The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  We did not question this. We gathered our few things and took a carriage to the train station, where we boarded a cattle car for Poland. There were other people in this car, dozens as I recall, and we were pressed so close together that I could hear the breathing of the strangers closest to me as we moved slowly through the night. Some of the people had permission from the Russian government to leave, and others, like us, were looking to leave without permission. Before the train left the station, we could hear a Russian official calling my father’s name: “Chiger! Chiger!” This confirmed that we had been right to leave. Of course, my father did not answer, hoping that we could pass anonymously among all these other people, and soon the train started to move.

  It took us three weeks to make a journey into Poland that now takes forty-five minutes. The way was difficult because many of the bridges and tunnels had not been repaired since the war. On what was now the Russian side of the border, there had been considerable damage. The conditions were also difficult because it was winter and because there were so many of us traveling in such a confined space. It was as if we were in the sewer once more. It was terribly cold, this I remember most of all. I had a coat, my beloved green sweater, and my proper boots. We did not know the journey would take so long. We had only a few tins of sardines, and soon we had eaten our way through them. From time to time, the train would stop and we would get out and stretch our legs. My father used this time to go out in search of additional food. Some of the people made fires in this cattle car, which we used to warm ourselves and to do some simple cooking. My father would take snow and warm it in the empty sardine tins, just as he had done to purify our drinking water in the sewer. In so many ways, this was like the sewer all over again, yet it was because of our experience in the sewer that we were able to endure such as this. The other people were so cold, so hungry, so desperate, but the four of us were okay. We thought, This is not so bad.

  Finally, we arrived in Przemys, which was not far from the border, on the Polish side. It had not been our plan to get off the train in Przemys, but the journey had been difficult. We were at last safe in Poland, and it was said that the rail passage would be a little bit better now that we were in Poland, where the bridges and tunnels that had been damaged by the bombing were mostly repaired. But we knew that Socha had settled here and thought we could visit with him as we considered our next move, which is what we did. We ended up staying with Socha and his family for a week or so, and it was during this time that Wanda Socha finally warmed to us and began to look past the fact that we were Jewish. She had been helpful to us during our time in the sewer only because Socha had insisted on it, but here in Przemys she showed a genuine kindness. She became fond of my family. She liked that my father took time to help her daughter, Stefcia, with her homework. Just as he had done with me in the sewer, he worked patiently with Stefcia, teaching her math, Latin, history. Wanda Socha looked on and could see that my father was a good person, that we were all good people, wanting the same things in life: to live freely among friends and family.

  We were happy to be re united with Socha in such an intimate way. Now we were refugees together. He talked to my father constantly about his plans for the future, about the redemption he owed to his role as our protector, about his faith. He valued my father’s advice. And he adored me and my brother, now as before. This much had not changed, only now he was more a beloved uncle than a benevolent authority figure. And his admiration for my mother and the stoic way she cared for her baby chicks had only deepened in the months since our liberation.

  It was a glorious time, to be together again under such pleasant terms, under one roof. Jewish, Catholic . . . it did not matter. We were two families living as one, and it was with heavy hearts that we continued on to Krakow, where my father was determined to rebuild our lives. We arrived there on March 18, 1945, ready to make a new start. My father even changed our family name from Chiger to Chyrowski, thinking if his name sounded more Polish, he would have a better chance of finding a job. When we arrived in Krakow, we had only an address given to us by my mother’s uncle. At this address there was only one room, with maybe twenty people sleeping on the floor. It was as if all the refugees from the eastern part of Poland had this same address. It was the opposite of the exodus that took place during the first part of the war, when Polish Jews immigrated east, choosing the oppression of Communist Russia over the tyranny of Nazi Germany. Now we moved west, choosing the uncertain freedom of what remained of Poland over the continued Soviet oppression in our former Polish territory.

