Claiming My Place

by Planaria Price

  I am so afraid that in my fever I might say something in Yiddish or call out “Mamashi.” I don’t, but I know they suspect me anyway. They know from the way I speak Polish that I am not a peasant girl.

  When my fever is gone and I can get out of bed, some of the Polish girls follow me to the chapel and insist I go first to take Holy Communion. Even though Sabina and I had observed the Mass, I had never taken Communion before and am terrified I will look awkward and give myself away. I kneel and cross myself and open my mouth and the priest puts something like matzo on my tongue. The wine has the same sweet taste as the wine we drink at Passover. The Polish girls say nothing and I am able to breathe again.

  Now that I am up and out of bed, the nun takes advantage of my fluency in German and has me help with simple chores and errands. I am happy to help. She is a kind woman and I am glad for an escape from the Poles. Whenever the doctor asks about my progress she tells him I need more time to heal. I think she may suspect I am a Jew and wishes to protect me, because she keeps me there for another two weeks even after I am well enough to go back to work. But finally I must leave.

  I return to the Arbeitsampt. I ask again if they have a record of a Janina Sieracka, and this time they do! She is working at an inn in Lindau on Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. I tell them she is my cousin, that we had worked together at the Gasthaus zum Rotter Lowen and we were bombed and separated and could I be sent to Lindau and work in the same place and they say yes.

  SEPTEMBER 1944

  I get off the train in Lindau and buy a small bunch of flowers at the train station. What a beautiful city, a small peaceful resort surrounded by a lake and so near the Swiss border. I ask for directions to the Hotel am Holdereggenpark and walk the three kilometers, my heart pounding with anticipation.

  The restaurant looks lovely, clean, and neat and I walk directly into the kitchen and there she is. And we hug forever and we laugh and we cry. I feel as if I am home. Sabina and I are together and safe and working, but everything is now rationed and we are hungry again. We have only one meal a day, Stamgerickt. It is potatoes and vegetables and we can have as much as we want, but after the marvelous meals in Ulm, it is practically tasteless.

  DECEMBER 1944

  It is just dawn. It is still dark and very cold but there is a bright full moon shining through the window. The alarm has not yet rung but something wakes me up. In the faint light of the moon I see Sabina sitting up in her bed, her eyes wide open. She looks stunned, like she’s in shock.

  “Sabina,” I whisper, “are you okay?”

  “I’ve just had the strangest dream, Basia,” she says in a hoarse, monotone voice. “It was so clear. It was so real. My mother came to me and woke me up. She said ‘Sabina, I am dead. Your father is dead. Your husband is dead. There is nothing you can do about it. Gone is gone. But soon the war will be over, and Sabina, don’t be sad because Leon Reichmann is still alive. Go and find him. I love you, meine maidele.’ And she kissed me and disappeared. That’s when I woke up. I think it was a few hours ago. It was so real. I felt her kiss.” And she points to her forehead.

  I go to her bed and hug her. She is trembling, and not from the cold. I hold her tightly, to keep her from blowing away.

  APRIL 13, 1945

  A guest at the restaurant reads from the newspaper to announce that the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, died yesterday, and everyone stands up and cheers. They are exultant, sure that now the Germans will certainly win the war. But I know that isn’t true. America is strong, and it is just a matter of time.

  Liberation

  After the final destruction of Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

  —Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) and Winston Churchill (1874–1965), Atlantic Charter, August 1941

  MAY 5, 1945

  I am cleaning the restaurant after the lunchtime crowd when a group of Algerian soldiers from a unit in the French army comes barging in. They are smiling and laughing and we do not need to know French to understand the meaning of the word they are shouting: “Libération!”

  Sabina comes running from the kitchen.

  The Allies have won the war. The Germans have lost, surrendered. It’s over!

  Sabina and I are free. Free!

  The soldiers tell us, in French and broken German and broken English that now we Poles can take whatever we want from the Schwein. They say to go plunder because we are now the victors. Go to all the stores and just take. But we are not that hungry and the shopkeepers are not our enemies. We really don’t need anything except our pasts returned to us. Our dead families and friends, our innocence, our youth.

