We felt that way too, but for us it was less a question of ultimate victory than of immediate survival. We too believed that it was only a matter of time now, perhaps a year, two at the most. But how could we hold out that long? The Russian front was five hundred miles away, and the vast majority of the local population was hostile to Jews.
I found a job with a dentist as an assistant in his office. Our first two or three months in Uściług were relatively peaceful. We knew that our situation could only worsen, but it was a welcome relief, for the moment, after the hard times in Ołyka and Włodzimierz.
Sometime in April the Germans tightened the screws, and there were no more easy jobs. Felek and I were assigned to work in a small shop making roof tiles. We would mix clay and water, put the mixture into a form, beat it with a special tool to shape and harden it, sprinkle the newly formed tiles with a cement additive, and set them on a rack to dry. It was hard work, but no policemen supervised us, and we were happy to have the job.
I was also giving math lessons to a boy named Lipiński. The Germans had appointed his father mayor of Uściług. Occasionally Mrs. Lipińska would give me a little money or food in payment for the lessons.
Evenings we spent at home reading or discussing the latest news of the war and of Jews in other towns. We were only six or seven miles from Hrubieszów, but for some incomprehensible reason, the Germans were maintaining guards all along the old border. For the first time since the German attack on Russia, we managed to exchange a few messages with our family in Hrubieszów. Their life was much the same as ours in Uściług: living in fear of the Germans and hoping to survive. But at least they were alive and in good health.
There was little news from the Eastern front. Both armies were resting, resupplying their troops, and preparing for new battles. But we were shocked to learn of the smashing Japanese victories. How could America have let herself be caught like that, unprepared for war in the Pacific? We had always known the Japanese soldiers were fanatical fighters, but we were amazed at the apparent superiority of their planes and ships. After the disaster at Pearl Harbor, they seemed unstoppable. First the Philippines were lost, then many more key islands, one after another. Finally Singapore itself, that supposedly impregnable British fortress, fell in a matter of days. Tens of thousands of British soldiers surrendered, the worst British loss so far.
These were sad days for the once mighty British Empire, which seemed to be in retreat everywhere: first in France, then in Greece, then in the Far East. Even in Africa the British army was beaten by a relatively small Afrika Korps, led by the brilliant General Rommel.
We were naturally distressed at this news, but still confident of ultimate victory. Now America was in the war, and Germany could never stand up to that great industrial machine once it was converted to wartime production. We heard about the fantastic capacity of American factories. Could it possibly be true? Could they produce one hundred thousand planes a year? One hundred thousand tanks? We shook our heads in wonder. “Leave it to those Yanks. They are just incredible, with their mass-production assembly lines.”
Of more immediate concern, however, was the Russian front. Would the Germans, now that the winter was over, be able to march again? Had the Russians learned from their past mistakes, and would they be able to hold the Germans off, or at least continue fighting until the following winter? Or perhaps—still more optimistically—they were strong enough now to counterattack and smash Hitler once and for all. It was a time of great tension and uncertainty.
It was in June or July that we heard for the first time terrible new rumors: gassings. The SS were using gas in specially equipped trucks to put thousands of Jews to death, and gas chambers for mass murder were in operation. Death factories, in towns we had never heard of before: Treblinka, Sobibór, Auschwitz. Gas chambers! It was impossible even to conceive of it: Men, women, and children screaming, gasping for air, choking, suffocating, a heap of bodies writhing on the floor in their death agony. How could this be? Why didn’t the world do something? How could those great leaders Churchill and Roosevelt permit it to happen? Even if they could not prevent Hitler outright, they could at least issue a strong declaration and a warning. Drop leaflets all over Germany, blast over the airwaves: “Stop it! Stop the slaughter, or we will hold all Germans responsible!”
But as the summer wore on, everything became clear; there were no more doubts. Hitler had in fact ordered the systematic extermination of millions of Jewish men, women, and children. His method was simple: the entire operation was carried out by a few thousand specially trained killers, aided by ten or twenty thousand local policemen: Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians.
