The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  Finally, my father relented and my parents packed our few things. My grandparents would leave in the morning, but we would leave in the middle of the night, because my father thought it would be safer for us to move about under darkness.

  My grandfather lay down next to me while my parents were making ready to leave. He said, “Sing to me, Krysha. Sing me our lullaby.” Always, I would sing him a lullaby before I went to bed:

  Za gorami. (Behind the mountains.)

  Za lasami. (Behind the forest.)

  Tancowala dziewczyneczka z ulanami. (A girl is dancing with the soldiers.)

  Always, I would sing and he would give me a kiss. It was our special routine. So I sang him our lullaby, and he kissed me and hugged me, and then we stood in the doorway and said our good-byes.

  My grandfather had a fine gold pocket watch. He wanted my father to take it, but my father refused. My grandfather was insistent. He said there would come a time when we would need it to buy our way out of trouble, so my father took it. My grandfather’s second wife—my stepgrandmother, a sweet, kindly woman whom I also loved—gave my mother a bottle of milk to carry for my brother, and then we went out onto the street. All of this happened in the doorway at Kresowa 56, before we disappeared into the night.

  It was the last time I ever saw my grandparents.

  Later, as we walked to some new place, my mother tripped and dropped the bottle of milk. It shattered on the cobblestone street. My father yelled at her. It was one of the only times I can remember him yelling at my mother. Probably his yelling had to do with something other than the milk. I was only seven, but I realized this.

  My father doubled back the next morning to see which direction my grandparents were headed, hoping maybe to reconnect with them later, and he watched as a German soldier shot his father. There was nothing my father could do but watch. He did not see what happened to my grandfather’s wife, but he expected the worst. He said it made his stomach turn to watch them shoot my grandfather, but this was what it meant to be Jewish in the Lvov ghetto in the early part of 1943.

  Here is a curious memory. In our last proper apartment before we moved at last to the barracks of the Ju-Lag, my parents participated in a séance with a noted Jewish spiritualist. My parents did not believe in such things, but a group of people had gathered to listen to this man, and so my parents listened. The man’s name was Dr. Walker, and he said he could predict the future of everyone who participated. He could tell who would survive the liquidation of the ghetto and who would not. He made a demonstration. There were about twelve people sitting around the kitchen table. Everybody was holding hands. At some point, the table began to knock. I do not know if it was the table itself that was knocking or if Dr. Walker was making the noise. The people all seemed to be hypnotized. Dr. Walker asked, “Who will stay alive?” Then he went around the table and the knocking stopped only when he reached my parents. He said this meant that they would be the only two who would survive. This was an ominous prediction to make among such a group, but Dr. Walker seemed to be somewhat hypnotized himself.

  During the séance, an SS man appeared. Someone had left the door open and he stepped inside to see what was going on. He could see right away it was a séance. Everyone was startled by the noise of his arrival and awoke from their trance. They were scared that they would be shot, because of course it was against regulations to engage in any kind of spiritual activity, but the SS officer sat down at the table and said, “Continue.” He was intrigued. Very often, this was our experience with the Germans in authority. In a group, they were brutal and heartless. Alone, they could be curious and feeling and human.

  Next, Dr. Walker moved to a part of the séance where the spirit was spelling out certain words, like you sometimes see with a Ouija board, only it was not a Ouija board. It started to spell out the letters “H” and “I.” My mother told me later that everyone thought it was going to spell out Hitler’s name, but instead came the letters “H-I-L-F-D-E-N-J-U-D-E-N.” Hilf den Juden. Help the Jews.

  The SS man appeared startled. He stood and left. The others watched him go and considered the strangeness of the moment. To be huddled in a séance with an SS man, in the middle of the ghetto, in the middle of such terror and turmoil. Sure enough, the others at that table would be killed. Dr. Walker himself was killed during the very next action. And, just as Dr. Walker’s table had predicted, only my parents would survive.

  For a few weeks more, my mother continued to work. Always, it was very difficult for her to leave us each day because Pawel would cry. He did not cry when she was gone, when we had to hide, but he cried when she had to leave. The separation was painful. He did not want her to go, and all day long he would wait for her to return. Together, we would worry we might never see her again. We would run to my mother at the end of her long day, and we would hug her close and fill her with questions. We were hungry for information about what was going on in the city, on the other side of the ghetto fence. What the other people were doing. What the other children were doing. We were trapped inside, so long inside that any piece of news was welcome.

  The Janowska camp was still being operated as a labor camp, but it was also a death camp. At its busiest, the Schwartz Co. plant employed over four thousand workers, and there were other manufacturers based at the camp as well. If you were young and strong and healthy, you were sent to Janowska and put to work. If you could not work, you would be shot. There was nothing in between. Sometimes the Germans would take you to the Piaski sand pits for the shooting, but sometimes they would just shoot you right there in the Janowska camp. It was not a place built for the execution of Jews, but it became a convenient place for it. Of course, the camp was not just for the Jewish people of Lvov, but for those from all over Poland, all over Europe. Over time, the Germans would kill over two hundred thousand Jews at the Janowska camp, although this number probably included the Jews who were shot at the Piaski nearby. The sad irony was that my mother went to work at the camp every day, sewing uniforms for the men who were out to kill us all.

