Cruel World (66 page)

Isaac, crushed by his loss, was taken to a large and cozy farm family who accepted him with no prior notice and no discussion. This was brave: their neighbor, accused of being in the Resistance, had recently been tortured by having both legs cut off with an electric saw before he was shot and his farm set on fire. Isaac survived the war, but Mme Levendel, who had been arrested by two French agents, was deported and did not return.

The rounding-up process continued all over France, as it did everywhere, until the very last moments of the Nazi occupation. Despite the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Vichy regime was still urging the completion of a new census of Jews on July 4. By the end of the war the number removed from France would reach some 75,000, which was approximately 25 percent of the total, but far below Nazi expectations.

Once the clearing of the ghettos began, and even before that time, children were, of course, also hidden in Poland. But in this realm of total German domination, where the gentile population was, for the most part, just as expendable as the Jews, there was little safety anywhere. There were other complications, principal among them the fact that Jews and gentiles in the region essentially lived in separate societies, each with its own rigid religious beliefs and strong customs. So self-contained was most of the Jewish community in Poland that an estimated 85 percent did not speak Polish but communicated in Hebrew and Yiddish. Nor had there been much love lost between the two communities over the years, and anti-Semitism, pumped up before the war by the Polish government in its unsuccessful efforts to align itself with Germany, was strong. Most “Poles” and “Jews” (so denominated even though all were Polish citizens), interdependent when it came to commerce, lived separately at the personal level. To this mix the Germans had added a new power class in their promotions of the
Volksdeutsche
, some of whom were eager to out-German the Germans in anti-Semitism, while the Russians had exacerbated ancient ethnic rivalries in their zone before losing it to the Nazis. In this cauldron, for every ethnic group survival was all, and for many this was based on the utterly misguided policy of pleasing the new masters and praying that they would go away soon. Jewish leaders hoping to satisfy the voracious monster had advised their brethren to go to the ghettos, work hard, and cooperate. Thousands of Poles, trying to avoid deportation, pretended to be
Volksdeutsche
, and many others, hoping to save themselves, collaborated in the worst atrocities of the Nazis. But the vast majority of both Poles and Jews tried to keep low profiles and obey just enough to avoid trouble.

A group of children from the Lodz Ghetto boarding a deportation train
.
(photo credit 12.2)

From the beginning, however, there were also people who helped others without thought of ethnic origin. At the time of the invasion, no one in Poland could possibly have imagined what the Nazis’ plans really were, but even early on conditions were so bad for Jews that officials in the Polish Welfare Administration in Warsaw had set up a secret help network that specialized in false documents and other assistance and had managed to make contact with Jewish organizations inside the ghettos. As the Nazis’ intent became clearer and evidence of extermination grew, and as the numbers of those seeking hiding places as whole families or desirous of sending away their children burgeoned, other help organizations came into being, many of which eventually amalgamated into the Council for Aid to Jews, known as Zegota. This group was sanctioned by the Polish government in exile and received small amounts of funding from it via the underground. Zegota, which was similar in many ways to the organizations in France, took hundreds of children out of the Warsaw Ghetto through
secret tunnels and by other means placed them in families and convents, and underwrote their care. Zegota operatives moved children to new locations when exposure threatened and dealt with their documentation. As had also been true in Holland, midwives working for Zegota delivered babies for women in hiding and tried to place them in foster families. This was of vital importance: a crying infant in a walled-up bunker beneath a house, which might hold a number of people, would betray them all, and such babies, in acts of surpassing tragedy, were often killed by their own parents.

The basic problems of identity change, feeding, concealment, and the risk of betrayal, present in the West, were all intensified in Poland. The punishment for sheltering Jews, promulgated on October 15, 1941, was death, as was the penalty for leaving the ghettos without permission. These penalties were carried out without even the pretense of a trial or hearing wherever fugitives were found. Dr. Klukowski reported as follows in his diary:

For Jews from smaller towns who either never went to a ghetto or who escaped from one, hiding with farmers in the country was frequently the only option. Not all hosts supplied food. Older children, often disguised as peasant women, would creep out to nearby villages to buy or steal what they could. But once they were suspected, they had to disappear altogether and became totally dependent on outside help. As their situations deteriorated some families left caches of valuables with Polish friends or acquaintances. Sometimes these trustees sold things off slowly and, if they knew where the owners were, got cash to them. Other fugitives risked all to go back to retrieve money or jewelry, which not infrequently had disappeared. Many of the host families simply threw the hidden families out or denounced them when there was no more money or when buying extra food aroused suspicion. Much depended on luck.