In city after city, the pattern was the same. The Germans ordered the Judenrat to announce a time when all Jews were to assemble at a designated place (usually the town square or the railroad station) to be deported to new “labor camps.” They were permitted to take with them only a small bundle of belongings.
Since by that time almost everyone knew what “deportation” meant, usually only about half of the town’s Jews would show up. They would be packed into cattle cars and shipped directly to the nearest gas chambers. In the small towns the SS would load the assembled Jews onto trucks and drive them to ditches nearby. There they would order the victims to undress and stand or lie down at the edge of a ditch and they would mow them down with machine guns. Then the killers would look for those showing signs of life and finish them off. Occasionally a few who were only wounded would pretend to be dead. The SS forced other Jews or local people to bury the bodies. The wounded would wait until the dirt had been thrown over them, then work their way to the top of the pile of dead, dig themselves out of the fresh earth, and sometimes succeed in escaping.
Those Jews who obeyed the orders to assemble were usually the weakest, the most docile, those who still refused to think the unthinkable and clung to the hope that they were indeed being sent to a labor camp, or those who had simply lost the will to fight. Many were refugees from Germany or other countries, strangers to Poland with no place to hide. The Jews who did not show up as ordered were the ones who refused to go voluntarily to the slaughter. Perhaps they had Gentile friends willing to risk their lives for them, or had hiding places of their own, or they fled into the local forests and fields and hid out there.
Once the SS had dispatched those Jews who had showed up for the roundup by sending them to the gas chambers and burying them in mass graves, they would start the hunt for those who had gone into hiding. It was a hunt the likes of which mankind had never seen. Whole families would hide out in skrytkas, as we had in Włodzimierz, and they would be hunted down inexorably, relentlessly. Street by street, house by house, inch by inch, from attic to cellar. The Germans became expert at finding these hiding places. When they searched a house, they went around tapping the walls, listening for the hollow sound that indicated a double wall. They punched holes in ceilings or floors. People stayed in these skrytkas for days, for weeks, often without food and water, and the Germans listened for the muffled cries of children, with desperate parents trying to smother their sounds with hands over the little ones’ mouths.
These were no longer limited “actions”; this was total annihilation. Teams of SS men roamed the streets, searching ditches, outhouses, bushes, barns, stables, pigsties. And they caught and killed Jews by the thousands; then by the hundreds; then by tens; and finally one by one.
Almost every day we heard new reports of the killer commandos going from town to town killing Jews. The death watch for the Jews of Uściług had begun.
The reactions of these doomed people varied. We had a neighbor who was an accountant. He and his wife were a handsome couple, both tall, with dark brown eyes and black hair. They were growing vegetables in a garden they had cultivated behind their house—tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, radishes, even corn. They would get up every morning at sunrise and work in their garden; their little eight-year-old daughter, a beautiful child, worked alongside her parents. They all lo
oked perfectly calm, but it was sad to see them. We wondered whether they would live long enough to harvest the vegetables.
Many were like that, quiet, resigned, apparently accepting the inevitability of their fate. Others, particularly the pretty young girls, found it hard to believe that any men, even Germans, when it came to it, could actually bring themselves to kill them in cold blood. They kept hoping, in spite of what they knew.
Late in July, to our astonishment, a messenger from the Judenrat came to tell us that Fred was in Uściług asking for us. We could scarcely believe it, but it was so. He had come with a German army officer who needed a number of Jewish tradesmen and couldn’t find enough of them in Hrubieszów. Fred talked him into looking in Uściług, and the German had obtained a special pass for himself and Fred to cross the border. When we met we hugged each other and wept. We hadn’t seen Fred since 1939, over three years earlier. He looked fine, as handsome as ever. For the next several hours all we did was hug and kiss and excitedly exchange stories, filling each other in on our doings since the war had started. Fred told us how Mother had gone to stay with him in Warsaw in 1940, how tough things had got there, how she had escaped by climbing the ghetto wall, and how finally they both had come back to Hrubieszów to rejoin Hanka. He even brought us a few dishes mother had cooked especially for us.
