Born Survivors (7 page)

‘I married a very rich man and I didn’t have to work,’ Rachel admitted. ‘We lived better than other people.’ They deliberately didn’t start a family straight away, as they wanted to enjoy each other’s company and do whatever they could to help develop the business. Besides, Rachel had experienced quite enough of babies for a while.

Łódź, which had a chequered history of Prussian, German and Polish ownership, was one of the most densely populated industrialised cities in the world. An imposing metropolis with grand buildings, Parisian-style boulevards and beautiful public spaces, it had Poland’s second-largest Jewish community after Warsaw, comprising over thirty per cent of the almost one million population. The rest were Polish Gentiles and a few minority Germans. With an estimated 1,200 textile businesses and more than two million spindles employed in manufacturing, Łódź had become the jewel of Poland’s trading empire during the Industrial Revolution and a magnet for skilled workers.

There was much more for Rachel and Monik to do in cosmopolitan Łódź than there ever had been in Pabianice. Without chores or studies, Rachel was also able to focus on her fundraising while the Friedman family discussed opening another factory in Warsaw, one hundred and thirty kilometres away, where they already had an apartment. Their plans were stalled by world events, however. When Adolf Hitler annexed Austria and threw out all the Poles it became clear that the German Chancellor could no longer be ignored. After
Kristallnacht
they knew his threats were genuine. As
Jews across Germany, Austria and Sudetenland panicked and prepared to flee, Rachel and Monik also considered getting out while they could. They were Zionists, after all, and many of their friends were leaving for Palestine. But what would they do in the Levant, so far from their loved ones? How and where would they live in such a hot and hostile Middle Eastern climate?

Tempting as escape from extreme Nazi politics seemed, Hitler and his fanatics were still some distance away and the hope was that he would be satisfied with what he’d already seized. Even if his influence did stretch as far as Poland, the family thought that only religious Jews would be targeted, not wealthy assimilated ones such as they.

After much deliberation, Rachel and Monik chose to stay in their mother country. They looked German and spoke German. They were better off financially than most and had many Gentile friends. Until shiny black jackboots were marching through their city they didn’t think they were personally at risk. As Rachel said later, ‘The Nazi brutality didn’t surprise me at all. The one thing I never expected was that they would be German.’ Besides, the couple couldn’t imagine that they’d find a better life than the one they already had. The thought was that, whatever happened – even if they lost property – they would ‘muddle through’.

Those hopes were dashed when the Nazis invaded Poland in a
Blitzkrieg
at dawn on 1 September 1939, showing off their massive military superiority. Infantry invaded across the northern and southern borders and there were multiple bombardments, including an aerial attack on Wieluń, just over an hour from Pabianice, which destroyed ninety per cent of the city centre with the loss of 1,300 civilian lives. Entire communities fled on bikes, on foot or on carts, praying that the Polish army might halt the German advance. Many crossed the borders to Romania, Lithuania and Hungary. Then Warsaw was pulverised by the Luftwaffe with aircraft targeting civilian as well as military targets. Tens of thousands of people were killed and many more injured.

Both Rachel in Łódź and her family in Pabianice heard the planes and ran to the shelters as sirens wailed warnings of fresh aerial attacks. By the time Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, it was too late for the couple to flee.

When the bombardment eventually stopped, Warsaw was placed under siege for three weeks until Polish forces finally capitulated and 100,000 prisoners-of-war were taken. The following day, 1 October 1939, German Panzer tanks rolled through the streets as the Wehrmacht occupied the city. Hitler later announced triumphantly, ‘The state to which England had extended its guarantee was swept from the map in eighteen days … the first phase of this war has come to an end and the second one begins.’ He assured his jubilant followers that Germany was now the greatest world power.

After the initial shock of invasion came the first waves of anti-Semitism. From day one, the two families realised that their ‘beautiful life’ was over. Poland was carved up between the Germans and the Soviets, neither of which was an appealing prospect. Forced labour was immediately imposed on all Jews aged between fourteen and sixty and many of the Polish Germans who’d enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s army suddenly became German again almost overnight, instigating a campaign of racism and public humiliation against those they’d secretly despised.