  There will be a big party tonight. The soldiers invite us to go, and to dance and sing and get drunk. Sabina enthusiastically wants to go, but I need to sit quietly alone and digest what all this means.

  Five years of fear and hiding and loss. What will we do now? Where will we go? What will we find? And dare we tell anyone that we are Jews?

  The soldiers ask me what I want to drink. They offer me wine, champagne, vodka, vermouth. Except for the wine on Passover, I have never drunk alcohol. I tell them vermouth because the sound of the word feels so beautiful in my mouth. They bring me a bottle and Sabina goes to the dance with them. I sit in my room and drink the whole bottle of vermouth, thinking about my past and wondering about my future.

  (I have never been sicker in my life than that following morning, that whole day, that night. Even on the boat to America, I was not as sick as on that glorious day of Liberation. And that is why ever since then I have refused even a sip of alcohol, except at Passover or when joining in a toast on festive occasions like bar mitzvahs and weddings.)

  MAY 7, 1945

  We are free, liberated. We should be joyful, but are we safe? We are so far from home. And where is home? The Algerian soldiers take us to a transport formed to take the Polish workers back to Poland. We still do not dare tell anyone that we are Jews. We travel all day crowded in dirty trucks, pushed against dirty, smelly bodies, our own sweat adding to the overall stench.

  We are bumped and jostled over rough, bombed roads and we are told that this night we will sleep in a now-vacant German officers’ barracks. After the crowding of the trucks, it sounds like a luxury, as there will be three cots for three people to each room.

  At sunset, aching, exhausted, thirsty, and famished, and desperately needing a toilet, we get off the transport with all the Poles. First, after using the smelly toilets and happy to have them, we go to a large mess hall and the food is that same horrible watery potato soup, so like the kind I used to make in Piotrków in the ghetto. Sabina and I still cross ourselves and pretend to pray. The war is over but we are surrounded by Poles who might hate the Jews. We eat and are happy for whatever that black liquid is that they are calling coffee.

  When we go to our assigned room we see that the other bed is already taken. There is a woman lying on her stomach sobbing her heart out. Sabina and I go over to her and gently touch her back.

  “Can we help?” we whisper in Polish.

  She turns over and I gasp. It is Mania Wajshof, Heniek’s younger sister!

  No, is it possible? She sits up and we hug and cry and cannot get over the coincidence. I have not seen Mania for five long, painful years. I worry because her sister Dora is not there. And Mania is crying so violently.

  I am afraid to ask, but I must. “Your family?”

  “Gone,” she sobs, “all gone.” She hugs me again, fresh tears flowing. “Oh, Gucia, I am so sorry. I know that you had broken up with Heniek, but all those precious years you had together. We were all taken in the third transport to Treblinka. Only I survived.”

  I am not surprised, but not knowing the truth about Heniek had helped me get through the years. I would
think of him so often: the good times we had when we were younger—perhaps the chance of meeting again after the war; perhaps I would feel different this time.

  “After you and he separated, he was heartbroken,” Mania says. “But then he met a very nice girl from near Łódź, Maryla Planska. Heniek became a Jewish policeman because he thought that would make him more protected and secure. They were married in late September, just before the Aktion.”

  I feel shocked and embarrassed at my sudden emotion. It’s true, I was the one who chose to break up with Heniek, and yet I feel such a deep pang of jealousy, and I am horribly ashamed.

  Mania is sobbing again and so am I.

  “We were all standing together in the Deportation Platz as Nazis read names from their lists. They called out all of our names, but for some reason they didn’t call Maryla. But Maryla chose to go anyway. She said her life was worth nothing without Heniek.”

  I can barely breathe. There is a tight band around my chest and my heart is pounding violently. And if I had married Heniek? If I had not refused him in my search for true love? If we had run away to Russia like he had planned, would he be alive today? If Maryla had not gone with Heniek, would she be alive today? I hope I will never, ever have to make a choice like that again. I am shaking and I feel so very, very sick.

