The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  The next day, when Socha arrived, he was deeply sorry. We had not yet had a chance to tell him how miserable we all were, but he knew he had taken a wrong turn and veered from Kowalow’s directions, and for this he apologized. When he saw for himself the dreadful conditions and the depths of our misery, he was sorrier still, and he immediately led us to our intended tunnel. The way was especially treacherous in the beginning because we had to grasp a steel bar and hoist ourselves up while water spilled down on us from a seventy-centimeter pipe above, but once we got past this difficulty, the going was fairly simple. One of the men remarked that it was a good thing this new place was so difficult to get to, because it meant it would also be difficult for the Germans to find. We would be safe there. There was a good, hopeful feeling among our group, despite the horrible night we had just passed. In fact, there was such a good feeling that as we walked I started to whistle. I was so happy to be standing upright and walking like a human being to a new, better place that I could not help it. For all these weeks, I’d had no reason to be happy, and now here I was, whistling.

  My father and I walked hand in hand along the Peltew. We were both barefoot. I believe we were the only two people in our group in this condition. There had been no time, of course, for my father to reclaim his boots before we had to leave our chamber in such a hurry. Socha would bring him a new pair, but not until we were settled in this new place. How I came to be barefoot, I can no longer recall, but I do remember stepping on what I thought was a hat pin as we walked. I did not say anything to anybody, and I did not break stride, but it was very painful. I quickly removed the pin without losing my place in our parade of underground exiles, and as I walked a little bit of blood began to drip from my foot. My father noticed this, probably because it was not such a little bit as I imagined. He knew that it could not be good to dip an open cut into the foul wastewater of the sewer. So he lifted me onto his shoulders, and still I continued whistling. I was so happy. Even the stick of a hat pin could not dampen my happiness. My father was happy, too. Certainly, we had nothing to be happy about, but as I whistled, my father told me later, I gave everyone energy and hope.

  We walked along the river for several minutes. I was whistling the entire time. Finally, we arrived at a shelter that was a little bigger than the chamber we had just left behind. The walls were wet and covered with mold and cobwebs. A layer of mud covered the ground. Rats covered every surface. The men did not like this place because they could see how much work there would be to make it habitable. It was still, after all, a small tunnel along one of the tributaries of the city sewer system, but Kowalow had determined that this was the place where we would be safest of all.

  Socha smiled at the disinterest of the men and turned to my mother. “Chigerova,” he said, “it does not matter, the opinion of the men. What matters is the opinion of the women.”

  At this, my mother turned and held out her arms, as if to marvel at our new surroundings. “It is like a palace,” she said. “Here we can stay.”

  And so we stayed. For over a year we stayed. In a place we would all come to call the Palace. A palace for the hen and her two chicks.

  Seven

  THE PALACE

  I was always grateful that my mother was able to see the possibilities of this chamber we called the Palace. She was the only one among our group to recognize the space for what it could be. I was also grateful to Dr. Weiss for impulsively lighting that match and giving our group away, because it forced us to abandon that dismal hiding place beneath the Mari Sniezna church. It was a blessing disguised at first as adversity.

  The men were right to view this new chamber as merely another dark, damp hovel, but my mother could see beyond the mud and the cobwebs and the rats. She had a great vision that came from only reasonable expectations. She could see that this hiding place would be more suitable than any other we could expect to find in the sewer. It had a higher ceiling—not quite two meters—so the grown-ups did not have to walk stooped over all the time. They still had to stoop over, but not so much. The shorter ones could stretch almost to their full height. Also, the chamber had an L shape, which meant there was a smaller room to the side of the large main room, and this could be used for privacy. She was smart to see that we could be comfortable here for an extended period.

