The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  Of course, this deception could not last. Wroblewski and Kowalow figured out what was going on. Wanda Socha also discovered that their savings were dwindling under this arrangement. However it happened, there came a time when we had to consider leaving the sewer. We had no other resources, no other recourse. Socha and Wroblewski arrived one morning and told us they could not continue with our safekeeping. Socha had a heavy heart, we could tell. Wroblewski was also saddened by this development, but there was nothing they could do about it, he said. The men offered to see us safely outside, to a part of the city where we would have a good chance of fleeing into the countryside.

  My mother would not go. She said, “We will die here if that is what it comes to, but we are not going outside with the children.” My zostajemy tu nawet jak mamy umrzec tu razem.

  My father, what could he do but agree with my mother?

  The others were conflicted. They knew what happened to the other members of our group when they left the certainty of the sewer for the uncertainty of the streets. They did not want to split from my family. They had come to rely on my father for his resourcefulness, just as they had come to rely on my mother for her care and concern. They were the leaders of our group, among the men and the women. And yet, without Socha and Wroblewski to bring us our food and other supplies, we would surely perish in our underground chamber. We would become meals for the rats we had spent so long trying to keep from our store of food.

  In the end, it was decided that we would not go. Already, my mother had so decided for our family, and now the others were in agreement. We would take our chances in the sewer on our own. It was thought that possibly Korsarz and some of the other men could occasionally venture outside in search of food and return safely to our small chamber. He had done so before, and he could do so again, and in this way we could possibly survive until the Russians occupied the city once more.

  Socha and Wroblewski made their final good-byes. It was another tearful time, among many tearful times. We could not begrudge our sewer workers their decision. They had their own families to think about, their own lives. They could not live their lives for us any longer.

  I remember feeling very sad when Socha left us for what we thought would be the final time. He had been a stranger to us, and now he was like a part of our family. I thought back to that kindly Aryan schoolteacher who visited our last apartment in the ghetto, who wanted to take me in and raise me as her own daughter. I would not go with her, but I would have gone with Socha. Absolutely, I would have gone with him. It was never discussed as far as I knew, but if it had come to that, it would not have felt as though I were being separated from my family.

  It was not like me to think in such dark, gloomy terms, even after everything we had been made to endure, but just then I did not think I would ever see Leopold Socha again. I could not say for certain whether it was day or night outside, but in our small chamber in the storm basin beneath the Bernardynski church, it was our darkest hour.

  Happily, our dark hour turned bright the following morning. We rose as usual and removed our sleeping boards and set about preparations for yet another day in the Palace. Berestycki began his morning prayers. Weinbergova boiled water for our coffee. Nobody talked, because we were still intimidated by this change in our fortunes, but then we heard the familiar slosh, slosh, slosh of the sewer workers as they crawled through the pipe that spilled into our chamber. We were not expecting Socha and Wroblewski, but who else could it be? For several minutes we heard this noise of approach, but we would not let ourselves become too excited. We were wary because it was possible that, on this first day of our independent existence, we were about to be discovered. It would have been an unfortunate coincidence, but it was certainly possible.

  At last, Socha’s head appeared in the opening, and our hearts soared as one.

  “Poldju!” my father said with some excitement, using the familiar derivative of Socha’s name. “Where is Stefek?”

  “It is only me today,” Socha replied.

  “And tomorrow?” my father said.

  “Tomorrow we will see,” Socha said.

  “Kowalow?” my father said.

  “Tomorrow we will see,” Socha said.

  This was the last time we spoke as a group about the money and the sewer workers’ decision to continue protecting us. Whatever happened among our sewer workers remained unspoken. It is possible that Socha and my father had a private conversation about the change to our arrangement, but I never learned about it. It was only important that Socha was back to look after us.

