The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  Others brought bread and barley. Others, fruit and sandwiches. Whatever people brought, we accepted it gladly. Truly, we were overwhelmed by the kindness of these good people, almost all of them Aryans who had been brainwashed by the Germans into believing that Jews were the lowest form of life. And yet here they were, trying to help. Two of my father’s friends from his athletic club came by with whiskey and kielbasa, which the adults consumed eagerly. Of course, we were careful not to eat or drink too much too quickly, because our stomachs had been inactive for so long. Indeed, these treats and delicacies were a welcome kindness, but we longed for the simple diet we had left behind. We had been so long without a visit from Socha and Wroblewski that we had barely eaten any of the basic staples over the past several days. We had not had any bread. Our soup had no ingredients but boiled water and maybe some onions. For fourteen months we had been undernourished, but for the past week we had been starved, so we longed for just a bite of bread, a sip of coffee, a drink of water.

  The next day, my father returned to the sewer with Socha and Wroblewski to gather some of our left-behind provisions. If you had told my father he would be returning so soon to his underground prison, he would not have believed it. But there was a good amount of food in the Palace, which we now urgently needed. There were other items that could be of use to us aboveground as well, such as pots and pans and the carbide lanterns that had for so long been our only source of light. So my father revisited our underground home, to rummage through our few things, to see what food might be salvageable. It was a desperate measure, but we were certainly desperate. And we would remain so for some time.

  Ten

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  The story of our endurance did not end in that courtyard on July 27, 1944, just as it cannot end here in these pages. Already, I am the last survivor of my underground family, but our story continues in the retelling. It continues in our legacy and in the lives we leave behind.

  My firsthand memories of the beginning days and weeks of our new life aboveground are mostly a blur, but they are complemented by the handed-down memories of my parents and others. I do recall the initial exhilaration of first freedom that found us immediately following our liberation. Such a wave of excitement! Such relief! And underneath and all around was such a grand happiness as cannot fully be described or understood. The memories reach beyond simple emotion: I can still picture the eerie, unfamiliar light as my eyes struggled to adjust to the outside world. For days, I could see only through the orange red film that colored my first steps aboveground. It made me so dizzy! I can still remember the luxury of my first night in a proper bed, which despite our otherwise drab furnishings was like staying in a world-class hotel. And I vividly remember holding a bouquet of fresh flowers for the first time in the longest while and burying my nose in the scent and thinking our troubles were over.

  In this I was premature, and it was only a few days more before I realized that we had merely traded one set of troubles for another. I did not recognize this right away, but soon enough. My parents probably realized it the moment we reached daylight. They were optimists, which explained how they were able to grab the smallest piece of hope and pull our family along by its thread, but they were also realists. They knew we would now have to think about things like finding a place to sleep and something to eat. They knew the many kindnesses of these strangers would soon fall away. They knew we would continue to struggle, only now it would be a different struggle. Now it would be a struggle to live under a regime that had already marked us as an enemy.

  The primary benefit to our time in the sewer was that we struggled together. Now our underground family had simply decamped to new quarters, and we continued as one. We were once again under Soviet rule, a hardship we now accepted as a better alternative only to the killing rule of the Germans. We were free only by comparison to how we lived in the sewer, but of course we were not so free after all. The Russian government was suspicious of all Jews who had managed to survive the Nazi regime, so we were closely monitored. Also, the Soviets still recognized my father as bourgeois, which was as much of a crime after German rule as it had been before, even though we now lived like peasants. We had no money, no prospects. Friends and family members who might have been in a position to help us become reestablished had either fled or been killed. Our circumstances were almost as desperate as they had been in the ghetto, only now they did not seem so desperate because of everything that had happened in between.

  Sometimes, shop owners would take pity on us as we passed by their windows and offer us a piece of fruit or some other sweet, which we accepted gratefully. At other times, we would find food in the street and considered ourselves lucky for the discovery. Of course, my mother did not like it when we ate food from the street, but we were so hungry. What could she do? We were very nearly homeless by the standards of today, and certainly impoverished by the standards of 1944 Lvov, which was now called Lviv.

  Sometimes we would be visited by the Russian soldiers who had gathered in the courtyard the day Socha led us out of the sewer. Usually it was the soldier who had received Pawel’s emotional outburst and another one or two of his friends. He was so moved, this one soldier, so touched by Pawel’s outpouring, that he felt a strong and immediate connection to our family, so he came to sit with us and to share his food. Pawel always liked it when these young men came because it felt to him that he was the one being visited. It felt to him as though they were his friends.

