The Girl Who Survived: Based on a true story, an utterly unputdownable and heart-wrenching World War 2 page-turner

by Ellie Midwood

  Rivka gestured for me to hide it at once. Another pair of black boots hurried past us. Her precaution was undoubtedly timely, however, completely unnecessary; he almost stumbled into my bucket and cursed it instead of me, who’d put it in his way. Rivka was right. They positively refused to see us.

  “Gold is even better,” her assurances came from under the piano, in a hushed whisper; the Boots had left the door to the hallway open. “It’ll fetch you some king-worthy rations; trust me on this one.” With that, she was back to polishing the brass wheels on the piano’s legs.

  Rivka needed a few days to “organize things,” she said. She didn’t brag when she implied that they, the local Jews, knew their way around here. Some of them grew up in the fenced-off area where the ghetto now stood; the rest had long mixed with the local population, intermarried, wore their cosmopolitan attitude with pride, and therefore had more than enough willing Gentile allies on the other side of the fence. They were much more resourceful than us, much more cunning, and certainly far bolder than us.

  “Boris will meet you tonight, on the corner where Respublikanskaya Street crosses Shpalernaya Street, right by the fence of your Sonderghetto,” Rivka instructed me in a whisper a few days later as we marched out of the gates to our assigned working place – the German Cinema House. “Do you know where it is? Good. You’ll recognize him by his Judenrat armband. Yes, he’s a member; don’t look at me in such surprise. How do you think he has access to all those goods? He can leave, together with Mushkin, twice a week to the city on a special pass, that’s how.” Ilya Mushkin was to the Soviet Jews what Dr. Frank was to us, their Judenrat Elder; that much I’d learned by now. Rivka paused, allowing the file of SS men to pass by us on the street and only then continued, “On your way to the fence you’ll see a little girl in a red hat sitting on the stairs of the house on our side; if she waves at you, walk to the fence and wait for Boris. He’ll appear within minutes. If the girl runs inside the house, turn around and leave – it means the patrol is nearby and we’ll have to try the next day.”

  To my luck, the patrol didn’t happen to upset our carefully organized plans that evening. That evening, we ate potatoes with speck, the entire hut, the whole twenty-three of us.

  “That was very unpractical of you.” Rivka expressed her disapproval by shaking her head the following day, quickly concealing a piece of smoked fat in her pocket – her share for putting me in contact with Boris. “You could have fed your sisters for weeks with that ration.”

  “I thought about it,” I admitted reluctantly. “But then just couldn’t do it. Those girls in my hut are somebody’s sisters too.”

  She regarded me for a very long moment, then extracted a deliciously-smelling wrap from her pocket and silently lowered it into mine. “Don’t start protesting now. I have a husband in Minsk, a Gentile. He brings me food almost every day; made himself his own entrance near Dmitrova Street. I won’t go hungry. Go feed your lot. You Hamburgs need it more than we do.”

  Chapter Five

  January 1942

  In Jubilee Square, the January sun, dull and distant, stared at our frost-bitten faces as they assembled us, in columns, in front of the Labor Exchange. Despite the big name, the house itself was a small affair, wooden and painted green, with wood carvings around the windows intricately cut in a typically Slavic fashion. The routine was familiar by now; listen to your name and assignment, join your respective brigade, and march down Respublikanskaya Street and out of the ghetto. Past the shells of bombed-out buildings, past bomb craters still visible under the cotton of snow, past stiff, frozen corpses of Soviet prisoners of war lining one of the streets.

  The daredevils had been plotting a revolt in one of the POW camps; even managed to steal weapons and ammunition from one of the German factories producing them right here, in Minsk. But, as always happens, someone got caught, someone got acquainted with the local Gestapo, and the result was now lining the road that we took to work, as a preventative measure, so that the Jews wouldn’t get any ideas into their cunning heads.

  “It’s not even that,” Rivka explained, carefully searching for a familiar face among the dead. Her brother was in the Red Army, she’d told me; just called up when the war broke out. She’d had no news from him since. “The ground is frozen through and through; they can’t dig a pit to bury them all. We’ll have to wait till it thaws out a bit. Then, they’ll give us shovels and put us to work.”

