by Gerald Green
A survivor told me how it worked.
First, the Jews were lined up on the German side of the frontier, after they had disembarked from the train.
They were marched through muddy roads for several miles to the actual barrier. Some old people collapsed. Those who protested were beaten and clubbed.
My father, luckily, was in fairly good condition. He walked with Max Lowy, the printer, and Lowy’s wife, Chana.
When the red-and-white-striped barrier was visible, the SS guards halted the column. Everyone had to empty his pockets. They were allowed to take only ten marks with them.
“You stole this money from the German people, and now you will give it back. We reclaim the money in the name of the German people.”
Watches and jewelry were snatched from the Jews. My father was forced to surrender his fountain pen, his watch, his wallet. The SS guard stared at the caduceus in my father’s lapel—the serpent-and-staff of the physician. “What the hell is that?” he asked.
“I am a physician. It was a gift from my wife when I graduated from medical school.”
The SS man plucked it from his lapel. “The Polacks don’t care about doctors. They’re animals, almost as low as kikes.”
Somehow my father assumed the role of leader. Most of these Polish Jews were poor, uneducated people. They turned to him naturally in their ordeal. He led them through the snowy fields—it was a bitter-cold day—and across the barrier, as the Polish immigration guards and army officers in their oddly peaked caps inspected papers.
“Papers ready, proof of citizenship,” a captain shouted. “As if we need any more damned Jews.”
I look back on this incident—the contempt, the hatred of the Poles—and on later incidents, far more brutal, and I am left with a numb inability to comprehend it. The Poles were hated by the Germans almost as much as we were hated. Hitler made no secret of his plans for them. They were to be slaves, a notch above Jews in the Nazi table of organization. One might imagine a community of interest in the face of oppression. But no. No pity. No understanding.
When finally the full weight of the German army, the SS, the official murderers and torturers descended on Poland, the Poles still found the time and energy to hate Jews, to betray us, and to stand by idly, indifferent, as we were systematically destroyed. I cannot fathom it to this date. It was as if in the midst of a tough soccer game, some players on the losing side were to turn on their most weary teammates and begin to beat them.
After hours of waiting, inspections, questionings, the last group of Jews was allowed to walk on to Polish soil. At a road junction, relatives and friends of the expelled people had been waiting for days, shivering, terrified, uncertain if their loved ones would ever arrive.
Lowy and his wife tagged after my father. “You got family here, doc? Me and Chana—nobody.”
“A brother,” my father said.
And Moses was waiting for my father. He was a bachelor, my father’s brother, a quiet, contemplative man who once thought of studying for the rabbinate, but was forced by economic circumstances to take over my grandfather’s pharmacy in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.
The brothers looked at one another, but would not cry. My father had learned some of my mother’s reserve, her absolute calm and dignity. So the two men, who had not seen each other since Karl’s wedding in 1935, merely studied each other. Their breath formed clouds in the frigid air. Around them, people wept, embraced, gave thanks, cursed our enemies.
“So … you are here,” Moses said.
“Yes. Back to the homeland, as it were.”
“A pleasant journey, Josef?”
“Not quite the Orient Express. They kept shuttling us back and forth for eight days. I understand we are the last the Poles will let in.”
Suddenly the casual banter ended, and the two men embraced, weeping in each other’s arms. Moses, embarrassed—he carried timidity to the point of nonexistence, my mother used to say—dabbed at his eyes. “Dust. The curse of Poland.”
“In January, Moses?” my father joked. “Don’t be ashamed to cry.”
“I’m not ashamed. But tears serve no purpose. I suppose we must get moving. The Polish army refused to let us bring any transport here. Not even a wagon. It’s a mile walk to the rail station.”
The column of people picked up their bundles and bags and began to follow my father and my uncle. My father told him of our tragedies. Karl in prison. The office closed. He asked if his wife had been able to get a phone call through to Warsaw. When he saw my uncle hesitate, he knew that he had bad news of some kind.
