The Daughter of Auschwitz. My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

Chapter Seven. Buried Alive

Germans and Poles celebrated the arrival of 1943 by getting rip-roaring drunk. And, at first glance, it seemed that we might indeed have a happy new year.

Pasted onto walls throughout the ghetto were large posters apparently offering hope of escape from captivity. What a change that made. Normally, posters were used to communicate new German rules and regulations, with a warning that summary execution was the punishment for disobedience. Now the Germans were dangling the prospect of paradise before the surviving Jews of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. The posters offered the chance to be transferred to the Holy Land. Anyone with relatives in Palestine who wished to participate was urged to register.

My father recalls that the news provoked an impassioned debate among the survivors. “Tempers flared and arguments broke out”, he writes.

Some thought it was yet another example of German deceit and cautioned against it. Others believed that the promise of settling in Palestine was entirely feasible, as part of a prisoner exchange being negotiated between the Germans and the British, who, at the time, were responsible for administering the Holy Land.

As so often happened in the ghetto, wishful thinking prevailed. Skeptical voices were shouted down and people began registering in droves. The demand increased when the Germans said that qualification for travel would be extended, not just to those with relatives in Palestine, but to those with friends and acquaintances there, too.

“After a day or two, the Germans announced that the list was full and so the Jews began to bribe them with jewels and gold and protektsia [protection money] if only they could be on the list”, writes my father in the Yizkor book. “The ‘fortunate ones,’ who were registered, at once began to pack, ready for the journey to Palestine”.

Somehow, my father managed to attach our names to the list. As a family, we were elated. For the first time in years, my parents exuded a real sense of optimism. At last, there was a chance to escape mass murder, humiliation and hunger, and move to a place that Mama and Papa regarded as Utopia. Palestine represented the pinnacle of their dreams. The melancholy air hanging over our room in the Block evaporated. I fed off my parents’ happiness. I didn’t know what Palestine was, or where — but I understood that it epitomized safety. When my parents were happy, I was happy. But the mood quickly flipped to one of despair and panic.

I am not too sure if my father was still a policeman at this stage. According to surviving Judenrat records, his last salary was paid before the deportations to Treblinka. But regardless of whether he was on the police payroll any longer, his intelligence-gathering skills remained as acute as ever. He detected that the Palestine Aktion was a German ruse. Those who had registered had been deceived. Instead, they were destined to be shipped to another labor camp or possibly worse. Our family and all the others were in imminent danger.

My father barged into our room looking terrible.

“I’ve managed to get us off the list”, he told my mother, in tears and out of breath. “But it was really hard”.

Then he dashed out of the door again, saying he had to warn other people to try to remove their names as well. Somebody was clearly profiting from the panic sweeping through the Block. Carefully reading his account in the Yizkor book, I now understand that he had to bribe someone, with whatever little money he had left. As he writes, “The middlemen who had previously been bribed to include people in the list now demanded new bribes to take them off it and replace them with other names”.

Reality kicked in at dawn on January 5, 1943. The ghetto was encircled by Ukrainian and German troops. My father remembers several hundred Jews being loaded onto carts and trucks. The Germans maintained the charade that they were all being taken to Palestine.

According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, some sixty-seven Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki made it to Palestine. They were first transported to Vienna, then to Turkey and on to the Holy Land after being exchanged for German prisoners of war. Sadly, the majority didn’t get more than seven miles down the road to the small town of Ujazd. There, in the shadow of a ghostly, ruined seventeenth-century castle, several dozen Jews were gunned down. The remainder were transported to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Without doubt, our little family had been fortunate to escape with our lives, as had those my father managed to alert. He was crestfallen that he hadn’t been able to warn more people. From that moment onward, however, my father was powerless to subvert the Nazis’ inexorable progress toward the final liquidation of the ghetto.

Mama and I continued our daily routine of sorting, stacking and packing clothes in the Sammlungstelle. Added to the piles now were the belongings of the victims of the Palestine deception.

The monotony was disrupted early one March morning when we were roused with the familiar cries that filled everyone with dread.

“Alle Juden raus”.

We were ordered to line up along Pierkarska, one of the four streets of the Block. A basket was placed in front of us, and a Gestapo officer addressed us brusquely. The basket was to be filled with jewelry and any other valuables we still possessed. It wasn’t a request.

You could almost touch the air of unease that rippled through the crowd. The Germans knew that people were reluctant to surrender possessions that might be useful in the future, to barter for food, or life itself.

