The Girl in the Green Sweater (31 page)

In the commotion that followed, I cannot say for certain what happened next. Socha told us to leave everything behind and to come quickly, this I remember. He told us where to go. Korsarz led the way. For some reason, we could not exit through the manhole directly over our heads, so we crawled and crawled through the wet pipes. Through the forty-centimeter pipes. Through the seventy-centimeter pipes. The forties, as we called them, were not so difficult as they had been on the way in. We were all so much thinner than we had been a year earlier. Now we had no trouble slipping through these tight spaces.

Pawel and I crawled just behind Korsarz. My mother was at our heels. Behind us came Weinbergova, Klara, and Halina, followed by Tola, Berestycki, Orenbach, and finally my father. Never before had a group of eleven individuals crawled so quickly through these narrow pipes. It was not such a long way. Before we knew it, we had climbed a small ladder and had arrived at the manhole opening Socha had described.

We did not know it just yet, but we had reached a small courtyard behind a cluster of apartment buildings, where a large crowd
had gathered. Korsarz climbed through first, and then we followed in order. When it was my turn, Socha reached a hand to lift me from the manhole opening, and with this hand he hoisted me toward him in a great hug. He twirled me about inside this hug, and I was dizzy with emotion. I had to close my eyes to the brightness of the day, and this of course combined with the twirling and contributed to my dizziness. I could hear clapping and shouts of congratulations, but I could not open my eyes. When I tried to do so, everything was colored in orange and red. It was like looking through a photographic negative. I could make out only vague shapes, so I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of our new freedom and imagined what it might look like.

Next, Socha set me down and reached for Pawel, whom he also collected in a great hug. This I was told, because still I could not see. Little Pawel, he was so scared by all of the excitement and all of the people. He screamed in terror, and Socha held him close and covered him with hugs and kisses. When my mother climbed through next, Pawel raced to her and began tugging on her coat. He shouted, “I want to go back! I want to go back!”
Ja chce isc z powrotem!
He had been so long in the sewer that it had become his entire world. He did not understand all of this noise and commotion. He could not comprehend all of these people, or the open space of the courtyard, or the bright sunshine that seemed to me to wash everything in shades of red and orange. At one point, he let go of my mother’s coat and attempted to climb back through the manhole opening, until Socha once again lifted him up and tried to comfort him.

Poor Pawel had been so young when we descended into the sewer. And he was still so young. For him, it was as if he had spent his entire life there. It was the only world he knew. This other
world, this aboveground
outside
world, was strange and terrifying to him. It was a logical thing that he wanted to go back, but Socha was able to calm him down after a short time, after which Pawel did a remarkable thing. He raced to one of the Russian soldiers who had assembled to greet us and threw himself at the soldier’s feet. He began kissing this soldier’s muddy boots, as if in gratitude.

One by one, the members of our underground family climbed through the manhole opening. Each time, there would be applause and shouts and astonished cries. We must have looked pitiable, our clothes reduced to rags, our faces worn and hollow, our spines bent and nearly broken. But we were alive! We emerged like cavemen, like some band of primal animals, but we were alive! The people, they could not believe it.

Finally, my father’s head appeared through the opening, and the shouts and cries seemed louder still. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the daylight, but I could tell this excitement was for my father. I heard people calling his name: “Chiger!” He had been well-known throughout the ghetto before the final liquidation, and probably Socha had told of his efforts in organizing our underground escape. Then Socha called out to my father as he stood to his full height for the first time in fourteen months and called him the captain of our shipwreck. The two men embraced, and there was once again applause and congratulations all around. I opened my eyes to this and could see their shadowy figures well enough.

Tola had been led away from this scene, probably by Wroblewski, so it was now only the ten of us in the open air of this courtyard. The ten of us, and Leopold Socha, our guardian angel. This was our underground family, and we were fairly surrounded
by dozens of Russian soldiers and neighborhood residents and local officials and other workers. We stood in the center of a makeshift circle, and Socha lifted his arms and indicated our group. “These are my Jews!” he said proudly. “This is my work.”
To sa moi zydzi, i to jest moja praca!

Slowly, the onlookers who had gathered to witness our resurrection began to disperse, but not before a few of them came to speak to us, to hear firsthand some of the stories that Socha had already shared with them and to share with us some of their own observations. A woman who introduced herself as the superintendent of one of the apartment buildings backing onto this courtyard told us that she had often detected the aroma of soup coming up through the sewer grates, just over where we had been sitting. Another woman remarked that during winter there seemed always to be only the thinnest patch of snow near our manhole, as if it had been melted away by the warmth from our bodies below or from the constant flame of our Primus stove. Everywhere else, the snow was piled thick and full, but here in this one spot it was thin and soft.

Soon, the other people disappeared into their own lives, and it was Socha and the ten of us once more. In this group, my parents found each other, and then they found us children, and we clung to one another as if the rest of this aboveground world had fallen away.

One of the main reasons Socha had been so long in coming was that he had been making sure that the Germans had indeed been put down by the Russians and that it would be safe for us to walk the streets once more. Another reason was that he wanted to have
everything organized for us once we left the sewer. He knew we no longer had any money. He knew we did not have a place to live or any proper clothes to wear, so he set about organizing our lives aboveground just as he had organized our lives underground. We learned this once the crowd of onlookers dispersed.

