The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  Of course, I did not know anything about these vials of cyanide, and Pawel, he was too young to understand, yet on some level he must have known something. Finally, my mother noticed the vial had broken and that the cyanide had surely spilled into Pawel’s food. She raced over to him and covered him with hugs and kisses, and from that moment on she believed he might be a kind of prophet. He was only three years old, yet he dreamed the Germans were coming back, and he knew not to take a bite of the poisoned food. For the rest of the war, my mother would ask him, “Pawelek, the Germans are coming?”

  I do not really believe my brother was psychic, but we were all changed by these first few actions. We were all broken, bent, beaten—so much so that my mother was willing to believe my little brother could see into the future. In this way, you could see how we were being psychologically defeated by the Germans. My father always talked about this. First, he would say, our freedoms were taken from us by the Russians. We were separated from our lives and fed all of the Communist propaganda and made to feel we were no longer human. Everything went from a straight line to a crooked path, and nothing was as we had known it to be. Next, after the Russians, the Germans continued with our dehumanization. We were reduced by what we were being made to endure. We were made smaller. Because we could no longer feel for the loss of our loved ones. Because the liquidation of our Jewish population was all but inevitable. Because we began to believe it was our fate and we were helpless against it.

  I did not need to be an adult to recognize the feelings underneath this type of thinking. I could see that I had been changed by what was going on. I could see that where I would have once cried for my grandmother, I could now only shudder and wince and take a deep breath and move on. And for this, I blamed the Germans. I blamed them for making my mother weak and afraid, even if it had been for only a few days. I blamed them for taking my grandmother and my aunt and my cousin—and, soon, for everyone else they would take from my family. Most important, I blamed them for taking away my tears.

  This was unforgivable.

  Our comings and goings were soon manipulated by a terrible man named Joseph Grzymek, the SS Obersturmführer assigned to the Lvov ghetto. Whether we would live or die was determined by this man, who was known as an expert liquidator. This was his specialty. Years later, it was revealed that Grzymek was not only SS, he was a high-ranking Nazi official, who was eventually tried for war crimes. At the time, we knew only that he had been sent to organize the ghettos and to choreograph the killing and incarceration of the entire Jewish population in that city, and when word came that he was being sent to the Ju-Lag, the Jewish people of Lvov were panicked.

  Grzymek’s arrival coincided with the closing of the ghetto. There was a fence surrounding the ghetto, with a gate by the bridge that crossed Zamarstynowska Street. Until August 1942, the gate was more of a checkpoint than a barricade; you could come and go with the proper papers, as we had done when we crossed the bridge to move into the apartment at Zamarstynowska 120. The ghetto was a marked-off area, but it was not yet a closed-off area. However, following the so-called August action of 1942, the “open” part of the city was liquidated and the remaining Jews were fenced inside the Ju-Lag. Once again, this was part of the Germans’ strategy, to confine us into smaller areas, to make it easier for them to control us, to torture us, to eliminate us. We were the “leftover Jews,” my father used to say, restricted now to a small area of just a few streets behind four-meter fences. Guards were posted along the fence with shotguns every few meters. If you had to work outside the ghetto, you were permitted to leave as long as you marched in line with the other workers. Always, you had to be counted.

  My mother, who worked the day shift for Schwartz Co., the manufacturer of German army uniforms at the Janowska camp, was given a big “R” to wear on her clothing. The “R” stood for Ruestung—German for daytime. Workers on the night shift wore the letter “W,” for Wernacht—German for nighttime. Sometimes they used the letters to divide the Jews. Sometimes there would be an action, and only the workers with the letter “R” would be taken. Sometimes they were looking only for the workers with the letter “W.” Somehow, I think my father had two letters. He was assigned one, and he forged the other. Each day, he wore whichever letter he thought would do him the most good.

