The Girl
in the
Green Sweater
The Girl
in the
Green Sweater
A Life in
Holocaust’s Shadow
KRYSTYNA CHIGER
with Daniel Paisner
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS
New York
THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SWEATER. Copyright © 2008 by Kristine Keren. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Design by Kathryn Parise
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Chiger, Krystyna, 1935–
The girl in the green sweater : a life in Holocaust’s shadow / Krystyna Chiger with Daniel Paisner.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37656-7
ISBN-10: 0-312-37656-1
1. Chiger, Krystyna, 1935– 2. Jews—Ukraine—L’viv—Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Ukraine—L’viv—Personal narratives. 4. Jewish children in the Holocaust—Ukraine—L’viv—Biography. 5. L’viv (Ukraine)—Biography. I. Paisner, Daniel. II. Title.
DS135.U43C533 2008
940.53'18092—dc22
[B]
2008022521
First Edition: October 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to my parents, Paulina and Ignacy Chiger . . .
may their memories be for a blessing. . . .
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
YES, I REMEMBER
One
KOPERNIKA 12
Two
THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SWEATER
Three
HERE THE GROUND IS SUFFERING
Four
ESCAPE
Five
OUR LADY OF THE SNOW
Six
ESCAPE, AGAIN
Seven
THE PALACE
Eight
THE PRISONER
Nine
LIBERATION
Ten
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Acknowledgments
It is not an easy thing, to tell the story of a difficult life. I have been fortunate to have many talented professionals help me to tell mine. At St. Martin’s Press, Nichole Argyres has been a very thorough, very talented, and very enthusiastic editor. Her assistant, Kylah McNeill, has also been very helpful. I appreciate all of their assistance and their many kindnesses, and that of their many fine colleagues at the publishing house. Most of all, I am grateful that they have chosen to help me share my story.
I would also like to thank John Silbersack, my literary agent at Trident Media Group, for believing in this project and strongly supporting it.
Also, I am extremely grateful to my collaborator, Dan Paisner, for his passion, his patience, and his understanding. We spent many long hours together working on this book, going over some very emotional, very painful material, and his encouragement was very important. I do not think I could have told this story so well without his help.
Together, Dan and I would like to thank Rabbi Lee Friedlander, of the Reconstructionist Synagogue of the North Shore in Plandome, New York, for his careful reading of the manuscript and his many insightful comments.
Personally, I am grateful to my family—to my husband, Marian, for his constant love and support, as well as to our children, Doron and Roger, and their spouses, Michele and Jennifer, for their incredible encouragement. I also wish to thank my two grandsons, Jonathan and Daniel, for their genuine interest in my childhood stories, and for asking endless questions and waiting for answers which to them seemed always unbelievable. It is through the telling and retelling of my family’s struggle that I have been able to keep these memories alive. This is important. In many ways, it is because of my grandchildren that I was moved to write this book. I am the last survivor of our group of survivors and I recognize that it is my responsibility to tell what happened. If I do not tell it, who will? If I do not remember it, who will? If the stories of our time in the sewer leave this earth untold it will be easier for future generations to suggest that the Holocaust is a myth, that it never happened.
Thank you as well to my many friends who supported me in this very emotional and difficult task. They, too, helped me to nurture these unhappy memories over the years, by asking me to share them, and recognizing that there were times when I could not.
I also want to acknowledge the caring people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for their deep interest in my family’s story of survival, and for taking such extreme good care of my precious green sweater that survived together with me for fourteen months in such horrible conditions. In addition, I am very grateful to the curators at the Imperial War Museum in London for permanently exhibiting my family’s story there. Thank you as well to the individuals at the Shoah Foundation, under the leadership of Steven Spielberg, for their tireless efforts in establishing a living, breathing visual and audio library of Holocaust survival stories; I am honored that my family’s story is included in this important archive, and that it is being made available for teaching programs around the world.
Lastly, I am especially grateful to Dr. Mordecai Paldiel of the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, for his essential research, and for his role in sharing my story with future generations.
Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.
—Anne Frank
In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. He settled in Heaven and assigned the Earth to the people. And on the Earth, this happened. . . .
—Ignacy Chiger, from the introduction to
his unpublished memoir, World in Gloom
The Girl
in the
Green Sweater
Introduction
YES, I REMEMBER
IT IS A FUNNY THING, MEMORY. It is a trick we play on ourselves, to keep connected to who we were, what we thought, how we lived. It is fractured, like a dream that returns in bits and pieces. It is the answer to forgetting.
I remember—the bits and pieces and the entire cloth. My father used to tell me I had a mind like a trap. “Krzysha will know,” he would say. “Krzysha remembers.” He called me Krzysha. Everyone else called me Krysha, and the difference was everything.
