The Daughter of Auschwitz

Chapter Two. Beyond the Tablecloth

My domain extended all the way under the kitchen table. The boundaries were defined by the ragged borders of a cheap cloth, draped over the piece of furniture that was the beating heart of life in our overcrowded home in the ghetto. Beyond the tablecloth was the world of adults — and their lopsided war between Nazi persecutors and oppressed Jews. When in residence in my personal realm, I rarely saw the grown-ups’ faces — from my perspective, the outside universe only existed from the knees down. But I heard them talking, and I made it my business to work out which voice was coming from which pair of legs.

I heard snatches of conversations. And key words repeated over and over again, with a mixture of fear, anger and venom. Words that stuck in my mind.

“Gestapo”.

“SS”.

“Aktion”.

“Rations”.

“Margarine”.

“Hitler”.

“Dropped dead in the street”.

“Starvation”.

“Palestine”.

“Judenrat”.

“Ghetto”.

“Kropfitsch”.

“Another one”.

“That poor child”.

“Back of the head”.

“Those poor parents”.

There was never any good news outside the tablecloth. Life was a litany of catastrophes, of people disappearing, massacres and the constant struggle to find food.

Not to mention the shooting and the screams outside the window.

When the news was particularly bad, they whispered. They tried to keep me from hearing. I knew it was really bad when there was a deep intake of breath and the sound of a hand clasped over a mouth to prevent a cry from escaping. My ears were my early-warning system. I recognized how lightly or purposefully people walked. I could tell when a new set of shoes or boots entered the apartment. Sometimes they were friendly. But when I heard heavy boots, I knew trouble was imminent.

Beneath the table was my sanctuary. There I stayed and talked to my doll.

“Are you hungry, bubale?” I inquired.

“I’m starving. You must be, too. But don’t worry, Mama’s in the kitchen and she’s cooking potato-skin soup.

“Here it is. Eat it up. Be a good girl, bubale. Tasty, isn’t it? Mmmmmm. Lovely. Come on now. Eat your soup, bubale. It’s good for you.

“I’m sorry there’s no bread today. Please don’t cry”.

Occasionally, I would surface above the tablecloth and go and perch on the knee of my father, Machel, or I’d nestle in the lap of my mother, Reizel. Whenever Uncle James came to visit in the early days of the ghetto, when it was easier to move around, I sat on his knee and twiddled his bushy eyebrows. But usually I stayed under the table because I didn’t have a chair. There wasn’t sufficient space in the four-room apartment and there wasn’t enough furniture to go around.

We weren’t the only family living in flat number five, 24 Krzyżowa Street, Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Jews were forced to share cramped accommodation. In many apartments, instead of five or six people, there were maybe twenty. In others, the numbers might have been as high as sixty or seventy. One bathroom had to service maybe thirty to forty people. I had to eat and sleep under the table because there was so little space. Some people slept on the floor. My parents squeezed together in a single bed. I joined them in the middle of the night if I woke up scared.

If you were lucky, you lived together with friends or extended family. If not, you were compelled to cohabit with strangers you couldn’t bear. I have no firm memory of how many people were there or who they were. The situation was so fluid that the apartment was a constant revolving door of refugees. One day a whole set of familiar faces would vanish. Their disappearance would be accompanied by urgent whispers coming from beyond the tablecloth. It didn’t take long before they were replaced by others. Perhaps by even more people. The atmosphere inside the apartment would change. It was not always an improvement. I could sense it under the table.

We were stuffed like mice in there.

The Nazis created the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto in December 1940. Jews were banned from the main part of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, an industrial town in Central Poland, seventy miles southwest of the capital, Warsaw. They were required to identify themselves as Jews by wearing a white armband adorned with a blue Star of David. Failure to comply was punishable by death.

The Germans severed the electricity supply as one of their first strictures. Depriving us of a key component of modern life was another snip of the scissors cutting us slowly and painfully to death. There was no sewage system either. We were ordered to hang curtains or screens at windows that overlooked Aryan neighborhoods. The sense of isolation and segregation from the outside world was reinforced with every new restriction. Not only were we no longer supposed to look at our Polish neighbors, we were also denied sunlight as we were pushed back toward the Dark Ages. The Poles were ordered to block windows that overlooked the ghetto so they wouldn’t see what was happening and inform the outside world. Mind you, significant numbers of Poles in Tomaszów were anti-Semites. Some of them might have taken pleasure from our suffering. At least the curtains denied them that.