  He was good with forgeries, my father. He once forged a document called a Meldecarta, which was a difficult document to obtain. You needed to produce the document and have it stamped at certain checkpoints or risk being sent to one of the camps or killed. My father received one of these documents for himself by legitimate means, but he wanted my mother to have one as well, and I remember one night in our apartment he sat huddled with some other men, falsifying another set. They used the thin membrane from an egg to transfer the ink and make a copy to another set of papers, to transfer the legitimate Meldecarta of someone who had already been killed by the Germans into my mother’s name. I do not know where he learned this technique or how exactly he managed it. Years later, I watched the movie The Great Escape, and there was a scene where the British prisoners made a forgery using a similar method, and I thought about my father and these men in our apartment.

  The August action was particularly devastating. It lasted for ten days, from August 12, 1942, until August 22. The Germans liquidated over forty thousand Jews during this time, including most of my father’s family and most of my mother’s family. Add to that the tens of thousands who were killed or captured in previous actions and the incidental killings between actions. The Jewish population of Lvov was decimated, and so particularly was our family. After this August action, we had only one another. My father’s father managed to survive, and my stepgrandmother, and so did my uncle Kuba, who had been married to my father’s sister Ceska, Inka’s mother. Also, my mother’s father was still alive at this point. But everyone else—aunts, uncles, cousins—was gone. My father wrote after the war that in all of Lvov only three Jewish families had survived intact. Only three! Ours would be one of them. But this was only nuclear families.

  My father woke up early on the morning the August action began, and he noticed how unusually quiet everything was. The streets were empty. He was curious and wanted to see what was going on, so he went outside and moved carefully among the buildings until he reached the hospital on Zamarstynowska Street. There he saw that all of the Jewish patients had been emptied out onto the street. There were lorries stationed out front, and the patients were being loaded onto the open carts like cattle. Some could not even walk. My father described this for us when he returned. He told us that the German soldiers were standing to the side with guns, ready to shoot any of the patients who complained or tried to escape. The patients were then taken to the Piaski sand pits and emptied onto the ground, where they were promptly shot by German soldiers.

  On August 22, the last night of the action, we were visited by my father’s uncle. He had been living just outside the city, but he had come to see who in his family had survived. Like my father, he was very careful moving about the streets. He moved only at night. My parents were asleep when he arrived. I woke when I heard their voices. I remember that my mother made tea for my father’s uncle and that he sat with my parents at our table, talking. He said to my father that everyone else in their family had been killed or captured. My father was very saddened by this, but he knew as much. He could see the desolation and the killing outside our window. Then my father’s uncle told my parents about some money and valuables he had saved. He told my father where it was hidden and drew him a map. He said that since no one else in the family had survived, he wanted my father to know where these things were located in case anything should happen to him.

  After he left our apartment, my father heard a gunshot. He looked outside into the night and saw his uncle’s body lying in the street. It is possible his uncle was the very last victim of the August action and that his very last act was to pass on his valuables to my father.

  We were right to be afraid o
f this man Grzymek. The August action was only one indication of his capacity for cruelty, of his madness. He was also a very thorough commandant, very fastidious, and this became apparent when life was supposedly “normal” and there was only the killing in the meantime, between the actions. To Grzymek, order was everything. He placed signs throughout the ghetto declaring, “Order must rule!” Ordung muss sein! Also, he was very sadistic. He was famous for giving his prisoners impossible tasks and then killing them when they were unable to meet those impossible tasks. If a man could carry only one hundred pounds, Grzymek would command him to carry three hundred pounds. This was Grzymek’s method. This was his idea of order.

  There is an expression in Polish to describe someone who has come up from nothing: Z chlopapan. From the peasant to the king. It is said with disdain, and it is meant to deride a pretender to power, someone who was not born into authority or who does not deserve it or who has not acquired it by noble means. This was my father’s opinion of Grzymek, a man of modest intelligence, from modest beginnings, who demanded that he be treated with respect and dignity. On their own, the people did not shower him with praise. On their own, his subordinates did not bow to him. Yet when he arrived in Lvov, he ordered a procession in his honor. He ordered all the people to assemble in the main square, in two neat rows, one on either side of the street.