  Mania buries her head in the pillow and weeps. Sabina and I hug each other thinking of our escape from Piotrków and the bombing in Ulm and we realize how very lucky we are.

  We have been traveling in the transport for several days. Each day is the same. We are squeezed in like sardines, smelly, thirsty, hungry, black-and-blue from the bumping on the rough roads. But there are no bombs and no Nazis and often we all break out in song and tell jokes and stories.

  This night we are separated from Mania, because this nicer barracks, used by high-ranking German officers, has only two cots in each room. It’s an odd arrangement. Sabina and I are placed in a small room with a connecting door to a room where two men will sleep.

  It is the middle of the night and we hear loud, drunken voices. It is a couple of Algerian soldiers looking for women. They pound on our door and Sabina and I quickly move our two cots against it. We unlock the connecting door and rush into the room of the two Polish men and get into their beds, hoping that they are the lesser danger.

  “Please, please protect us. Please say we are your wives,” we plead. Mercifully, they do what we ask and yell out to the Algerians, who then leave us alone.

  MAY 12, 1945

  Mania is eager to return to Piotrków, but Sabina and I are not ready to go back now, if ever. And we no longer feel safe traveling with the Algerian transport. But where to go instead? Then we hear that there are a lot of Jews in Munich, more coming each day. After hugging Mania with a teary goodbye, Sabina and I leave the transport and hitchhike the rest of the way to Munich. It’s not hard to get rides since there are so many American soldiers on the roads; American trucks are constantly going back and forth. The Americans are very nice to us. They tell us that they are not supposed to pick us up but they do it anyway and give us chocolate and cigarettes. They laugh and say we are fat enough to eat the chocolate. We don’t understand what they mean.

  Then they turn serious. They tell us tragic stories of how many concentration camp survivors died after their liberation because of the gifts of the Allies. One soldier starts to cry and tells us of his horror when they liberated a camp named Dachau a few weeks earlier. In front of them was a mountain of dead bodies and standing and sitting were living skeletons with huge sad, hollow eyes. My mind is barely able to register the shocking image he creates, and I instantly erase it, as I have learned to do so well.

  The soldier says he gave a woman chocolate and she died soon after. The medics came and warned the soldiers, “Do not give out the chocolate or the cans of sardines and meat; not yet. If a starving person eats too much, too fast, they will die.”

  The soldier is such a young boy, he still has pimples on his face and he is sobbing with sadness and guilt over what he, in his kindness, has done. None of us can stand that irony: sudden death upon liberation because of the generosity of the liberators.

  We save the chocolate for when we will feel happier and plan to trade the cigarettes for food. The last part of our journey becomes more difficult because the Americans are now strictly forbidden to pick us up, so we look for other trucks and we walk. We sleep at night in the fields, still frightened that the Algerian soldiers will find us. We try to keep ourselves clean by washing in the rivers. It feels like this trip will never end.

  JUNE 1, 1945

  At last we arrive in Munich. It has taken us three weeks. We go to look for Jews. We are told that there is a large group of survivors being sheltered in the Deutsches Museum in the center of Munich. We walk there and, yes, here we find Jews. Real Jews. And by joining their number we let drop the masks we’ve been hiding behind these last three years and re-inhabit our own Jewish faces.

  Just like the American soldiers told us, some truly look like skeletons, with hollow, dead eyes, but some look like us, healthy and free, and some are as white as snow from hiding in attics and behind walls for five years. Surprisingly, there are many children, but their legs are like toothpicks. They can barely walk because they were hidden in barrels, in coffins, in sofas, in closets, between walls. Their young growing bodies never had exercise and never saw the sun. But now we are Jews, all together, and alive and safe. A few of the children just sit and stare at the ground, but most of them are running around like real children and we young Jews start to meet others our age and talk and talk and talk.

