A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (6 page)

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 him 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.