My Holocaust Story: Hanna

by Goldie Alexander

  Papa nodded. ‘Your friend is fortunate to have such strong beliefs. Faith, regardless of what kind, sustains many people through dreadful trials.’

  On Monday, Maria told Eva and me that she had gone to Mass with her mother. ‘Mother sends you her thanks. It’s really lifted her spirits.’

  I was curious enough to ask, ‘Did it make you feel better too?’

  She shyly nodded.

  Most Saturdays I continued visiting Eva who, thankfully, was starting to recover, more colour returning to her cheeks. One Saturday I found her out of bed seated on a chair propped up by cushions. When I asked where the cushions had come from, she said, ‘Mama asked the Judenrat for help.’

  This surprised me. ‘I didn’t think they had any money. They keep trying to raise funds.’

  Eva nodded. ‘Yes, we have to return them when I get better, though …’ she sighed. ‘Right now, I feel as if I never will.’

  ‘Course you will,’ I said. Though she was still so thin and wan, her scalp covered in wisps only starting to grow back, I wished I could really believe this.

  That evening, Adam was performing in a ‘Young Artist’ event. Papa and Mama had relented and let Adam perform. He had been practising for hours but it always seemed he didn’t need to. He truly was the child prodigy Pan Schmidt had always claimed he was.

  The concert was a raging success. Adam was the last to perform, and I thought the other artists, all older than him, were pretty good, too. A girl with dark frizzy hair played a Beethoven piano sonata. Another, a skinny tall girl sang a Schubert song in a lilting soprano and a boy, I guessed him to be about eighteen, played the Saint-Saen cello sonata.

  When it was Adam’s turn, I was terribly nervous in case he made a mistake. Then I told myself he wouldn’t. Mama accompanying him on the piano, he performed the slow movement of a Mozart violin concerto. As I listened to his music fill the hall once more I wondered how, in a world that still held such beauty, could such evil and cruelty exist?

  ‘There has always been good and evil,’ Papa whispered, as if he read my mind. ‘Ever since the garden of Eden. Remember it is our choices that make the difference.’

  The ghetto was shrinking and the population diminishing. Over the past few months nearly one-hundred-thousand people had died as a result of disease, starvation, random killings and the intense cold.

  The Germans continued to reduce the ghetto walls to what they called the ‘Central Ghetto’ or ‘Little Ghetto’. With so many people crammed together, life became stifling. The Nazis had begun mass deportations to the Treblinka Labour Camp. This lessened the population of the ghetto, yet we remained like rats trapped in a cage rapidly becoming too small to contain us.

  Mama was becoming more and more silent. These days she rarely spoke, not even to Papa and us children. Papa and I knew she was becoming deeply depressed. It didn’t help her low mood that she was now busy processing Jews from Danzig who were being brought into the ghetto before being sent on to labour camps. The inhabitants of Danzig had lived as a free people since the last war, neither under German nor Polish rule. But the Nazis had attacked Danzig along with Poland in September 1939.

  Papa said that Mama’s sadness came from hearing dreadful stories about atrocities being committed in that city. Those that still survived now faced the prospect of more cruelty, and a future of forced labour and starvation.

  ‘She thinks death would be kinder to them,’ Papa explained to me. He sighed deeply. ‘Sometimes I wonder if she is right.’

  We relied on Papa to keep us going, to keep our spirits lifted in this darkness. If both Mama and Papa fell into despair, what would become of us children?

  As a result of the sadness around me I often felt empty, as if all could do was wait for the inevitable. Was there to be no rescue from this horrible situation? Would our only way out be through death? ‘Pluck and audacity.’ Those words from The Scarlet Pimpernel that I had clung to all these years now rang hollow in my mind.

  In an effort to lift our spirits, Papa spent precious zlotys on a gramophone and some records he found in one of the markets. One record had Otto Klemperer conducting Beethoven’s ninth symphony—music that promised better, fairer times. As we sat around the gramophone listening to the orchestra and chorus perform the ‘Ode to Joy’, Papa said, ‘Amazing to think how Klemperer could side with the Nazis, yet still produce such wonderful music.’

