by R. D. Rosen
Laura’s brother Manek was soon caught in the street without his Star of David and taken to an SS camp, but at least he was given a pass to return to the apartment at night. One evening he told the adults of watching two German soldiers beat two men for stealing a bar of soap, then bash their skulls against each other until their brains splashed against the wall. Another time, he reported that a soldier took a child by the ankles and swung him as hard as he could against a brick wall. The German was laughing. Atrocities Laura never before imagined had become her daily reality, like the potatoes and cabbage the family now subsisted on.
The Schwarzwalds were told to pack the few belongings that the Soviets and Germans hadn’t already taken, and they joined the rest of the city’s Jews in the Lvov ghetto in the Zamarstynow borough. Their new home was a single room that the family—Laura, her husband and daughter, her parents, her father’s parents, and her aunts and uncles—had to share with another Jew, a total stranger. Not a mile away, the Germans had already established, in a former factory, the Janowska forced labor and concentration camp for Jews destined for Belzec, the extermination camp near Lublin. In fact, Janowska itself became an extermination camp, where killing often took the form of entertainment. The SS officials there organized a prisoner band, instructed them to compose “The Death Tango,” and ordered them to play it during executions.
In a matter of weeks, the family’s comfortable life had been reduced to a meager existence of fear and chaos. Their only hope was to obtain false documents in the bustling market of Poles and Ukrainians who were getting rich selling their identification papers to the doomed.
Daniel started work as a security guard at a hostel for construction workers of the German military engineering group, Organisation Todt. At least it was a job that paid him in increasingly scarce food and work passes for him and Laura, who was permitted to remain in the apartment with their daughter, as his hausfrau. Laura’s two unmarried younger sisters, Adela (whom everyone called Putzi) and Fryda, were given jobs in a factory making military uniforms.
“Selections” continued, now right under their noses. One night Laura heard unfamiliar noises outside and got out of bed to see thousands of Jews, denied transportation, trudging to work on foot before dawn, many near collapse, a column of human despair shuffling along between lines of German soldiers prodding them with their rifles.
After a few weeks, the noise changed to the rumbling sounds of trucks carrying deportees to the concentration camps. The frightened Jews stood tightly packed in the open trucks, staring at the sky, searching for God, hoping for a miracle. Laura heard one man cry out loud, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. . . .” Then a woman took up the words that are supposed to be the last ones uttered by a Jew before death. Then the others joined in, like a demented congregation, their voices rising, unheard, into the gray sky.
In exchange for her diamond ring, Laura temporarily rescued her own parents from the Germans and arranged to hide them at her husband’s place of work. Life was now a lethal game of musical chairs, in which those who couldn’t find one of the diminishing number of places to hide were taken away, almost surely to their deaths.
The Schwarzwalds clung to each other on Janowska Street in the Lvov ghetto as the Germans shot 5,000 Jews who were elderly and sick, and therefore useless to them. In early spring 1942, 15,000 more Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were deported to the extermination camp in Belzec, not far from Lvov. In August, tens of thousands more were sent there. Another thousand orphans and sick Jews were shot dead. By September 1942, of the 100,000 Jews who lived in Lvov before the war, there were approximately 65,000 left, and they could only imagine what was happening elsewhere. Every morning the Jews of Lvov awoke to horrible news—that the nightmare was still real.
Laura learned that in the nearby town of Gorlice, Laura’s great-uncle had been made head of that ghetto’s Judenrat, or Jewish Council, the administrative organization made up of the community leaders, that the Nazis forced the Jews to form in every ghetto, under penalty of death, to facilitate their own deportation and extermination. This policy, used in the camps as well, put the decision of which Jews would live and which would die not in the hands of God, or even the Nazis, but of the Jews themselves. If the Nazis ordered the head of the Judenrat to produce 5,000 Jews at six in the morning to be deported, he had three choices. He could comply, comforting himself with the Nazis’ reassurance that deciding which Jews would live and which would die was preferable to all of them dying. He could refuse and be executed, along with who knows how many others for good measure. Or he could do what Laura’s great-uncle did. In Gorlice, the Nazis asked him to prepare lists of Jews to be “resettled.” He told them such an assignment would require serious thought, so that he could make sure the Jews left would be of the utmost use to them. “Come tomorrow morning,” Laura’s great-uncle said, “and I will have for you exactly what you want.” When the Nazis returned, they found him dead at his desk, a suicide.