“What is it, Moses?”
“Josef, the Palitzes are dead. The old people. They took their own lives.”
My father staggered, halted, gasped. Those decent old people. A man of enduring patience, always full of sympathy for the old, the ill, the poor, he found it impossible to comprehend such limitless brutality. He worried about my mother, about Anna and me, he told Moses later. And within him, a worm of doubt began to gnaw: perhaps things much worse were in store for the family he had left in Berlin. The suicide of the Palitzes was perhaps a portent, an omen.
They plodded on, through snowy fields, ice-packed roads. A few Polish peasants came out to stare at them. Once, an old man collapsed. My father attended him, pleaded with a Polish farmer to let him spend the night in the warm hut. The farmer refused. The man had to be carried to the station.
Moses tried to be optimistic. Things would get better. In Warsaw, he had arranged for my father to work on the staff of the Jewish Hospital. There was even a small apartment he could share, if my father didn’t mind living over a drugstore.
“I lived over one until I was nineteen, Moses.”
Moses had brought bread, sausage, cheese. They munched as they walked to the station, sharing what little they had with Lowy and his wife.
When my father introduced the Lowys to Moses, Lowy joked, “Some way for Jews to meet, on a dirt road in Poland. They don’t mark the way with kilometers, but with anti-Semites.”
Then he asked if he could come to Warsaw with them. He and his wife had no one. They were originally from Krakow, but their families were long gone.
“Look,” Lowy said. “No charity, not a cent. I’m a skilled workman. A printer. Look at my nails. Forty years of printer’s ink under them. But it would be nice if, at least, I could be with some folks I knew.”
“Warsaw is no paradise,” Moses said.
“I gave up on paradise long ago,” Lowy said. “I’ll settle for a bed and a cup of tea. And maybe some type to set, a press to run.”
Moses liked him at once. “Of course, Mr. Lowy. You will come with me and my brother.”
And so they trudged along, weary, bone-cold, unwanted, to the train for Warsaw.
By August 1939, my mother, Anna and I had been living in Karl’s studio for some months. Inga, forever generous and caring, had moved into her parents’ apartment, adjacent to us. She slept in Hans’ bed. He was off on maneuvers somewhere in the east.
In the studio, we had moved aside Karl’s easel and his paint table, and stacked his drawings and canvases behind the closet. My mother and Anna shared the couch. I had located an old bedroll I had used on camping trips and I slept on the floor.
From the house on Groningstrasse, my mother had salvaged more than enough kitchen equipment, hardware and such things as lamps and rugs to make it reasonably comfortable if crowded. She had also, wisely, been withdrawing money from the various bank accounts for several years, and before my father left, he had revealed to her that he had been keeping a great deal of his income in cash. So for the time being we could support ourselves.
The neighborhood was a Christian working-class section, and we tried to be seen as little as possible. Inga volunteered to shop for us. The worst thing was the terrible boredom.
Sometimes I would kick a soccer ball by myself in the nearby park, or run a few miles to keep in shape, but I was restless, impatient, and to be truthful, a bit frightene
d. I did a lot of the cooking and cleaning up in the small studio. There’d been a girl I’d dated in high school. Once I tried to find her; her family had disappeared. No one would tell me where they had gone.
It was not an easy life, but we knew that many Jews had it much worse—including my brother Karl. There seemed no future for us, no way out. That is what frightened me, although my mother maintained her usual calm. I can see her clearly, tying her apron, pushing back a strand of graying hair as she started to chop vegetables for our evening meal—soup made with a few neck bones. We’d traveled a long way down since those fine dinners at the old house.
If my mother was terrified, or brimming with sorrow, she managed to conceal it most of the time. She was no wailer, no breast beater. But I did see a change in Anna. Once a spry, vivacious and aggressive girl, she now lapsed into silences, sulked, and would not respond to my teasing. “I hate it here,” she said to me—almost every morning, when we rose to take our turns in the small bathroom, and look for ways to use up another day.
