III
WEEDS FOR DINNER
TRANSPORT TO ŁÓDŹ GHETTO
In October 1941 my parents, Rudolf and I left in the very second transport by which the Germans were sending Prague Jews away. We knew nothing; we had no idea what was to become of us. We simply had received an order to arrive at the collection point, which had been set up within the precinct of the Trade Fair Palace, and were led there in a column through Prague streets. I have such a strange memory. I remember events that have touched me personally, but the surrounding circumstances are sometimes left out. So I only recall how we went along marching. Many people stopped in sympathy, and men took their hats off. The Germans shouted at them to get packing otherwise they would include them in the procession. We came to the Trade Fair Palace where Jews were being gathered and realized that this was the beginning of it and that what would follow wouldn’t be a simple affair. There were ill people there who were carried in on stretchers, babies, and small children who cried incessantly. There was so much noise that it can’t be described in words.
A majority of the people tried to remain calm and organize everything sensibly. SS men dashed amongst all of us, so it was a very chaotic situation. And in the middle of it, in that biggest uproar, a small man sat on his suitcase playing his violin. Perhaps he hadn’t observed what was happening around him, for he continued to practice Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Again and again: papaa, papapa. I remember that very well, something so extraordinary. We were there several days; then they loaded us onto a train, and we still didn’t know where we were going.
During the transport, in the middle of night, the train stopped at a small station to collect drinking water into barrels located in each wagon. With excessive yelling they chased us out of the train – one from each wagon. I was chosen and ran out terrified, tripping along the rails, and there on top of a pile of ballast illuminated by the station lamp grew a beautiful violet flower. I can see it clearly even today. It looked like a wild iris. Why is it that one remembers comparatively trivial events while the most dramatic moments fade totally with time? Maybe it is my strangely developed sense for ‘monumental detail’ that causes events to crumble into sharp impressions of the smallest elements, and at the same time, I miss the overall perspective.
Such as the snowstorm during our arrival in Łódź; it was only October, and never – even afterward while there – have I experienced a similar storm, even in winter. With great difficulty we stumbled from the railway station and, for the first time, saw those poor people and children, barefoot, nearly naked and dying of hunger.
Several days later I entered some kind of cellar. There was a kerosene lamp. The young people from our transport sat on the ground. Someone played a harmonica. The ceiling was vaulted, and the lamp cast strange, long and pointed shadows as if we were in a cathedral. I thought that an angel would appear and make a bloody cross on the forehead of whoever had been destined to die.
In Łódź there was a large ghetto, taking up part of the town. It was surrounded by a fence made of wood and wire, topped with razor wire and various spikes. It was guarded by ordinary soldiers. Inside there were quarters housing Nazi officers, who were by majority members of the SS. Trains kept arriving frequently. There were about one hundred and seventy thousand people, but by the end only seventy thousand remained. At the beginning they accommodated us in one of the better-built houses, and we were there several weeks before other transports arrived.
The ghetto had its own self-administration, and its leader, who represented our interests and was responsible for the internal order, was a Pole, an older man, Chaim Rumkowski. People didn’t like him, but I took pity on him because he was under enormous pressure and had a great responsibility. And I thought he had known all along how it would end.
Of course, we had no inkling at all that Auschwitz or any gas chambers existed. It was only much later that I learned an interesting story of how Himmler told Hitler about the poison gas experiments on people. Those first Jews from Poland were transported in special vans and when the vans stopped, gas was pumped into them. The first time they did this, apparently Himmler, who was present, fainted. And Hitler told him: “You see how humane we are, how we have such humane compassion.”