  It had taken Eva several months to be well enough to return to school. Her hair had grown long enough to be shaped into a bob that really suited her. Even though she was so thin and pale, I thought her just as pretty as before. The boys who still turned up to school thought so too, because they clustered around her. Knowing how sick she had been, they kept offering to do small tasks, and she was always given the room’s most comfortable chair.

  As time went on more of my classmates simply disappeared. Maria stopped coming. Then Inka. I couldn’t imagine why our family had been spared so far.

  But every time I started to think this way, Papa would remind me, ‘We can’t afford to give up hope. Not when hope is the only weapon we have. The way we fight back is by surviving.’

  I looked up at his dear face, a face that had once been so round and was now so shrunken; at his bushy beard, once quite black and now completely white. Both my parents looked decades older than they really were. Both had white hair and wrinkles as if they had aged twenty years in only four.

  The following day, as often happened, an SS officer armed with a stick hit anyone who walked down Leszno Street on their way through the Little Ghetto. Many people had blood running down their faces. I remembered Papa’s words, but I was finding it harder and harder to hold on to hope, when our reality was so randomly brutal.

  Despite Papa’s wise words, and our best intentions, all of us were falling under a black cloud of depression. Mama was working hard, but her work was taking its toll on her energy and her spirits. She saw and knew too much. Adam became more and more horrified by the injustices around us, he could no longer lose himself in his music. He refused to take any interest in his violin. Whenever Papa suggested he play for us, he shook his head. Adam, who had always been so easy-going, started to bicker about little things. So much so, to avoid any arguments, Ryzia and I spoke to him as little as possible. I felt sorry for him though. He had lost Alex, where I still had my best friend. The thought of losing Eva was so terrible, I could understand why he was so angry.

  Poor Ryzia was outgrowing her dolls, and where a child her age would usually be exploring the world, she was cooped up. She had started to curl into a corner, soothing herself by sucking her thumb and rocking. I found myself retreating to the opposite corner at times when I was too miserable to do any homework or even read. Instead I bit my nails until the tips of my fingers bled—at least the pain reminded me that I could still feel.

  One Saturday, when I was moping in my corner, Papa looked across at me from the table where he was reading one of the underground newspapers. ‘Hanna, why not offer your help to a school? One has just started across the road from here.’

  The schools were always asking for volunteers.

  ‘There aren’t any schools on Shabbat.’

  ‘Yes, there are. And most of the students have no-one to look after them. It is up to more lucky ones like us to be responsible for their wellbeing.’

  ‘Lucky?’ My heart was full of misery. But not wanting to contradict Papa, I said, ‘If you think so, Papa.’

  I told Eva about it and she agreed to come with me.

  The school was situated in a cellar in a building that had once been smart, but certainly wasn’t any longer.

  Most of the children were very young, many no more than three or four. They jumped up when they saw us, clustering around us and asking for food. Mama had been able to find us some sweets. They weren’t very nice, a mix of saccharin and molasses that the ghetto chemists produced, but they were like manna from heaven for these starving children. I couldn’t remember the last tim
e I had seen such joy.

  Their teachers introduced themselves as Dorishka and Anna. We played Tiggy and Hide and Seek and Jumping up and Down and then, laughing, sat on the floor to sing in Yiddish, ‘Raisins and Almonds’, ‘With a Needle’, and the ‘Song of the Baker Boy’.

  Our singing over, and our voices so croaky, Dorishka called a break. The children went to play with the few toys that had been salvaged for them, and Eva and I joined the teachers in having a glass of hot water sweetened with sacharin as there were no tea leaves.

  Before the war both women had been teachers. ‘Look at these kids,’ Anna said sadly. ‘Without parents, what chance do they have?’

  ‘What chance do any of us have?’ Dorishka was filled with bitterness. ‘But we have to keep living, we have to keep trying to survive …’ her voice trailed away and she looked into space.