One day Heinz Muller called on the Helms family. He was now a sergeant in the SS, what branch I was not certain. Inga had told us that he had once hoped to marry her and had asked her father for her hand. She detested him. Muller was delighted that my brother—his rival—was now in prison, but he had to tread carefully in Inga’s presence.
It was a hot summer’s day, and the door to the Helmses’ apartment was open, as was ours. Voices drifted in, as I lay on the couch reading the sports pages for the eleventh time.
Inga was pleading with Muller to find out for her where Karl had been taken. We knew that many of the Jews arrested after Kristallnacht had simply vanished. Some had been murdered, executed on fake charges.
“I’m only a sergeant,” Muller said. “I can’t poke my nose into the files.”
“But to find out where he is—”
Her father broke in. “Inga, Muller can’t stick his neck out for—”
“Say it, Papa. My Jewish husband.”
Muller hemmed and hawed, then said, “I suspect he’s in Buchenwald, a civilian prison. They sent most of them from Berlin there.”
“Can I write to him? Can I see him?”
“I’m not sure. They’re tough about it. A letter, maybe. But my advice is … forget about it. Leave him alone. Your father is right, you do yourself no good.”
“Sound advice,” Helms said.
Then her mother: “Muller’s right, darling. Maybe it was for the best.”
“When I think of that fancy mother of his, with her airs, and that doctor—a lousy Polish Jew is all he was,” Helms added.
“Stop!” Inga cried. “You have no shame! I won’t let you talk this way about my husband!”
They were silent for a while, just some low-voiced grumbling from her father and her mother’s whine.
There was an abiding quality of strength and justice in Inga. That combined with her love of Karl, made her a formidable woman. A word about how they met may explain this better. Karl was a student at the art school, as I have mentioned, where Inga, a pretty, very “Aryan” girl, worked as secretary to the director. When the employees of the school—clerks and teachers—asked for salary raises and were refused, it was Inga Helms who led the petition-signing, the meetings, the plans for a strike.
Karl remembered seeing her getting up at such a meeting and demanding that they be prepared to close down the school if necessary. No, she said, she was no Red, no Socialist, had little interest in politics. But she knew what was right. The teachers—all sensitive party people—listened to her. (The strike was forbidden, but their salaries were raised.)
She had this rare quality one finds in some people—a built-in, almost biologically fixed sense of justice. After the strike meeting, Karl, shy, often tongue-tied, saw her leaving by herself. He decided she had no boyfriend and invited her to have coffee with him. They fell in love almost at once. Karl told me that for all her humble background, she had an intense understanding of people, of motives, and spoke well.
She protested she was only a secretary, and knew nothing about art, could not discuss Picasso or Renoir with him. Karl had laughed. He was emboldened to take her hand when he walked her home. “You need remember only one thing,” he said. “A critic named Berenson said it. ‘The purpose of art is to enhance life.’” Impulsively, she kissed him. There was no doubt that they would marry someday.
I recalled these traits in Inga, as I heard her father’s loud voice. “It’s we who have the right to be angry! You married one, and then you take their goddam family in! Living next door to us!”
“Be silent!” Inga cried.
Muller sounded calm, like a family counselor. “Bad business hiding Jews. You can get hurt.”
“Muller, I beg of you,” Inga persisted. “Can I send him a letter? Can he buy his way out? What can you do for me?”
“Buy? I’ve heard of rich Jews doing it now and then—for a king’s ransom. But a poor artist like your husband, never.”
“Help me. Please, help me.”
And her father: “Muller, don’t go sticking your neck out for her, or for that Jew she married. It’s bad enough we got them living next door.”
“I am disgusted with all of you!” Inga cried.
Now her father was raging. Like all weaklings, he lost his temper, enjoyed shouting at his children. “I want that Jew bitch out! And her brats also!”
“No! They are my family! And sometimes I think they are closer to me than any of you!”
I heard a door slam.