  On one of these visits, Pawel’s soldier caught my father’s attention. Most likely this was the first time my father had been at home during such a visit, because usually he was out looking for work or for food. This time, though, my father crossed the room to shake the soldier’s hand, and as he did the soldier said, “Am ‘hu.” It was the first time I heard this word. It is a Hebrew word, difficult to translate. It is almost like a signal, passed from one Jew to another, a powerful acknowledgment that you are part of the same nation. After the war, we heard this word all the time. It followed us all the way to Israel almost thirteen years later, where people would still catch one another’s attention and speak this powerful word: Am ‘hu. In this word was a shared look, a shared past, a shared identity. In this word was a hope for our future. And this was where I heard it for the first time, in our small, sparsely furnished room adjacent to the courtyard where I walked in daylight for the first time in nearly a year and a half, spoken by a kindly Russian soldier who was only now admitting to my family that he, too, was Jewish.

  By the end of our first week of freedom, my father found a job at the health club where he used to work, only he did not earn a salary. He was paid with vouchers that he could exchange only for food, which he would forsake for himself and take home for my mother and us children instead. If there was any left, my father would offer it to Klara or Halina or Genia before taking any for himself. The others found work here and there, and what they had in plenty they, too, shared with the group. There was still a surplus of potatoes, which my father had managed to collect from the Palace among our few other provisions, so my mother made latkes for Pawel and me to sell on the streets. Also, we discovered a container of empty shoe polish canisters in an abandoned store, and these we filled with shoe polish and sold as well. We did not consider this begging. Rather, it was a way to make something out of nothing in order to survive. We found that the more miserable and disheveled our appearance, the more latkes and shoe polish we managed to sell, only this was not a strategy, it was our reality.

  We were still hungry, but I would not accept my mother’s share of our food. In the sewer, she would not take her small bite of bread or her few sips of water. She would give them instead to me and Pawel. But it was not enough to really share, and we were so desperately hungry that I did not think to quarrel with her about this. I was merely grateful for the nourishment. Now, I was a little more mature than I had been in the sewer, a little less selfi sh. Now, there was a little bit more, and still my mother would no
t eat. Now she would continue to give her portion to me and Pawel, and I started to worry about her health. She was so thin! I had become a very nervous person, and this caused me great anxiety, that my mother would not eat. I decided I would not accept her portions. I said, “If you do not eat, I will not eat.” And in this way I forced her to eat.

  We could not afford new clothes, so we collected thankfully the few simple items that were donated to us by kindly families and made the best of whatever we had worn throughout our time in the sewer. It was a wonder to me what my mother and the other women could do with a little bit of cleaning and sewing. We looked almost presentable in the rags that had survived our underground ordeal. I thought back to those crisp, clean shirts Socha had stolen for us some months earlier and longed for the feel of new clothes on my back. Until then, I continued to wear with great pride my precious green sweater, which my mother lovingly cleaned and repaired. Proper shoes, however, we could not afford, and I walked barefoot or in homemade shoes fashioned from rags and newspapers. Even this I did not mind at first. I did not even notice the pitying stares of the others as my family passed on the street. That is, I did not notice until those stares were coming from the other children. Suddenly, I was embarrassed by our situation. In the beginning, the other children teased me for living in the sewer with the rats and the waste and the filth, and I shrank in the face of their taunts. I may have been strong enough to stand up to the subhuman elements of the sewer, but I was not so strong that I could shoulder the jeers of the very children I longed to befriend.

  My mother registered me for the first grade in August 1944, only a few weeks after our liberation, and at first the woman who helped her fill out the paperwork could not understand that we were Jewish. She had been under the impression that all Jews living in Lvov had been exterminated, and here was this woman and her eight-year-old daughter filling in the space marked “Jewish” on the official form. The school registrar was so surprised that she would not at first allow me to enroll, until my mother appealed this decision to the school principal. Here it was decided that I could indeed attend school but that it would probably be better for my mother not to advertise that we were Jewish. I would be registered as Jewish, but we would not talk about it. Such was the lingering nature of anti-Semitism in the hearts of the Aryan population that remained in the city. Such was the awareness of the other children, that they were able to guess at my past and ignore me in kind. And such were the depths of our misery and misfortune that my mother chose to follow this woman’s advice and bury our Jewish heritage in this one regard. It was difficult for her to accept, that after somehow surviving the tyranny of Nazi Germany, we still could not live openly and proudly as Jews. Yet she had no choice but to accept it, because this, too, was our reality.

  A part of me was terribly excited to be attending a proper school at long last, but at the same time there was another part that dreaded the isolation I felt each day. I was so lonely! The other children knew I was different. One day, a girl asked in a mean way why I was not writing from right to left, instead of from left to right. I did not know what she meant by this. I did not know how to speak or write Hebrew at that time and so did not recognize this as a kind of taunt until my mother explained it to me. This was typical of how I was treated by the other children. I was a curiosity to some and an irritation to others. I managed to make one or two friends, but for the most part I kept to myself during the school day. In this way, I was in hiding, still.