  In this way, we resumed our plain existence in our underground chamber. The next day, Socha returned with Wroblewski, and there were once again warm greetings all around. Kowalow was once again on the lookout, and once again each day was much the same as the day before, only now and then there was some variation to our routine. There was the time, soon after our money had run out, when Socha and Wroblewski looted a German-run clothing store on our behalf. This was not such an ethical dilemma for Socha, our reformed Catholic and reformed thief, because the Germans had already taken everything from us and he considered it a kind of justice. How he came upon this opportunity, I never knew, but one morning he reported to our chamber and announced that he and Wroblewski had deposited dozens of tailored men’s shirts in a nearby manhole. He told the men how to get to this place. We had been underground for several months by this point, and our clothing was ragged and torn. Socha thought it might improve our spirits if we had some new clothes. Berestycki had been a tailor in Lodz, and I remember how he admired the quality of these shirts. For the next few days, we made an incongruous picture, men and women and children prowling our underground hideaway in fine men’s shirts, until these items too became ragged and torn.

  In addition to the clothes, the sewer workers managed to steal a number of other items from this store, fabrics mostly, which they fenced on the black market and converted into money to buy our daily supply of bread and other necessities. Here again, there was no ethical dilemma, only opportunity. It was a way for the Germans to underwrite our cost of living. This was as it should be, Socha said. This was only fair.

  There was the time our sewer workers came upon another windfall—a truckload of potatoes. It was winter, and there had been talk throughout Eastern Europe of a potato shortage. My father had read about it in the papers. This was of some concern to us because potatoes were a cheap staple of our diet. Socha, too, was concerned. The more money he and his colleagues had to pay for our upkeep, the less they would have left over for themselves, and already Kowalow and Wroblewski were not happy that there was no longer any money. When Socha came upon this truckload of potatoes, he thought he could get them down to the Palace and save himself and Wroblewski the trouble of carting the small bags of potatoes they brought on a regular basis, as well as the money from not having to buy any potatoes for several weeks or more.

  He was alone at the time, and he located a manhole where he thought it would be dry underneath, and he set about dropping these potatoes to the sewer below. They were bundled in sacks, about two pounds each. After a while, a group of Germans came by and asked Socha what he was doing. They were Germans in authority, probably SS or Gestapo. Socha answered their concerns with authority of his own. One of the Germans stopped him and said, “Why are you throwing potatoes into the sewer?”

  Socha said, “They are spoiled. I have been instructed to dispose of them.”

  There was enough authority in Socha’s voice that the Germans left him alone to continue dumping the potatoes into the sewer. When he was finished, Socha closed the manhole and made note of the location. With Kowalow’s help, he drew a map for my father and the other men, describing how to get to this place underground, and the next day my father went with Orenbach, Berestycki, and Korsarz to collect the potatoes. There were too many to carry on one trip, so back and forth they went, back and forth, until all the potatoes were carried to the Palace. Such a mountain of potatoes! Maybe fifty
or sixty pounds! We stored them in the space between our two benches and hoped we could eat our way through them before our friends the rats.

  There was the time little Pawel slipped on a stone and hurt his leg so badly that it appeared certainly fractured. We did not have any plaster for a cast or any way to make a proper splint, so there was not much my worried parents could do for him. Socha could not attempt to procure such supplies or fill any prescriptions for pain medication without attracting attention, so Pawel could only sit still for several weeks until the bone could heal. My father would carry him to the chamber pot whenever he had to go. Luckily, Pawel was young and in otherwise good health, and the bone healed quickly.