  Today, if you go to the Janowska camp, you will see a sign at the entrance. In English it reads, “Passerby, stop! Bow your head! There is a spot of the former Janowska concentration camp in front of you! Here the ground is suffering! Here the Nazis tormented, taunted, executed innocent people and sent them to the gas chambers. Let the innocently undone victims be remembered forever! Eternal damnation on the executors!” I think it is a moving inscription to commemorate the lives lost in this place. I read this and I get goose bumps, because this was where my mother worked each day, where so many members of my family were taken, where surely the earth must have absorbed so many tears, so much anguish.

  It was around January 1943 that my father first started to think about where he would take his family when we were pushed at last from the ghetto. Already, he was running out of hiding places. For a time he considered fleeing. He had an Aryan friend named Michat Kollerny. They had played together on the national volleyball team before the war, and he had brought my father some false documents with our pictures on them that we could have used to negotiate our escape. There were four complete sets of papers, one for each of us, but my father determined it was too dangerous. He was too well-known because of his flirtation with Grzymek, so we abandoned this plan. We kept the papers, but my father was afraid to use them, except as a last resort.

  Another plan was to build a bunker beneath the ghetto commander’s quarters. My father thought this was an ingenious strategy—to hide beneath the very nose of the man who had vowed to kill him with his own hands. My father believed Grzymek would never search for him below street level, so he dug a tunnel from an unoccupied house across the street from the German command center. For several weeks, he prepared a bunker for us, while he was doing legitimate work on a greenhouse for one of Grzymek’s men. The bunker was just beyond the ghetto fence, and each day my father would do his work on the greenhouse and then some extra work on our bunker. This went on for sever
al weeks. He completed the tunnel. He put in supplies: an electric light, two beds, food, some pots for cooking. All by himself, he did this. It was, he thought, a good place to wait out the war with his family. Dangerous, but probably not any more dangerous than what we were facing aboveground. All that remained was to wait for the day when we would have no choice but to descend to this bunker and continue our lives there.

  We were confined now to the barracks in the deepest part of the ghetto. The living conditions were miserable. The people were miserable. One night my father was doing some repair work in the basement of one of the barracks and noticed that it would be possible to enter the city’s sewer system from this place. It would take some digging and some calculations to determine the precise spot for the digging, but it would certainly be possible. Later that same week, when he was hiding once again from Grzymek, my father escaped through a manhole into the sewer. He wanted to see what it was like beneath the city streets. The bunker he had built for us was really only an extension of a basement. It was not so deep underground that it could not be discovered. Perhaps it was not such an effective plan to hide us there after all. But the sewer! There were miles and miles of pipes and tunnels and good hiding places. They would not be pleasant hiding places, of course, but they would be safe. Certainly, my father thought, no one would look for us in the sewer, just as no one came looking for him when he escaped through the manhole. He found his way below by calculating the location of the streets above, and in this way he was able to resurface through another manhole in a different part of the ghetto without being detected.

  This notion, that the sewer might offer us sanctuary, was a revelation for my father. He remembered when he was a small boy, when the Peltew River was open, before it was covered with stones by Italian POWs after the First World War. The Peltew was the main waste waterway for the city sewer. Back then there must have been a terrible smell by the river, which was probably why city officials were forced to cover it. My father watched the workers dig the first canals and set the stones for the retaining walls. He knew where the river ran in relation to the streets that had since been built above. It was not so long ago that the river was covered. It was not hard to reimagine.

  At around this same time, my father met a man named Jacob Berestycki. The two men had good friends in common. They were told they could trust each other, and so they got to talking. Berestycki knew my father as someone who was very good at building hiding places. He wanted to talk to my father about building some kind of bunker beneath the city where together they could hide from the Germans. He was not thinking about the sewer necessarily, just some space below the street level. Someplace like the bunker my father had recently completed and stored with supplies. My father wanted to talk to Berestycki about this idea he had of using the sewer for sanctuary. Berestycki mentioned that he knew someone in one of the other barracks who was pursuing a similar plan. This was how it started: a group of Jewish men, reaching for some last, desperate measure, looking for someplace to go to escape the Germans.

  Berestycki introduced my father to a man named Weiss. I remember going to meet this man with the rest of my family. I remember I did not like him. To be fair, Weiss did not expect my father to show up with his wife and children. He was expecting a secret meeting to discuss a delicate matter with a man he did not know. Still, I did not like this Weiss. He had some other friends with him, and I did not like them, either. They were all so sour, so miserable. We met in the basement of Weiss’s barracks, and my father huddled with the men in one corner while my mother sat with me and Pawel in another. The men talked for a long time.