  I remember feeling so ashamed of my makeshift boots that I raced to school ahead of the other children and tucked my feet beneath my desk. It was difficult enough to be known among the other schoolchildren as the girl who lived in the sewer. This was embarrassing. It was difficult enough to be marked as Jewish and made to feel somehow inferior to the other children. This was upsetting. I did not want to compound the teasing by allowing anyone to see what I was wearing. When I finally did receive a pair of proper boots, I was so proud. Now I took my time going to school. Now I walked up the aisle to my desk as if I were a model on a runway, and when I sat down I left my feet in the aisles where everyone could see I was appropriately shod.

  Very quickly, the others in our underground family began to realize they might have an easier time in their hometowns, and one by one they announced plans to seek a better life elsewhere. Jacob Berestycki, for example, had only moved east to Lvov during the first Soviet occupation to escape the Germans. Now he returned to his native Lodz, where he hoped to find family and better opportunities. There he remet and married a childhood friend. Together they had two children, a girl and a boy, and eventually settled in Paris.

  Berestycki was the first to leave, but the others would follow. If the putrid Peltew was the current that ran through our time in the sewer, then it can be said that many tributaries flowed from that river. Our group was carried away by these currents to all corners of the globe. We did not stay so terribly long together once Socha placed us in these four rooms in the abandoned building overlooking the courtyard, probably only a few weeks. We would never again know such an intimate bond outside of our own families, but it was inevitable that we would go our separate ways.

  We did not all separate, of course. Klara Keler and Korsarz the Pirate, Mundek Margulies, were married soon after the liberation and moved to the Polish town of Gliwice. I liked that they were together and would now be a family. This did not surprise my parents, who of course knew that a romance had sparked between Klara and Korsarz during our time underground, but it was a complete surprise to me and Pawel. We did not know of such things as romance. We knew only the love of family, and in this one respect I was overjoyed that two people who had become so dear to me would now be husband and wife. It was like something out of a storybook, I thought. They also had two children, also a girl and a boy, and eventually settled in London.

  There was another romance to emerge from our underground group: Chaskiel Orenbach and Genia Weinberg were married soon after the liberation and moved to Lodz as well. After a short time, they settled in Germany, where they had a daughter. No one would have guessed that these two would find each other in this way or that they would make a life and a home surrounded by the very people who had persecuted us. They were both difficult personalities, but together they had been through a lot. Genia lost her husband and two small children, including the one she carried secretly and had to smother in our underground chamber. Chaskiel lost his brother and the rest of his family as well. They suffered on the common ground of our Palace chamber.

  Halina Wind, we did not see so much after the war. She moved first to Gliwice in the company of a friend, and after that we fell out of touch. It was not until several years later that we learned she had moved to the United States, where she lived a long and healthy life. She married and had two children, also a girl and a boy.

  Tola, who had been a reluctant member of our group for the last days of our confinement, would return to the Russian army, but he was soon killed.

  Our guardian angel sewer workers were also carried away by the aftercurrents of postwar Europe. We finally met Jerzy Kowalow a day or two after our liberation. He had worked so long and at such risk on our behalf, yet during all this time we could not even say what he looked like. My father had met him only once, during his initial descent into the sewer when he first encountered Socha, but now he was anxious to remake his acquaintance and to thank Kowalow personally for his role in our safekeeping.

  Socha and Wroblewski would remain our good and trusted friends, although in the case of the latter that friendship was briefly threatened by charges of treason. It was discovered soon after liberation that Wroblewski had belonged to an anti-Communist group, a punishable offense under Russian rule. It did not matter that Wroblewski had not associated with this group for several years, only that he had at one time. Socha, too, belonged to a similar organization, but only Wroblewski had been arrested and charged.

  A group of us went to the Russian prosecutor to argue Wroblewsk
i’s case: my parents, Pawel, myself, Korsarz, Klara, and Halina. We thought if we spoke highly of Wroblewski’s bravery in helping to hide us from the dreaded Nazis, the prosecutor might look favorably on Wroblewski’s case. We thought that we could help with his safekeeping, for once. My father also contacted a journalist friend who worked for a Russian newspaper, Ogoniok. The man’s name was Bielajew, and he agreed to print the story of our life in the sewer and the sewer workers’ role in our survival. These two initiatives contributed at least in some small way to Wroblewski’s release.

  Meanwhile, Leopold Socha and his family quietly fl ed to the Polish city of Przemys. He believed that the suspicions that were now following Wroblewski would soon find him as well. We were sad to see him go, but soon my father recognized that we too could not stay in Lviv. Already, my father had been visited by Russian officials on a few occasions, and it was becoming apparent that he was some kind of target. They were very organized, the Russians, very efficient. Certainly they realized that my father had his own business before the war. Always, because of this, my father was worried he would be sent to Siberia. One night in February 1945 he heard from some friends that there was a Russian official looking to arrest him, so he came home and said, “We have to run.”