  ‘Dorishka’s husband has disappeared,’ Anna explained. ‘We haven’t seen or heard of him for over a fortnight,’

  ‘All those people are being shipped to the Treblinka Labour Camp, I can only imagine that he’s ended up there.’

  Eva asked, ‘Do you know what happens in that camp?’

  Dorishka shook her head. ‘No-one has ever come back to tell us. The Germans claim they are being sent to work in their factories, but …’ she hesitated. ‘I’m not sure if this is true. Who can you believe?’

  ‘Certainly no Nazi,’ I said grimly.

  ‘You know, before the war I had so many gentile friends,’ Anna mused. ‘Surely there must be some left who see what is happening and are trying to stop it.’

  ‘There is the Polish Resistance,’ Dorishka reminded her.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, my ears pricking up.

  ‘It’s called the Polish Underground State. They are loyal to the old Polish government.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  Anna smiled grimly. ‘My husband was in the Polish army but escaped before the surrender in 1939. He’s been fighting for Poland ever since as part of the resistance movement. He is now in the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

  ‘I don’t know, but by now there must be tens of thousands, maybe even over one hundred thousand?’

  ‘That many!’ gasped Eva. ‘If your husband is in the Home Army, does that mean there are other Jews as well?

  ‘Some,’ Anna told us. ‘But most Jews who have managed to escape the ghetto are hiding in the forests and have formed their own partisan resistance movement.’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ Eva cried.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d call it wonderful.’ Anna was very matter of fact. ‘They don’t have much in the way of weapons and if they’re caught, they’re tortured and shot.’

  Still, this was the most heartening news I’d heard in a long time. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my family. I was sure this would lift their spirits. Even Mama’s.

  Returning home I found Adam talking with Janusch at the table. Both boys’ eyes lit up when I repeated what Anna and Dorishka had told me. I hadn’t seen a look like that from Adam since Alex had died.

  ‘I’ve heard a few whispers about the resistance,’ Janusch said. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Where?’ Adam asked.

  Janusch shrugged. ‘Here and there.’

  ‘Well, I know very little, but this is news worth celebrating,’ Papa declared. He set off for one of the bakeries in Nowolipki Street at the edge of the Little Ghetto. He told us he would buy the best bread he could lay his hands on.

  Just the thought of that bread made my mouth water. I had learned to live with hunger, but some days were worse than others. Sometimes that aching, empty gnawing in my belly meant I could barely think of anything else.

  Mama turned on the stove, using the smallest amount of coal she could, to heat up the remains of the stew she had made.

  ‘We won’t touch it until Papa comes home, that won’t be long,’ she said. ‘But we can enjoy the smell. That will be enough for now.’

  An hour went by, then two. By now Mama was beside herself with worry. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she kept muttering over and over.

  ‘He might have been forced to hide, and wait somewhere, Mama,’ Adam said. ‘You know that happens to all of us often enough.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll both go!’ Mama was suddenly forceful.

  Leaving Adam and Janusch with strict instructions to look after Ryzia and not open the door to anyone apart from us, Mama and I pulled on our threadbare coats and set off.

  We arrived outside the bakery a short time after, without running into any problems. But once we arrived, it was obvious what had happened.

  I was used to awful sights, even the sight of dead bodies in the street. There was so much death in the ghetto every day, people dying from starvation, cold, disease. And many others who were the victim of brutal, random shootings by Nazi soldiers.

  On the ground outside the bakery were the dark shapes of about thirty crumpled bodies.

  A man was bent over the body of an elderly woman, gently cradling her head. He looked up at us.

  ‘They shot all of them,’ he sobbed. ‘They were just waiting to buy bread.’

  Mama stood like a statue, her face still and expressionless.

  The man sobbed and then shook his fist violently.

