apparently been lost on the train en route to the Carpathian Mountains. It seemed untrue, and all because I was trying to recover what was rightfully mine.

  Pan Tarasiuk had begun making candles in the apartment, using paraffin and string. He fashioned a wheel with nails and on each nail he’d hang a long string, pouring hot paraffin while turning the wheel. Eventually, each of the strings accumulated enough paraffin to become a candle. Each day I’d take a large basket of candles to sell in the market; in this way, the Tarasiuks had new means to feed the family. But there were many other candle makers who were dishonest. They wouldn’t put full strings into the candles but a tiny tip of a string at the very end to make them look like a whole candle. People would buy them, bring them home, and light them, but the candles would soon sputter and die.

  The market was the place where all the business was transacted. Wheelers and dealers sold everything from used dishes, shoes, and clothing to food from the countryside, such as fruit and vegetables, sometimes even meat and a few skinny chickens or kielbasa. Sugar was in short supply, so people had resorted to using saccharine. Saccharine was sold in small amounts, a tablespoon at a time, wrapped in tissue paper, then folded into a stronger paper, in order to prevent spillage. A packet of saccharine could sweeten a large pot of coffee or tea, or a large amount of food. Saccharine grains looked like sugar, but were far sweeter.

  Dishonest merchants would substitute a tablespoon of regular sugar for saccharine, barely enough to sweeten a cup of tea, let alone a large pot. Peasants skimmed cream from milk, resulting in a thin, bluish liquid. They added a bit of carrot juice to make it appear richer, as if it contained cream. Because milk was not pasteurized, it had to be boiled at home before it was used. Unfortunately, the milk containing the added carrot juice would curdle as soon it came to a boil and the whole amount had to be discarded. Food was in short supply and very expensive; one could only hope that what they bought would be edible and not spoiled. Pretty soon, customers learned who the trustworthy salesmen were. Since the candles Pan Tarasiuk made were well made, I developed regular customers. I was proud to be an honest seller. I was always hungry while selling the candles and the market was full of fresh food being sold by the peasants. The food was so tempting, but Janina knew exactly how many candles I brought to market and how much money they would fetch. And woe to me if my money wasn’t the correct amount!

  While selling my candles I walked around the carts displaying ripe fruits, fresh tempting vegetables, scrumptious cheeses, and baked goods. I often sampled items, and pretended I didn’t like them so that I wouldn’t have to buy them. I’d take a cherry or a strawberry, take a small bite, shake my head as if I didn’t like it, and move on to the next cart. I could have eaten all the sweet fruits with gusto, but I didn’t dare to spend even a few kopecks on a piece of bread or an apple. I was that afraid of Janina.

  In the fall of 1945, the Russian government gave Polish citizens an option to either stay in Lwów and become Russian citizens or to go west beyond the new border in order to keep their Polish citizenship. The Tarasiuks decided to leave Lwów, and I went with them. It was a golden Polish autumn. We traveled in a cattle train, but one that had the gates open, unlike trains that took Jews to the camps. I didn’t realize that Jews had gone to concentration camps in the exact same cars that we were on; the major difference was that we were free to get on or off the train at any time.
<
br />   After several days we reached the city of Poznań in northwestern Poland. Janina’s brother had moved from Lwów to Poznań months before and had secured a one-room apartment for us in the same bombed-out building where he lived. There were six of us altogether: Pan and Pani Tarasiuk, Zdzich, Cesia, baby Andrew, and me.

  We occupied a ten-by-eighteen-foot room with one window, covered in cardboard, the glass having been broken. In those post-war years, one could not get window glass at any price. Living in such tight quarters was hell. The single room served as our bedroom, kitchen, washroom, and living room. The walls were filled with bedbugs that came out to feed on our blood every night. All we could do was to squash the blood-sucking critters during the night, though we were half asleep. We had body lice that laid eggs in the seams of our clothing and feasted on our blood by day and night. It was impossible to get rid of them unless one could bathe and burn the lice-infested clothing. We had no way of improving the situation.

  We had one gas burner for cooking and heating water. Toilets were located outside in the corridor. I rarely left the room since it was very cold and I had only a single pair of torn shoes and no warm clothing. I had no money and no place to go. Besides, I was too busy taking care of Andrew, cooking, washing, and cleaning.

  All through the war, I’d lived and carried on just to survive, hoping to see my father and other relatives again one day. And when the war was over, that hope was gone. Though my life was no longer threatened, it remained hopeless, grim, and depressing with no future. The whole country was in total disorder; there was no law except for those who had guns or muscles. Schools did not function, shops were empty, and nothing was normal. No culture, no music, no life of any sort. Secretly, I wondered if making it through the war had really been an advantage. I was so unhappy and lonely and miserable. I had no future staying with the Tarasiuk family. My despondence deepened. I considered suicide.