Born Survivors (8 page)

At his orphanage in Dzielna Street, the women offered their help and Korczak asked them to find warm clothes for his ‘little ones’, which they did. It was almost certainly those coats and dresses that the children wore when Korczak told them to look their best the day they left the ghetto the following year. Deportations East had begun by then and young, old and sick were some of the first to be summoned to the trains. Having announced, ‘Where my children are going, I must go as well,’ Korczak was with them as they were marched, two by two, to the
Umschlagplatz
(loading point) at the Warszawa Gdańska freight station, from which a train delivered them to the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp. He died at their side.

Adam Czerniaków, the head of the
Judenrat
, who failed in his attempts to stop the Nazi demands to provide 6,000 deportees per day, swallowed a cyanide capsule rather than comply. He wrote notes to his wife and a member of the Judenrat in which he said,
They demand me to kill children of my nation with my own hands. I have nothing to do but to die … I can no longer bear all this. My act will prove to everyone what is the right thing to do
.

The borders of the ghetto were heavily guarded but people could
pass through the gates if they had the correct papers. Deprived of the goods they’d grown accustomed to buying from Jewish merchants, the Gentiles of Warsaw relied on black market traffic. Those sympathetic to the needs of the people trapped inside also risked death to take in vital items such as food and fuel, while men and boys crawled through tunnels and sewers to carry mail and other goods.

Using his false documents, Monik occasionally risked travelling beyond the walls to buy essential provisions or to seek news of Rachel’s family in Pabianice. Every time he left, Rachel knew there was a chance that he might not return. It was always a relief when he did and, lying together whispering into the night, they tried to reassure each other that their nightmare would soon be over. Even when the deportations began, they told each other, ‘This too shall pass.’ And when the Nazis promised those who volunteered to be ‘resettled’ extra food and the chance to work on farms and live in spa resorts, the family refused to be swayed. They were determined to stay together until they were forced to leave. Still they clung to the hope that the war would end any day.

It was clear that the screws were tightening, however. SS officers, accompanied by Jewish police who wore special hats and uniforms embellished with a yellow star, began to round people up and summarily execute anyone identified as ‘subversive’. There were public hangings in the main square. Families lived in terror of a knock at the door, especially after curfew. Almost all the ghetto’s smugglers were rounded up and shot, cutting off contact with the outside world. It became too risky to use false papers, and increasingly acute food shortages hastened the deaths of still more Jews.

Monik, feeling increasingly helpless, knew that he and his young wife had to escape. Using up virtually the last of the family money, he hired a smuggler to get Rachel out of the ghetto, even though the dangers were enormous. The smuggler, who was probably a Gentile, arrived with a horse and cart. He collected Rachel and another woman and calmly trotted them out through
the gates before setting off on the 120-kilometre journey to Pabianice. ‘It took three days,’ Rachel said. ‘We didn’t hide. We dressed just like farmers with
babushkas
.’ Two weeks later, he went back for Monik.

Monik’s mother Ita remained in Warsaw in the care of his brother Avner. His other brother, David, fled east and was last heard of in the Soviet Union. Avner later followed and ended up in Kiev, but neither man is believed to have survived the war.

Rachel hadn’t seen her own family for two years and there was an emotional reunion with them in the Pabianice ghetto. Shaiah Abramczyk was in his mid-sixties and his wife in her forties, but they both looked much older. Frail and waxen, the light had gone from their eyes and there was none of the joyfulness she remembered from her childhood. They were nevertheless keen to hear Rachel’s news and to tell her theirs, proudly recounting how they’d managed to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a few small gifts and something a little better to eat than soup.