Suddenly, soldiers pulled four men out of the line at random and shot them. This had the desired effect. On the Germans’ command, the remaining Jews returned to their homes and dug out any small remaining valuables from their hiding places. The basket soon filled up. Of course, people prized life above material goods. But the loss of money, jewels, gold or silver was debilitating. It removed the possibility of buying a path to safety whenever the specter of sudden death next loomed. The cloud of depression that hung over the Block darkened.

However, the mood lifted marginally by the time Purim came around a few weeks later. Traditionally, one of the most joyous festivals in the Jewish calendar, Purim commemorates the survival of Jews in the fifth century BC, when their Persian rulers intended to wipe them out. Some describe Purim as the Jewish equivalent of carnival, when we are supposed to celebrate family, unity, togetherness and triumph over adversity. At that stage of the German occupation, three and a half years in, and especially after the previous six months, the idea of overcoming our oppressors was in the realm of fantasy. Still, the festival gave us a much-needed lift. As my father writes: “March 20, 1943. Today is Purim Eve, a warm, sunny day. Even the work of collecting and sorting Jewish belongings proceeds in a lighter spirit”.

There would be “a tinge of festivity”, he continues, following the traditional reading of the sacred scroll of Esther (a Jew who became Queen of Persia and is celebrated as a heroine in Judaism). The scroll tells of how a plot to destroy the Jews (hatched by Haman, a vizier, or high official of the Persian court) was foiled by Esther, together with one of her cousins.

“Anyway, that evening, all would be forgotten”, writes my father. “The survivors in the ghetto would gather in fellowship, eat a little, drink a glass or two, maybe even sing, and maybe for an hour or so the burden of their tragedy would be finished”.

But at five o’clock that evening, a truck drove up to the ghetto gate and a German police officer yelled, “Aufmachen ihr dreckige Juden-schwein”[6].

Meister Pichler strode into the ghetto and presented the Jewish policemen with a list of names. He told them that all of those on the roll had to assemble immediately as they were to be sent to a labor camp. The most important person on the list was Dr. Efraim Mordkowicz, a genuine hero of the ghetto who had performed miracles through the occupation. Despite a paucity of medical supplies, and the murder of so many colleagues, he had worked tirelessly to heal the sick and alleviate the suffering of his fellow Jews, especially during the typhus epidemic.

Dr. Mordkowicz duly arrived at the assembly point with his nine-year-old daughter, Krisza, who was clinging to him with one hand while clutching a bundle of belongings in the other. He turned to the police chief Hans Pichler and asked him where they were going. My blood ran cold as I read my father’s description in the Yizkor book:

Among their number were the ghetto’s remaining physicians, patients from the makeshift hospital, several Jewish policemen and the last surviving members of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s intelligentsia.

Just then, Johann Kropfitsch, the notorious Austrian policeman who had killed so many children, appeared: “Kropfitsch, who was known for his sadistic trait of firing at the heads of small children, put a bullet into the head of little Krisza and thus staunched her tears. The other butchers began firing at the Jews standing on the edge of the grave”.

Pichler and two other Nazis ran after the two sisters, opened fire with pistols and killed them. My father witnessed the Germans’ reaction: “Die verfluchten Hunde haben die Kleider verseucht”[7].

“Polish workmen filled in the graves”, recalls my father. “Afterward, they said that the earth on top of the graves went on heaving for some time after the murders”.

I am one of the last living links to Dr. Mordkowicz and his daughter, Krisza, who was five years older than me, and the nineteen other people murdered that day. Just a few hours after some of them were buried alive, trying to claw their way back to the surface, I was at work alongside my mother in the Sammlungstelle, sorting through the clothes as usual. Among those we handled were two bloodstained dresses, smudged with mud from the Jewish cemetery. We recognized them.

That massacre has gone down in Tomaszów Mazowiecki folklore as the Nazis’ Purim Aktion. It was a reminder, as if we needed one, of the arbitrary nature of the German occupation.

For weeks, life followed a monotonous routine, then it was punctuated by a spasm of sadistic violence. Tension mounted a month later, in the middle of April when, seventy miles away, the Jewish rebels inside the Warsaw Ghetto began their heroic battle against elite German forces. The soldiers guarding us were afraid that rebellion might spread to other ghettos. They had nothing to worry about in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. We were hemmed into four streets and completely surrounded. Our rooms had been searched multiple times. The Germans must have known we had no weapons. What were we going to attack them with? Nevertheless, they still opened fire if anyone was brave enough to venture past the barbed wire.