Marianna Adameczek was nine when, wounded in the arm, she fled
from the site where most of her family and many others were being shot. She managed to reach a prearranged hiding place her father had set up with Polish friends. With another girl, she would spend the next two years in a “specially prepared hole dug in the barn.” There she was cold, in pain until her wound healed, and miserable at having to be silent at all times (a need for almost every hidden child), but she at least had company and kind caretakers.
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Hiding was different for Leszek Allerhand, who spent his days completely alone inside a large tomb in a cemetery while his mother searched for food. Later he was put in a closed-up apartment and “forbidden to walk, move, use gas, light, toilet, or the bathroom.” He was told to sleep on the floor and stay away from the windows. As he put it:

Leszek was lucky to be outside the wardrobe. Hundreds of other children were condemned to hours and days of darkness and forced silence inside these often huge pieces of furniture in which false backs and other compartments could be constructed. They too lived in a world of dreams alternating with terror when the rooms outside were searched by police, a frequent happening in Poland where fleeing forced labor conscripts and partisans were just as numerous as Jews. Some children stayed so long in these and other cubbyholes of infinite variety that they could not walk or talk when they emerged. Leszek was also lucky to be warm, but this would not last, for like most such hidden children, he and his mother would move again and again, from haystacks to flophouses to a space beneath the bed of a kindhearted
Volksdeutsche
prostitute who entertained German soldiers over their heads. Along the way they were taunted, blackmailed, and denounced a number of times by Poles who saw that they were Jews, and unexpectedly helped or released an equal number of times by other Poles, including a policeman. This we know because they survived. Those who did not find people with consciences cannot tell their stories, but they were many.

Thousands of children, once they had escaped or had found a way out of the ghettos, were entirely on their own. Friends to whom they had been
sent would panic during roundups and turn them out on the street, where they would be swept up in the deportations. Almost none stayed in one place for long. Jerzy Frydman, about eight years old, was separated from his mother in the Warsaw Ghetto and “could not find her anymore.” He joined a group of children playing near the ghetto gate who “would rush the gate like a swarm of locusts and try to get over to the other side,” a maneuver that was not successful. Jerzy finally managed to get out by burying himself in a load of garbage. The driver of the cart, perfectly aware that he was there, let him off in the woods near Blonie, a few miles west of Warsaw. Jerzy, who spoke no Polish, survived for a time by begging. One man fed him and then locked him in a closet, intending to denounce him and collect the bounty paid for each Jewish child turned in; but Jerzy got away and continued to prowl the outskirts of villages. One night, amazingly, he encountered his father, also in hiding, who, before vanishing once more, told the boy to learn to pray in Polish. His father was shot a few days later. The child’s terrible wanderings and adventures continued in a cycle of betrayals, imprisonments, and threats of execution interspersed with odd jobs given to him by relatively more humane Nazi operatives. At one such workplace he fell into a farm machine and lost an arm. His employers arranged medical care, but Jerzy did not trust them or the hospital staff and he escaped once again. Hiding was now far more difficult for the one-armed child, and wherever he was spotted, a hunt was organized to capture him. Still there were people who gave him refuge. One “splendid” woman in a “tiny village” hid him under her floor until the village was totally burned by the Germans, whereupon she sent him away, saying, “Go away and don’t come back to me, because I do not have any strength left.” The boy spent the last winter of the war roaming the forest and making forays into villages for scraps of food. Sometimes he would hide in a cellar at night, which is where he was found when the Red Army arrived in early 1945.
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Not all the children who escaped were condemned to constant wandering. Many stayed with families who not only cared for them but, with tremendous dedication, taught them Polish and the art of dissimulation, which in Poland required total familiarity with the rituals of the Catholic Church. Much has been made of the forced conversions of hidden Jewish children, but while the teaching of Catholic ritual may have been roughly imposed at times, it is unquestionable that ignorance of Catholic customs in Poland was a dead giveaway that could doom both the fugitive and his protectors. The ability to conform was particularly vital in convents and Catholic orphanages, which took in an estimated 1,200 Jewish children.

The various orders of nuns that existed all over Poland before the war were in many cases fugitives themselves.
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All but a couple of orders founded in Germany had been expelled, along with their needy charges, to the General Gouvernement, where they set up in temporary quarters and tried to continue their traditions of child care. Among the prewar orphans were a number of Jewish children, whom the Germans ordered to be sent to the ghettos, a policy approved by the Jewish Councils. This trend was soon reversed. As the clearing of the ghettos began, more and more “foundlings” were left on convent doorsteps. Sometimes they were retrieved by parents who had found refuges “on the Aryan side,” but many would stay in the convents for the duration. Poles who found children wandering on the streets directed them to the convents. One nun saw a four-year-old girl, who had found her way out of the ghetto through the sewers of Warsaw, struggling to climb out of a manhole, and took her to a convent in a neighboring town.
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