I thought of my imaginary friend, Melek. I would not speak openly to him in this place, inside such a commotion, but I talked to him silently, in my thoughts. I was glad to have him near. I said, “Well, what do you think?”
He answered, “It is not so bad, Krysha.”
This was Melek, trying to lift my spirits. This was me, trying to convince myself that everything was going to be okay.
Outside, it was the end of the Ju-Lag. We learned the details later, but on this first night we knew it in our hearts. We were 150,000 Jews before the war, and after this final liquidation we would number only 5,000 at the Janowska camp. My father received a report that piles of corpses were being thrown into Grzymek’s waiting trucks, which were then driven to checkpoints outside the city before returning empty to receive more bodies. The action continued for three days, and at the end of these three days the ghetto was reduced to ashes. What they could not shoot or capture, the Germans burned to the ground.
During the next few days, Socha and Wroblewski managed to bring us some bread. Each day there was a big round loaf that Weiss and the others would pull into many small pieces. There were only a few loaves for so many people, and this further enraged the men who seemed to have made a separate arrangement with Weiss. Socha stayed only long enough to deliver the bread and to discuss a few things quietly with Weiss, Berestycki, my father, and a few of the others. He also brought some carbide for the carbide lamps he left behind. I remember that there was a lot of tension and misery among our group. Some of this tension was because of our miserable conditions and general discomfort, and some was over the arrangements our group had made with Socha and his colleagues. There was no drinking water, no room for everyone to sit at the same time. I remember that when people had to go to the bathroom, they did so in the corner, pretending at privacy, as if this made a difference. My father tried to keep his sense of humor, even about this. He said we were sitting in sewage, so what did it matter if we did our business off to the side? He said this to my mother, only she did not think it was funny.
On the third or fourth day, Socha returned and announced that he could not continue with such a large group. My father guessed in his journal that this happened on June 4 or June 5. The group did not at first understand what Socha meant by this. There was a good deal of anxious murmuring and uncertainty as Socha explained that it was too difficult to gather suffi cient food and other supplies for so many people and that to keep us safe and relatively comfortable (and quiet!) was also impossible. It placed him and his colleagues in danger, and it placed the entire group in danger as well. It would be better to save only a small group, he said, as originally planned, and he told us he would select only a few of us to follow him deeper into the sewer. My parents were not so worried about this because they knew we would be among those to be saved, but the others were alarmed. The men begged Socha to continue with his protection. The women threw themselves at his feet. The children began to cry. It was a wretched scene. My mother pressed me and my brother into her coat so we would not have to look and covered our ears so we would not have to listen.
Somehow, Socha separated a group of twenty-one from this large mass of people. How he arrived at this number, we never knew. How he made his selections, we also never knew. Among this group were Pawel and me, my mother and father, Uncle Kuba, Weiss and his mother, Berestycki, Korsarz, two disagreeable brothers named Chaskiel and Itzek Orenbach, another disagreeable fellow named Shmiel Weinberg and his wife, Genia, and another nine individuals. Weinberg and the two Orenbachs were part of Weiss’s crowd, and Socha was persuaded that our group would be better able to continue with his payments if they were included among us.
The other fifty or so, they begged and begged to go with us. One man, a well-known jeweler before the Soviet occupation, approached Korsarz and offered to give him a bundle of diamonds if he would put in a good word for him with Socha. Korsarz could keep the diamonds himself or share them with the sewer workers, the man said. There was pushing and shoving and excitement, and in the confusion the man with the diamonds somehow stumbled and the handkerchief containing all his diamonds fell into the water. This was the measure of everyone’s desperation. All the jewels in the world could not have changed Socha’s predicament, which was now our predicament as well.
Our smaller group was haunted by the pleas for mercy offered by the larger group we were leaving behind. We would hear their remonstrations in our dreams. We worried over their fates, but at the same time we knew they would not fare well. Even to a child, this was clear. It is amazing to me now that none of these people followed our group as we moved deeper into the sewer. They argued Socha’s decision, but they did not go against it.
Some weeks later, after our group had been settled for some time in a nearby chamber, Korsarz would return to this place and discover the bodies of many of these people. Some of them had drowned. Some of them had apparently gone off on their own in search of sanctuary. Some swallowed the cyanide poison that most Jews had taken to carrying, their bodies now eaten away by rats. Korsarz was very upset when he came back to our group after his discovery. He told my father what he had seen, and he was very upset, too. But they did not talk about it after that, because of all the difficulties we would face during our underground odyssey, leaving behind these other desperate people, these families, these children, was probably the most difficult.