  “Good thing, too,” a stocky woman to my right added, “there won’t be any pogroms for now.”

  No, there weren’t any organized pogroms but the SS still came in the middle of the night, drunk and savage and terrorized both ghettos, the Ostjuden and the Hamburg one, without any discrimination.

  Roused from their beds and the floor (whoever was fortunate to occupy which), barefoot and trembling, we stood at attention before them, hoping to guess what they came for tonight. Was it gold? Quickly, Lisl, give them your gold earrings so that they leave us alone. They want us to undress and dance for them again? Inge, you sing, you have a beautiful voice. We’ll dance. We’ll do anything just so they don’t take us outside and shoot us as they did a week ago with four girls from the house next to us.

  Dr. Frank tried reporting it to the ghetto Kommandant Redder when Redder summoned the Sonderghetto Elder to his office, but Herr Kommandant’s facial expression spoke for itself upon hearing the report; the incident with four dead Jewish girls was the last thing he would investigate. As for that silver, he tapped his paper with his pencil, he needed Dr. Frank to collect by next Monday this exact number…

  Which song would our SS guests like to hear? We’ll sing whatever you like and we’ll dance for you and give gold to send to your girlfriends at home. Just leave as you always do afterward so we can catch another couple of hours of sleep before it’s time for us to gather in Jubilee Square again.

  This morning we were assigned to laundry duty. Inside the laundry room, the steam obscured the walls from view. Today, Rivka and I would wash the officers’ dirty undergarments while Byelorussian women next door cleaned and starched their uniforms. We, the Jews, were not deemed worthy to touch those, only the socks, underwear, and sweat-stained undershirts piled in baskets next to the tubs with scrubbing boards in them. It would have been inconceivable for them to learn that women were ready to fight for the chance to be assigned laundry duty; we could spend the entire day in a hot, steamy room! It was considered almost a holiday.

  For the first two hours, I scrubbed army garments against iron washboards as hard as I could but then, after Rivka’s expressively arched brow and ironic smirk, didn’t bother anymore.

  “As long as it smells fresh, they won’t know the difference,” my Soviet friend remarked knowingly. “Why grind your hands into mincemeat for them?”

  I suppose, no reason.

  “Amazing how your perspective changes under certain circumstances, isn’t it?” Another washed pair of underpants landed in a tub where we rinsed them before hanging them to dry. Rivka wiped her forehead and nodded a few times as though to emphasize her point. “Three years ago, my husband and I went to the Cinema House and saw a newsreel about Germans now being our friends and allies. Now, I scrub the floors at the same Cinema House where the Germans watch their newsreels, in which their compatriots keep murdering their former allies. Not even a year ago I was Raisa Belinskaya, an engineer and a citizen of the Soviet Union. Now, I’m Rivka Belinskaya, a washerwoman and a Jew. Not even a year ago, my co-worker Pasha Serebryankin was a good lad who knew many a good story and didn’t work for the German police and didn’t beat up my friends for trying to smuggle food back into the ghetto to feed their families. Not even a year ago, my husband thought that we were all Byelorussians and could never have imagined, in his worst nightmare, that he’d have to occasionally hide his own wife and son in his own apartment so that they didn’t get killed during the pogrom.”

  “Not even a year ago I worked in a factory and made parachutes for the Luftwaf
fe together with other, Aryan Germans,” I continued, forgetting the sock in my hands for a moment. “Not even a year ago, there wasn’t a star on my clothes with the word Jude on it and my parents were still alive. Not even a year ago, I’d never think that my own countrymen would kill them.”

  “Don’t make a new song about it now. It’s all water under the bridge. Now, it’s to rescue ourselves and to fight for us.”

  “What?” I looked at her. From Rivka, the oddest glance this time, apprehensive, considering.

  “Time to change the water, I’m saying.”

