A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Until my father got a job as a cook’s helper in the Schutzpolizei kitchen outside the ghetto, we had very little to eat. During those early days, food could still be bought from the outside. The more prosperous Jewish families lived relatively well compared to us, since we had hardly any money, even after my mother sold almost all her jewelry. In his new job, my father would return home every evening with a large canteen of food. He usually hid pieces of meat under the mashed potatoes and vegetables he was allowed to take with him. By midafternoon each day, my mother and I would already be waiting for him and our one good meal. From time to time, we were invited by wealthy families in the neighborhood to join them for a Sabbath meal. I remember looking forward to these dinners because of the food. But I also dreaded them because they were always preceded by what seemed to me to be interminably long prayers.

  Soon, I too found a way to get some food and on rare occasions even a little money. Because religious Jews are not allowed to work on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays, they may not perform most household chores on those days, including lighting ovens and fireplaces and turning on lights in their homes. These chores had in the past been performed by non-Jewish servants or Poles hired for that purpose. When these people were no longer allowed to enter the ghetto, I was asked by some of our neighbors, who knew that we were not observant Jews, to perform these functions. That is how I became a Shabbat goy (a Sabbath gentile). I liked doing these chores, not only because I was paid for them but also because in that way I got to know many families in the neighborhood and was able to see what their homes looked like and how they lived. I was fascinated by the appearance of the very orthodox Jews — their long payess (sideburn locks), their tzitzit (cloth fringes), their black hats and caftans, as well as the talaysim (prayer shawls) and the tefillin (phylacteries) they wore on their arms and foreheads when praying. But the majority of the people in the ghetto were not orthodox and dressed just as we did.

  Once all Jews had been moved into what became the Ghetto of Kielce, the area was surrounded by walls and fences and guarded by Jewish and Polish police as well as the Schutzpolizei. There were many children in our neighborhood, and I soon had lots of friends. In those early days, some Poles were still allowed to come in, mostly to sell vegetables, milk, and firewood. When winter came, Polish farmers would enter the ghetto with their horse-drawn wagons to sell firewood, which was very expensive. We kids would wait for them and jump on the backs of the wagons, hoping that the drivers would not see us before we had a chance to grab some of the wood and run off with it. If a driver saw us, he would try to slash at us with his long whip. Sometimes he would succeed, despite the avoidance techniques we developed over time. Besides needing the wood, we had a lot of fun playing this game, particularly since our parents, while not approving of our wagon jumping, were always pleased to get the few pieces of wood we brought in.

  Another game I remember playing with my friends was hiding in the empty field behind our apartment complex. There, from time to time, we could watch the Polish peasant women urinate in a standing position, with their legs spread out but without lifting their long skirts. At some point we would whistle or bang on a can in the hope of startling them and making them change their stance — with the predictable results. We would then run away laughing, while the women would hurl terrible Polish curses at us.

  Once, two of my friends and I found a leather box of tefillin used by religious Jews in their prayers. Somebody had told us never to open such a box, that it was a sin to do so, and that God would strike down anyone who took out the little piece of parchment it contained, with its Hebrew inscription from the Torah. But we had also heard that if you found that piece of parchment and put it under your armpits, you would be able to fly. Well, we had quite a dilemma on our hands: we wanted to be able to fly but were afraid of God’s wrath. Eventually, and with trembling hands, we cut open the box, expecting lightning to strike us right then and there, but nothing happened. At this point, one of the older boys very cautiously placed the parchment under his arm and readied himself for takeoff. Again nothing happened. Then, one after the other, we each tried the same maneuver. The result was the same. Disappointed but still afraid of God’s punishment, we threw the box away and promised not to tell anyone what we had done.