We were in Łódź Ghetto from October 1941 to August 1944, but as early as the spring of 1944 it all started to fall apart. We were there until the very end. When the fighting front crept nearer people were gradually moved out. There were so many people. Łódź Ghetto was terrible for being so crowded with people living very close together, including small children. There was no food, and at the beginning, it was awful before people got used to the hunger. At the start, women managed to adapt to the difficult conditions better than men because they needed less food and secondly because they stopped menstruating – Mother Nature immediately took action that resulted in saving further energy. Apart from that, women as usual had the task of looking after others, and hence they were mentally more robust. They had no time or energy to think of themselves because they had to take care of children or their parents.
The awful thing was that my parents weren’t old people. My father was in his mid-fifties, and my mother was fifty – comparatively young people – but there, anybody beyond thirty turned into an elder. At that age the human organism doesn’t recover much, and vitality is limited. At the beginning it was the young men who were dying most. And as time passed it became worse and worse.
In the ghetto you were with your parents and husband. Did you live together? And how was life there in general? I can’t imagine how life could function. Were there any opportunities to express feelings and love?
Łódź Ghetto wasn’t organized as a concentration camp; families had to find their own refuge. We lived together in one room, which Rudolf discovered; I had no aptitude for finding anything. We were glad to be together – that was good.
I was proud how people were well behaved there. Some were very nervous, starved and constantly living in fear, but I didn’t see a single case where people didn’t care for each other – that was very important. Older people’s health deteriorated quickly. They wasted away and became very thin, even the young men, because food was totally inadequate, while at the same time they were required to work very hard.
If there was a young woman in the family then she kept the accommodation clean; it was very important to maintain hygiene. We used to walk through the center of the ghetto, where there was a strip with thinly growing grass and many weeds, but we plucked out the weeds. That was recommended to us by people from our Czech transport among whom were many scientists and academicians – you could use this but not that. We always picked the weed, brought it home and cooked it for dinner.
Meager rations for the Jews confined in Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt), Poland, circa 1940s. Thousands of men, women and children starved to death there during the war.
Courtesy Česká televize.
Anyway it was comforting that people cared for each other. Close relationships with relatives greatly aided survival. I wanted to live for someone – I had to care for them, and that was a very strong incentive.
From time to time there were sudden raids. The Nazis invaded the ghetto, collected all the people who got in their way and took them away into the unknown. Sometimes the raids were better organized. At one time they took only children, threw them onto cargo trucks and drove them away to Auschwitz – we didn’t know where, but for their mothers it must have been horrific.
One of those big raids lasted several days. When a later transport arrived at Łódź Ghetto we had to move into one of the very dilapidated houses, which was already partly in ruins. There we found a room where we lived on loose straw or straw mattresses, if we were lucky enough to get hold of them or find them. Rudolf found a straw mattress for my parents, and we had something like straw bedding. The best thing was that there was a trapdoor leading to a cellar below.
All these changes in accommodation were very damaging f
or older people; the raids were specifically targeted at them. As I said, my parents weren’t old, but their health was greatly run down. They were thin but managed to hold on; they were brave, especially my mother. When the raid was on we all had to come out onto the street or a courtyard, wherever we were at that time. I remember precisely that there was a kind of big wooden case or pedestal on which a young good-looking German soldier in a beautiful uniform and shiny boots stood. Around him the half-dead people gathered, and I had a notion that he wasn’t a human being – ‘it’ must have appeared from outer space; it wasn’t possible otherwise. That difference between us and him – suddenly we were just wretches. And he assessed people one after another, and if it was an older person, they took him or her away. By then we had some experience with those German raids and I persuaded Mother and Father to crawl down into the cellar and saved them. We succeeded in the same way during the future raids. They tried to remove people who weren’t productive. We all had to work. I think it was good; otherwise, we all would have gone mad there.
Jews on the bridge that connected two sections of Łódź Ghetto, Poland, February 1941. BArch, Image 101I-133-0703-20 / Photo: Zermin.
Courtesy Bundesarchiv.
IV
A ZEST OF LIFE
LIVING IN ŁÓDŹ GHETTO
Do you remember the moments when music helped you?
