Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  Cereal, millet, granulated sugar,[?] and other foods are smuggled the same way. Only flour is smuggled in paper bags ... through upstairs windows. From above, the Polish smuggler lowers a rope to the pavement. There the Jewish smuggler ties the paper bags to the rope. The Pole hoists the rope with the paper bags, fills them with flour, then lowers the rope with single bags of flour, which are [promptly] seized by the smugglers who spirit them away. In order not to cut his hands, the Pole wears heavy cotton gloves, through which the rope slides smoothly.

  When the time comes to lower the merchandise, the ground-floor windows are besieged. Around the smugglers are their wives, their sons and daughters, porters[?] talking to the Poles. But only those can buy who are entitled, according to the smugglers.

  Often you can hear one smuggler arguing with another at the ‘non-Jewish’ window: ‘Jakie, rat! You stinker! The devil take you! You won’t get near that window again! I swear, I’ll fix you good!’

  ‘Meyer, shove off! Hurry up. Look how he works.’

  ‘Mendel, blazes take you, why are you standing there![?] Here, take this to the market.’

  … People scramble for merchandise and the smuggled goods are quickly removed. A heave, a shove, a yank, and the merchandise is stowed away in the half-closed dark stores … Broad-shouldered women, red-cheeked, with callused hands[?] wink nervously, keeping a lookout to the end of the alley, where it meets Franciszkańska, to see if someone is coming, driving, riding. And, suddenly the air is pierced by a hoarse warning scream: ‘Passover!’

  The warning is picked up on all sides and [all] doors are slammed shut and bolted. Padlocks are hung up outside. Some of the smugglers remain inside, others go out to keep watch. They lean against the store, as if to say they have nothing better to do. The Poles above speedily hoist up the ropes, and Kożla becomes quiet. The atmosphere grows more[?] in tense anticipation. The smuggling routine has ground to a halt.

  For it is ‘Passover’. Some non-Jew with a briefcase has turned up. No one knows who he is, but probably he is a police agent. So they wait. When the Pole upstairs, too impatient to wait, has the nerve to lower the rope again, shouting to the Jews below: ‘There is no more Passover’, they send up a warning with the contemptuous manner of the more experienced: ‘Hold on, Passover is still around.’

  The Poles deliver milk to Kożla Alley at about seven in the morning, elsewhere still earlier. Large tin cans of standard litre capacity are set outside the windows of the ground-floor apartments. A thick hose equipped with a measuring device is passed through the wire mesh of the grates. One turn of the tap and out pours a white stream of rich milk, diffusing the aroma of cow sheds, and quickly fills the cans. Even more quickly it is dispatched from the window into the stores, where milkmen and women are already waiting with containers to deliver the milk home to their customers.

  Berl the Souse

  The Jewish smugglers, receivers of the milk, are provided with tasters to see if the milk is pure, unadulterated, but that is only for themselves. They don’t care if the customers are fooled, in fact they manage to somehow, because, after all, it’s not a matter of justice, but a matter of profit[?]; a plump drumstick or gizzard, and a drink, which a man like Mr Berl must have. Indeed, this Mr Berl has prepared the cans in his place in such a way that they contain a goodly quantity of water mixed with a sort of white froth, and that’s the way he does business. When a woman comes to the window and insists on buying the milk as it flows directly from the Pole’s hose, to be sure of its purity, he argues that it will cost her six złotys.

  The accounting is quite simple.

  Actually we’ve run ahead of ourselves. The work plan or, more accurately, the daily smuggling plan begins not with milk, but with vegetables. Not everybody can buy bread, but a beetroot, on the other hand, a potato, or carrot, are precious foods in wartime, much in demand.

  Solly the Skirt, a squat man with round red cheeks like Simhat Torah apples, and doughy hands stuck in his pockets, starts selling at dawn: smuggled potatoes, greens, and also eggs, creamery butter, honey, and sometimes also non-kosher fats. His wife, Rosie, with a big backside, fleshy lips, and puffy beringed fingers, stands at the scales; time and again she lifts a bag of flour and asks this one and that one what he’s buying, how much he pays, and giddap – we’re off again. If she doesn’t like the price, she shouts in her mannish voice: ‘Beat it, phonies, we’ll send [a delivery boy] to your house[?]. Too bad you can’t do with less than pure white flour.’