Yes, I remember. If I saw something, heard something, experienced something, I put it away for later, someplace where I could reach for it and call it back to mind. It was all filed away, the stories of my life bundled for safekeeping. Even now, when most of the people I remember are gone, they are here for me like they never left. Like what happened so many years ago happened yesterday instead.
My memories come to me in Polish. I think in Polish, dream in Polish, remember in Polish. Then it passes through Hebrew and somehow comes out in English. I do not know how this works, but this is how it is. Sometimes it has to go through German and Yiddish before I am able to tell it or understand it. All these thoughts. All these moments. All these sights and sounds and smells—tiny, fractured pieces, fighting for my attention, calling me to make sense of the whole. My memories of my family’s struggle during the Second World War are the memories of a child, reinforced over a lifetime. They are my memories first, and then on top I have put my father’
s memory, and my mother’s, and even my baby brother’s. To these I have added the reflections of others who shared our ordeal, along with the histories I have read. I might have been only a child, but what I saw, what I heard, what I experienced, has been reconsidered many, many times, and it is the accumulation of memories that now survive.
Yes, I remember what it was like to be a small girl in Lvov, a vibrant city of six hundred thousand. People called it “Little Vienna.” It was a city of winding cobblestone streets that reached to majestic churches and open courtyards bursting with colorful flowers and lovely fountains. It was mostly Polish, with a great many Jews and Ukrainians as well—one hundred and fifty thousand Jews in all before the war. It was the place of my growing up, a childhood of privilege and hope cut short by ignorance and intolerance. It was where our lives were transformed, first by the Soviet occupation that threatened our freedom and later by the German occupation that threatened our lives. It was where everything went from sweetness and light to desperation and darkness.
I remember our French pinscher, Pushek, his coat the color and feel of soft snow. We called him Pushek because he was soft, like a goose with down feathers. My father brought him home the day my younger brother, Pawel, was born, and he was a special gift. He was with us for two years, all through the Soviet occupation, but when the Germans came we had to give him up. We could not have his barking give us away. My mother brought him to stay with a woman who lived just beyond the city. She did this without telling me, because she knew it would make me cry. It was my first real loss of the war, and of course I cried. Two days later, we heard a scratching on our door. It was Pushek! He came back! All the way from the edge of town, maybe five miles, but that only meant we had to return him to the woman and that I would cry all over again.
I remember our piano, an August Förster, and the German officer who claimed it for himself. His name was Wepke, and he came to our apartment to pick what he wanted from our few remaining nice things. This was how it was, all over Lvov, all over Europe. The fine things of the Jewish people became like a flea market for the German officials, the SS and Gestapo. They picked clean our leavings before we could even leave them behind. This officer Wepke sat down to play our piano, went over the keyboard, rubbed his hands over the fine wood casing, announced that it was one of the finest instruments he had ever seen. I imagine it was. He played beautifully, like a maestro.
I remember hiding in a crawl space beneath our window ledge. Sometimes it was the Germans who came looking for us. Sometimes it was the Ukrainians, who in many ways were worse. My father was handy with tools, and he made us elaborate hiding places, behind false walls, in the backs of closets, where my brother and I would go while my father was at work and my mother was sewing uniforms for the German army at the Janowska labor camp on the hill overlooking town. My father built a false front beneath our window and closed my brother and me inside, sitting on potties for when we had to go. There was no room to move and hardly enough air to breathe. All day long, I worried what would happen if my father did not come home, if he was taken off the streets like so many other Jews. If my mother was shot on the long march down Janowska Road. Who would free us from our special hiding place? Who would even know we were there?
I remember huddling with my family and some men we did not yet know in the basement of one of the ghetto barracks, when a round-faced Polish sewer worker named Leopold Socha agreed to look after us in the underground tunnels and pipes beneath Lvov, to help us find a place to hide, to bring us food and supplies. Poldju, as my father would call him, was a reformed thief and an observant Catholic who believed that in protecting us from the Nazis, he would find redemption. He was kind and generous, with a bright, wide smile that seemed to light our dismal barracks. He saw our salvation as his salvation, but it was also an opportunity.