  I did not go to this procession. Like most of the Jewish children who had survived to this point, I no longer went outside, but I could see some of the activity from my window. I peeked from behind the curtains. I could see the shiny black leather of Grzymek’s boots and his jacket. I could hear him barking his commands. He rode through town in a stately carriage pulled by two beautiful black horses. It was a big show of power. He looked like the Roman emperor Nero, my father said, riding through the square. He drove his own carriage. In one hand, he held the reins; in the other, a Russian machine gun known as a pepesza. Every now and then, just to show that he could, Grzymek shot and killed one of the Jews in the two neat rows, and when he did the people stood straight in horror, afraid to move.

  Finally, Grzymek pulled in the reins and the horses came to a stop. He stepped down from the carriage and began to inspect his two neat rows of Jewish prisoners, for we were all now prisoners of the Ju-Lag. What was once merely one of the poorer neighborhoods of Lvov was now like a concentration camp, suitable only for the warehousing of the city’s Jewish population. Grzymek would not step too close to any of the Jews, because he was afraid of the lice. He said, “Stand back, so your lice will not jump onto me.” Darnit euch die laeuse nicth enfrienen. This was in part a show of disrespect to the Jewish people, a way to denigrate us as filthy human beings, but it was also rooted in an unfortunate truth. The living conditions in the Ju-Lag were horrible, the inevitable result of so many people living in such unhealthy, unsanitary conditions. And so yes, many of the Jews struggled with lice. We were living in filth, and Grzymek did not like that we were living in filth, and when he was through with his inspection he waved his hand and ordered everyone to clean the streets.

  In time, we would learn that Grzymek was also famous for his obsession with cleanliness. It was like a phobia. Everything had to be perfect, and if it was not, he would shoot whoever was responsible. Always, he would ride up and down the streets in an open car or an open carriage. Always, he would stand, waving, holding his Russian rifle, ready to shoot at anyone or anything for any reason. If he saw a dirty shop window, he would stop his car and approach the window and break it with the butt of his rifle. If he saw a cigarette butt in the street, he would shoot the man or woman or child standing closest to it. Very quickly, the Jewish people of Lvov came to look on this man not with the respect he seemed desperately to crave, but with fear. And it was a fear born of craziness. He was worse than a murderer, Grzymek; he was a madman. You never knew what he would do. He would shoot you for no reason or look away for no reason. Even children, he would shoot. Oh, he hated Jewish women and Jewish children, especially dirty Jewish children. My father used to say that Joseph Grzymek would prefer a dead baby to a dirty baby. This was our conquering ruler.

  During this first inspection, when Grzymek was paraded down the street in his horse-drawn carriage, my father made a regrettable mistake. He made himself known to this maniac. There were tens of thousands of “leftover Jews” when Grzymek came to Lvov, and it would have been nothing for my father to pass anonymously among them, but that was not to be. When Grzymek gave the order for everyone to clean the streets, my father stepped from his place in line and asked to be put to more productive use. He introduced himself to Grzymek and told him he was a skilled carpenter. This was true. He also told him he worked with a group of skilled carpenters throughout the ghetto. This was also true. Then my father suggested that perhaps the Obersturmführer might assign him and his fellow craftsmen a task more meaningful than simply sweeping the streets. Grzymek would not be spoken to in such a disrespectful manner by a filthy Jew, so he reached for the leather whip he kept on his belt and lashed my father across the face with it a few times. My father was cut in several places, and his left eye started to bleed. From that moment on, my father could not see properly with his left eye. Then Grzymek handed my father a shovel and a mop and told him to get to work. This my father did, in terrible pain, his face covered with blood, until Grzymek continued with his procession and my father could sneak into an alley and seek help for his wounds. He found a friend of his, a locksmith, who took my father to his wife, who cleaned my father’s cuts for him.