  In Poland, the expression Yekke, a somewhat derogatory term of ridicule, was applied by Polish Jews to German Jews who spoke no Yiddish or Polish and who, because of their appearance or demeanor, were thought by many Polish Jews to look more like gentiles and to be naive in matters of business. To Polish Jews, my mother was a Yekkete (a female Yekke), and when she and I walked down certain streets, we were frequently called Yekkes by the children in those neighborhoods. Once, while walking alone on one of the streets where I had previously been with my mother, I was surrounded by a group of boys my age and somewhat older. They began to push me around, made fun of my clothes, and kept calling me “Yekke putz, Yekke putz,” the latter being a bad word I had been told never to use. I managed to run away but promised vengeance. My opportunity arrived soon, when a few days later I saw a boy walking with his mother on our street and recognized him as one of my tormentors. I raced up behind him, gave him a push with all my might, and ran away. He fell and cut his lip. When his mother saw the blood, she began to scream and wail, hurling vile Yiddish and Polish curses at me, my family, and my descendants. I could hear her from the far side of our courtyard where I was hiding. My mother was very mad at me when she heard what I had done, and told my father. I expected to receive a severe spanking, but after hearing the whole story, he said that it was good that I was learning to defend myself, and while he did not approve of my hitting the kid from the back, it was too late to do much about it.

  Soon life in the ghetto became increasingly more difficult and dangerous, and our games began to give way to fear that kept us off the streets. There was one German — I no longer know whether he was from the Gestapo or the Schutzpolizei — who would come into the ghetto and randomly kill people as he walked down the street. He would walk up behind them, shoot them in the back of the neck, and move on. News that he had entered the ghetto would spread like wildfire, and in no time at all the streets would be deserted. I once saw him from a distance and ran home as fast as I could. After that, I was afraid to play in the street and no longer thought that our courtyard was safe.

  As time went on, the Germans would, with ever greater frequency, conduct so-called razzias, or raids, in the ghetto. As a rule, these raids would begin with a contingent of heavily armed soldiers driving up to a house. They would storm inside, pull people out, and drag them into their trucks. Anyone who resisted was kicked and beaten. Some people were shot on the spot. Once, when I heard a lot of noise in our courtyard, I ran to the window and saw Germans pouring into the building across from us. Minutes later, I heard terrible screams coming from one of the apartments there. It served as a chaydar (religious school) as well as the living quarters of the rabbi, who taught a few children there in violation of the prohibition against teaching. The rabbi’s wife and grown daughters were made to undress and stand naked in the courtyard while the rabbi, his hat knocked off his head, was dragged out of the house by his beard and taken away.

  At other times, the Gestapo or the Schutzpolizei would drive into the ghetto, randomly grab men with beards, and order them to cut off each others’ beards and sidelocks. Those who resisted were severely beaten. The soldiers seemed to be enjoying themselves. They would laugh a lot and make fun of their victims, who were shaking with fear and pleaded to be allowed to keep their beards. Jews also had to doff their hats when encountering a German soldier on the street. If a Jew did not do so, the Germans would knock his hat off and beat him. But if he did, they would frequently also beat him, yelling, “Why are you greeting me, you dirty Jew? I am not your friend!” My father solved this problem by never wearing a hat, not even on the coldest days of those terrible Polish winters. “Why give them the pleasure?” he would say when people called hi
m a Meshoogene (crazy man) for not wearing a hat.

  Every so often, we heard that this or that community leader or some other person had been picked up by the Gestapo, never to be seen again. My father and mother would discuss these events in whispered tones. Then I would hear one of them say that the victims must have been denounced to the Gestapo by our own people and that one had to be very careful what one said and to whom. “Yes, the walls have ears,” one of them would invariably say, and while I did not quite understand what that expression meant, I soon learned not to tell anyone what I heard in our apartment or in those of our neighbors, where my father and mother and their friends would gather in the evenings to talk and share some vodka that someone had been able to find.

