The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  After we left Zamarstynowska 120, we moved frequently. Sometimes we moved because my father arranged for a better, safer place or a place where we knew somebody. Sometimes we moved because the Germans had taken our building and we had no choice. Each day, when my parents were out, Pawel and I would sit quietly and wait for them to get back. For me and my brother, this was terrible—to be left alone, for so many hours, when all around us people were being pulled from their apartments and out onto the streets. Pawel may have been too young to dread those long hours the way I dreaded them, but I was anxious enough for both of us.

  In one of the apartments we moved to after Zamarstynowska 120, my father built for us a special hiding place beneath our window ledge. It was good for us that he was handy with tools, that he had access to materials, and that the Germans would not question him if they caught him with his supplies because he carried the proper papers and wore the correct letter. The special hiding place was like a small compartment directly beneath our window ledge. It looked only like an extension of the ledge itself, and my father fashioned a false wall extending beneath the ledge, which he painted over so you could not see a difference against the rest of the wall. Behind the false wall, he removed a layer or two of bricks, to give us more room. He had to finish the wall from the outside, sometimes with nails to keep the opening closed, sometimes with a fresh coat of paint, so we could not escape unless my father came home to free us.

  The people in the ghetto came to know my father as handy and capable of building good hiding places, and soon they called on him to make such places for them in their apartments. This he always did. But it was in our apartment that he worked hardest and longest. It was for us that he saved his best work: little closets inside our closets, false walls in the back of our wardrobe. You would have had to be a detective to discover some of his hiding places. In the bathroom of one apartment, he built a special hiding place for all our important papers and some jewelry. Probably the papers and the jewelry are still there, because I do not think my father ever went back to claim them, and certainly no one could have found them. The space he built for us beneath the window ledge was very ingenious, very clever. There was hardly enough room for my brother and me. You would have never imagined that you could fit two small children in such a space. We sat close, face-to-face, as if we were still babies in my mother’s belly. My father placed two potties in the space for us to sit on, in case we had to go to the bathroom during the day. If there was talk of an action, or if there had not been an action for some weeks and my parents were growing worried that it would soon be time for another, we would climb inside this space before my father left for work in the morning. Then he would close up the wall behind us and move a big heavy table in front of the window, for camouflage.

  I do not remember if my father built any airholes into this false wall so that Pawel and I could breathe inside, but I believe now that he must have. Always, he thought of everything. But if there were any airholes, they were concealed even from us, because it was pitch-black inside our tiny space. My brother and I could not see each other. We could only hear each other breathing. This was comforting at first, but as the hours passed it became also terrifying. To hear only your breathing, only your brother’s breathing, louder and louder, all day long, with time moving so slowly that it might have stopped. The noise was so loud, I could not hear the prayers inside my own head. Even my imaginary friend, Melek, was silent underneath such a noise.

  For me, these long, endless days in our hiding places were the worst part of the war. Absolutely, this was worse than losing our apartment at Kopernika 12. Worse than losing all of our fine, nice things. Worse than the beatings we sometimes suffered or that we were made to watch. Worse than the fourteen months underground in the stink and waste of the sewer that was still to come. And it was not just one time. Many times we were made to crawl inside a hiding place and wait for my parents to return. In one apartment, my father made our hiding space in the kitchen. In another, the bathroom. And always, we were so scared! Our tears would run without noise, we were so afraid to make a sound. We could hear the footsteps of the Gestapo as they made their inspections. This happened frequently. We were not allowed to lock our apartment doors. Anyone could come in, at any time. There was a characteristic sound to the footsteps of the Gestapo, with their heavy boots. There was no mistaking it. In and out they would come. Gestapo, SS, Wehrmacht . . . they all took their turns.

  My brother, he was also scared and crying silent tears. I held his hand and whispered to him that everything was going to be okay. He was so good, so brave. I tried to be good and brave like Pawel, but there was no one to hold my hand. There was no one to tell me that everything was going to be okay. All I could think was what would happen if my father was taken from the streets before he could make it home. What it would be like to be left inside this small space.

  Sometimes, when there was no talk of any action, we would not have to hide. My parents would just leave us in the apartment. We were not to go outside, of course, and I was to stay away from the window, to make sure no one could see me from the street below. I learned to tell which noises were to worry about and which noises were okay. If I heard a suspicious noise, we were to hide. I used to stuff poor Pawel into our one brown suitcase. This was not a strategy I discussed with my parents beforehand, but a course of action I came upon myself. One day I heard the Gestapo marching up our street and into our building. I saw the suitcase underneath the bed. I thought this would be a good place to hide my little brother. He was barely able to fit, but if he curled up in a tight little ball, I could close the lid. He did this without complaining. Then I slid the suitcase underneath the bed—it was so heavy!—and stepped into the closet behind one of my mother’s robes, careful that you could not see my feet sticking out on the bottom. In the closet, holding my breath because I was afraid the sound of my exhaling would alert the Gestapo, I counted out the seconds before Pawel would suffocate. Usually, I would wait for a full minute or more after the disappearing sound of the Germans’ characteristic footsteps, before escaping from my closet and rescuing Pawel.