  Solly stands nearby on his stumpy legs, frowns, his squinty eyes with whitish brows dusted with flour summon up the sleepiness of a baker. He keeps his hands in his pockets; the watch chain over his well-filled waistcoat gleams sumptuously, as if to say: Damn your hides, you paupers! The hell I’ll give you such flour for that price. Solly the Skirt knows what flour is. After all, he was a baker before the war.

  One of his six or eight partners, Izzy the Face, who is two heads taller but has the same oaken shoulders, also stands around with his hands in the pockets of his lumber jacket and does nothing. He just watches to see if the ‘capital’ is growing. His people sit at the counter, adding, counting, and taking in money. The young man at the till keeps track, and, at each transaction, he opens the drawer crammed with paper money and closes it. The Polish money which the Germans issued, with reproductions of the Chopin monument and Piast’s portrait, lies piled up in heaps like greasy waste paper. Hundreds, five hundreds, and fifties, fifties, fifties – mountains. The young fellow, with the shiny boots and the expensive cigarette in his mouth after a good breakfast, shows contempt both for the money and those who provide it. So much money is piled before him, so much inflated paper, that he imagines he’s not short of money. Indeed he too has forgotten what people without money look like, and he waits impatiently for the paupers to pay up, so he can grab it fast.

  Izzy the Face has nothing to do. He hangs around the shop, his floury visored cap down over his eyes, looking like a ferocious dog. Also the third, fourth, and fifth partners are in the store. Once they were well-to-do truckers, soft-drink producers, tanners. Now they are smugglers. One of them sits with one leg propped up on the counter, munching a drumstick, a pickle for dessert, loftily eyeing the customers…

  Only the women, the partners’ wives, are nimble. They are experts on eggs, butter, and all the other foods, and they are dying for that big take. One complains to the other that for thirty złotys she cannot get anything for her children to eat, but of course she’s lying. She wants to make herself out to be a poor slob. Both women know very well that this is said only for the customers, so they won’t envy her. Look, upon my word, even the top smugglers of the Kożla can’t afford to spend more than thirty złotys for breakfast. But of course it’s not true, because nowadays a kilo loaf of bread costs twenty złotys, and what about butter and milk and cheese and indeed a fresh egg, which a smuggler’s child simply must have for breakfast – things that hundreds of thousands of Jewish children in town see only in their delirious dreams. The twenty-złoty loaf is a sure guarantee that the smuggler’s children will have all those good things. It also ensures Solly’s peace of mind and that of his partners, as well as the nervous helter-skelter of their wives.

  Meanwhile, we’re still at the start of the day, at the sale of potatoes. Right away the sale of other foods will begin and then comes the real hullabaloo. You can never know, two hours later a miracle can happen – someone will start a rumour that the Germans are invading Russia. At dawn troops were seen marching over the bridge to Praga. That’s enough. The Gentile smugglers understand such sensational news as well as their Jewish counterparts, and prices suddenly soar. That’s all they need. When prices soar, things get brisk in Kożla. There is a scramble for the merchandise. Every bag of food lowered from the Polish windows is instantly seized in the pincer-like grip of the strong iron paws of the tough Jewish porters, who grab the goods for the rich traders in the markets. No one can compete with them.

  Hundreds of
Jews then throng the street, as on festivals in front of the synagogue, portly, well-fed. They make deals and talk politics. The pavement is thickly littered with cigarette butts and stubs, at a time when a cigarette costs sixty groszy, about ten to twelve times the pre-war price.

  Pedlars circulate in the crowd with little boxes of cakes, shouting, ‘Come on, let’s go, who’ll take a chance?’ Numbers are drawn from a small sack; some lose and some even win a pastry. A couple of smuggler lads besiege the cake peddlers and devour the cakes with such insolent gusto, it is sickening to look at their greasy faces. Street singers and players drop in here in the hope of earning something in this land of plenty, but who appreciates them? The fiddle screeches, the singer sings: ‘I don’t wanna give away my ration card, I wanna live a little more.’ But it has no effect. This street comes alive, starts to move and surge only when the whisper spreads: ‘Another quarter, half a złoty ... two ... rye flour 24½ …’ That’s the prettiest music in the alley.