  Not long after the ghetto was established, the Jewish community council put my father in charge of the office that allocated living quarters to the many people who had been moved into the ghetto. He did not really want that job since it put an end to the food he brought home from the police kitchen, but he felt that he could not refuse. The previous head of that office had been dismissed because of mismanagement and allegations of widespread corruption in the assignment of apartments. Not long after he took this job, my father threw two men out of our apartment. My father was very angry, and I later heard him tell my mother that the men had tried to bribe him with a lot of money to assign them a bigger apartment. That prompted my mother to ask why he did not get us a bigger apartment now that he had that power. My father just looked at her, shaking his head in disbelief; we continued to live in the same little place assigned to us when we first arrived in Kielce.

  After bringing some order to the ghetto housing office, my father was put in charge of the Werkstatt, or workshop, which resembled a small factory. Here tailors, shoemakers, furriers, hatters, and other artisans had to work for the Gestapo and Schutzpolizei, performing whatever tasks they were ordered to do. For the most part, they made clothes and shoes for the officers and their wives. The Werkstatt was just outside the ghetto walls, which meant that my father and all those who labored there had permits to leave the ghetto to go to work.

  Not long after my father became the head of the Werkstatt, my parents found out that my maternal grandparents had been deported from their home in Göttingen, Germany, to the Ghetto of Warsaw. How they got that news I do not know, but I remember my parents talking day and night about my grandparents and what could be done to bring them from Warsaw to Kielce. At some point I heard my father say, “I’ll talk to one of the officers of the Schutzpolizei. His wife has a big appetite for the fur coats we have been making for her; he also seems to be more human than the others.” Not long after, my grandparents arrived in our ghetto. To me it was a miracle, the nicest thing that had happened to us in years. My mother was very, very happy, and I finally had grandparents like some of my friends.

  Thomas’s grandmother, Rosa Blum-Silbergleit

  My grandparents were provided with a room in a house not far from where we lived. I would visit them daily and hear wonderful stories about my mother when she was a young girl, about her brother, Eric, who lived in America, and about their life in Göttingen before the Nazis came. They had seen me a few times when I was just a baby, but as far as I was concerned, this was my first meeting with them. Visiting them was to enter another world, a world far removed from the ghetto, one full of love and tranquility. Here, I felt safe and protected. The stories they told me about the past and the future transported me into a world in which all people lived in peace and where being a Jew was not a crime.

  The two families we were closest to in our apartment house were the Friedmanns and the Lachses. They were related to each other and still lived in their prewar apartments, one floor below us. My father and mother would often be guests in their homes, and I would play there with their children, Ucek and Zarenka, who were cousins. Zarenka was about four years old; Ucek must have been a year or so older. When I asked why the Friedmanns and the Lachses always had good food, I was told that they were rich and that when the war was over, we too would be rich again and have all the food we could eat. It was not easy for me to understand why we had to wait for the end of the war to be rich, but I kept these thoughts to myself.

  One morning in August 1942, while it was still very dark, we were awakened by loud honking, repeated bursts of gunfire, and announcements over loudspeakers: “Alle raus, alle raus! Wer nicht raus kommt wird erschossen!” (“All out, all out! Whoever does not come out will be shot!”) The ghetto was being liquidated or, in the words bellowing out of the loudspeakers, “Aussiedlung! Aussiedlung!” (“Evacuation! Evacuation!”) People were screaming and crying all around us. My mother immediately began to pack some of our belongings, while pleading with my father to hurry up. He was standing over our kitchen sink, shaving very deliberately and telling my mother to be quiet. “Let me think!” I heard him repeat over and over again. It was all very eerie, and the noise outside was getting louder and louder. When my father finished shaving, he put away his straight razor, helped my mother pack a few more things, and told us to follow him. There was shooting all around us, with one or two gunshots at a time coming from some of the houses the Germans had begun to search. When they encountered sick or old people who could not leave, they would simply shoot them on the spot and move on. We were the last family to come out of our building, just ahead of the marauding German death squads.