All the while, in the Sammlungstelle, we were working steadily through the clothes. The mountains of possessions had shrunk. Soon there would be nothing left. Those garments were the very reason for our continued existence. The chattels of the dead were keeping us alive. What would happen when the warehouse was empty and our work was at an end? What would become of us?

By May 1943, there was no need for everyone to turn up for work. That spelled danger for those who were unproductive and no longer slaving on behalf of the Third Reich. There was a sense that something new was on the horizon. Experience taught us that a change in our circumstances was never benevolent.

The grim mood was exacerbated by the stench of rotting waste. In the unseasonable heat, flies swarmed around the piles of garbage. Beyond the barbed wire, to the horizon, the world was rich with color as nature put on its summer clothes. Its beauty was a feast for the eyes. Yet at the same time, it accentuated the depth of our despair.

By this stage, there were about 700 people left in the ghetto. The numbers were whittled away when small groups were dispatched to the Bli˙zyn slave-labor camp fifty miles to the southeast.

On May 30, there was an announcement that another selection was due to take place. The very word “Selektion” induced a sense of profound anxiety. We knew by now that it usually meant a death sentence. The Gestapo declared that thirty-six people would be chosen to be left behind. Those names were read out. All three of us were on the list. Mama, Papa and I. I was too young to realize the significance at the time, but it was a terrifying moment for my parents and the other thirty-three people. They were afraid they would be shot immediately or taken to the graveyard and executed there.

The rest of the ghetto, some 650 people, went back to pack a few essential belongings.

“Mothers tore children from deep sleep, dressed them hurriedly and drenched them with hot tears”, writes my father. “They knew that leaving that place meant their future was even more uncertain. People ran to their families, to friends, and helped each other to pack, and held on to each other as if saying goodbye”.

A whistle pierced the air, ordering everyone in the ghetto to gather at the Appellplatz—the assembly point. Apprehension rippled through the ranks of people standing five deep. Then the names of the thirty-six were read aloud again and we stepped aside. The Germans ordered the remaining 650 people to start marching toward the railway station.

“Why are you leaving us behind?” the people around me shouted, as the column of Jews passed through the ghetto gates for the last time. “It was such a scream that it penetrated the air like a knife, a scream that reached the heavens, a scream straight from the mothers’ hearts”, writes my father. “It was bone-chilling”.

Pichler grinned and ordered our group to follow him to the Sammlungstelle. We were pushed into a building and locked inside. The door was guarded by helmeted guards with machine guns. The Germans took pleasure in terrorizing us.

“All those inside expected at any moment that they would be led to the cemetery and shot”, writes my father.

I can’t remember how long we were locked in the warehouse, but I do recall that there was shooting not very far away. I now realize what that was. The Germans went from apartment to apartment, from room to room, in the four streets of the Block, killing anyone who was still hiding or was too sick to move. Some of those who were murdered that day had stayed because they couldn’t face the prospect of being herded into a cattle car to extinction and chose to die in familiar surroundings.

After the guns stopped firing, the guards opened the door and we realized we’d been spared. They had locked us up because they wanted us to think that we were next and also because they didn’t want any witnesses.

Many Jews reading this will be nodding sagely to themselves right now and thinking: I know why they survived—gematria.

Gematria is a Jewish form of numerology whereby each Hebrew letter has a numerical value. As such, certain words are believed to possess mystical power. A key word here is chai, meaning “life”. Chai’s numerical value is eighteen — hence it’s a Jewish tradition to present gifts of, say, eighteen dollars, or multiples of eighteen, as a good omen for life. Thirty-six — twice eighteen — is a particularly auspicious number. It represents two lives.

Perhaps it was a coincidence that thirty-six people were chosen from the ghetto that day, or perhaps a higher power was involved. Who knows? Either way, those of us in that warehouse all got a second chance at life.

As one of the handful of children to escape the slaughter in my hometown, there is no denying that I am incredibly fortunate. However, what followed was anything but a privilege.