  Who cares about the corpse, or rather the dying man who has chosen to lie down right in front of Solly’s place and plans to die right under the smugglers’ feet? On Ostrowska, Wołyńska, even on Franciszkańska, and the Nalewki, the dead lie in the streets as though they were at home. Jews arise in the morning, go out and know they will find dead bodies there – one, two, five, ten corpses of famine, the bloated dead who hungered through the war and, hungering, attained death, desired yet hated. But here in Kożla Alley? A squashed fly or a louse – who pays it heed?

  The smugglers are in shiny boots and fine jackets. The cool September sun gilds their pampered faces. They nibble on the caramels and pastries which the sweets-pedlars bring them, and they never even hear the whir of the death-bullet as it whizzes by.

  ‘Hey, boy, look out! Auntie’s coming!’

  He means Basha, a red-head, one of the ‘strollers’. It is nine, ten o’clock in the morning. The food smuggling is in full swing. The strollers stuff their knapsacks with the plenty of Kożla Alley and carry it to the bakers. The strollers earn twenty, at most thirty, groszy on each kilo of food, and they have to lug many loads. Some make dozens of trips daily to the alley for fresh food supplies. They have wives and children, they work hard, walk a lot, carry many loads, want to eat, indeed, must eat. For bread and potatoes alone they need fifty złotys a day, if not a whole hundred. Without them [the smuggler would be] helpless. The smuggler knows it, but he likes to make a living too, no less than anyone else who has hired hands.

  Basha, a tall girl with big feet, strides like a boy, and zips across the street with the sacks of flour like a demon. One-two and she’s there and back with an empty knapsack and a handful of paper money. Before you look around, she’s out and back inside again and so on continuously. Not slower than Basha is old Zelig, a man in his seventies, from childhood accustomed to lugging loads … He also comes to the alley sometimes twenty times a day.

  Not all the strollers have the same luck. There are some women strollers who can barely manage to drag their swollen legs. They have to plead for eight or ten kilos of flour at one time, and the smugglers regard them as nuisances they can’t get rid of. They do them a favour and throw them a few kilos of flour, as though it were a despised handout to these pesky recipients, but this is just for appearances’ sake. At bottom they know how to appreciate the value of every stroller[?] because he helps them quickly to unload the forbidden fruit, to avoid tangling with a stray gendarme, a Polish policeman or a Junak.

  Yesterday there was a pretty piece of business. Right after a good deal on all sides, the Germans appeared unexpectedly at night – different Germans who had not been ‘fixed’ – and they did a real piece of mischief. They confiscated food worth tens of thousands of złotys and, besides, it cost a fortune to get off with only the losses. During the tumult three boundary guards fell from the roof and were killed on the spot. Well, after all, they do live from boundary money.

  The system of boundary money is a complicated one, reminiscent of the wide range of means through which circulating and profit-seeking capital has at all times tried to benefit and, under all circumstances, to ensure its income. There are Polish and Jewish boundary men. The Poles smuggle the merchandise, brought by Christian suppliers to the Jews. The Jewish boundary men deliver to the Jewish smugglers on the Jewish side. The boundary men keep accounts so know how many tons of provisions are smuggled in, and for every kilo they get a percentage. The boundary men have their own people who watch the buying and selling and make sure they won’t be cheated.

  The boundary men have a hard lot. Standing on the roof means they are always in mortal danger. But what won’t a Jew do to earn his bread?

  Kożla Alley gives thousands of Jews their livelihood. The barrowmen, who cart away vegetables and fruit, and the porters who live off it. Outside every smuggler shop are always a couple of porters who grab the lowered bags of flour, sacks of grain and other provisions and deliver them to their designated places. Besides their regular earnings, the porters have staked out a new claim – a package fee on every sack of food that leaves Kożla Alley.