  Thomas’s grandfather, Paul Silbergleit

  Our courtyard was crowded with our neighbors, who were trying to get away from the soldiers and their incessantly barking dogs that seemed to be trained to attack when their handlers yelled “Jude!” (“Jew!”) My father pushed through the crowd, trying to lead us out of the courtyard with his Werkstatt pass in hand. Whenever he recognized one of his workers, he would urge them and their families to follow him. Gradually, some twenty to thirty people joined our group.

  Along the way, we tried to find my grandparents, but they were nowhere to be found. I never saw them again. To this day, I can still see them — their smiles when I entered their little apartment — and the feeling of peace and happiness their embraces and kisses brought me.

  As my father led us toward the ghetto wall and the entrance to the Werkstatt, we were stopped again and again by heavily armed soldiers, who would yell and point their guns at us in a most threatening manner. That was very scary. There was still a lot of shooting all around us. Dead people were lying in the streets, and we could not be sure that the German patrols we encountered would not shoot us as well. As soon as we were stopped, my father would inform the soldiers, in roughly the same tone of voice as they used when addressing us, that he was under strict orders by the commandant of the city to protect the Werkstatt. We would then be allowed to continue. “Never show them that you are afraid of them,” I remember my father telling me time and again.

  When we reached our destination, my father locked the gate and told everyone to settle down for the day. The shooting continued all around us for much of the afternoon. After a while, some men in our group pleaded with my father to let us march out “before they come in and kill us all for disobeying orders.” He would have none of it and insisted repeatedly that our chances for survival were much greater if we remained in the Werkstatt until things had calmed down in the ghetto.

  We stayed in the Werkstatt a few more hours. Had we wanted to, we could have escaped from there into the Polish part of the city, but without false papers and a lot of money we would soon have been caught and most likely executed. So we remained in the Werkstatt until the shooting had died down. At that point, my father decided that the time had come for us to move out. Once again, we were stopped repeatedly by German patrols. My father would inform them that he was under orders to bring the workers of the Werkstatt to the officer in charge of the evacuation. We would then be allowed to continue on our way to a large square.

  Along the way, we passed a group of German soldiers. They had surrounded two young Poles who were on their knees, pleading
for their lives. Next to them were two sacks with part of their contents strewn around. One of the Poles was wearing the whitest shoes I had ever seen. The soldiers were kicking the young men and yelling that looting was punishable by death. Then they shot them. For years afterward, whenever I saw or heard that someone had been shot, it would invariably revive memories of that terrible scene — the young man on his knees, and those white shoes.

  As we approached the square, we could see a group of Gestapo and Schutzpolizei officers facing a large crowd of ghetto inmates, all pleading to be allowed to cross over to the other side of the yard, where the people were standing who had been selected to remain in Kielce after the liquidation of the ghetto. As we entered the yard with my father in the lead, the commandant of the Schutzpolizei, who was a frequent customer at the Werkstatt, recognized my father. “We need him,” he exclaimed, “he runs the Werkstatt!” and he motioned my father to the other side. My mother, holding on to me, followed. When a soldier tried to stop us, the officer motioned him to let us through. Once we were together, my father pointed to the group he had led out of the Werkstatt and told an officer that they were his workers. They too were allowed to join us.

  From a distance I could see Ucek and Zarenka, my little neighbor friends, standing in the square with their parents and the other people who were to be sent away. A short time later, as we were moving out of the courtyard, Mrs. Friedmann somehow managed to push Ucek and Zarenka toward my mother, their “aunt Gerda,” pleading with her to “save them, please save them!” The children ran over to us. My parents immediately moved toward the middle of our group in order to hide Ucek and Zerenka among the grown-ups. The two children cried silently as we left the square. My mother sought to console them by whispering that they would soon see their parents again. That was not to be, for all those who were forced to remain in that square and the others who had been evacuated earlier in the day, including my grandparents, were transported to Treblinka and killed on arrival in that extermination camp. In all, more than twenty thousand people — almost the entire Jewish community of Kielce — were massacred in that operation.