Born Survivors (9 page)

Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a childless sixty-three-year-old Polish businessman, had been appointed the
Juden Älteste
– or ‘Elder of the Jews’ – by the Nazis. Just like Czerniaków in Warsaw, Rumkowski was put in charge of the day-to-day running of the ghetto from his headquarters in Bałuty Square. It was also his lot to decide the destiny of every man, woman and child. A former textile manufacturer and the director of an orphanage, Rumkowski was to become a controversial figure, regarded as a hero or a quisling, once he chose to co-operate with the Nazis.

White-haired and blue-eyed, he believed that in using the negotiation skills he’d honed as the director of the city’s largest orphanage, he could help save the Jews of his city by trading on
their ‘currency’ as skilled workers. Declaring the motto ‘
Unser Einziger Weg Ist – Arbeit!
’ (Our only path is – work!), he insisted that if the ghetto remained highly productive then the Nazis wouldn’t be able to afford to dispose of its valuable workforce. It was an achievement that some believed ensured their survival two years after the Warsaw ghetto and others had been destroyed.

But he also created a clear class structure within the ghetto, and many of the ruling elite associated with the man known as ‘The Eldest’ did well under the arrangement. These men and women who helped deceive, starve and exploit their fellow Jews lived in comfortable apartments, drinking vodka, and eating food destined for others. Some even had separate
dachas
or summer houses in the former allotment district of Marysin. They employed teachers of music and Hebrew for their children, enjoyed luxuries such as hot water and soap, shipped in goods from outside and even attended concerts and balls while the rest of the population sat in their hovels scratching at their scabs. In the winter, when only the soup kitchens and bakeries were allowed fuel for their fires, the elite had plenty while the rest of the population scraped out the dust from coal wagons or dismantled derelict buildings for their rafters.

Rachel and eight members of her remaining family, who shared one large room in a better-appointed apartment in an area renamed Pfeffergasse in the centre of the ghetto, were better off than many. Even so, they slept side by side on mattresses laid on the floor, both in order to keep warm and because of the lack of space. Rachel’s brother Berek, who was immediately put to hard labour thanks to his youth and strength, was billeted elsewhere. The family received their ration of bread each week from a local grocery store and sent their youngest boy Heniek to queue for it in the hope that the shopkeeper might take pity on him and give him a slighter larger loaf. When Heniek eventually brought the precious bread home, Fajga carefully sliced it into nine segments, always giving the largest piece to their father as he was ‘the king of the house’.

Each night when the older members of the family returned
home from work, Fajga would serve them soup cooked from whatever scraps she could find. Sometimes they’d be allowed potatoes, although most that arrived in the winter were frozen solid and so black with rot when thawed that they had to be buried for fear of poisoning people. On other occasions, they might get turnips. Among the rations they were allowed was imitation coffee powder, which Fajga mixed with a little water to make soft patties to help fill her children up. The smell of coffee would ever after remind Rachel and her sisters of those innovative little patties.

‘Hungry as we were we tried not to lose our happiness,’ said Sala. ‘We still thought that the day was near when everything would change.’

Slave labour in the Łódź ghetto

A surprisingly practical man with an inventive mind, Shaiah Abramczyk toiled all day in a workshop and then used his skills at home. He sectioned off one end of their room with a partition for privacy, mended his children’s worn-out shoes, made shelves, and
somehow connected them to an electrical supply to bring them light and power for a sewing machine. This was especially useful for Sala, a talented needlewoman who made clothes and hats for Germans. Once she’d finished her shift in a dimly lit factory she would walk home footsore, her eyes gritty from the strain, eat her soup, and set to making garments out of old fabric. She then exchanged them with a family from the ruling elite for a little extra food.

‘My work … was to make elegant clothes for ladies, which were sent back to Germany,’ Sala said. ‘Sometimes I modelled them and German people came in and watched me. Then at home I made things out of nothing … we had lots of green material once, I remember.’

The requirement to work was not only necessary for food but to ward off the ever-present threat of ‘resettlement’ to labour camps, which had started in January 1942 before Rachel and her family swelled the ghetto’s numbers. Jews and Roma gypsies from across occupied Europe had been shipped into Łódź from late 1941, and Rumkowski and his Resettlement Commission were ordered to supervise deportations of 1,000 a day to make room. If the elders didn’t provide enough to satisfy the quotas, the Nazis assured them that their wives and children would be substituted. Repeatedly instructed to hand over his own people, Rumkowski faced a monstrous moral dilemma but felt he had no choice but to obey. He realised early on that those who were hell-bent on the destruction of the Jews would only replace him with someone who would do as they asked. He hoped at least to negotiate the numbers down.

As each new deportation began, German police accompanied by the ghetto
Schutzpolizei
prowled the streets hunting for ‘fresh meat’. Salvoes of gunfire could be heard as any who tried to resist were shot during the round-ups. Once a new batch of deportees had been chosen from lists of names, men in uniform would arrive in lorries and surround an apartment block. They would
then drag everyone out into the open, even in their nightclothes. If the occupants didn’t open up voluntarily, their doors would be kicked in.

Those unlucky enough to be on the list were initially incarcerated in the ghetto prison in Czarnecki Street before being loaded onto trams to the main railway line at Radogszcz Station, Marysin, just beyond the ghetto perimeter. An estimated 200,000 Jews passed through what the Germans called the Radegast loading platform during the course of the war. While they were being held in Czarnecki Street, there was still hope. During those few hours or sometimes days, their loved ones raced desperately around the ghetto trying to find a ‘connection’ – a person of influence they might know – who could be begged or bribed to remove them from the transport lists. Invariably they failed, but if they did succeed it only meant that someone else would have to take the rescued person’s place to fill the quota for what became euphemistically known as ‘going to the frying pan’.