  Certainly, my mother could have attended to my father’s wounds, but she was working. By the time of the August action, she was working at the Janowska labor camp, making uniforms for the German army. Schwartz Co. was probably the largest employer of Jews at that time; their factory never shut down. My mother had to work or risk being shot, which meant she had to leave me in charge of my brother, Pawel. For the first time since the Soviets commandeered my parents’ business, my mother would not be at our side. She worked now in twelve-hour shifts. Some days she would leave the apartment at five o’clock in the morning and return at seven o’clock in the evening. Twelve hours for working and one hour each way for marching. Other days she would work at night, on the reverse schedule. I liked it when she worked at night, because in the day she would be home. When she was working in the day, we were alone, because my father was also working. When she was working at night, I tried to keep very quiet during the day so she could sleep. I looked after my brother. I remember feeling so relaxed, so good that my mother was home. It made me strong. But it did not matter how quiet we children were, my mother could not sleep during the day, and she saw what happened at the Janowska camp to workers who fell asleep on the assembly line. She was afraid this would happen to her.

  Such a long shift, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. And for what? Two bowls of soup. That is all. Two bowls of soup and the privilege to continue living and working under such oppressive conditions. If she did not work, she would be killed. You worked to demonstrate your usefulness, not to earn money. And so my mother accepted her soup as payment and worked without complaint. She would have to march several miles to work, back and forth along the Janowska Road, and she used to tell us the long march was the most difficult part of her day. Walking in rows, flanked by Germans with rifles. If someone fell out of line, they would be hit or shot. If someone was tired and could not keep up, they would be hit or shot.

  One evening, my mother came home covered in mud. She was crying. I reached for a wet cloth and helped to clean her up. I said, “Mama, what happened? Who did this to you?” She answered only that it was some bad people. Always, she tried to protect me from the truth, but I learned later there was a group of Ukrainian children making mud balls and throwing them at the Jews. This was a game to these children! And my poor mother was made to suffer this torment without stepping out of line.

  “Dirty Jew!” they shouted. “Dirty Jew! Good for you!”

  One by one, step by
step, she was hit by wet clumps of mud. The mud was hard and filled with small rocks and other debris, and it must have stung terribly when it hit her, but more than the pain there was the anguish of the moment, the humiliation. Of course, my mother was not alone in this indignity; the other Jewish workers in the line were also under attack. But my heart ached only for her. More than once this happened. It made me very angry. My father, too. But what could he do about it? Shake his fists and shout? What could any of us do about it but continue on?

  I have always told people that fourteen months in the sewers of Lvov was not so bad compared with hiding aboveground with my brother during the days both my parents went to work. Next to this, the sewer was nothing, and yet the people look at me as if I am fooling with them. But this was so. Underground, at least, I was with my parents. Underground, at least, we had one another. I did not care so much how we suffered as long as we were together. Aboveground, alone in the apartment, I had only my brother. We were children. It was frightening and bewildering, never knowing if my parents would return. I was like a parent and a sister to my baby brother, but this was too big a job for such a small girl. In this way, I had my childhood taken from me. The Germans, they did not take me, but they took a part of me. This part.

  All the time, we discussed with my parents what to do when we were alone. What to do if I heard the Germans coming. What to do if there was an action. What to do if my father did not come home. What to do if my mother did not return. What to do—God forbid!—if both my parents were taken. My parents had us very well trained, because all around us other parents and children were being taken out into the street. All around us, families were being separated. So every night my mother would lay out a set of clothes for me and a set of clothes for Pawel. If we heard anything during the night, we were to jump into our clothes and run. Or hide. My mother would help Pawel to get ready, and my father would help me. That was the plan. At the end of each day, I would slip out of my cherished green sweater and lay it out at the foot of my bed or on the floor at the foot of my mattress, the arms opened wide and waiting for me to slip them back around me. Sometimes we did not even bother to take off our clothes. We slept fully dressed, ready to flee. Always we slept with one eye open, one ear listening.