  For months and months, this was how things were—and I prayed constantly for a time when my family could be together, all the time together, without my brother and me being left on our own. It would not happen the way I prayed it would happen, but it happened just the same.

  Three

  HERE THE GROUND IS SUFFERING

  With each action, the ghetto became smaller, our situation more precarious. There was no end to our suffering. We went from a city of 150,000 Jews, to a city of 200,000 after the Germans and the Soviets divided Poland in 1939, to a city that now could count us in the tens of thousands. Our numbers were dwindling—and so was our resolve.

  Here is just one example of how we were weakened. When we were still living at Zamarstynowska 120, the Ukrainian militia discovered a cache of fur coats in the attic of our building during a routine inspection. The coats did not belong to us, and they did not appear to belong to any of the other families currently occupying the building, but somehow my father was considered responsible. The soldiers determined that we had to pay a fine of 7,000 zlotys—about $1,400 at the time—as punishment for having these coats. If we did not pay, they said, they would take my father. Of course, we could not allow this to happen. My parents had money, my grandfather on my father’s side had money, but this was a lot to pay for the crime of living beneath an attic full of someone else’s fur coats. But we paid the fine. After all, this was what our money was for, to buy us our continued freedom. It did not matter that the Ukrainians kept the coats and probably sold them on the black market. It did not matter that the punishment did not fit the crime, because in fact there was no crime.

  Here is another example: on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the ghetto commander, Grzymek, issued a special work order requiring all Jews to once again clean the ghetto. He ordered the men to their knees, to scrub the cobblestone streets,
to pass the day that should have been spent in meaningful prayer in meaningless toil. Naturally, they knew it was an insult to require Jews to work on Yom Kippur. The work itself was an insult, so they added insult on top of insult and hoped to weaken us in this way as well.

  In one important way, Grzymek and his cohorts nearly did succeed in breaking my family. Like all Jewish parents in Eastern Europe, my parents worried how to keep their children safe. It was a constant concern. My parents knew that many other Jewish families had placed their children with non-Jewish families and hoped in this way that their children could survive the war undetected. Some of these arrangements were permanent and some were meant to be temporary, with the children to be returned to their true families as soon as circumstances allowed. These were the so-called hidden children of the Holocaust, and they were great in number. Usually, there was some payment involved, some money that passed from the Jewish family to the non-Jewish family to be used for the child’s safekeeping. Sometimes there was an additional payment or exchange of property, to compensate the adopting family for the risk they were assuming in taking in a Jewish child. Many Aryan families were put to death for harboring a Jewish child; many more were sent to prison just for suspicions of the same; more still lived in fear of being found out. Some of these situations were successful, and some ended in the discovery by the Germans of the deception. Very often, the children were so young that they did not remember their biological parents and grew up without ever knowing the circumstances of their adoption; many did not even know they were Jewish.

  Some months into the German occupation, my parents looked into making just such an arrangement for me. I did not know about it at first. They began making discreet inquiries until finally they located a woman who was willing to discuss the matter. The woman they found wanted only me, not Pawel. It was difficult to find a family willing to take in a boy, because of course all Jewish males were circumcised and therefore easy to identify as Jews. But with girls it was not so easy to tell, Jewish or not Jewish. This was why so many of the surviving “hidden children” were girls.

  This arrangement was probably a long time in planning. It is surprising to me now that I did not know about it beforehand or read it on my mother’s face. Usually, I could hear my parents talking at night. We were living in only one room, and there was no space for secrets. However it happened, they found time to make the arrangements, and one afternoon a young schoolteacher came to our room to meet me. She had brown eyes and brown hair. She was a very nice woman, but I could not understand why she wanted to meet me. We did not have visitors very often.

  My mother explained that this teacher wanted to take me. “She will be like a mother to you,” she said. “You will go with her.”

  I understood immediately what they were doing, and I told my mother I would not go with this woman. It was difficult for me to be so strong in my argument because I was only seven years old, but I was fi rm. I said, “I will not go.”

  My mother said, “You have to go. There is no other way.”

  I said, “I am not going. Whatever will happen to you will happen to me. I do not want to live if it means I will not be with you.”

  I did not feel as though my parents were trying to get rid of me. I understood they were trying only to save me. But still I would not go. I would not be saved. I would not be removed from my family. Thankfully, mercifully, my parents listened to my appeal. They did not want to live without me, either, apparently. Looking back, I find it unbelievable that two such caring, thinking, desperate adults would listen to the pleas of a child on a matter such as this, but that is just what happened. They listened. They accepted that what might be an agreeable solution for other families was disagreeable to ours, and after a few minutes the nice young teacher left. I remember she had a warm smile.