After separating from the large group, we walked along the Peltew for another stretch, until Socha led us into another side tunnel. This tunnel was so narrow and the bottom was curved in such a way that there was not enough room for us to walk with our two feet together, so we moved heel to toe, heel to toe. One foot in front of the other. Pawel and I could walk normally, but the feet of the adults were too big to fit comfortably. Also, there was wastewater at the bottom of this pipe, in some spots reaching almost to the hips of the grown-ups. For me and Pawel, it was almost above our chest. The water level made our forward movement very slow, very difficult, and it only got worse. There were so many of us in the narrow opening—twenty-three counting Socha and Wroblewski—and we displaced so much water as we moved through the pipe that the level reached higher and higher as we filled the space. Before long, my father had to carry me, and my mother had to carry Pawel, to keep our heads above water.
From this pipe we moved into an even smaller pipe, this one maybe seventy centimeters in diameter. It was the first time we had to crawl through the wastewater that accumulated on the bottom of these pipes, and we tried not to think about it. Socha and Wroblewski were crawling, too—Socha in front and Wroblewski in the middle of our long, snaking line. Each held a carbide lamp to light our way. Finally, we reached a hatch in the roof of our pipe, and Socha stopped to pry it open. Through it, there was an iron ladder built into the stone wall, and we climbed up this ladder to another narrow pipe and continued crawling. Socha climbed the ladder first and helped us from above. Wroblewski crawled past the hatch and waited for the rest of our group to pass through it before bringing up the rear. No one spoke as we moved. No one complained. It was very tight inside the pipe, very close, and there was not a lot of room to wiggle through, even for me and Pawel. But somehow everyone managed.
At one point, one of the carbide lamps caught our movement in such a way that it put a picture in my father’s mind of a group of trapeze artists at the circus, climbing a thin ladder to reach the high wire. It takes a certain personality, I realize, to compare what we were doing with the actions of circus performers, but my father was always considering our circumstances in the most positive way. To me, we were not like circus performers. To me, we were like animals. Wherever our sewer workers told us to go, we went. Whenever they told us to sit, we sat. Whatever they gave us to eat, we ate. Whatever we had to crawl through, we crawled through. Even old Mrs. Weiss, the oldest of our group, was on her knees and elbows, crawling through mud and sewage, and no one complained. No one talked. We just did as we were told and hoped for the best.
; Five
OUR LADY OF THE SNOW
Imust pause here and share what I know about Leopold Socha’s background, because it is useful to understand what motivated this man to help us the way he did.
He had not lived such a happy or noble life, our Socha, before meeting my family. He had been in and out of prison. As a child, he got into all kinds of trouble. He was orphaned at a young age. He was a ruffian. School was not important to him. It is a heartbreaking thing, to know someone and to come to love and admire that person and then to discover that he had such a difficult childhood. That is how it was with Socha. He ran with a group of young men who did not respect other people. He was never violent, but he was disrespectful. Certainly, he did not respect other people’s property; he became a petty thief. His concept of right and wrong seemed to have more to do with what he could get away with, whether or not he would be caught. He was good at stealing, but not so good that he could avoid the police. By the time he had reached his middle twenties, he had served three separate three-year terms for robbery—once for a bank job that had captivated all of Lvov for its brazenness and careful planning, and once more for a petty break-in at an antiques store.
The bank job was well-known in Lvov. Socha entered the bank through the basement, approaching by the sewer where he would later work and where we would seek our sanctuary. It was quite a clever plot, the authorities said, and after Socha made away with the cash, he stowed it in one of the pipes leading away from the Peltew River. My father remembered reading about it in the newspaper. Indeed, Socha might have gotten away with the heist if he had not been so reckless with his spending and with his tongue, and the lesson he learned was to choose his words and his audience very carefully. His great worry, during the long months he was protecting us, was that one of his colleagues would have too much to drink and boast about the Jews they were hiding in the sewer. Already, he had learned this lesson, and he knew that to violate it here would mean certain death.
The antiques store robbery was a great coincidence. It was the sort of break-in Socha and his hooligan colleagues performed regularly, only here he happened to target an antiques store owned and operated by my mother’s uncle. We discovered this association some months after our first meeting. Socha took some silverware, some jewelry. My mother remembered this incident, and now she was sitting across from the man who had perpetrated it. Of course, it no longer mattered about the silverware and the jewelry, but it was a strange point of connection just the same.
Somehow, Socha met and married a good woman named Wanda. She convinced him to turn his life around. He took a government job as a sewer inspector. He did not consider the irony: the very sewer where he had staged his greatest robbery, where he had stowed his loot and plotted his escape, would now deliver him a second chance. Since adolescence, most of Leopold Socha’s life had been spent behind bars of one kind or another. Now that he was married, soon with a young daughter, he was looking to change. He was still a young man when he started meeting with us in Weiss’s basement. He had just rediscovered his Catholic roots. With his wife he attended church regularly, something he had not done since he was a child. He prayed. He came to believe deeply that by redeeming himself in his present life, by living in a good, purposeful manner, he might absolve himself of past sins.