I remember the simple green sweater my grandmother knitted for me when we still lived in our grand apartment at Kopernika 12. My father’s mother. His parents were divorced, his father remarried, but this was my natural grandmother. Always, she liked to knit for me, only I was not always such a good girl. I liked to disturb her knitting. I would take a spool of wool and run with it and hide. Or I would take out the last rows, where she kept her place with the needles. And yet somehow she managed to make me some nice things, despite my mischief. She made nice things for everyone in the family. It gave her great pleasure. This sweater was my favorite. It had a delicate lace neckline. After she was taken in one of the actions, it was even more precious. I wore it constantly. When I put it on, it felt as if I were wearing one of her warm hugs. That I managed to keep the sweater all during the war was just another of the small miracles that found me and my family—and that it stands now on permanent exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is a tribute to the struggles of all Jewish children during the war, as well as to the child I used to be.
I remember the night of the final liquidation, the last action. It was May 30, 1943. Already, more than one hundred thousand of the Jews of Lvov had been transported to concentration camps or killed. I remember the sounds of the commotion and chaos, the shouting and the confusion. I remember the sheer black terror. Around midnight, the Germans started pulling people from their ghetto barracks and herding them onto the trucks that would take them to the Janowska camp or to the Piaski, the sand pits north and west of the city where Jews were lined up and killed. There was our group of a dozen or so, desperate to avoid capture, scrambling to fit through the hole my father and the other men had painstakingly dug. Another few dozen were so desperate to escape, they entered the sewers through manholes on the street. Together, we spilled into the sewer, hoping to find sanctuary among the rats and the filth.
I remember the small, dank cavern where we sat for our first three days underground. It was miserable. There were spiderwebs so thick that they could slow the rats that seemed to occupy this space in droves. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. We would get used to the rats, and they would get used to us, but we were not so used to one another just yet. The walls were slick with the sludge and dampness of the sewer. Tiny yellow worms covered every surface. The smell was fetid and dank and awful. There was mud and small puddles of wastewater at our feet. The only place to sit was on the wet ground or on two large, misshapen stones.
I remember the dysentery we all suffered those first weeks underground. My brother and I suffered most of all. The constant diarrhea, the nausea, the disorientation. My mother had the idea that if we did our sickness off to the side, we would somehow keep our hiding place more sanitary. It was as though we had to fool ourselves into believing we were still human.
I remember how each day one of the men crawled nearly two kilometers through a maze of small pipes, some only forty centimeters wide, the handle of a kettle clenched between his teeth to collect drinking water from a fountain dripping from the street above. The kettle filled, he would retreat backward, because there was not enough room in the pipe to turn around, and in this way we would each receive three-quarters of a glass of water each day. My parents did not drink their share and gave it to us children instead because we were so sick, but they were sick, too.
I remember, some weeks in, a disagreeable man in our group became so enraged at my brother’s crying that he threatened to shoot him. His name was Weiss, and he thought he was in charge. He got it in his head that my brother’s crying could be heard on the street above.
I remember the slosh, slosh, slosh of Socha’s boots as he trudged through the water on his way to our hideaway each morning. The echo of the pipes told us he was coming, along with his coworker Stefek Wroblewski. The sloshing meant we would soon have a piece of bread or some news about the fighting.
I remember the dull cries of the baby born to a young woman some months into our underground odyssey, a woman whose husband had abandoned her after just a few weeks in the sewer and who kept her pregnancy secret from the others. A woman who had already given her infa
nt daughter to a Ukrainian woman during the early days of the German occupation, hoping this would keep the child safe.
I remember these things and so much more. The fire that almost suffocated us. The flood after the spring thaw that almost drowned us. The times we were nearly discovered. The prisoner who joined our group in the last days of our confinement. There are good memories, too. The satires my father would write for us to perform, to keep our minds from our situation. The joking and the laughter. The unshakable bond that developed among the few of us who made it to our final hideaway, a place my mother called “the Palace” because there was room for me and my brother to stand, room for us to cook, room for us to bathe once each week. There was not a lot of room, of course, but room enough. Most of all, there was the affection we all came to feel for Leopold Socha, who continued to look after us long after our money had run out and we could no longer pay him.
I remember hearing the bombs of the Russian aircraft, when the front reached Lvov and the newspaper accounts we were by now receiving reported a coming end to the fighting. And still we worried that the bombs that would hopefully free us might kill us first instead, trapped as we were in our underground burrow, beneath the very streets that were the target of the bombing. Indeed, those final days were a mix of jubilation and terror, we were all so anxious about what would happen next.
I remember the day of our liberation, when Socha led us to a manhole opening and coaxed us up the iron ladder to a courtyard, where a crowd had gathered to greet us. After so much time underground, without a sliver of daylight, I could hardly see. I was wearing my precious green sweater, which must have looked like a rag. Probably we were all a sight! Our clothes were tattered, our bodies dirty and withered and broken. The day burned orange, like a photographic negative, and it would be a few days more before my eyes could adjust. It was like something out of science fiction.
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