  There was the time when a small fire enveloped our close space and nearly accomplished what the Germans could not. Weinbergova was cooking our daily soup when suddenly the Primus stove tipped over and a fire erupted. And it was not just a small kitchen fire, but an open, roaring flame. The benzene used to light the stove had spilled, so the fire spread. It happened in an instant, and soon it was like a raging fireball, which was especially dangerous in our tiny chamber. There was nowhere for the group of us to go. We would have been incinerated or suffocated were it not for the swift action of our group. Immediately, Korsarz and my father threw blankets on the flames and tried to extinguish the fire. Their efforts were not terribly successful, for one of the blankets took the flame and caught fire itself. Then, one of the men determined that our store of used carbide powder would be a good way to smother the fire. All along, we had been emptying the used powder in a pile at the far end of our chamber, and the men scooped this up and threw it on the flames. This proved effective. At the same time, my mother and Klara covered the small opening that led to the street, thinking only to prevent the smoke from escaping and giving away our location, but this action had the unanticipated effect of closing off a source of oxygen to this chamber and making it difficult for the fire to breathe. Both courses of action, taken together, allowed us to put out the fire, but not before we experienced some difficulty breathing ourselves. Our hair and eyelashes were all singed from the flames, our faces blackened from the ash and soot, our routines momentarily upset by the chaos we experienced until the fire was under control.

  When Socha and Wroblewski arrived the next day, they could not believe what had happened. They commended us for our heroics and our cleverness in extinguishing the flame, only there had not seemed much of either on display during the ten or fifteen minutes it took for the fire to be stilled. Really, it was more like a series of desperate measures that happened to do the job before we were done in by the flames.

  There was the time, almost seven months into our confinement, when we celebrated Christmas with Socha and Wroblewski. Socha had been talking about this for some months. He felt that since he had celebrated our Jewish New Year with us, we should in turn celebrate his holiday with him. I cannot imagine how Socha and Wroblewski managed to separate from their families on such an important holiday, but they passed most of Christmas morning and much of the afternoon in our company. They brought vodka and sandwiches and a festive mood. My father was worried that Socha and Wroblewski would drink too much and become talkative once they returned to the outside and give away our location. My father did not drink, but on this occasion he pretended to do so. He kept filling his glass and spilling the vodka into the mud, and in this way he hoped there would be less vodka for our sewer workers to consume. We learned later that Socha was also worried about Wroblewski. Always, when the two men retired at the end of each day and Wroblewski suggested they stop for a drink before heading home, Socha worried. He trusted his colleagues implicitly to keep their secret, but he did not trust them under the influence of alcohol. He did not trust himself under the influence of alcohol, either, and so determined not to drink beyond a social glass or two as long as we were in his care.

  There were birthday and anniversary celebrations, too, but of course there was no real cause for celebration, merely gratification that we had survived another milestone under the brutal Nazi regime, in such inhospitable conditions. Socha in particular made a grand show for my mother’s birthday. He very much admired my mother, the way she cared for us two chicks, the way she cared for Babcia and the other women in our group, the way she shouldered our hardships with grace and composure. Once again he brought vodka, and once again my father pretended to drink more than his share, to keep as much alcohol from the lips of our visitors as possible.

  For these special occasions, my father would prepare a performance of some kind; he wrote plays and satires and new lyrics to popular songs. He was very clever in this way. His satires were commentaries about the individuals in our group, and we used to laugh so hard at how we appeared in one another’s eyes. His songs were clever pieces of wordplay that often poked fun at our own characters and at our struggles at the hands of the Germans. We were not so desperate, he believed, that we could not laugh at our situation. Halina was also clever with words, and she contributed some poems and satires of her own.

  The L of our chamber would be offstage, and this was where we would go to prepare our scenes. There was not a lot for us to be excited about in the monotony of our underground work, so we came to enjoy the preparations as performances. There would be a part for everyone who wanted to participate, only not everyone wanted to participate. Genia Weinberg and Chaskiel Orenbach, as I recall, would not take part. They considered it a waste of time to stage these little plays for Socha and Wroblewski, but doing so was how we reminded ourselves that we were still a civilized group, that we could be creative and productive, that we were human beings after all. We came to look forward to these performances—the sewer workers, too. I would look up from practicing my letters and see my father busy scribbling in the 1938 pocket diary Socha had brought him for just this purpose and know that a new satire was soon coming.