  It was in Krakow that we learned Socha and his family had left Przemys to join Klara and Korsarz in the town of Gliwice, where Socha hoped to establish a tavern. It had been a lifelong dream, Socha wrote to my father, to operate a small tavern. He was excited to finally have this opportunity, an opportunity provided in no small measure by our time in the sewer, because Socha used his savings from my father’s payments to establish his business. We were all so pleased that our dear friend and benefactor would be able to leave behind the misdeeds of his past and live a meaningful life in a quiet town, and to know that we had contributed to his redemption just as he had contributed so mightily to our salvation. We talked of Socha and his family often, and whenever we did it was with great warmth and gratitude that our paths had crossed so fortuitously at such a desperate time. We wrote back to Socha that we would visit at the earliest opportunity, to toast the success of his new tavern, to celebrate with Klara and Korsarz this exciting new chapter in the life of our extended underground family.

  And then, on May 13, 1945, less than two months after we said our last good-bye, we received a telegram from Korsarz with the devastating news that Socha had been killed the day before in a tragic accident. He was riding bicycles with his daughter, Stefcia, when a Russian army truck approached recklessly along the streets of Gliwice. Socha was struck and killed by the truck, but somehow Stefcia was spared. According to the police report, Socha’s body fell over a manhole opening, and his blood could be seen dripping into the sewer below.

  I was standing with my mother when she read this telegram and she sank to the floor in sorrow. At first she could not say what she had just read, so I looked at the telegram myself. I saw only enough to know that something terrible had happened to our Socha, and I too began to cry. The news was like a punch in the stomach. This is a cliché, I realize, but this was how it felt, and this alone was worse than the pain I felt over all the other tragedies I had been made to experience. Uncle Kuba, Babcia, my grandparents, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles . . . their tragic deaths did not add up to the pain of this one loss. To be forced from our apartment and sent to live in a series of smaller and smaller dwellings and eventually to the ghetto barracks and to the sewer below . . . these tragedies did not add up to the pain of this one loss. To be stripped of our family dignity, our family fortune, our family heritage . . . these tragedies too did not add up to the pain of this one loss.

  To lose someone so dear in a time of relative peace, on the cusp of relative prosperity and happiness, it was a particular agony. I thought back to that day toward the end of our time in the sewer when Socha took me by the hand to find that small sliver of daylight, to ease me from the depths of depression. I closed my eyes and pictured his big, bright smile. I heard his voice. I felt the positive energy he brought with him into our Palace chamber each day when he arrived with food and provisions and news of the war. I considered all of this and held fast to my mother. Together, we were crying, crying, crying. Little Pawel, I do not think he knew exactly what had happened, but he began to cry as well, as did my father when he arrived home and learned the sad news.

  We went immediately to Gliwice, and as soon as we arrived we went to the place where Socha had fallen. The street had been cleaned of his blood, but Korsarz indicated where it had been dripping into the sewer below. This was a meaningful symbol to our underground family, as we stood in silence and remembered the great bravery and humanity this man had
demonstrated over our long confinement. Such an irony! Such a sadness! I was still a mere child, and so too young to weep for Wanda Socha and her daughter. Now, as an adult, my heart breaks for poor Stefcia, to have witnessed her father’s frightful death at such close range. She was only twelve years old! It breaks too for poor Wanda, to lose her husband when he was finally at peace with himself and excited about his prospects. But back then I thought only of what my family had lost. What I had lost.

  Our guardian angel.

  Our Socha.

  In his memoir, my father wrote that on Leopold Socha’s tombstone it should be inscribed, “He who saves one life saves the entire world.” Kto ratuje jedno zycie—ratuje caly swiat. Such was the strength and character of our beloved Socha. Indeed, every year on the anniversary of his death, I light a Yahrtzeit candle in his memory and I consider these words as I prepare to chant the mourner’s Kaddish. I think of Socha and the life he lived before he met us, the lives he saved with his protection, the lives we all managed to build for ourselves after the war . . . and in this way I honor his memory.