  Holding her rolled-up sleeve with one hand, she searched in the soapy tub and pulled the rubber plug out of the water. I followed her example. I was slowly learning everything from her, my only connection with the outside world the language of which I didn’t even comprehend. She knew how to survive and she’d teach me how, so I could teach my Hamburgs in return. Having drawn a new tub, she was now busy stuffing hers and my pockets with aromatic soap which was stacked in the laundry room in abundance.

  “Take it, take it, don’t be daft! You’ll trade it for potatoes at the market tonight. Do you want your sisters to eat or no?”

  “If the police find it—”

  “If the police find it, you give them four pieces from your left pocket, and keep the four from your right to yourself.”

  “You’re giving me too much…”

  “These you will tie to your thighs with your garters. And these two you will put in your bra.” She tapped her temple with her finger in a universal gesture of accusation of someone not using their head and suddenly laughed. “You Germans may be highly intelligent but God forgive me, you’re not too savvy when it comes to the simplest things.”

  “We’re not used to stealing things, I suppose.” Almost apologetically, I grinned back at her.

  “You’d never survive in the Soviet Union then. Everyone steals everything here. That’s just how things work. Factories have quotas for stealing.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Oh no.”

  Suddenly, she was stripping bare. To my mortified look, she pointed at the clock on the wall. “Lunchtime. Your compatriots will not show their faces here for the next thirty minutes. Bath time.”

  With those words, my ingenious friend discarded the last items of her clothing and immersed herself into a hot bath, heaving a sigh of blissful relief. So, that was the main reason why Soviet women were ready to fight for the laundry assignment. They washed right here, scrubbing themselves off with fine German soap before throwing the Germans’ undergarments in the same dirty water. Suddenly, such an insolent and courageous, tiny act of resistance ignited the most profound sense of admiration in me. I began tearing off my clothes too. She was right, after all, my cunning Rivka; my regimented compatriots would only interrupt their lunch in case of an armed revolt breaking out under their window, no less.

  She regarded me approvingly as I immersed myself in the water and nodded to some thoughts of hers.

  “There are partisans in the forests.”

  I barely heard her words. The chatter of the Byelorussian women in the room next to us drowned her soft murmuring. They wouldn’t bother or denounce us either, Rivka assured me. Half of them were her friends. They would even share their lunch with us later after the Germans have theirs and allow us to eat.

  “So, I’ve heard,” I replied carefully, wondering what it was she’d been tip-toeing around lately.

  “A lot of ours escaped the ghetto to join them.”

  “Yours.”

  “Yes, ours. The Soviet Jews that is.”

  “All right.”

  Rivka began soaping her finely-shaped, white arms. “Would yours… be interested in cooperating with us? We can assist in many things. We can smuggle out some of you as well.”

  I considered carefully. “We would never survive there, even if the partisans take us, which I doubt.”

  “They will,” she assured me quickly. Something told me that she’d already had this conversation with someone and that someone had promised her something. “They’re not the Red Army; they’re freedom fighters, independent ones. They welcome everyone, who wants to fight against the Hitlerites. Their only condition is that each fighter must bring something useful.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something they can use; a radio transmitter, a typewriter, medical supplies… weapons.”

  I met her pointed look. For a few moments, I didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Where would I get weapons?” I asked with a cautious grin. I suddenly didn’t know her. She was as foreign and treacherous as the land to which we were now confined.

  “I bribed someone to get you assigned to this kosher duty, didn’t I? So, I can bribe someone just as well to get you assigned to a munitions factory. Some of your compatriots as well. Whoever is interested.”

  I didn’t trust her. She caught on that. “You’re wondering why we’re not getting our own people into those gun factories, aren’t you? Don’t look at me like I work for the Gestapo now; I promise, I’m something quite the contrary. You see, after what happened with the uncovered revolt in the POW camp, the Germans banned us from the munitions factories. But only us, the Ostjuden. Someone from our Judenrat learned that you, the German Jews, aren’t on that list. Some of you work there. They trust you. They don’t expect treason from you. They know that you’re just as good at following rules as they are; that you would never steal anything…”

  In the meaningful silence that followed, I finally realized what she was saying. Rivka’s grin grew wider, culminating in a veritable Cheshire Cat’s toothy smile. “Have no illusions, Ilse. They won’t stop until they slaughter us all. I don’t know about your obedient compatriots, who mistakenly assume that it’s only our heads the SS are after, but we are planning on getting out of here and in as big a numbers as possible. I picked you because you seem like a sensible enough girl. You know how to adapt, to survive; you learn quickly and you’re not afraid.”