  These aberrations from routine were life itself. Indeed, the most dramatic of these came in the form of a birth and two deaths. The birth, of course, was the inevitable result of Weinbergova’s secret pregnancy, which was not such a secret as our time underground continued. Still, Socha did not know of her condition until the very end. We had put off telling him for so long that it was now thought best to wait for the last possible moment. Finally, my mother and father took Socha aside to explain the matter. At first, my parents reported, Socha was shocked. He thought back to the difficulties of the past months and wondered how a pregnant woman could endure such hardships. Then he wondered how a baby could be safely delivered in such unsanitary conditions, and after that there was the greater worry about how to care for the baby and keep its certain cries from being heard aboveground. Surely the activity of a healthy baby over a prolonged period would lead to our discovery. This was a big dilemma, everyone agreed, but no one could offer a good solution to any of the problems the pregnancy presented. Finally, Socha threw up his hands and said, “We will have to think about what to do.”

  But Weinbergova could not wait for Socha to develop a plan. She went into labor shortly after this encounter. Genia was moved into the private corner of our chamber. I remained with Pawel and a few of the others in the main part of the chamber. I did not know exactly what was happening, only that something was happening. I was nearly eight years old, but despite the maturity and wisdom that had been forced upon me by our circumstance, I was still innocent of such things as childbirth. I would piece together the particulars later. My father acted as midwife. My mother and some of the other women frantically boiled water. There was a good deal of rummaging through our few things for a suitable blanket or piece of cloth. This, too, I remember. There was the low moaning of Weinbergova. This I remember most of all, and as I listened to Genia’s moaning, I felt so terribly frightened for her. I did not know what could cause such pain, such anguish. I could not even imagine. She must have been so afraid!

  Regarding the details of Genia Weinberg’s delivery, I can only share what my parents shared with me afterward. After
the birth, my father cut the umbilical cord with a pair of rusty scissors. The baby, I learned later, was a boy. Babcia collected the newborn from my father and tended to him while my mother prepared a mixture of warm sugar water to get the child to nurse. After a while, the baby was placed alongside Genia’s oustretched body on one of the planks we used for sleeping. My mother said Genia appeared to agonize over her natural maternal instincts to protect and nurture this child and our unnatural circumstance that cast this infant as a threat to our survival. No one knew whether to welcome this child or to fear his arrival, not even Weinbergova.

  It was an anxious time in our part of the chamber. Even Pawel was nervous. He did not understand the commotion all around. He did not understand the sound of the baby crying. “This is a baby, Krysha?” he asked me at one point.

  I could not think how to answer.

  Meanwhile, outside, Socha was just as anxious. He had spent the time since learning of Weinbergova’s condition trying to find a home for the baby that was about to be born to our underground family. He did not know that Weinbergova was now in labor, and we did not know he was making these inquiries on the child’s behalf. Socha knew only that the baby was coming, probably soon, and he went to church after church, trying to find a group of nuns that would care for a newborn child without asking any questions. Finally he located such a church, such a group of nuns, and he could not wait to return to our chamber the following morning to deliver this welcome news.

  Weinbergova passed an uncertain few hours with her newborn baby pressed to her side, not knowing what Socha had arranged. She only knew that with each cry her baby threatened to give us all away and that the baby’s chances of survival in our damp, dark hovel would not be good. My mother sat with them and watched as Genia moved closer and closer to the child. Genia kept covering the baby’s face with a rag, and at first it seemed this was merely to quiet the sound of his whimpering, but then it became clear that she was attempting to suffocate the baby and put an end to the uncertainty. My mother gently pushed the rag away from the infant’s face, and then a few moments later, at the next sound of whimpering, Genia returned with the rag and my mother gently pushed it aside again. All of this happened without any words passing between the two women. Their eyes did all of the talking. Back and forth they went like this, as everyone else drifted off to sleep. It had been a long, eventful night. My mother stayed up with Genia for as long as she could, stroking her hair, pushing her hands from the baby’s face, but eventually she too drifted off, and it was at this moment Genia determined to smother her newborn baby, to sacrifice the one, whose chances were slim, for the good of the others, whose chances were only a little bit better than slim.