Too soon the German officer came and told Fred it was time to go back. We hugged and kissed good-bye, telling him that when the “action” started in Uściług we would try to make it to Hrubieszów. But as the car disappeared down the road, I remember thinking: “This is probably the last time I will ever see Fred.”
On the Eastern front summer fighting had begun, as expected, and apparently in good weather the Germans were still stronger than the Russians. They launched a two-pronged offensive in the Ukraine, one thrust eastward, toward the Volga, the other southeast and south, toward the Caucasus, to capture the Baku oil fields, which they badly needed.
Initially the German advance was rapid. Their panzers cut deep behind the front lines, and the Russians were in retreat. But this time it was orderly, without hundreds of thousands of prisoners being taken, and after a few weeks, we knew the Germans had lost their punch. Their advance in the Caucasus toward Baku was slowing down; though they did capture some of the oil fields, those had been totally destroyed by the Russians. The German advance toward the Volga and Stalingrad was slow and along a narrow front. And most significant of all, no major German attacks came on the crucial Moscow front. Leningrad, although still surrounded, was holding out. Clearly the once unstoppable German army was running into difficulties. This gave us immense satisfaction; however desperate our own situation, at least Hitler was in trouble. If only we could live to see the day when he would be captured and exhibited all over the world in a cage!
Toward the end of August it became clear that the Uściług “action” would come any day now. Just at that time, as I was bending over the sink one day to wash my face, I felt a sharp pain in my back. I tried to straighten up and couldn’t. My brothers had to lead me bent over to bed, and when I lay down I had to have my legs propped up because I could not straighten them out.
Sam knew a Polish engineer who worked for a company that did construction work for the Germans on both sides of the river Bug. He made arrangements with the engineer to smuggle us into Hrubieszów. Now the question was: Would I be able to move? For two days Felek and Sam massaged my legs and applied hot compresses almost around the clock. At last I was able to move my legs and to bend; it was now Monday, August 31.
That very day, the Germans ordered that all Jews were to gather in the town square the next morning, Tuesday, September 1, at nine. Sam gave the Pole half of all the money we had left, promising him the other half after he had taken us to Hrubieszów. Our lives were in his hands, Sam told him. He promised he would not let us down. He was to meet us at three in the morning. We were to wait for him in a World War I ditch not far from the Bug bridge.
After packing a few belongings we tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t even close my eyes from nervous excitement. So it had come—the final extermination action. I was worried about this Pole. He seemed altogether too reassuring, almost too friendly, but what good did it do to think about it? We had no choice but to trust him.
At one o’clock we left the house and started walking toward the ditch, watching out for the Ukrainian patrols. In a few minutes we had reached the ditch. So far, so good. Now we had only to wait. The time crept by; we waited patiently. Three o’clock passed, and he hadn’t come. Fear seized our hearts; he had betrayed us! But maybe he was just a few minutes late. By three-thirty we were losing hope. The bastard had taken our money and betrayed us. Still we tried to reassure each other. Maybe he was having trouble with the truck. Maybe he would still come. At four-thirty a woman and a little girl came into the ditch, and a few minutes later a middle-aged man and his wife joined us. So did a young man, a locksmith. A few more Jews came, all desperate people who had nowhere else to go. By five-thirty there were thirteen of us in the ditch.
Slowly the sun rose. It was going to be a glorious day, not a cloud in the sky. It was September 1, the day of the action, and we were trapped. The ditch was long and narrow, its top covered with long grass and weeds growing across it from either side, so that from a distance it was almost invisible. We decided to hide all that day and try to get to the river at night, if the Germans didn’t find us first.