  “No, I’m not. But I need time to think it all over. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about what you proposed, not even my sisters.”

  “See?” She slapped the water in apparent delight. “You do know what’s good for you. Think about it and let me know when you’re ready. But don’t take too much time. Spring is coming. The earth will thaw out. You know what will come next.”

  Chapter Six

  February 1942

  “You’re not afraid,” Rivka had said. I wonder what else she would say had she seen me now.

  I splashed some more water, tinted with rust, onto my burning face and lifted it to a cracked, rust-stained mirror that graced the wall of a women’s bathroom – the only one in the entire armament factory. It used to produce Mosin-Nagant for the Red Army; now, it produced Škoda guns and Mauser rifles for the Wehrmacht under a civilian German engineer’s supervision. He often invited distinguished guests from the German headquarters, strode down assembly lines with the proud face of an over-achiever, talked insufferable statistics and numbers while the distinguished guests nodded solemnly and the workers stood with their hats in their hands, heads bowed low.

  I regarded my reflection in the glass – a pale girl with wary, shining eyes, dark hair covered by the kerchief; a small bruise on the right cheekbone, still visible but already healing, from two days ago when a Lithuanian guard from the Black Police had hit me – twice. The first time because I happened to be walking by him as we were being readmitted into the ghetto after a day’s work and second because I looked at him in astonishment after he’d hit me for nothing the first time. He must have felt better after that second slap – at least it was justified.

  Lousy underground material I was, at any rate. Lousy, through and through. All morning I spent with every sense of mine strained to its utmost, with eyes darting from one supervisor to another, with hands so wet with fear that clips with bullets kept sliding out of them. And yet, when the moment was right, when every supervisor ju
st happened to have his back to me, I lost my resolve at the last moment and dropped the clip into the box where it belonged instead of my pocket where it should have gone according to Rivka’s plans. And now, look at me, hiding here with “thief” written all over my face when in fact I didn’t even have the guts to go through with the whole enterprise.

  Them, the Soviets, were made of much harder stuff than us, the tender children of the great German civilization. They came from a country of workers and peasants after slaughtering their masters in cold blood and argued with each other as to whose district’s commissar hanged more enemies of the state during Ezhovshina. We still changed into “proper attire” for the evening after work, had a Sonderghetto book club and a small string quartet which played Mozart on Sundays. Lousy underground material, if I say so myself. They were the anarchists; we cherished our order, even when it was the order in which the SS lined us up for execution. They killed, bribed, stole, lied, and schemed to stay alive; we regarded them in horror and called them Slavic savages.

  But at the end of the day, who had the speck and who slowly starved to death? Who managed to make people “disappear” to the other side of the barbed-wire fence and make everything legal according to the papers that they submitted to Kommandant Redder? Who had the connection with the Gentile, “Russian” side as they called it? Who knew how to make it to the partisans, swelling in numbers around Minsk? There was no going back to German civility, not for someone who wished to survive – I suddenly realized it that day. Not in this place. I would just have to teach myself how to be a savage like them. Savages had a chance. My cultured kin already had one leg in their communal grave.

  Empty-handed and empty-minded, I trudged back to my work station to produce more bullets so that the SS would have enough to shoot us all later. Unlike most of my compatriots from the Sonderghetto, I had no illusions on that account. The pogroms were not only for the Slavs, as many stated with a knowing look about them; for the SS, it was all the same. We weren’t divided into Germans and non-Germans any longer. We were divided into the ones wearing the uniform and the ones whom they shot, regardless of their nationality.