  At the corner of Franciszkanska stands Zelig the Paw, a stolid personage in a Polish peasant hat with a lacquered visor that he wears at a rakish angle, ready to spring on anyone carrying a package:

  ‘Stop!’ he hisses. ‘Don’t be bashful, uncle, hand over fifty for a package fee.’

  ‘Me – fifty?’ replies the passer-by, trying to look innocent.

  ‘Yeah, fifty and make it quick.’

  The other gives in. Otherwise Zelig the Paw lets him have the feel of a real paw so that he sees stars. Against such an argument all pleas are useless, so he cries and pays.

  Noon Rest in Kożla Alley

  At noon everything quietens down in Kożla. All the supplies of smuggled provisions have already been sold. The porters sit on the shop steps, the smugglers take a nap on the counters in the empty stores and Kożla Alley rests, preparing itself for the afternoon smuggling, which starts at about four or five.

  You never know if the afternoon prices will be the same as the morning prices. This you can tell only when they lower the supplies through the windows. In the courage of the first smuggler who carries off his bags of flour, of the porter and the boundary men, the entire alley [senses] the change on the bourse and, like a sudden wind across a wheat field on a hot summer day, a murmur gusts through the street: ‘Higher’.

  Not only the barrowmen, porters, strollers, milkmen, and boundary men live off the alley. Thousands of grocery stores live partly off it, naturally raising their prices. Last but not least, Kożla Alley supports tens of thousands of Jews who even with money in their pocket would die of hunger if the alley did not serve as their granary.

  Time will tell.

  Whoever will endure, whoever will survive the diseases that range in the ghetto because of the dreadful congestion, the filth and uncleanness, because of having to sell your last shirt for half a loaf of bread, whoever will be that hero, will tell the terrible story of a generation and an age when human life was reduced to the subsistence of abandoned dogs in a desolate city.

  Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (and Soviet-occupied Poland), began on 22 June 1941. In the wake of the German armed forces went four Einsatzgruppen. Their orders, transmitted orally, was to kill Jews, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Other German forces, Wehrmacht and SS troops, frequently went on Jew-killing rampages, either of their own volition or after being stirred up by senior commanders. Field Marshal von Reichenau, commander of the German Sixth Army, informed his men that the essential aim of the campaign against ‘the Jewish-Bolshevist system’ (the Nazis consistently conflated Socialism with the ‘conspiracies’ of international Jewry) was the ‘complete crushing of its means of power’:

  This poses tasks for the troops that go beyond the one-sided routine of conventional soldiering. In the Eastern region, the soldier is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of
an inexorable national idea and the avenger of all bestialities inflicted upon the German people and its racial kin.

  Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just atonement on Jewish sub-humanity.

  Where the killing of Jews was controlled, Einsatzgruppen ensured that they killed local Jewish leaders first, to destroy a community’s morale and ability to retaliate. In the first forty days of Barbarossa, more Jews were killed than between the eighteen-month period 20 January 1933 to 21 June 1941.

  Diary of an SS Executioner, Drohobycz, Galicia, 12–28 July 1941

  SS-HAUPTSCHARFÜHRER FELIX LANDAU

  Landau, an SS Sergeant Major (Master Sergeant), volunteered for an Einsatzkommando – known universally as an ‘EK’ – on 30 June 1941.

  12 July 1941

  At 6.00 in the morning I was suddenly awoken from a deep sleep. Report for an execution. Fine, so I’ll just play executioner and then grave-digger, why not? Isn’t it strange, you love battle and then have to shoot defenceless people. Twenty-three had to be shot, amongst them two women. They are unbelievable. They even refused to accept a glass of water from us.

  I was detailed as marksman and had to shoot any runaways. We drove one kilometre along the road out of town and then turned right into a wood. There were only six of us at that point and we had to find a suitable spot to shoot and bury them. After a few minutes we found a place.

  The death candidates assembled with shovels to dig their own graves. Two of them were weeping. The others certainly have incredible courage. What on earth is running through their minds during these moments? I think that each of them harbours a small hope that somehow he won’t be shot. The death candidates are organized into three shifts as there are not many shovels.