  Of course, we did not know how long we would be here, in what was essentially a storm basin beneath the Bernardynski church, located underground somewhere between the Bernardynski and Halicki squares. We could pray that our stay would be mercifully short, but we had to plan for it to be hopelessly long. No one could predict. My father had been keeping up on news from outside. This was what we called the rest of the world—outside, na zewnatiz. Socha would bring reports on outside developments, and then in the evening we would discuss these reports. There was nothing to do but discuss. Soon, Socha began bringing the daily newspapers, in Polish and German, and my father and the others pored over every word. We talked about the war. We talked about the hoped-for Russian liberation, which already seemed our best chance for surviving this ordeal. We talked about the camps. Mostly we talked about what our lives might be like when we returned to the outside. This last was always discussed as a certain eventuality. It was never if we returned to the outside. It was always when. In this there was probably the most important aspect of our survival: hope. And it was not just my parents who remained hopeful; it was our entire group. Without the negative influence of Weiss and his cronies, without the constant fear of being discovered that began to abate after nearly two months underground, we were now trying to be positive about our circumstance. Chaskiel Orenbach was still a disagreeable, offputting personality, but there were enough of us taking an optimistic view to drown his pessimism.

  Another key aspect of our survival, as I wrote earlier, was the presence of routine. Socha was quick to recognize this on our behalf. As soon as we were settled in this new place, he set about dividing the daily tasks we would need to accomplish in order to keep our group safe and whole. Socha and Wroblewski began making their deliveries at a certain time each morning, usually between nine o’clock and ten o’clock, and this meant we could build our day around their visits. This was useful to us and helped us to know when to have our breakfast, when to have our supper, when to have our dinner. It gave us a necessary sense of structure, something we had not had before, and it allowed our bodies to return to their accustomed rhythms. Now there was an order to our days.

  When we were hiding under the Mari Sniezna church, the sewer workers came to us whenever they could sneak away from their assignments or whenever they felt they could do so without being detected, but here in the Palace they made an effort to keep to the schedule. Socha also made a schedule for the men, telling us who would go to retrieve the water, who would collect the supplies he and Wroblewski would leave to improve our new living space, who would do this or that. He made a schedule for the women, telling who would help with the cooking, who would help with the cleaning. Always, he would tell us what to do and when to do it. Everybody had a job, except me and Pawel. Probably Babcia, too, did not have any defined duties. She was a very good woman, but she was getting sicker and sicker. The dampness, the bacteria, the cold, the unsanitary conditions . . . it made her appear so very old. She was not such an old woman by today’s standards, but by our circumstance she was made tentative and fragile. She would help when she was strong enough, and at other times she would sit and rest.

  My mother used to say she had a special ache in her heart for the suffering of old Mrs. Weiss. The poor woman could not have been proud of her son, who bullied his way around our group in our first weeks underground, who abandoned her here, who had earlier abandoned his wife and daughter. Most of the time, Babcia was lying down. It was difficult for all the adults to stand, but for Babcia it was especially difficult. Always, my mother took care of Babcia. She bathed her. She held her hand. Babcia blessed my mother. She said, “Every day I say a prayer that you and your family will survive.
” My mother cherished this prayer. She believed that it helped keep us alive.

  My mother’s primary responsibility, Socha said, was to take care of her two chicks, and in many ways she took on this same role with the other women in our party. She was like a mother to us all. She was like a mother to poor Babcia, a woman who was probably old enough to be my grandmother. She was like a mother to Klara Keler, a young woman who had lost her own mother during the liquidation and now looked to my mother for strength and comfort. She was like a mother to Genia Weinberg, who carried the weight of her secret pregnancy alongside the memory of the child she had left behind and the cowardly husband who had abandoned her. She was even like a mother to Halina Wind, a young woman who carried herself as if she did not need any carrying. It was my mother’s nature to look after others, and now, according to Socha, it was also her job.