Although there were occasional lulls in the round-ups, everyone in the ghetto lived with the constant prospect of transportation and death. The growing feeling in Rachel’s family was that hope was dwindling. Their sole focus was now on simply staying alive as long as possible and protecting those they loved. Increasingly fearful that he would lose some or all of his family to these random selections, Shaiah Abramczyk did something practical to protect them. The man whose children believed he was clever enough to have been an inventor, extended the partition wall of their room all the way across and built a wooden dresser up against the middle of it. He then created a secret door in the back of the lower cupboard, through which the family could squeeze each time they heard the police and SS arrive. ‘There was just enough room for us all once we crawled through,’ Sala said. ‘Anyone who came into the room would think it was empty. Father even hung pictures up on the wall so that it looked solid.’

When the deportations from the ghetto resumed in September
1942, this secret hiding place proved invaluable. As the clatter of diesel trucks and the thunder of jackboots heralded the arrival of each new batch of guards, their neighbours were carried off to no one knew where. Each time, the Abramczyk family crept through the little door in the dresser and formed a tight human knot as they tried to close their ears to the pleas and cries of women, and the cackle of sadistic laughter. ‘The Germans came in and started screaming at everyone, “Out of the house!” They selected people. They took fifty or sixty of them away in buses,’ said Sala. ‘That happened again and again and again.’ All the family could do was say a silent farewell to friends and neighbours lost for ever.

Behind the barricades, few knew what was happening in the wider world or fully appreciated what would become of their loved ones who had been sent away. In effective quarantine from any news, they could have no idea that the only choice was between death by a bullet or suffocation by carbon monoxide at Chełmno. Hidden in the cracks of some of the cattle cars that came back from the East were found secret notes hinting at the horrors ahead and urging their fellow Jews not to board the trains. Clothing and possessions belonging to deportees from across occupied Europe were also sent back to the ghetto to be recycled for the war effort and some bore the names of people known to those left behind. Increasingly, the Jews of Łódź began to suspect the worst and came to believe the rumours about what ‘the frying pan’ really meant.

Fearing Nazi retaliation if their quotas weren’t met, Rumkowski and his deputies repeatedly tried to assure the populace that those deported would be looked after in new camps and allowed to remain together as families. They would help with the war effort and enjoy better living conditions in military barracks, they promised. But as the transports continued relentlessly and no word ever came back from those sent away, few believed the reassurances. In the end, even Rumkowski stopped pretending.

His master plan was failing. Having set up what he’d considered
to be a model work camp with its own schools, hospitals, fire service and police force, within a community in which he was the supreme ruler – he even conducted marriage ceremonies – his authority was being systematically undermined. Not only had thousands been sent away but the Nazis persistently failed to provide enough food in return for the labour his ghetto provided. Desperate to quell the increasing numbers of strikes and demonstrations by the hungry and the angry, Rumkowski became ever more dictatorial and threatened to arrest those who resisted his attempts to keep the ghetto working.

Determined to hasten the pace of Jewish annihilation still further, the Nazis broke their pact with him and demanded even greater numbers for the transports. Then they made their cruellest demand yet – the deportation of every child under the age of ten and every adult over sixty-five, which amounted to 3,000 lives every day for eight days.

The Abramczyks’ hiding place was what saved them on 5 September 1942, when from 5 p.m. the
Allgemeine Gehsperre
, or
Groyse Sphere
(great curfew) in Yiddish, began. During that week more than 20,000 people were called for. Few families were left untouched.

Having spent days, hat in hand, pleading unsuccessfully with his masters to revoke the order or at least reduce the quotas, Rumkowski – who prided himself on his love of children – finally accepted that he could never sway the Nazis from their own master plan. A ‘broken Jew’, he summoned his people to Fire Station Yard the day before the great curfew began. That humid autumn afternoon he took a breath and announced to the vast gathering: ‘A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly … I never thought I would be forced to deliver the sacrifice to the altar with my own hands … I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’

Amid screams and wails, he told his people that he’d only been able to negotiate a reduction in the original demand of 24,000 people, plus the preservation of children over the age of ten. He said the numbers of qualifying children and old people amounted to 13,000, so the rest of the allocation would have to be met elsewhere. He had agreed to hand over the sick, he said, ‘in order to save the healthy’. If the deportations were met with any resistance he’d been assured that they would be carried out by brutal means.

Rachel’s youngest sister Maniusia was eleven years old and just safe under the impossible edict. But that didn’t diminish the horror of what was being demanded, or the manner in which the operation was carried out. Rachel said, ‘We thought they were sending them to work until they started to take the children and the sick from hospitals. Then we knew they were taking them to kill them. They took away the children in such a terrible way. Children were thrown out of the windows down to the trucks so we knew nothing good would come of it.’

Already on the brink of madness because of the conditions they were forced to live in, some parents went insane once they lost the children they’d fought so hard to protect. There were rumours of mothers smothering their babies rather than hand them over to the Nazis, who prowled the streets with guns and dogs.

Sala said, ‘We stayed in our hiding place whenever we heard the Germans looking for people and then we stayed there until we knew it was safe to come out.’ When everything had quietened down after an hour or more, they crawled back through the dresser and wandered about their building to check on who’d been seized. The sight of an apartment door kicked in and swinging on its hinges meant that those neighbours wouldn’t be coming back, so they helped themselves to any food or useful items left behind. ‘That’s how we lived through those few weeks … we took it and ate it like animals, not like people.’