Born Survivors (10 page)

The prisoners of Łódź continued to exist like this from day to
day, sometimes from minute to minute, and certainly from meal to meal. Polish
zlotys
, Reichsmarks, or the Litzmannstadt ghetto money known as ‘Rumkies’ or ‘Chaimkas’ (in an early nod to Chaim Rumkowski), became largely meaningless as the only currency became food. Rations remained unpredictable, not least because the Nazis restricted deliveries whenever a fresh transport was imminent in order to wear down any resistance. They would then offer free meals to any who volunteered to be resettled elsewhere. For those who stayed, the daily calorie intake was also cut by two-thirds at a time when growing corruption meant that many supplies were being illegally diverted anyway.

Radegast station, Łódź, from where Rachel and 200,000 Jews were transported

Those worst affected by malnutrition, often barefoot and in rags, their bodies misshapen, were known as ‘hourglass’ people. It was common for these cadaverous souls with swollen bellies and legs to
take to their beds, eyes gleaming feverishly, and die within days. Epidemics of scabies, typhus and TB carried off hundreds more. As conditions worsened, an increasingly beleaguered Rumkowski vowed to keep the lamp of industry burning in the ghetto. In another speech, he promised, ‘I can’t save everyone so instead of having the entire population exposed to a slow death by hunger, I’ll save at least the top 10,000.’

With people collapsing in the street to be covered by swarms of blowflies in the summer or for the ice to claim them in winter, the need for food became all-consuming. Getting hold of even a few vegetable peelings or a rotten potato became an obsession in the ghetto.

Rachel, a young wife from a once wealthy and prominent family, was more fortunate than many because of their connections. But she still had to work – twelve hours a day in the office of a straw factory that made footwear for soldiers on the Russian front. These huge overshoes were so rigid that they were almost impossible to walk in but they protected Wehrmacht toes against frostbite. Three of her sisters worked in that factory too – even the youngest.

Beyond the ghetto walls, Rachel’s husband Monik continued to try to find ways to rescue his wife. Risking everything after escaping from Warsaw with his false papers, he travelled to Łódź to try to see her. ‘He thought I was too weak to live in that ghetto on my own, but he couldn’t get me out,’ Rachel said. ‘My brother Berek who was working in a nearby camp saw him going back and forth on the tram. In the end he risked his life and came through the barbed wire with the Germans all around just to be with me in the ghetto because he was sure I would have a better chance. He didn’t want to live through the war without me … so he came in to be with me.’

Giving up his opportunity to escape for ever, Monik moved in with Rachel’s family, into an already overcrowded room. His biggest problem was that he was now an illegal alien within a meticulously regimented Nazi system that didn’t feature his name on any of its
lists. Before the war Rumkowski had been a personal acquaintance of Monik’s mother Ita, so the family called in a favour. The ‘king of the ghetto’ told Monik that the only place nobody would ask questions about where he came from would be in a division of the Jewish
Sonderpolizei
or special police. He readily agreed and was put into quarters with the rest. ‘He did whatever they told him to do,’ Rachel said. Like all those fighting for survival under Nazi rule, he didn’t have much choice.

Monik also became a volunteer fireman with Rachel’s brother Berek in what had, by necessity, to be a self-regulating community with its own emergency services. Those who were lucky enough to get government posts such as theirs were billeted together in the police headquarters or the fire station, where they were slightly better fed. Then Rachel was allocated a small room to herself in an apartment on a nearby street. It was somewhere she could finally enjoy some privacy with her husband, whenever he was able to join her.

There were other surprises too. ‘Someone who was a representative from our company before the war took us to a big stockroom and helped us to some clothes and blankets – because we came with just the clothes on our backs.’ With the ghetto in the grip of winter and blizzards coating everything in deep layers of snow that lent even the most squalid streets a deceptive air of innocence, an extra blanket meant the difference between life and death.

Everyone did what they could to keep up morale by organising musical and cultural events. There were jazz bands and classical concerts, plays, and pantomimes for children. Sala – who’d danced and sung in amateur theatre productions since childhood and in the Pabianice ghetto – featured prominently in several of the performances. Education wasn’t forgotten either and in Rachel’s factory, teachers were employed alongside children to give them lessons while they all worked. ‘They taught them without books or papers, just by mouth, or by listening or spelling and telling them stories.’

From September 1942 until May 1944, the 75,000-strong workforce of
Judische Arbeitskräfte
(Jewish slaves) was so productive for the SS that it earned the ghetto a respite from transportations. But the tide of war was turning and Allied bombers now began to target German cities for the first time, including a mass bombing of Hamburg and the Ruhr industrial region that killed or injured thousands. Then in May, Heinrich Himmler – the second-most powerful man in the Reich – ordered the liquidation of the ghetto. In the next three months 7,000 Jews were sent to their death at Chełmno, but when the special death vans couldn’t keep up with the numbers, transports were switched to Auschwitz. The hapless ghetto postmen whose task it was to deliver the notices to those expected to report for a transport became known as ‘Angels of Death’.

With food in such short supply, there was a need to reduce the number of mouths to feed, so more of the remaining children and the elderly were put on trains to the unknown. By rights, the youngest of Rachel’s family should have been sent away then, but still they managed to keep safe behind their false wall. Then some of the able-bodied men were taken. Berek and Monik escaped that transport because of their roles within the police and the fire brigade, but they couldn’t protect their family much longer. There was nowhere left to hide.