  But we do not talk about the past. We flirt with one another and we talk about the dance tonight and the walk along the river and the picnic planned for tomorrow. We must look forward. We must never look back or we will go mad.

  The American Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, is there at the museum and they are trying, with the Red Cross, to help all of us. They are writing down the names of the survivors and we stand in lines to put the names of our families on the List of the Missing, while we are on the List of the Found.

  We need to register with the HIAS. They will give us real identity cards as displaced persons (DPs) under our real names and countries of origin. It will not have Jew stamped on it. Sabina has no doubts about who she is. Janina Sieracka is gone and she is again Sabina Markowitz. But with all I have learned about the devastating losses in this war, I feel as if Sura Gitla is dead. Gucia’s innocent idealistic life is finished. There is no present or future for her. I had good luck and survived as Danuta Barbara Tanska. I feel strong and adult as Basia. And to be honest, Gucia identifies me as a Jew. I feel safer with Barbara, who could be anyone. I tell the HIAS woman that my name is Barbara Gomolinska and so it is. They give us our IDs and a little money. With that and what we had saved from our wages, Sabina and I can afford to rent a small room.

  We answer an ad for a room with the Schwartzkopfs, a German family, and when we tell them we are Jews they say it is fine with them. They tell us they never liked Hitler and that they never knew about the concentration camps or the extermination of the Jews. Actually, they tell us, some of their best friends were Jews. We hear this same story from Germans over and over and over again. Nobody knew about the fate of the Jews and nobody supported Hitler. Of course we don’t believe them but we certainly don’t question them. For our own sanity, we must let it go for now. For the first time in five years Sabina and I can stand tall and feel safe. We are still young and we have the rest of our lives in front of us.

  Piotrków

  My eyes shed streams of water over the ruins of my poor people.

  —Lamentations 3:48

  JULY 1945

  I cannot wait any longer. I really must go home. I have been able to contact Janek to let him know I am alive and in Munich. He writes back that he is going to Piotrków and Idek and Josek are alive and already there and Uncle Josef, too. How I long to see them and to see what is left of Pi
otrków, even daring to hope of rebuilding our lives together there. Unbelievably, I have just learned that Hela and Marek survived the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and are living in the DP camp there. And that is what is left of our large family.

  Sabina cannot bear the thought of going back because she knows she has no one to go back to. Except for me, she is truly alone in the world. She gives me a letter for Leon Reichmann and tells me to give it to him when I see him. When I see him! She has no doubts that he is alive and that they will get married. She has no doubts about her mother’s advice in her dream. I think the memory of that dream has kept Sabina going.

  At the Deutsches Museum there are other Jews from Poland who want to go back, too, so we decide to all take the train together. If there is any doubt that Hitler is no longer running Germany, one need only look at the railway system. Once so precise and dependable, the trains stood as a shining example of the Führer’s restoration of Germany to its rightful place of superiority to all other nations. Now the rail system is in total chaos. All we know is where a train is heading and where it will stop along the way. No one can predict when it will leave or how long it will be between one stop and the next.

  When we get on the train we learn that it will stop in Ulm and stay there in the station for several hours. I do not question the powerful impulse that guides me to get off the train in Ulm. I tell my companions to wait for me.

  I feel surprisingly calm knocking on the door, not sure who will answer. The Gasthaus zum Rotter Lowen has been repaired from the bomb blast. Herr Schweibold opens the door. His only show of feeling is the slight pause before he finds the words to welcome me in. I am disappointed to learn that his wife is not there. He is not a bad man, and like so many others, endured the war by taking care of himself, keeping his head down, and staying out of trouble. Frau Schweibold, however, was a true Nazi.

  I remember so clearly, one time, when Sabina and I were peeling potatoes in the kitchen, Frau Schweibold was cursing the evil Allies for the devastating bombing they were inflicting on Germany. As she uttered one of her self-righteous, arrogant opinions, for once I decided not to play it safe and hold my tongue. “But Germany started it by bombing Poland!” I argued.