Socha had worked diligently over the previous few days preparing a new home for us. One of the buildings that backed onto this courtyard had been occupied by the Germans during the war, but now that the Russians were in control the building was empty. Socha had arranged for us to occupy the first floor of this building. He had gathered a full supply of furnishings for us as well. Chairs, tables, beds, and bedding . . . whatever he could think we might need. We had not thought of these things during our time underground because they were secondary to our survival, but Socha was clever enough to think of them on our behalf. Such was the depth of his commitment to us that he would make this extra effort even after our survival had been assured.

There were four rooms on the first floor of our building. Socha assigned my family to one room. Korsarz and Berestycki occupied the second room; Halina Wind and Klara Keler occupied the third room; and Chaskiel Orenbach and Genia Weinberg occupied the fourth room.

Almost immediately, some of the onlookers took pity on us and brought us food and other necessities. By the light of day, we must have looked frightening. Pawel and I especially became the objects of great concern. Our cheeks were pale, our arms and legs as thin as reeds. The hollows beneath our eyes were as deep and empty as a corpse’s. Our feet were wrapped in rags and newspapers, since we had no shoes. Even our hair, which we had taken great pains to brush and keep clean, appeared matted and
unkempt, like a bird’s nest under siege. To the other adults in our party, who had become accustomed to our appearance, we were only Krysha and Pawelek, the indomitable children of Ignacy and Paulina, but to these strangers we were an unbelievable sight. One kind lady brought us a jar of honey, which Pawel and I devoured like hungry bear cubs. This woman was astounded that two small children could live in such desperate circumstances for such a long period of time and that we appeared before her as a pair of wild waifs. The very least she could do, she said, was to bring this jar of honey.

Others brought bread and barley. Others, fruit and sandwiches. Whatever people brought, we accepted it gladly. Truly, we were overwhelmed by the kindness of these good people, almost all of them Aryans who had been brainwashed by the Germans into believing that Jews were the lowest form of life. And yet here they were, trying to help. Two of my father’s friends from his athletic club came by with whiskey and kielbasa, which the adults consumed eagerly. Of course, we were careful not to eat or drink too much too quickly, because our stomachs had been inactive for so long. Indeed, these treats and delicacies were a welcome kindness, but we longed for the simple diet we had left behind. We had been so long without a visit from Socha and Wroblewski that we had barely eaten any of the basic staples over the past several days. We had not had any bread. Our soup had no ingredients but boiled water and maybe some onions. For fourteen months we had been undernourished, but for the past week we had been starved, so we longed for just a bite of bread, a sip of coffee, a drink of water.

The next day, my father returned to the sewer with Socha and Wroblewski to gather some of our left-behind provisions. If you had told my father he would be returning so soon to his underground
prison, he would not have believed it. But there was a good amount of food in the Palace, which we now urgently needed. There were other items that could be of use to us aboveground as well, such as pots and pans and the carbide lanterns that had for so long been our only source of light. So my father revisited our underground home, to rummage through our few things, to see what food might be salvageable. It was a desperate measure, but we were certainly desperate. And we would remain so for some time.

T
he story of our endurance did not end in that courtyard on July 27, 1944, just as it cannot end here in these pages. Already, I am the last survivor of my underground family, but our story continues in the retelling. It continues in our legacy and in the lives we leave behind.

My firsthand memories of the beginning days and weeks of our new life aboveground are mostly a blur, but they are complemented by the handed-down memories of my parents and others. I do recall the initial exhilaration of first freedom that found us immediately following our liberation. Such a wave of excitement! Such relief! And underneath and all around was such a grand happiness as cannot fully be described or understood. The memories reach beyond simple emotion: I can still picture the eerie, unfamiliar light as my eyes
struggled to adjust to the outside world. For days, I could see only through the orange red film that colored my first steps aboveground. It made me so dizzy! I can still remember the luxury of my first night in a proper bed, which despite our otherwise drab furnishings was like staying in a world-class hotel. And I vividly remember holding a bouquet of fresh flowers for the first time in the longest while and burying my nose in the scent and thinking our troubles were over.

In this I was premature, and it was only a few days more before I realized that we had merely traded one set of troubles for another. I did not recognize this right away, but soon enough. My parents probably realized it the moment we reached daylight. They were optimists, which explained how they were able to grab the smallest piece of hope and pull our family along by its thread, but they were also realists. They knew we would now have to think about things like finding a place to sleep and something to eat. They knew the many kindnesses of these strangers would soon fall away. They knew we would continue to struggle, only now it would be a different struggle. Now it would be a struggle to live under a regime that had already marked us as an enemy.

The primary benefit to our time in the sewer was that we struggled together. Now our underground family had simply decamped to new quarters, and we continued as one. We were once again under Soviet rule, a hardship we now accepted as a better alternative only to the killing rule of the Germans. We were free only by comparison to how we lived in the sewer, but of course we were not so free after all. The Russian government was suspicious of all Jews who had managed to survive the Nazi regime, so we were closely monitored. Also, the Soviets still recognized my father as bourgeois, which was as much of a crime after German rule as it had been before, even though we now lived like peasants. We had
no money, no prospects. Friends and family members who might have been in a position to help us become reestablished had either fled or been killed. Our circumstances were almost as desperate as they had been in the ghetto, only now they did not seem so desperate because of everything that had happened in between.