Daniel was able to visit his family in the ghetto only occasionally, leaving Laura and Selma alone and at the mercy of the German soldiers, who three times came to their room and ordered them to be deported to the gas chambers at Belzec. Each time, Laura used her fluent German to persuade them to leave her and Selma alone.
On a fourth visit, the soldiers insisted she come with them, then changed their mind and asked for Selma only, saying that the Führer loved little children and would take good care of her. Laura knew full well how much the Führer loved Jewish children. She had heard Manek’s story, and she had already seen the piles of children’s corpses behind the fence at the Janowska camp, their blood having been taken for transfusions for soldiers at the Eastern Front. Incredible—the Nazis committing in reality the atrocity that Christians had been falsely accusing Jews of for centuries. Somehow she prevailed again, shooing Selma away, and the soldier softened. He even returned later, warning her that the roundup of Jews was finished for the time being, and that the next day it would be safe for her to go out and forage for food.
But how many times would she be so lucky? It was already too late for her grandfather Moses and her invalid grandmother Sarah, who had been carried off in a chair, loaded onto a truck, then thrown off it, and shot. A friend reported seeing her tiny corpse, like a dog’s, on the pavement. It was too late for her own parents, who had been discovered and deported to Belzec, where they too would be murdered. When the soldiers had come for them, her father hid, but as soon as he heard the cries of his wife he came out of hiding, saying he didn’t want to be separated, and so he too began the journey to the gas chambers. When Laura and her sister came home to an empty apartment, the building’s concierge told them, “The Nazis came for a cleaning.” Daniel’s family was now also gone. Laura’s family and her siblings were among the last of the clan in the ghetto, now a pitiful city populated mostly by ghosts, both living and dead.
The Schwarzwalds knew it wouldn’t be much longer before the Nazis closed in on them. The SS were clearing one ghetto block at a time—from the window Laura could see them herding Jews, friends and acquaintances among them—and soon it would be their turn. Laura found a platform under the roof of an adjacent house where they could hide at night, packed in like herrings with fifteen others, including an epileptic girl of thirteen who started to howl at the sound of German boots in the empty apartments below and had to be silenced with a pillow. Laura would toss Selma across a ventilation shaft to someone who caught her on the other side, then leap from a top-floor window of their building to the window of the next with a bag of food and a change of clothes for her daughter.
Meanwhile, her husband hid on the roof at work, pressed all night against the drainpipe.
The competition for Christian identification papers that roughly matched the Jews’ ages was intense and the price always climbing, but somehow Daniel succeeded first in purchasing authentic Christian birth certificates for his wife’s two younger sisters, Fryda and Putzi, who wou
ld now become Zofia Wolenska and Ksenia Osoba. Then he was able to purchase a marriage certificate for Laura and a birth certificate for Selma from a family named Tymejko.
The papers for her and her daughter were going to be delivered in two days. By now, Laura could barely summon an ounce of hope. She had become like a stone. She felt as if suffering no longer touched her. A human, apparently, could adapt to anything. In late August, while Daniel was at work, the paperman actually came, and the documents were hers—but only after, by sheer luck, she had gotten rid of an unexpected visitor who claimed that he had been promised them as well.
When her husband begged her to leave with Selma, she agreed. He would try his best to follow.
The family’s good fortune had run out, though; on the eve of their escape, Daniel found himself in the right place, but at the wrong time.