  In this way, Socha was like the puppeteer of our group. He recognized our individual strengths and characteristics and put them to use for the common good. This was the most important thing, he always said, the good of the group. He wrote everything down for us so we would not forget our roles, and by our first week in the Palace you could not recognize the group we now were from the group we had only recently been. We were like our own little functioning society, and our trusted sewer workers were our benevolent rulers. I use the word benevolent because despite the exchange of money it really seemed a kindness, what these men were doing for us. They were devoted to our safekeeping. Every day, they were putting themselves and their families at great risk, and the money was not so great that the equation was not also balanced with compassion. In Socha’s case, there was also the matter of redemption. The money alone could not justify the chance he was taking.

  I use the word ruler because Socha and Wroblewski were very much in charge of every aspect of our lives. We survived at their pleasure. We looked to them to arbitrate our petty disputes, to ease our concerns, to cure our ills. It was as if by their very freedom they held every authority. Leopold Socha, our guardian angel, and his sewer worker colleagues would determine our shared fate.

  We no longer saw Jerzy Kowalow, but he too was busy on our behalf. Every time Socha and Wroblewski came to the Palace to meet with us, Kowalow was standing watch on the streets above, ready to signal his colleagues in some manner at any sign of trouble. He was just as vulnerable, just as exposed, as the two men who actually crawled through the pipes each day to bring us bread and supplies, and just as invaluable. Usually, he signaled the others by tapping on the pipes in some kind of code, but sometimes more direct intervention was required. On one occasion, Kowalow noticed a German officer watching the sewer entrance Socha and Wroblewski were intending to use. Kowalow proceeded to place scraps of wood through the manhole opening, as if he were following orders to do so. Then he returned to the sewer through another entrance to warn his colleagues to exit the sewer by some other opening to avoid suspicion.

  Without Kowalow, we would never have come across this place we now called the Palace. Without Kowalow, we would never have located the source of our freshwater. Indeed, Kowalow located a new source of freshwater for our group to reach from the Palace, and the men reported that it was somewhat farther than the journey had been from the old hiding place, but at the same time the journey was easier—the pipes were not so narrow, there were not so many sharp turns, and the way was not so arduous. Now we were not limited to three-quarters of a cup of water each day; the water was more plentiful because the source was easier to reach and the men could make more than one trip and they could carry more than one kettle. They would crawl to an area beneath the Fountain of Neptune, just below Glowny Rynek, the main marketplace in the city. At first they would have to mark their way as they crawled, to ensure that they returned by the same route, but after a few days they knew the way by memory. The long daily trips for water would be the most difficult chore after our new hiding place had been thoroughly cleaned and established, but it was one the men accepted gladly. Sometimes Klara Keler would accompany one of the men on this long trek, though the women usually stayed behind and saw to the cooking and cleaning.

  The cleaning consisted of removing the mud from the walls and trying to remove some of the mud that was piled at our feet. Also, it involved organizing the area that would serve as our kitchen and putting our pots and pans and our one Primus stove into good working order. And it included the scrubbing and drying of several old planks of wood, which Socha and Wroblewski had discovered in a chamber beneath the Nazi headquarters. Socha escorted my father and a few others to this place, and together they rummaged through the left-behind wood. There was too much to carry back, so the men made additional trips to complete the hauling. The wood they brought back was so wet that the men could not do a good job of drying it before we had to at last put the planks to use. We placed them on stones, in two rows of four boards each, and in this way they served as benches during the day. At night, we pushed the planks together and used them as beds for sleeping. This was important because the “beds” provided the adults with the only opportunity they would have in our chamber to stretch to their full height.

  The remarkable thing about these boards was that they were so damp when the men collected them, and within weeks they were completely dry. Indeed, everything was damp upon our arrival. The walls were dripping with moisture. But as we sat on these boards, and as we lay on them, the heat from our bodies dried the wood. Indeed, the heat from our bodies soon dried everything—the walls, the floor, the air around. In the beginning, we could even see the vapor from our own breath form little drops of moisture, but soon the air itself was dry as well, and in this way we were like a living science experiment, confirming that so many bodies in such a small space could not help but have this effect on our self-contained environment.