Men of the Hasidic sect especially were subjected to random violence on the hostile streets. They were often stopped and abused, beaten with rifle butts, had their beards cut off (or sometimes torn out at the roots), and were forced to scrub the pavements with toothbrushes or their prayer shawls. Many were hanged for no reason. Homes were looted and the windows of businesses and synagogues broken. All Jewish holidays were cancelled, and the Germans seized Jews for forced labour while preventing them from doing their skilled work in the textile industry. Those who escaped being snatched away were compelled to hand over virtually every possession and cash transactions were banned.

Thousands lost their livelihoods and most of their belongings within days of the invasion. Former neighbours joined forces to storm Jewish homes and rob them of whatever they wanted. They stole china and linens, paintings and furniture. They even tore wedding rings from fingers. All Jews had to wear first yellow armbands then yellow stars, conspicuous emblems of their separateness.

German was declared the official language of their part of Poland, and city and street names were altered: Pabianice became Pabianitz, Łódź was renamed Litzmannstadt after a First World War general, and when its main street was renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse, Rachel and Monik knew that the Germans were there to stay.

Using the considerable means at his disposal, Monik managed to acquire false papers asserting that he was a
Volksdeutsche
, an Aryan Polish German. With his fairer colouring and green eyes, this gave him status even among the Aryan Poles who looked set to become the ruling class. He acquired similar papers for Rachel, which allowed them to travel freely between Łódź and his family apartment in Warsaw. It also kept them immune from the increasingly restrictive measures now being imposed. Ironically – and if not for their devotion to their business and families – the couple could have moved somewhere far safer if they’d chosen to do so, and might well have been able to stay undetected for the duration of the war.

Rachel heard through friends that her beleaguered family in Pabianice was still alive but any direct contact with them would have given her away. She also heard that a ghetto for Jews was being prepared in a small area of its old town and that some had moved voluntarily, hoping for safety in numbers. The authorities claimed the ghetto was necessary to protect Jews from Aryan attacks and to stop them ‘collaborating with the enemies of the Reich’. They also said it was to keep them separate because of the risk of spreading the diseases that all Jews allegedly carried. In early 1940, Rachel’s family was among thousands from Pabianice and the neighbouring
countryside herded inside one of Europe’s first ghettos with the threat of execution if they attempted to cross its heavily guarded boundary.

Entire families were given just a few days’ notice and were only allowed to take bedding and a few belongings. By December 1940, the ghetto had grown from a few hundred inhabitants to approximately 8,000, squeezed into rooms or apartments allocated by the authorities. Luckily the Abramcyzks had friends who owned a property within the ghetto’s tight grid of cobbled streets and were offered one large room to share. It had a little furniture and a small kitchenette. Others were less fortunate and many families were separated or forced to share tiny living spaces with strangers in derelict warehouses or bleak apartment blocks. Most had no electricity or running water.

Under Nazi rule, all food and fuel provided to the ghetto had to be paid for with goods and services, so everyone had to work. According to the terms of the Economic Communities set up by the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council of Elders, one day’s work entitled them to one portion of soup, so unless they completed their shifts they faced starvation. Some people toiled in factories outside the perimeter of the ghetto while others laboured in their homes. Sala and her brothers Moniek and Berek worked in a factory that made clothes, uniforms and luxury goods. Fajga stayed home with her smallest children and Shaiah did what he could to provide food and make their home habitable. The family existed on pots of thin broth or stew and a little bread. They had to beg, scavenge or barter for extra vegetables and a little meat or eggs if they were lucky.

From 5 p.m. until 8 a.m. all the inhabitants of the ghetto had to remain within the confines of their homes, which were crowded and stifling in the summer. Without a working sewage system, people used wooden buckets that quickly overflowed and had to be emptied each day into stinking latrine tanks and mobile excrement wagons – wooden carts on wheels – that were pushed by the hapless
Scheisskommando
or ‘shit detail’.