On September 1, 1942, the Germans ordered all remaining Jews to consolidate their living quarters in one section of the ghetto, and Daniel went to the Jewish Community House to see one of the Jewish Council members, his friend Dr. Katz, to ask him about finding a new place to live. The game of musical chairs was coming to an end.
Unknown to Daniel, a Jew had killed a drunken German soldier the day before, and the Nazis wasted little time retaliating with their customary brutality. While Daniel conferred with Dr. Katz on the second floor, the Nazis surrounded the council building with MG-42 machine guns, a weapon so effective—it could shoot a fifty-round belt in a matter of a few seconds—that it would still be in use seventy years later. SS men stormed the Jewish Council building and forced dozens of Jews outside, where they were instantly mowed down. The SS men then stomped up the stairs and cornered the members of the Jewish Council and the other Jews with them.
Word of the Aktion spread quickly inside the ghetto. Laura left Selma with her sister Fryda and headed immediately to the Jewish Community House. Laura wouldn’t tell anyone for many, many years what she saw that afternoon, although by then a grisly photograph of it had begun to appear in photographic histories of the Holocaust. There were no signs of life around the building, but six perfectly spaced corpses hung from the second-floor balcony, dangling like a row of marionettes in a toy store.
When Laura saw the dead council members, some of whom she knew, twisting slowly in their nooses, she clutched her stomach and turned away. When she turned back, she didn’t see Dr. Katz or her husband among them, and this gave her hope. But she didn’t dare advance any farther to investigate. To associate herself with any of the dead men would be suicide. The corpses would remain hanging there for weeks.
Before the day was over, she learned that Dr. Katz had managed to jump out of a second-story window and hide in a cobbler’s workshop nearby. He was still alive and reunited with his wife. But Daniel? No one knew for sure.
That night, still hopeful, Laura waited for her husband’s return. By morning, her hope had evaporated. If he were alive, she knew, surely he would have gotten word to her. Unless he had been captured, or was hiding in the forest. But false hope was something she couldn’t afford. She resigned herself to the likelihood that her husband was gone, Daniel, the man about whom Laura had once written her cousin Tonka in Tel Aviv, “Danek is sweet, loving; I love him with all my heart as a husband, a lover, a friend. Everybody at home is very attached to him and he to them. Grandma never takes her eyes from him. They made out fine with such a son-in-law.”
Laura still had her daughter and siblings; the others were gone.
The day after the Aktion, September 2, 1942, was Selma’s fifth birthday, but there was no party, and no presents, unless her mother’s soothing lie counted; she had quickly concocted the fiction that her father was working for the Russians for a while and would return someday.
But Selma wasn’t soothed. After listening to the sound of German boots like gunfire on the cobblestones outside and sometimes on the stairwell, she had felt safe only when her father got home from his job in the evening and she could run to him and hug his legs—even when he still worked in the bakery and would be covered in flour. He was blond and had gray-green eyes, just like she did, and she wanted him back. Now.
Selma curled up on a makeshift cot and sobbed into her pillow as Laura watched, berating herself for saying the Russians had taken him. Had there not been a softer lie to tell her, something that promised her father’s quicker return, something to get the little girl through these days? Did it even matter, anyway, since they would all be dead soon? Laura comforted her daughter as best she could, but who would comfort her? Only her daughter stood between her and serious thoughts of suicide, which would be so much easier than living another day.
Only God knew what was going on in her daughter’s head, but her mother saw how quiet she had become, how she endured each new terror in silence. Every once in a while, bright images of their old life peeked through the darkness to torture Laura—her grandparents’ Shabbos dinners, the sight of Daniel working on timber-export numbers late at night, how Selma reacted to her first taste of orange—but she would shoulder them away. Look, she thought, look what history has done to us. Would her little girl ever know that not far away Jews were digging their own graves and waiting for the bullet to the base of the skull?