For all those years, Rachel and her family had managed to remain together and evade capture. Then one day in August 1944, Berek – ‘the best brother in the world’ – a man who’d done everything he could to keep his family alive and together, visited his family to tell them the ‘good news’ that the transports had ended.

The authorities assured the firemen that the relatives of key workers would be saved. They just had to come out of hiding and assemble in Fire Station Yard so that the authorities could make a note of who they were and work out how many mouths they had left to feed. Like so much else in Łódź, though, the promise was hollow.

‘We were on our way back home from the fire station when guards dressed in SS uniforms caught us,’ Sala explained. ‘Mother
had stayed home with some of the young ones so I told one of the Germans, “My little sister Maniusia needs to run home and tell my mother that we’ve been taken.” I hoped she’d be able to hide with the rest of the family but Mother came hurrying back with them and so we all went together. We were taken to the trains. We didn’t talk. We didn’t know where we were going or what they were going to do with us. I was holding my little sister like a baby. Then they opened the doors of the wagons.’

Inside a goods wagon used to transport enemies of the Reich

Amongst some of the last Jews to leave the Łódź ghetto – which was the last of its kind in Poland – Rachel Friedman was twenty-five years old the day she was transported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on Monday, 28 August 1944. She hadn’t seen Monik for several hours and had no idea if he’d been seized for the same transport and was in another wagon, or whether he was hiding somewhere in the
ghetto. They were never given the opportunity to reassure each other or say goodbye.

Her brother Berek, who could have remained in Łódź as part of the special squad of seven hundred and fifty Jews designated to clear and recycle everything left behind, elected instead to go with his family. He was young and strong and knew that he could help their father Shaiah survive the worst privations of a hard labour camp. He almost managed it.

Accompanying them on some of the last trains out of the city that August night were Chaim Rumkowski, his wife, and three other members of his family. Some claimed he’d volunteered to go with the last deportees, hoping for the best. Every other ghetto in Poland had been liquidated by then and the ‘king’ of Łódź (whose forename was taken from the Jewish toast ‘To Life’) had, by whatever means, managed to keep his people safe for longer. His fate was either to die in the gas chambers to which he’d inadvertently sent thousands, or at the hands of other Jews who blamed him for the deaths of so many. Nobody can be certain.

Of the more than 200,000 people registered as living in the Łódź ghetto, less than a thousand survived. It was one of the Nazis’ greatest triumphs in the destruction of European Jewry. Herded into closed goods wagons like animals to the slaughter, Rachel and her family managed to stay together. Pressed against each other in a dark rear corner with very little space, no food and not a drop of water, they waited to find out where they were being sent. ‘We were all so scared and afraid to talk in those enclosed trains with not even a place to look out,’ she said. Without any privacy, the Jews of Łódź suffered together as the waste bucket in the wagon quickly overflowed and was then accidentally kicked over with a clatter; the spilled ammonia made their eyes water. Desperate for a little fresh air, they all realised they might have been better off if they’d stood closer to the slit of a window threaded with barbed wire.

By the time the train shuddered to a stop in Auschwitz, the children were crying and the elders praying. Breathing shallowly,
pressed together in the crushing darkness, they heard the metal clasps unlocked and then the doors slid open on their rollers with a bang, letting in a welcome blast of air. Spilling out of the wagon into dazzling searchlights, they were met with an insufferable din of yelling and were prodded and pushed into separate lines. That, they agreed, was the worst moment of all. ‘You don’t think. You don’t talk. You just go like an automaton,’ Rachel said.

Dr Mengele was on duty again that night, standing by the
Rampe
as his latest shipment was delivered. His wife Irene, the mother of his only son Rolf, had recently arrived to visit him in the camp – a stay that would last almost three months, as she was taken ill and had to remain in the well-equipped SS hospital for a time. During her visit, her husband told her that his work in Auschwitz was the equivalent of serving at the front and that his duties there had to be carried out with ‘soldier-like obedience’.

Whenever a transport came in, some of the officers of the special SS-
Totenkopfverbände
(‘Death’s-Head Units’), responsible for administration in the concentration camps, were overheard complaining about the quality of the ‘new stock’. Mengele rarely commented but instead looked each new prisoner up and down as he asked a few questions, sometimes quite kindly, before directing them to the right or to the left – to life or to death.

Rachel’s family was split up within minutes of their arrival. A wide-eyed Fajga clung to her three youngest children, the thirteen-year-old twins Heniek and Dora, along with ‘baby’ Maniusia, as they were shoved one way, while Rachel and her sisters Ester, Bala and Sala were pushed another. Huddled together as each group was marshalled forward, their heads swivelled anxiously on their necks as they tried to snatch a last look at their loved ones before being shouted back into line.

Shaiah Abramczyk, the sensitive, book-loving intellectual and inventor who’d encouraged his children to learn the language of the Reich, watched what was left of his beautiful family scattered to the Polish winds as he and Berek were forced into a group earmarked
for hard labour. ‘They were too far away,’ Rachel said. ‘There was no sign of my Monik. We didn’t see our mother with the younger children … We saw our father and he showed us with his fingers that two went through and one didn’t.’