I think that everyone is helped by music. I love classical music best, but at times also modern music – that is, the modern music of my youth. A well-known Polish violinist who was allowed to keep her violin lived in Łódź Ghetto. I had no idea that she was there, but the atmosphere in the ghetto was so bad that one was pleased at least to be able to breathe. There was very little food, very heavy work, and rarely was one able to go out for a walk. Once I set out on an errand, and suddenly I could hear beautiful violin music. I think it was Brahms’ Violin Concerto, and I stood leaning on the wall of the house where the violinist lived, and listened. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t living in the same sphere as before. I understood how far I had fallen that I couldn’t claim even the smallest pleasure as my own. That was why it was such a wonderful moment, but very painful.
The ghetto was patrolled by German soldiers on one side, and the detainees guarded the other side to make sure that no one escaped. It happened that some tried, but they were immediately shot. It was curious that along a fenced off track, a tram used by the regular townsfolk ran through the center of the ghetto. We all worked, and some workplaces were on one side of the track while others were on the opposite side. There was a wooden bridge, named Hohensteiner, to enable us to cross the track. First you had to go up the steps to the deck spanning the track and then down the steps on the other side. That bridge was a rather peculiar object. For those in the ghetto it was a test to prove they were still alive. For those who were already too weak and moved very slowly, the climbing of steps was an insurmountable obstacle. The local saying was: “That person can’t cross the bridge.” Meaning that person was already somehow doomed.
A model of Łódź Ghetto created by ghetto resident Leon Jacobson in 1940. Jacobson was a shoemaker by training. Photo: Arnold Kramer. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leon Jacobson.
We weren’t allowed to linger on the bridge; we had to keep moving up, across and down. We always looked down with longing at the trams passing below with their open platforms like those used in Prague; at the rear of each tram was a platform where passengers stood, normal people. At one time from the bridge I saw a small open wagon fully loaded with flowers, and that was a massive shock. I stopped. I completely forgot that I wasn’t allowed to – and I stared at the flowers, because there was nothing like that in the ghetto. The Germans were afraid of epidemics and various infectious diseases that could start raging in such dreadful conditions without proper hygiene. So for that reason everything was painted with lime, and as a result nothing grew there, only that bit of grass and weeds in the middle of the ghetto. There was nothing of nature to see there, and suddenly there was this beautiful wagonload full of carnations, red ones, as well as other flowers.
However, spring in Łódź Ghetto, in that place where hardly any plants grew, where hardly any bird took flight – despite that, spring was in the air. On occasion the wind even brought the fragrance of fresh soil, forests and life outside. I went to find my father in the fields at Marysin. The sun shone, and Dad walked behind a plough, slowly with bent legs. Then I realized for the first time how much he had aged. He was pale and drawn with hunger and humiliation. For a while we stood there in the sun. Dad took his cap off and said timidly: “Now at springtime, one has such a heavy heart …”
After many years I understood why he had chosen to do this work that was so much worse than any other. He had to walk a long way to get there, and then he plodded behind the plough all day dragging the heavy wooden clogs stuck with large lumps of soil. But he was there on his own with the elements he treasured most – the soil, the sky above his head and the fresh breeze. He was returning to that from which he had risen.
My cousin Jindříšek, the son of one of my dad’s sisters, was there too, and he kept telling me: “How come I didn’t know of you.” No one knew about anybody else who lived a little further away because people had no time to go out and meet others. He was in a very bad state, very thin. I told him straight away: “You have to come to live with us; we’ll take care of you.” I went with him to his den. He had been lying there on a tattered blanket, sharing it with another boy, so I led him to our room.
When Jindříšek had been with us for several months, suddenly I heard the bells of the fire engine. Despite that being almost a daily occurrence I knew immediately that this time it was a fire in our house. I scuttled home, breathless. My mother was there chaotically throwing essential items into suitcases, and my father, by that time already helpless, ran around trying to give a hand. Jindříšek lay in his lair on the ground and followed everything with his large black yearning eyes. The firemen formed a circle around the house. There was smoke and shouting everywhere, and it was very frosty – water didn’t flow. People didn’t panic even at that moment; general resignation prevailed.