This was his character when he met my father and the other men on their exploration into the sewer. He had not counted many Jewish people among his friends prior to this meeting, but he did not like how the Germans were treating them. He did not understand it. At the same time, he liked that these Jews were refusing to accept such treatment. He liked their willingness to fight. He wanted to help them because they reminded him of how he used to be when he was up against authority and because he had learned in church that by helping others, you can help yourself.
There was also the money. After all, it was Leopold Socha who put the price on his kindness. It was Socha who came up with the fi gure of 500 zlotys per day. It was a lot of money, to be sure, but he had to use some of it to purchase bread and our other essential supplies and to divide what was left between Wroblewski and Kowalow; so the money alone could not account for his generosity. Some months into our confinement, when our money would finally run out, it would be Socha who would convince his colleagues to continue with their protection. It might have started as an opportunity, but in the end it would become a lifeline. He would come to consider it his life’s work, helping us to hide in the sewer, protecting us from the Germans, returning us to the rest of our lives just as he hoped to return himself to the life he had nearly squandered as a young man.
It must have been difficult for the adults in our group to remain hopeful, considering our dreadful position. For me and Pawel it was not so difficult because we were in the dark. This is an appropriate phrase, because for most of the time we sat quietly in the dark and also because we did not know what was going on. My mother was still distraught over what might have happened to her father. My father, he was distracted by the change to our plan. He had not been preparing to spend so much time in such a small, disgusting space, with such a group of terrible people. He may have been thinking that we would have been better off in the original bunker he had prepared by himself beneath the ghetto command.
Of course, I did not like our present situation, but I was also hopeful. It is a child’s nature, I believe, to think positively, to be encouraged toward a happy outcome, and even after everything my family had endured, I was still in this one respect a child. I did not have it in me to think we were doomed. Do not misunderstand: I did not like it very much, sitting there in the sewer, but I did not mind it so terribly much, either. Not at first. A little bit later, I would mind. A little bit later, I would become sullen and noncommunicative; that is how much I would long to breathe fresh air, to play with other children, to return to a normal life. My nature would change. As I remember it, this change to my outlook happened some months after we went into the sewer. As my father remembered it, though, this change happened straight away. Either way, it happened. I went from a happy, good-natured little girl to a hardened, desperate creature; my time underground would go from a necessary adventure to a hardship. But in those first days and weeks, all I cared about was that I was with my parents, that my family was together.
I did not know most of the other people in our group just yet. I had not even seen their faces in the darkness, but I would begin to know some of them by their voices and by the unreasonable demands they would make on Socha and Wroblewski. For the first time, listening to the disquiet of our new companions, I realized how difficult it was for them to sit quietly and uncertainly in the darkness. For me, it was not so difficult. After all that time in hiding, I did not think it was so bad. My parents were near, and this was enough for me. I was not yet conditioned to think in worst-case scenarios, so I trusted my parents to see me and Pawel safely through. There was nothing else to consider.
Our dark, dismal quarters were only a little bit better than the elliptical tunnel where we had been staying those first few days. The mood of our group, however, was little improved. This second place was more like a room than a tunnel. We were not pressed so tightly together. It was also wet, fetid, and cold, but there were places to sit. There were stones here and there, and this was where we sat—me on my father’s lap, Pawel on my mother’s. I cannot imagine that it was comfortable for my parents, sitting on those stones hour after hour, but it was better than standing, better than squatting among the rats in the film of dirty water at the curved bottom of the pipe in our first hideaway.
The rats were one of our biggest problems in the beginning. We would eventually get used to them, but during these first few days we were still somewhat frightened and disgusted by them, so my father and some of the other men positioned themselves over our group with sticks, and they were constantly swatting at the swarm of rats at our feet. The men worked in shifts, so that there was almost always someone assigned to chase the rats, but of course this was a
futile exercise. The rats were everywhere! The swatting would cause them to scatter, but then they would return. The effect was like a crash of waves against the shore; the water would go out and then it would come back in again. Eventually we realized that we could no more chase the rats from this chamber than they could chase us, and my father took the philosophical position that we would have to adjust to each other.
This new chamber was located beneath a church called Maria Sniezna. Maria, Our Lady of the Snow. I remember thinking this was a good omen, to hide beneath a church. We were Jews, of course, but it made me feel protected. As though God were watching over us. Our God, their God . . . it did not matter. My mother would come to regard Leopold Socha as our guardian angel, and already he was watching over us in the shadow of the Maria Sniezna church, helping us to stay alive. My father remembered that on June 10, 1943, just a few days into our stay in this new place, the churchgoers above celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi. He remembered that from our underground bunker we could hear the sounds of the procession, the ceremony, the voices of the children singing. In his journal he noted that I was saddened by the apparent contrast between our lives underground and the lives overhead. I must have expressed to my father that I wanted to be outside, gathering flowers and playing with the other children.
The Girl in the Green Sweater Page 13