  I couldn’t speak. I walked down the length of the queue of bodies, looking for my father. I found him, right near the door of the bakery. His arm lay protectively over a woman lying next to him, as if he had attempted to shield her, even as they both faced certain death. His face showed no signs of his last moments of terror, and I could see a small, round bullet wound in the centre of his forehead. In my grief I found enough strength to be grateful that he must have died instantly, that he didn’t suffer.

  I knelt beside him, and took hold of his hand, weeping silently, saying goodbye to my poor, dear, wise, kind Papa.

  1943

  What little core of resistance Mama still had disappeared entirely after Papa’s death. She went to bed, closed her eyes and stayed there for days. I tried to get her to drink and eat a little, but it was useless. Without Papa, she had lost any interest in surviving.

  Ryzia was only just four years old. Adam and I knew that if Mama wasn’t able to take care of her, we would have to do so instead.

  We decided to take turns staying home and going to school. Going there was becoming even more dangerous as the Nazis had begun raiding some schools and taking children away.

  Without Papa, we no longer had any money coming in. Mama also stopped going to work. She was no longer capable of doing anything except lie on her mattress, eyes closed. After a week she had got up, but we couldn’t get her to leave our room. She still resisted eating, but I persuaded her to take a bite. If I insisted that she eat more, she would turn her head away from me.

  Papa had hidden a few zlotys under his mattress. If I was very careful, that money might last us a few more weeks. What we would do after that, I had no idea.

  Even if we had enough money, food was becoming harder to find. I spent hours combing the ghetto trying to sift out something, anything. After some days I found a shop selling a strange grain that looked more like chaff. I decided it would have to do.

  Totally despondent, walking head down, I heard gunfire just ahead. This was not unusual, but since Papa’s death I’d become more and more afraid. I ducked into the first doorway I saw, and watched the German truck drive off. I didn’t want to think what horrendous sight lay around the corner.

  I stepped out of the doorway, straight into a German soldier. I collapsed onto the ground, too terrified to move. What would be the point? I knew that I was about to die.

  I closed my eyes and waited. All I could think was who will look after the others?

  When nothing happened, I opened my eyes and found the young soldier staring at me. For an endless moment, we just looked at each other.
His uniform—a metal helmet, a warm coat with a velvet collar, thigh high boots, and a baton and gun dangling from his belt—was impeccable. He was as long and thin as a pulled out noodle. His face was also long and pale, his eyes a watery blue magnified by thick glasses. I had never seen anyone look so unsuited to soldiering.

  He reached out a tentative hand, as if to help me up.

  I shrank back.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said in German, then he repeated it in halting Polish. ‘I won’t hurt you. Promise.’

  If I was too frightened to speak, my face must have shown disbelief.

  ‘It is horrible here,’ he whispered. ‘What is happening to you … to your people …’

  His eyes reddened and filled.

  I was so startled I could only nod.

  He pulled me up, and with his hand on my back guided me to a nearby alley where we couldn’t be seen from the street.

  I still didn’t dare trust him. I didn’t know what he was planning to do with me.

  He began speaking quickly, darting glances this way and that, whispering in a hoarse voice, ‘Please, can I talk to you?’

  What could I do but nod? I was sure he was crazy. I was far too scared to utter a sound.

  ‘You understand German?’

  I tried to stay ‘Ja.’ The word stuck in my throat. I cleared it and nodded.

  He sighed with relief, saying, ‘When this war began I was only a student, I was studying theology … religion. I was going to be a priest. You understand?’

  ‘Ja,’ I managed. ‘Naturlich.’

  ‘I’m no Nazi. They are evil. I hate them with all my heart.’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘I don’t want to be in their war. I was conscripted last year. I’m not much use as a soldier to them. As you see, my eyesight is dreadful. So they sent me here. Into this hell. I can’t witness this without saying something. But what can I do?’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said. ‘Only to talk to you.’

  ‘You want to be my friend?’ I asked in disbelief. Anger burnt at the back of my throat. ‘How can I be that?’ I whispered fiercely. ‘You’ve gone along with it, haven’t you? What have you done to try and stop it?’