Later that night, the night of Selma’s fifth birthday, Laura met with her brother Manek and her two sisters, Putzi and Fryda, and they decided to escape with the false papers that had been Daniel’s last gifts to all of them. They decided that Putzi and Fryda would leave first for Kraków by train, after which Laura and Selma would follow a few days later, and finally Manek. There was nothing to lose.
That Putzi was even still alive to make a run for it was itself a miracle. Group by group, the young Jewish women she worked with making military uniforms for the Germans had been taken away and deported until there was only one group left—Putzi’s. When the SS men came for them, Putzi ducked down behind her machine, slid to the floor, and held her breath. Somehow the Germans didn’t notice. After they marched the other women away, Putzi remained on the floor, alone and trembling, waiting all night for them to come back for her, but they never did. In the morning, she snuck out of the factory and made her way home. For the rest of her life, she would suffer from guilt that she alone had survived.
Even before the papers had arrived, when acquiring Catholic identities looked like it was going to be their only hope, Laura had started reading the catechism to Selma. Before they had been moved to the ghetto, Laura’s Christian landlady, the wife of a university professor who had been taken by the Russians, had given her a Polish Catholic catechism and a New Testament and tried to convince her to leave Lvov as soon as possible. She even suggested the family move to a resort town, a place where people were always coming and going anyway, where the locals were accustomed to strangers. She assured Laura that becoming a Catholic would be relatively effortless. She would have to go to church, but only occasionally, and merely watch what the others were doing. She might even see its many advantages over Judaism.
“My children are not happy with me for wanting to help you,” her landlady had told her. “What can I do? I can’t take a chance that they would report me to the Germans. But, you see, that is what it is like now, Laura. I cannot protect you, but I can give you advice on how to protect yourself. So take this Bible and the catechism”—she made the sign of the cross on Laura’s forehead—“and may Jesus Christ be your savior.”
She had not taken the woman’s advice, but she had taken the books and, thinking ahead, had been quietly preparing her five-year-old daughter for Catholicism. Laura’s greatest fear now, on the eve of their attempted escape, was no longer death—what was death to a stone?—but that Selma would inadvertently betray them all if she raised the slightest suspicion that she was a Jew.
“Tell me the five church commandments,” Laura would whisper to Selma at bedtime in their ghetto room.
“I don’t know, Mama.”
“You do know. The first commandment begins, ‘On Sundays and ho
ly days of obligation . . .’”
“Please, Mama.”
“‘On Sundays and holy days of obligation,’ you must what?”
Her daughter sighed. “Attend Mass and re—and re—”
“Refrain.”
“—refrain from unnecessary work.”
“Good girl. Now the next one: ‘At least once a year’—what?”
“I’m hungry, Mama.”
“Zula,” her mother said, using her pet name.
“At least once a year, the sacrament of penance.”
“Now the third commandment, the one about the Easter season.”
“At least once a year during the Easter season, I must take the Holy Communion.”
Laura kissed her hard on the forehead. “You’re such a good girl! What about the fourth commandment?”
In the last couple of days before the two of them were to set out into the world as Bronislawa and Zofia Tymejko, Laura’s drilling intensified—and that wasn’t all.
“I’m giving you a special name today,” she told her. “To be safe, so that nothing bad happens to me and you, I will call you Zofia. Zofia Tymejko. That is your new name. My new name is Bronislawa Tymejko.”
“That’s not a very nice name.”
“Which one?”
“Yours is not as nice as Laura.”
“That’s all right, Zula, because you call me Mama. You must always call me Mama, do you understand? But if someone asks you my name, what do you say?”
“I say your name is Bronislawa.”
“Very good. Bronislawa what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tymejko. Tymejko.”
“Tymejko.”
“So what is my name now?”
“Bronislawa Tymejko.”
“Very good. Who is Laura Schwarzwald?”
“That’s you too.”
“No!”
Selma flinched.
“That is no longer my name! That person doesn’t exist anymore. You mustn’t ever say that again. When someone asks you who your mother is, or what her name is, what do you say?”