The Gestapo commanded us to clean up the four streets of the Block. Inside and out. We had to erase all evidence that a war crime had taken place. Most important of all was that no traces of flesh or blood should be visible. We had to make it appear that the Jews had left in an orderly fashion — that no harm had been done to them — just in case the Red Cross, or another supposedly neutral organization, started asking difficult questions. But then I doubt the Germans would have allowed the International Red Cross access to the ghettos. It was more likely that the properties were being prepared to be taken over by Poles or Germans as part of Hitler’s plan to ensure the population of the Third Reich was entirely Aryan.

The tasks I had to perform as I approached my fifth birthday were things no child should ever have to do, and I could not avert my eyes or hide away. The images I saw over the ensuing weeks haunt me to this day and have kept me awake at night as I have dug into my memories for this book. For nearly eighty years now, I’ve had one particular recurring nightmare, where I am walking among dead bodies. That dream always shakes me awake, after which further sleep is impossible, as my mind is propelled back to Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

We couldn’t transport the murder victims to the Jewish cemetery and give them eternal rest in sacred ground. We buried them close to the buildings where they had been murdered. My father dug the graves, and then we manhandled the bodies from the beds and floors where they’d been killed, downstairs, along the cobbles and into a shallow pit.

I helped as best I could. I lifted an arm, or a head or a foot, as my mother and father struggled to maneuver the corpses into their rudimentary tombs. Lodged in the back of my mind is the stench of death in the early summer heat, and the look of agony on the corpses’ faces. But what I clung to, amid all this depravity, was my parents’ humanity as they treated the dead with the dignity they warranted.

For the first time in almost four years of mass murder, my father managed to say Kaddish—the traditional prayer of mourning for the dead — under the noses of the guards with their machine guns at the ready. It was another act of defiance.

“Exalted and hallowed be His great Name”, intoned my father.

“Amen”, responded my mother in a whisper.

“Throughout the world which He has created according to His Will. May He establish His kingship, bring forth His redemption and hasten the coming of His Messiah”.

“Amen”.

“In your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen”.

“Amen. May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity, blessed”, whispered my mother.

“May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified, exalted and extolled, honored, adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He”.

“Amen”.

“Beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world; and say, Amen”.

“Amen”.

“May there be abundant peace from heaven, and a good life for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen”.

“Amen”.

“He who makes peace in His heavens, may He make peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen”.

“Amen”.

My parents said the prayer as they shoveled earth over the bodies, the guards unaware that an important Jewish tradition was being upheld. I’m sure my mother and father were thinking of their parents and other murdered family members as they incanted those ancient words. Perhaps they had recited Kaddish in the privacy of our crowded rooms, first in the big ghetto, and then in the Block. I’m not sure. But I had never heard the prayer before. And this despite the fact that I am descended, through my mother’s side, from a long line of Hasidic theological scholars; I had no idea what my parents were saying or doing (although I recognized its poignancy), which shows you how difficult it was to practice our faith under occupation. I find it extraordinary that my first conscious experience of a Jewish religious ritual should be in the aftermath of a war crime, in the presence, not of a rabbi, but of Nazi soldiers, who could have killed us without a second thought. Looking back, it amazes me that anyone could praise God at a time like that.

When the burials were over, we moved inside the houses. We washed away bloodstains. We picked up bone fragments. We tidied up kitchens. We swept floors. We disinfected bathrooms. We made beds. We smoothed out pillows. Everything had to be perfect. We had to leave no trace, on pain of death. I never left my parents’ side, helping in whatever way I could.

It took us three months to sanitize the scene of the Nazis’ crime. We finished in the first week of September, three days shy of my fifth birthday.

“We’ve outlived our usefulness”, I overheard my mother whispering to my father. “There’s nothing left for us to do. Now we’re doomed. They are surely going to kill us now”.

Four years after entering Tomaszów Mazowiecki, in September 1939, the Germans had fulfilled the declared intention of Hitler’s National Socialist movement. They had ethnically cleansed the Jews completely. A vibrant, highly cultured community that had been in existence for over two hundred years was now extinct.

The Germans had a phrase for this.

Tomaszów Mazowiecki was now Judenrein. Jew pure. Cleansed of Jews.

Only 200 Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki survived the Holocaust. After the war, some returned to their former homes to try to find lost relatives. But the memories of what happened there were so dark that they settled elsewhere.

However, there is still a Jewish presence in the town today. In the overgrown Jewish cemetery, where so many of my relatives lie, and in the gardens of the Block — in those four streets: Wachodnia, Pierkarska, Handlova and Jerozolimska. It’s a place that I despise because of what happened there. But for me, that tiny corner of the world will always be sacred ground.