  As for the life my family built after the war, it continued for the next twelve years in Krakow, where my father eventually found work in an office, where my mother reunited with her sister, where Pawel and I resumed our childhoods, and where soon we were no longer worrying constantly that we would be tortured or terrorized by some Nazi or Soviet official. Soon we were almost back to normal, although life could never be the same as it was for us at Kopernika 12, when Lvov was a thriving city filled with such hope and purpose. Still, we had come through an unimaginable hardship and so could not complain. This became like a theme for my family, that we should not complain or advertise our suffering, that whatever difficulty we were encountering was nothing compared with the difficulties just past or the difficulties of others.

  When it was just the four of us, we spoke often about our time in the sewer, but we hardly spoke of it at all when we were with friends and family. There would be a story in the newspaper that might call to mind an event in the ghetto, or there would be a smell that would take us back to how we used to live, or a taste of soup that reminded us of the soup Weinbergova used to cook for us, or a resemblance between some stranger on the street and one of our underground family members. Together we would consider this connection, and together we would remember. It was a time we might have chosen to forget, but it was a part of us after all, and it was not as if every memory were unpleasant. There were happy memories, too. The songs and satires my father used to write. The jokes Korsarz used to tell. The warmth and security we would feel whenever Socha came to nourish us with food or news from the outside. In truth, we never laughed as hard as we did during the comic moments that found us during our time underground, probably because the contrast between joy and sorrow was so great that we seized every small piece of happiness and coaxed it to appear larger still, and so we were eager to laugh over these same moments again and again in memory.

  In 1957, we left Poland for Israel, where my father believed he could improve our circumstance. We went first to Gliwice to say good-bye to Wanda Socha, to see if perhaps there was anything we could do for her. She was grateful for our visit, but of course she did not need anything. To demonstrate this point, she took us to her kitchen and pointed to a large coal stove in the corner. It was an old stove, and it looked as though it had not been used for many years. She opened the heavy iron door and pointed inside. She said, “Do not worry about me. I have everything I need here. Until the end of my life, I will have enough.”

  My father looked inside and saw bundles of neatly stacked zloty notes and a good deal of the fine jewelry and silverware he had paid to Socha for saving our lives. Whatever our guardian angel had spent to buy our food and provisions, whatever he had spent from his own pockets to pay Kowalow and Wroblewski so they would not know that our money had run out, whatever he had spent on his small tavern before he was so cruelly taken from us, there was still a small fortune left over. And my father did not begrudge Wanda Socha this small fortune. At one time it was all he had in the world, but now it would be used to care for the wife and daughter of his beloved Poldju. And that was as it should be, he said. Indeed, my father told me later that he was grateful to learn the money was still there, that it had amounted to something after all.

  In Israel, nobody talked about the war. Nobody talked about the Holocaust. Whatever we experienced, however we had come to this place, it was in the past and not to be discussed. Such was the attitude of the Jews we met in our adopted homeland, and in many ways it echoed the attitude we had developed at home; however, here we numbered in the tens of thousands. Everywhere you looked, there was a survivor of one kind or another. Around every corner there came a tale to match our own. On the bus or in a public square, if you happened to see a number burned into the forearm of a man or woman, marking him or her as a concentration camp survivor, you dared not mention it. You looked away in embarrassment. It took me a long time to get used to this and to weigh it against my own experience. Already, we did not talk about our time in the sewer except among ourselves. Already, we had put the years of the German occupation behind us. Yes, it was a miracle that we survived, but everybody had the same miracle. Nobody survived easily. To be here among us, still, meant to have suffered along the way.

  I was a young woman when we arrived in Israel, and the “inside” emotional life I began keeping to myself during the first Soviet occupation had deepened over the years. There could be months now when my family would not speak a word of our time in the sewer. It was buried beneath the surface of our lives, like the sewer itself. I struggled to understand this, and as I did I began to realize that everybody carried a heavy bag behind them. All around, there were Jews who had survived by some separate constellation of miracles. All around was the heavy baggage of a time of great upheaval.

  It would not be fair to suggest that our bag was heavier than most. It was just ours, that is all, and I would carry it proudly, going forward.