Rachel’s family tried to make the best of their situation, praying that their ordeal would soon be over. They tried to keep morale up and kept telling each other, ‘Just one more week and then we can be people again.’ Weeks turned to months and still nothing changed. Everyone grew thinner and sicker as morale plummeted. Her sister Sala said, ‘They took away our pride and we did the best we could but we weren’t the same as before.’

By February 1940, a similar ghetto of approximately two and a half square kilometres was prepared for Łódź’s 164,000 Jews in the run-down Bałuty and Stare Miasto quarters. Rachel and Monik decided to get out while they could and relocated to their apartment in Warsaw with his mother and two brothers. Even though the Luftwaffe had ravaged much of the city, Warsaw was by then in an area of Poland placed under the administration of a German governor-general named Hans Frank and the couple hoped they’d be less conspicuous. ‘We didn’t expect the war to last more than two or three months and then it would be over,’ Rachel said.

They found the people of the capital extremely nervous. With refugees pouring in from all over the country seeking shelter, life was less easy than they’d hoped. More and more wooden carts pulled by men or horses arrived daily in the city, precariously overladen with all they could carry, pots and pans dangling from them noisily. Food was in extremely short supply and even with false papers there was the constant threat of arrest, or worse.

By April 1940, construction began on the walls of the proposed Warsaw Ghetto into which all of the city’s 400,000 Jews would eventually be squashed – making it the largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the ensuing months, widespread panic set in as people fled further east in the hope that they could escape to Palestine or somewhere safer. Rachel, Monik and his brothers also travelled to the border to investigate the possibilities. Along the route they encountered straggling lines of refugees taking with them whatever they could carry, all hoping for sanctuary in distant lands.

Monik’s widowed mother Ita had refused to leave her home, while her health had deteriorated still further since the Nazi invasion. Like many sons of his generation, Monik felt that his first duty was to his mother and that they’d be better off if they stuck together. When he and Rachel realised what a strange, nomadic life they would have to lead they knew that escape with Ita wasn’t feasible. ‘It was very hard,’ said Rachel. ‘Too hard for her – so we came back and decided to stay.’

By November 1940, all the Jews in Warsaw had been rounded up and forced into the ghetto. Any escapees were shot. Behind walls three metres high and topped with barbed wire, its hundreds of thousands inhabitants existed from day to day squeezed into an area of just 2.09 square kilometres. The Friedmans’ large apartment was already within the ghetto walls so, to begin with, little changed. ‘Life was almost normal,’ Rachel said. ‘We didn’t do much and we lived on my mother-in-law’s money.’ Food and other parcels were allowed in from outside and anyone with a supply of zlotys or Reichsmarks could buy luxuries on the black market. The months passed and life went on much the same, until the day when the family were ordered to leave their apartment because it was declared too large for four people. A customer of theirs from before the war kindly offered them a room in his flat, which they accepted gratefully.

With people beginning to drop in the streets and the death rate from starvation, exhaustion, and diseases such as tuberculosis and typhus growing to 2,000 a month, Rachel decided to organise relief for those less fortunate than her own family, especially if they hailed from Pabianice. ‘A lot of people were very poor and very hungry so a few of us organised a kitchen so that they at least had a bowl of soup and a piece of bread every day. Some paid a few coins for their meal and with this we bought some more food and fed up to seventy every day.’

The Council of Elders or
Judenrat
who managed life within the ghetto found Rachel and her volunteers a larger kitchen in which
to prepare their alms for the poor, but gave them no other material help. ‘We did it for six months until we ran out of our money. Then we had to close it down.’

Rachel switched her focus to acquiring clothing for those most at risk of dying of cold in the winter. With fuel for heating and cooking in short supply, there were already corpses in the streets and the small cemetery filled so quickly that mass graves had to be dug. She was especially concerned about the ghetto children, many of whom had limited resistance as they were already half-starved and sick. She went with a couple of friends to see Janusz Korczak, the sixty-two-year-old doctor, educator and children’s author, who’d first set up an orphanage in Warsaw in 1912. Korczak had turned down several chances to escape from the ghetto because he refused to leave his two hundred street children behind.