  It was an impossible puzzle: how to save at least one child, even if it meant breaking up a family, how to do your best when all around there was the worst. I did not understand this then, but I understand it now. It was a difficult time, with no sure or easy path for Jewish families. Each day, there was a new dilemma, another puzzle. I am still haunted, for example, about the circumstances of one particular day. It was early in 1943, during an action that was focused on the children. I was seven and a half. My brother was not yet four. We were living in the barracks in the heart of the Ju-Lag. All over the ghetto, the Germans were going from apartment to apartment, taking only the children. I imagine that for the Germans this served the double purpose of eliminating a large segment of the Jewish population and at the same weakening the will of the surviving adults.

  During this action, my father hid us in the basement, where he had made one of his double walls. Our barracks was a large brick building with a large cellar, and he had fashioned this hiding place in such a way that the basement room where he put it up simply looked smaller than it actually was. You could never tell this hiding place was there, behind the false far wall of the room, if you were not looking for it. The cellar in this barracks building was where people took their things to be repaired, where the men would meet to discuss the situation with the Germans. My mother was working at the Janowska camp when we climbed into this hiding place. There was a small entrance. We had to crawl to enter it, but once we were inside we could stand up straight. There was no light, and we held each other’s hands, for comfort. We were pressed in like sardines, and on the other side my father concealed the opening and closed us in. He put up some tape and some wood and painted over it so no one could tell that anything had been touched.

  My father was nearly finished when my mother completed her long march home from the Janowska camp. All the way home, she said, she worried about me and Pawel. She knew the Germans were taking the ghetto’s children and that we were in danger. She went first to our apartment, and of course she panicked when she discovered we were not there. “My children!” she cried. “Where are my children?!”

  One of the women we were sharing the apartment with told her my father had taken us downstairs, and my mother rushed to the basement to make sure we were okay. She was overjoyed when she found us alive and well. Frightened, of course, but alive and well, and she joined us in our hiding place, so my father closed her inside as well. She would not leave us alone at a time such as this. Our fate would be her fate as well.

  Again, I did not know this at the time, but there were those three vials of cyanide pressed into my mother’s hand. All the time, she held these vials, thinking that if we were captured, there would be time to place the poison under our tongues and put a quick end to our suffering. Thank God it never came to that.

  Some hours later, we could hear the Germans searching our building. It was just one German, as it turned out, but from our hiding place it sounded like an army. We could hear him thundering through the building with his heavy boots and his thick, gruff voice as he talked to himself. He was in the basement for the longest time, and we could hear all of this moving about. We stood very still. We did not make a sound. My brother was still very young, but my father had been hiding us for so long by this point, so many different times, in so many different places, that Pawel was good at keeping still and quiet. I held his hand tight, and he was quiet.

  Finally, the German lifted his voice, as in discovery. “Wet wall!” he said. “Wet wall!” Nass Wand! Nass Wand!

  The German soldier had been tipped off by another Jew in our building that we were in hiding and on inspection recognized that the false wall my father had built was a slightly different color from that of the other walls and wet to the touch because the paint had yet to dry, so he took a hammer to the spot and started to bang. I cannot be sure it was a hammer, but there was a lot of banging and commotion on the other side of the wall, and inside our tiny hiding space we were terrified. Pawel at last started to cry. I think I might have screamed. My mother did not move to hush us, because we had been discovered.

  When the German broke through the wall, he seemed more puzzled than angry. He was
surprised at the good job my father had done in hiding us, almost pleasantly so, and he stood back from the wall as if to admire my father’s handiwork. The German soldier would not have recognized it were it not for the wet paint, and for a moment I thought he might congratulate us for fooling him in just this way. My mother spoke German, and she understood that the soldier was marveling at my father’s ingenuity. But then he pulled us out and started beating us with a leather crop. He hit me, over and over. My brother, too. We both cried, I think. He hit my mother. She did not cry, and I was proud of her for not crying.

  And then, shortly after the beatings began, as if by some great coincidence, my father came home. Probably somebody had gone to tell him what was happening. He saw right away what was going on. He said, “This is my family. Please. Let them go.”

  He started to beg. It was not like my father to beg, but he would do anything for his family.

  The German, he was curious. About the wall, about the begging. He said, “Why did you hide them?”

  My father said, “I hid them to save them. From the action. You are taking all the children.” Then he dropped to his knees and begged again for our release.

  The German became so frustrated with my father’s begging that he took the butt of his rifle and bashed him on the head with it. The German, he was just a boy. He hit us like he was supposed to, like he was following his orders, but it was not like he meant it. It hurt, but my father said later it could have hurt a lot worse.