Together with my father we dragged the suitcases out. We set Mother on them wrapped up in a blanket, and finally I ran in to get Jindříšek. The firemen didn’t want to let me in; one of them took a swing at me with his stick. Dad started to fight with him, and in the meantime I ran inside. Jindříšek was trying to get up but couldn’t make it. I shouted at him furiously, desperately. I put one of his arms over my neck, and although despite being thin to the bone, he was very heavy. I pulled him outside shouting at him all the time, roughly; I wanted to pass on a bit of my determination and energy in order to get him out, over the threshold, over the yard and onto the street. He was slipping at every step, but we managed it finally. He sat down on a suitcase fully exhausted, white as a sheet. Mother covered him up with a blanket, put his head in her lap, and they sat there as if he had been taken down from a cross. I put my head on my father’s shoulder and wanted to cry from the relief.
At last the firemen had put out the fire, and we could return slowly and drag the suitcases back. People helped us a little then, and we were all thoroughly exhausted with exertion and excitement. When we returned it was the first time ever I saw Jindříšek smiling. He laughed about how I had shouted at him. However, shortly afterward I came home from work, and Mother whispered that he had asked her to sing Where Is My Homeland and Where Have You Gone, My Youth. And from that time on he hadn’t spoken. I bent over him and saw that already he wasn’t aware of me. We had some soup that Mother concocted, and I tried to feed him – and he responded. It was terrible how that dying person had no sense, no perception, only that hunger. I took him in my arms, and he died. He was twenty.
Perhaps if he had one or two normal, sufficient meal portions he would have survived. Nothing is more senseless or cruel than to die too soon, before one manages to commit sins, whi
ch death exonerates. Long after, I had a feeling of being observed from that corner of the room by black, yearning, lost eyes.
When everything was back to normal I warmed a large cask of water, undressed and slowly and thoroughly scrubbed myself and brushed my hair, carefully put on my clothes and cleaned my shoes, and without hurry returned to work. I think that day I realized for the first time that I was irrevocably, finally and forever an adult, a whole woman – and from then on I would consider everything for real.
When I was young I knew that events disappear into the past but only today do I understand what it means. The real raw past is what Jindříšek thought about when he lay there on the mattress on the ground and observed how we walked past him; it was what my father felt in that field then and what passed through my mother’s mind when she sang Where Is My Homeland to her nephew. It is what no one will ever find out. The past is what leaves behind no evidence of itself.
Jews from Łódź Ghetto boarding a deportation train, Łódź, Poland, August 1944. Reference 35BO3.
Courtesy Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem.
V
A WORD OF HONOR
THE TRANSPORT TO AUSCHWITZ
What was your work like in the ghetto?
In Łódź Ghetto we all had to work hard, right from the beginning when it was still quite well organized. The local Poles ironically called the ghetto’s many sweatshops resorty (Arbeitsresort), and those made huge profits for the Nazi officials who ran them. Our reward for the slave labor was miniscule food rations. Rudolf was a watchman. Initially, I wangled a job at a pharmacy where for several weeks they still had some medicine. Later I kept making rounds to visit the sick with a doctor who was from Prague and knew my parents. He had been my doctor when I was young, but now he was an old man. After a while there was hardly any medicine left, so he couldn’t help much. But he was very conscientious; he said when ill people see a doctor who looks after them, it makes them feel better. But even that didn’t last long, and I quickly had to find another job. To keep their heads above water, people had to work. And when they didn’t work they were taken away. There was a constant concern for the elders to be able to work as long as possible to keep themselves alive, otherwise they would be transported out. We had no idea then where they were taken, but all of them went to Auschwitz.
Hitler, Stalin and I Page 3