Happy as she was to be with her family, Rachel soon realised – as did her husband – that life there was just as bad as in Warsaw. Then word came that all the Jews in Pabianice were to be transported to the Łódź ghetto, where conditions were said to be even worse. Leaving her family with a heavy heart, Rachel and Monik felt they had no choice but to pay to be smuggled back into Warsaw the same way they’d been spirited out. Once inside, they each made their way to separate houses for safety. Monik was taken in by friends, as arranged, but the door to Rachel’s ‘safe house’ was locked and its occupants too afraid to let her in. In grave danger of being picked up by the police, she had no choice but to persuade the waiting smuggler to take her back to her parents.

Not long after she’d been returned, on Saturday 16 May 1942, troops and police surrounded the Pabianice ghetto in order to ‘liquid ate’ it. The authorities gave everyone just twenty-four hours’ notice to gather their most precious belongings. In the sights of Nazi
rifles, and with Alsatians barking at them menacingly, everyone had to assemble in precise formation. All eleven members of the Abramczyk family, Rachel amongst them, stuck close together as they were marched to the town’s sports stadium to be herded inside and counted for a ‘census’.

They sat there for a day and a night. They were given no food and some people were beaten or humiliated. Eventually they were told that they were to be sent to Łódź by bus and tram. As they stood in seemingly endless lines waiting to board the vehicles, German soldiers suddenly stepped in to decide who’d be viable for slave labour and who would not. ‘We saw them taking old people and kids up to seven or eight. They were not letting them go on the bus,’ Sala said. ‘We were lucky because our youngest were eleven and we managed to keep them.’

Pandemonium broke out as hysterical women refused to leave without their children. Rachel and her family watched in horror as a Nazi grabbed a baby from its mother’s arms and threw it far into the air. They didn’t even see where the infant landed but they knew it couldn’t have survived. ‘I will never forget that,’ said Sala. ‘After that some mothers gave up their babies to the grandmothers to keep them safe, not knowing where they were going or what would happen.’

In the course of two days 4,000 children, the elderly and the sick were callously ‘selected’ before being sent to an unknown fate. The wailing of their relatives could be heard far beyond the stadium walls – as could the sound of gunfire as any who protested were executed on the spot.

While the family were waiting their turn to be transported, German officials called for strong young men to volunteer to travel with the children and the elderly for ‘important work’. To their horror, Rachel’s eighteen-year-old brother Moniek jumped up and offered his services. He insisted that the children might not be so afraid if he accompanied them. ‘We said, “Don’t go back! Stay here!” and he said, “No, I have to go and help.” They took him away
with the children.’ Their last sight of handsome young Moniek was of him being driven away on a bus full of children, singing nursery rhymes in an attempt to calm them down.

The distraught family could have had no idea at the time, but those selected that day were transported to Chełmno, renamed Kulmhof by the Germans, a specialist SS killing centre less than a hundred kilometres northwest of Łódź. Approximately 150,000 people were to be exterminated at Chełmno during the course of the war – either shot as they were lined up beside burial pits or locked inside a specially adapted lorry that was then filled with exhaust fumes from the vehicle’s engine as it was driven to a clearing in the middle of Rzuchów Forest. Some 70,000 of the victims came from Łódź. It was many years after the war before the family eventually discovered what had happened to their cherished Moniek.

‘They sent them to a forest and they shot them all,’ Sala said. ‘My brother was one of the ones to clear the mess and after it was cleared they killed those young men too. They told him to remove his clothes and the authorities found his clothes after it was done. He was the first to be killed in our family.’

Unaware of Moniek’s fate but still turned inside out by his loss, the Abramczyk family were in a sorrowful daze as they were transported – minus one – to Łódź.

Conditions in the new ghetto, situated in a slum area of the old town, were shocking for Rachel even by comparison with Warsaw, where an estimated 70,000 Jews had died of starvation between 1941 and 1942. She said she’d never fully understood what hunger meant until she arrived in Łódź. Large signs at the heavily guarded gates warned, ‘Jewish residential area. Entry forbidden.’ The soldiers posted every five hundred metres had instructions to shoot on sight anyone who tried to escape.