Muller was trying to pacify Inga’s father. “Well, can’t say she wasn’t warned. Beautiful Aryan girl, mixed up with them. Damn, if only you’d forced her to postpone the wedding. The Nuremberg Laws would have been passed, and the whole thing would have been illegal.”
“Muller … as an old friend,” Inga’s mother was saying, “you’ll say nothing about …”
“Your Hebrew in-laws? Not a word.”
In the studio, I was listening to the radio. Anna was doing homework. Now that she could not attend any public school, and all Jewish schools had been closed, my mother acted as a private tutor, giving her books to read, assignments to complete. I could have used some education myself; but I was too angry, too upset to learn. Besides, I’d never been much of a student.
On the radio, the announcer was quoting Hitler’s latest speech. The Führer’s patience was exhausted with the Poles. The Poles were being arrogant, quarrelsome, and they would have to answer to him. He warned England and France to stay out of it.
“Poland, you’re next,” Anna said.
I agreed. “It’s crazy. Nobody believes him when he says he’s going to do these things. I looked at some stuff in Mein Kampf once. Why didn’t anyone take it seriously? What he said about Jews, and Slavs?”
My mother was writing a letter, hopeful it would reach my father in Warsaw. It was a warm day, but she wore a shawl. She seemed to have turned gray, pale. “People deceive themselves when they’re frightened, Rudi.”
“Like us,” Anna said. “We’re as bad as those dumb politicians who give in to him all the time.”
Inga appeared at the door and motioned to me. I got up from the window seat and stood in the vestibule with her.
“That pig Muller thinks Karl is in Buchenwald. I’m going there.”
“They won’t let you near him.”
“I’ll try. He is my husband, Rudi. He needs me.”
“Did Muller say he had any chance of being freed?”
“No. But I’m going anyway.”
I looked at her long, pretty face. I had to admire her. She could have divorced Karl, ignored him, fallen back on her Aryan status to save herself all this heartache.
“I’m going to go away also,” I said.
“With me?”
No, I told her. I could do my mother and Anna no good hiding in the flat. Or could I? I was the man of the family now. But I told Inga that I was convinced we would all be arrested, deported
. There was still a Jewish Council of sorts in Berlin, but it was quieter and quieter every day; we were isolated, under siege. I said I would never let anyone take me. At least they would not take me alive.
Her eyes looked into mine, as if to say, “The way Karl went?” But she did not utter the words, and I was sorry for my foolish bravado. How did I know what I would do? I was no one to be bragging to her of my unproved courage. She had defied her family, married a Jew, stood by him. I asked her why.
“I loved him,” she said.
“It had to be more than that.”
“Respect, affection. Karl is gentle, he cannot hurt anyone. I saw too much bloody fighting in the streets—right in this neighborhood. Reds, Nazis, all of them. And my father coming home bloodied, tenants in this building screaming, battling. Karl was a revelation to me. I did not know there were people who did not understand cruelty, violence. So what if he was a Jew? I have always been my own master.” She smiled. “Rudi, I am an old hand at running away. I ran away twice when I was a child—to get away from this awful place. But I didn’t get very far.”
I asked her if she would think I were a coward if I left my mother and Anna. She thought a moment and said no. She would look after them; a better protector than me. I’d be marked, picked up sooner or later.
I recall this conversation now, and I wonder whether I should have stayed. Tamar says it was the wisest decision I ever made. I could not have saved Mama and Anna from what happened to them. I would have become nothing more than another victim.
Inga and I walked into the studio.
“What were you two talking about?” asked my mother. “Did I hear you mention Karl?”
“No, Mama,” Inga said.
Anna looked up from her book. “I wish Karl were here. And Papa. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were all together.”
“Papa is fine,” my mother said. “His last letter said things were not that bad in Warsaw.” I barely concealed my anger with her blindness. Things were dreadful in Poland. “Papa is busy at the hospital. He’s the associate chief of medicine, and widely respected in the Jewish community.”