  We knew the difference between day and night only by our routines, by the timing of our sewer workers’ daily visits. We had two carbide lamps, which we used to light our small space, but for long stretches, when our work for the day was done, we would remain in darkness. For most of the day, we would sit on our improvised benches. Pawel and I would engage each other in games of imagination. Or he would play with the rats. We lost our fear of these underground creatures and grew used to them over time, as my father had predicted. Pawel in particular was fascinated by the rats, and there were three or four of them in his acquaintance he called by name. I tried to learn their names and their personalities as well, but I did not have the patience of my little brother in this regard. I could not tell one rat from the other.

  The adults in our group had a harder time adjusting to the rats than the children. The rats were not interested in us. They were interested only in our food. Infection was probably a worry, but who had time to think about such things? The worry was all around—the contaminated air, the wastewater, the close quarters. To Pawel and me, they became like family pets. To the adults, they were more like tolerable pests. A great swarm of tolerable pests. Several times, Pawel and I would attempt to count the rats in our view, as a way to pass the time, and always we would lose the count and have to start over. During the night, they would crawl over us as we slept, and we also got used to this in time. Sometimes I would wake up and one of the rats would be licking my ear or staring at me as if waiting to play. I could never tell if this was one of Pawel’s friends or just another from the group, so I always smiled back at the rat before gently shaking it away. Somehow I felt we had intruded on their space and that we were meant to get along.

  Very quickly, our group became like a family. Socha was our true leader—a benevolent ruler, to be sure, but also an inspired leader. It was a wonderful thing, the way our spirits lifted each morning when he arrived with our delivery. Previously, we had been a divided group, with divided loyalties and agendas, but now Socha put himself in charge of almost every aspect of our lives. I do not think any of the men in our group wanted to take on a leadership role for themselves; however, as a practical matter, when the sewer worke
rs were not among us, it appeared that my father was now in charge, and my mother by extension became a kind of figurehead for the women. Already, my father was responsible for paying our fee for protection and safekeeping, but he also seemed in charge of other matters. The others came to value his opinion and to look to him for guidance. He was the most attuned to events in the outside world and to a possible timetable for our liberation. And he was among the most resourceful of our group and one of the hardest workers.

  It was my father, for example, who fashioned a way to store our food and keep it from the hungry rats. He made a small shelf where he thought we could place some of our perishables. This worked for a time, until the rats discovered the bread on the shelf and managed to reach it by crawling along the stone walls. After this, my father had the idea to place crushed glass along the surface of the shelf, like a minefield protecting our scraps of bread, and in so doing, he hoped it would be difficult for the rats to cross the shards. The glass came from some bottles that had been discarded in the sewer. This too worked for a time, until the rats discovered a way to shimmy beneath the shelves by gripping the edges with their outstretched claws and moving upside down until they could find a toehold in the stone wall and lift themselves to the surface above without stepping on the broken glass. They were so clever! So persistent! On one occasion, I watched with my brother and father in disbelief as a pair of rats attempted to transport an egg without breaking it. One rat lay on its back with the egg on its belly while the other rat pulled its partner along by the tail. Such ingenuity!

  The rats were always getting into our food, so my father devised a storage system for the potatoes, coffee substitute, and sugar Socha and Wroblewski would now bring us with our daily bread. We stored these items in tins, in the hollow beneath our makeshift benches. We also stored our bread in this way, but the rats would somehow manage to get into the bread. Always, we would eat the stale bread first and in this way keep the freshest bread on hand. If it was kept too long, it would grow moldy from the dampness. Also, we wanted to keep an extra supply of bread in store in case our sewer workers could not make a delivery to us for a period of time, although usually it was a race with the rats to see who could get to the bread first. It was not until my father fashioned a kind of bread box that he could hang from the ceiling that we were able to keep the rats from our bread—a welcome innovation as far as our group was concerned. Pawel and I were especially pleased with this contraption because we enjoyed watching the rats attempt to reach the bread box. This was our entertainment.