Inside the barbed wire barricades some 230,000 people were squeezed together in abysmal conditions in tenement buildings on mud or cobbled streets. Windowless apartments housed entire
communities. The air was rancid with the smell of sewage and rotting people – alive and dead. The ghetto’s scarecrow inhabitants seemed too catatonic to tend to their appearance any longer. Loose skin hung from them like cloth and many looked so insubstantial silhouetted against the light that it seemed as if the breeze might blow them away. Sala said, ‘The ones that had been there the longest looked awful. They were undernourished and swollen with hunger. They could hardly walk and they had yellow faces hanging down. It was pitiful.’

Three steep wooden bridges spanned the ghetto’s main streets, which were forbidden to non-Aryans, and trams passed beneath them, but their passengers weren’t allowed off and could only watch helplessly as conditions in the ghetto worsened. Having come from homes filled with colour and vibrancy, all the Abramczyk family could see around them now were shadow people and monochrome hues, as if the very pigments of life had been bleached out by hunger and cold.

Łódź ghetto walkway for Jews to avoid Aryan streets

As with almost every ghetto they created, the Nazis insisted that the Jews pay for their own upkeep, so their chief purpose became industry in return for a chance to live. There were more than a hundred factories behind the fences that ringed the perimeter and everyone between the ages of ten and sixty-five had to work. Each day there were announcements on loudspeakers in the ghetto’s largest open space – Fire Station Yard – on Lutomierska Street, informing newcomers where to report before the factory whistles blew. The Nazis set a ‘Jew allowance’ of approximately thirty pfennig a day per person for subsistence rations dispensed from communal kitchens, so each resident had to work to pay back their ‘loan’. Rachel and her family were immediately employed making raw materials for the German war machine. These included textiles, shoes, rucksacks, saddles, belts and uniforms. In return, the Nazis provided just enough food for the population to survive (but not always) and a few basic services.

Once a worker had completed half their shift, they were entitled to a bowl of soup or ‘swill’ and a small piece of bread. Weekly, they queued for further rations such as beets, potato, cabbage, barley or onion, depending on what was available. If the authorities were feeling generous they might hand out a little sausage of dubious origin, a stick of margarine, flour, artificial honey or tiny (stinking) fish, which had to last a month. Milk was delivered through the gates occasionally, but in the summer it soon turned sour, while any fresh produce quickly spoiled.

It was up to individuals how they managed their provisions for the week; they might choose to barter shoes, clothes, cigarettes, books or other precious belongings for a little extra something like radish leaves to enhance a soup or root vegetables normally fed to cattle. Rachel’s father Shaiah, a chain smoker, frequently traded his food for cigarettes and began to shrink inside his clothes.

What Rachel and her family remember most about the ghetto is ‘working all the time and being hungry all the time’. Their eyes began to sink into their sockets and their hipbones to rub against
their clothes. Belts were tightened and then had new holes punched in them, and the few clothes the family possessed soon became threadbare and stiff with grease. Their bellies ached and their legs were leaden. As in Warsaw, it was only the black market that helped keep people alive as the distribution points and potato depots increasingly fell prey to corruption and theft – known to all as ‘skimming’. Hundreds suffered from pus-filled abscesses or swollen feet, legs and bodies – all caused by malnutrition. ‘Some people could hardly walk because they filled their empty bellies with water and drank too much,’ Sala recalled. ‘There was a time when my feet wouldn’t carry me so Mother gave me some dark oil and brown sugar as a kind of vitamin. I don’t know why, but it worked.’

An estimated twenty per cent of the ghetto’s population died of exhaustion, starvation or disease. In the frigid winters people froze to death in their beds. Some killed themselves by jumping from windows, by poisoning or hanging, in order to avoid the inevitable. A few parents killed their children and then themselves. Others ‘went into the wire’, which involved running at the barricades confident they’d be hastened to their end by a Nazi bullet. Later, in the camps, the most desperate prisoners were often to use this method of suicide, running at the electrified fencing in order to bring about a swift end.