  Weiss did most of the talking. He was like the spokesperson for his group. He had most of the ideas, but really it was just one idea: to descend into the sewer and follow the river to the outskirts of the city. My father did not think it was a good strategy to try to escape to the countryside with a wife and two small children. If he had been by himself, possibly he could have taken his chances. With his family to think about, however, it was better to find a place where we could hide for an extended period. His plan was to build a kind of bunker for us in the sewer where we could wait out the war, but he thought it might be profitable to continue his association with Weiss and these other men. He thought they could help one another.

  Together, the men recognized that it would be possible to descend into the sewer undetected from this barracks basement. Weiss had heard of my father’s facility with tools and carpentry and thought he would make a good addition to his group. Berestycki said he could be trusted. And so a partnership was formed. Weiss claimed to have a lot of money. The other men in his acquaintance also claimed to have a lot of money. My father, too, had money. Where he kept his money, I never knew, because at this point he had only the clothes on his back and perhaps another change of clothes. Probably he built good hiding places for his money and valuables the same way he built good hiding places for his children. Always, the Jewish people of Lvov were sewing money and jewelry into their clothes, so probably this was what he did. Wherever his money was, there was always enough to pay our way out of trouble, always another fine watch to replace the ones we had to trade for our freedom.

  Very quickly, the men determined a good entry point into the sewer and began digging a tunnel through the basement floor of Weiss’s barracks. They took turns with the digging, using spoons, shovels, picks . . . whatever they could find. The floor was made of cement that had been laid directly upon the soil. The cement was cracked and broken in many places before the men even started to dig, so they targeted an area where the floor was already compromised, to make the digging easier.

  With this new plan, my father abandoned the bunker he had made beneath the ghetto command. This would be better, he said. This would be our best chance.

  My father built a false wall surrounding the area where he and the other men were digging, so that upon casual inspection it would appear that the basement was slightly smaller than in fact it was. The false wall concealed an interior room of about one meter wide and two or three meters long, and it was in this room that they did their digging. They dug very quietly, usually at night. Sometimes my mother would take me and Pawel and we would stay with my father while he dug. We did not like to be separated, but there was not so much room behind the false wall for all of us and the other men. There was not enough air to breathe. The men worked by candlelight, and the flame swallowed up oxygen, so it was difficult to get a full breath. Difficult, but not as difficult as being separated. During the day, the men would cover up their work with a carpet, a table, and some stools. Then they would go off to whatever jobs they were assigned in the Ju-Lag camp. During the day while the men were at work, we would sometimes use the concealed space to hide, if there was an action or some other uncertainty that required it.

  We were not living in the same barracks as Weiss, but we spent a good deal of our time in that basement. I do not think Weiss and the other men appreciated having my mother, Pawel, and me around. It was such a small space, and everyone was nervous about being discovered. They must have worried that we might scream or cry and give us all away. My father was not worried about this. He knew we would be good, and he knew we wanted to be near. But the other men did not know us or how well we had been trained. They looked at us and assumed we were like other children, when in truth we were like animals. We knew only how to survive.

  It took about eight days to dig all the way through the cement floor to an opening into the sewer. I remember it as taking much longer—weeks and weeks and weeks—but in his journal my father noted that it took only eight days. Eight very long days, from a child’s perspective. Usually, my mother and father would work their regular shifts during the day, and at night we would meet in Weiss’s cellar. Usually, we children would sit nearby with my mother and Weiss’s elderly mother while the men did their digging. Most nights we fell asleep in the cellar, huddled in my mother’s arms.

  Here again, the intrusion of children into this d
angerous scene was not especially welcome by the others in our group, but my father did not give them any choice. He would keep his family near, he said, or he would lend his tools and his ingenuity to some other escape plan. He did not tell the others about the bunker he had already prepared, but he kept it in the back of his mind, as an option, in the event this uneasy alliance came apart.

  Finally, the opening to the sewer was finished. It was small, about seventy centimeters in diameter, barely enough room for an adult to slip through, but it would have to be big enough. When the opening was ready, a group of the men decided to go through it, to make a kind of trial run. My father was among this group, along with Weiss and Berestycki. It is possible that they were joined in this by my uncle Kuba, my father’s brother-in-law, whose wife and daughter had been taken in the action with my grandmother some months earlier, but I cannot be certain. Also, my mother’s father, Joseph Gold, was still alive and living in another barracks, and he was included in our plans as well, although I do not remember my grandfather participating in the digging.

  The group descended into the sewer with a lantern and some tools. There was a ledge above the Peltew, and the men walked along it for several hundred meters. The ledge was too narrow for regular walking; the men had to move with their backs against the stone wall, shuffling their feet from side to side.

  My father reported that it was very dark and very noisy. The rushing water of the Peltew was like a thousand waterfalls. The men walked for several minutes, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what they were looking for. What most impressed them, my father said, was the absolute blackness. When the lantern was out, they could not see one another even though they were standing close together. They could not imagine how it would be possible to survive in such darkness for an extended period of time, but this was the last option available to them, they all felt.