From time to time we heard machine-gun and rifle fire. It was hard to believe time could drag so slowly. Twelve o’clock came, then three o’clock, four o’clock. I would never have believed a day could last so long. At five minutes to five I decided to stop looking at my watch, hoping that would make the time pass more quickly. After what seemed at least an hour later I allowed myself to look again. It was just five o’clock—only five minutes had elapsed! I really thought my watch must have stopped, and checked it against Sam’s. It was correct. I shall never forget that experience; it was as though we had entered some new dimension outside the normal movement of time. Five-thirty came. We began to hope. Maybe we would make it to nightfall without being discovered. At six o’clock we began a whispered discussion about the best route to take to the river.
It was six-thirty when suddenly we heard a harsh German voice bark: “Juden—raus!” (Jews—out!) At the sound my brain seemed to explode. This was it. They had us. Slowly we climbed out of the ditch. The sun was still very bright. There were two Germans with machine guns and a Ukrainian policeman with a rifle. Both Germans were of medium height. I still remember the eyes of one of them: they were shiny, almost glazed, like mirrors. Neither of them hit or cursed us; they were merely efficient, impersonal professionals who wanted to get their job done without delay.
Quickly they herded us into a group. The two Germans led the way, fingers on their gun triggers, and we followed. The Ukrainian, tall and lanky, his rifle at the ready, walked right behind us. We walked in silence. No one wept, no one pleaded for mercy.
Soon we turned into the main street of town. A strange calm came over me. The day was still beautiful, the sky still blue, even bluer against the orange red of the setting sun. The colors pierced me with their vividness. I remember my thoughts very clearly. I knew this was the last day of my life. I looked at the sun and thought, “I will never see the sun again.” I looked at the trees, and thought, “I will never see trees again.” I felt no bitterness, but there was a great sadness in my heart. I was not yet nineteen. I had never slept with a girl. My mouth felt very dry, and I couldn’t swallow. My tongue seemed swollen to twice its normal size. I had to hold my mouth open.
As we walked down the street, I watched the reaction of the Ukrainian townspeople. They seemed undisturbed at the sight of Jews being led to their deaths. A few even laughed and joked about us. I can never forget a young woman who, seeing us from a window on the second floor of her house, turned and called to her little girl, whom she held up to see us as we passed. That there was a
little girl among us seemed not to trouble her at all. I remember thinking: “How can these people be so merciless? Don’t they have any hearts?”
We were now three or four blocks from the end of the street and only a few hundred yards from the execution pits. Father said to us, “One should not have children.” He didn’t care what happened to him, but he was in despair at the prospect of having to watch us die.
We were now approaching a narrow street that led to the tile shop where Felek and I had worked. Sam suggested that we shove our money and our watches into the hands of the Ukrainian policeman and run for it.
In a few feverish seconds we took off our watches, wrapped them and the paper money in a handkerchief, pushed it into his hand, and started running to our right, toward the narrow street. I expected the shooting to start immediately, so I ran the six or seven steps before we reached the corner with my head turned toward the Germans and the Ukrainian, to see what they would do. The two Germans weren’t even aware of what had happened, and continued walking on in front of the group. The others Jews stopped and looked in our direction, confused. The locksmith reacted quickly enough to follow us, a step or two behind. The Ukrainian stood still, holding the handkerchief.
Everything was in a whirl. In about thirty seconds we had reached the back of the tile workshop. Through the windows we could see that there was no one inside. We tried the door, but it was locked and the windows were closed. To this day I don’t know how I found the strength, but I managed to grab the window frame and pull it out with my bare hands, along with the two or three nails that held it. We climbed inside the room where Felek and I had worked before the action started. There were large windows all around it, and empty tile racks and a few pieces of equipment, but no place to hide. Behind the door was a storage room for cement and other materials, but it was locked. Several bursts of machine-gun fire erupted outside. They were shooting the rest of the people from our group.
I Shall Live Page 10