Initially, my mother, father and I lodged with my grandparents in Ko´sciuszko Square, which, before the war, was a relatively smart address in the heart of the town’s commercial district. At first, the ghetto had three sections and people could move between them, although they were banned from leaving the outer confines without a permit. Twelve months later, the Germans forced Jews from two of the ghetto’s districts into the third much smaller section. This had a perimeter they could seal off far more easily. The sense of claustrophobia intensified. We were kicked out of our home in Kościuszko Square and were more than grateful when another family that we already knew took us in at 24 Krzyżowa Street.

During the three and a half years I lived behind the ghetto walls — if “lived” is the right word — I rarely breathed fresh air. I spent almost all my time inside, for the simple reason it was too dangerous to be outside. My air smelled of boiling potato skins. Not even boiled cabbage.

By 1941, more than 15,300 Jews were squeezed into the ghetto. The prewar community was swollen by over 3,500 refugees from neighboring shtetls, or small towns. The ghetto was horrendously overcrowded. Conditions were unhygienic.

Apartments were breeding grounds for disease. In the latter half of that year, a typhus epidemic ravaged the ghetto. So many of the community’s doctors had been murdered that any surviving medics struggled to contain the outbreak. The Germans transferred 600 Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki to other ghettos in nearby towns to try to reduce the spread of infection. Those people were effectively exiled from Tomaszów and warned not to come back. Thirty-three Jews defied the order, made their way back to Tomaszów and were executed.

Sometimes, when I came out from under the table, I’d look out of the window and see lines of steel-helmeted Germans marching with rifles sloping on their shoulders. Their stout knee-length boots struck the cobblestones in unison, creating a sound that radiated strength and irresistible superhuman force. The vibrations traveled up through our building and into my stomach. And then I would duck back down beneath the tablecloth.

In my child’s mind, I regarded the table as my safe haven, although in reality, it was a cell. A prison within a prison. No matter our age, we were all inmates. And the walls of our prison were constantly closing in. Jews were eliminated at every stage. All the time, the Germans shoehorned more prisoners inside, squeezing every one of us, physically and psychologically, to the limits of human endurance. And beyond.

In towns across Poland and all the territories the Nazis conquered, Jews were forced into ghettos that were prisons in all but name. Ghettos were the first stage of the Nazis’ master plan to eradicate the Jewish race. The best known is the Warsaw Ghetto, a sprawling city within a city where 420,000 Jews were incarcerated and starved behind high walls and razor wire. A quarter of a million of them were rounded up in the ghetto in the summer of 1942 and gassed. The Warsaw Ghetto is synonymous with courage and resistance because of the uprising in the spring of 1943, when 700 underequipped Jewish fighters held crack German troops at bay for almost a month. But Warsaw was not the only city where such a place existed.

I was two and a quarter when my parents and I entered the ghetto of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. We didn’t have a choice. Resistance was futile. You didn’t argue when guns were trained upon you by the most brutal military machine the world had ever seen.

Still, when I was nearly three and a half, I displayed my own innate spirit of resistance. It was in January of 1941, when the Germans instigated what they called a fur Aktion. They ordered ghetto inhabitants to hand over fur coats so they could be sent to Germany to clothe people on their home front. It was part of a systematic effort to strip us of our valuables. Earlier, they had scoured the ghetto demanding people surrender their jewelry.

Our apartment was raided by thugs in uniform. Mama didn’t possess a fur. But I did. It was a beautiful white fur coat with a hood and white neck ties with fur balls at the end. I was so proud of that coat. It was my favorite possession; and it was so warm. Although I hardly ever got to wear it because I rarely went outside, in a time of utter deprivation, it made me feel special.

The instant one of the German soldiers went to the closet and took the coat off a peg, I became incandescent with rage. I flew at him. I started punching and kicking him. He was a big man, a giant compared to me. But no one was going to steal my prized coat. I had no fear. I just wanted to fight. Mama was shocked. She tried to pull me away. But I wasn’t listening to her. I tried to bite the soldier’s knees and lunged at him. He kicked me away with his heavy boots and then walked away with my most treasured possession. I could have been killed. People were shot for much less.

I recognize that little girl in me today. She was fearless. What other child would do such a thing? I like to think I am still the same feisty creature. The memory of that coat stayed with me. I bought one almost exactly like it for my granddaughter decades later.

The episode with the coat demonstrates clearly that when a child reaches the age of three, they are blossoming into a sentient human being, capable of feeling and understanding sensations, and of processing information as their cognitive abilities begin to fly, although most lack the vocabulary to articulate what they are seeing. That period should be a time of wonder at the simple joys the world has to offer. Marveling at the aerial dance of a butterfly. Recognizing the love of a mother and father and reciprocating. Seeing smiling faces, feeling safe and secure. Falling asleep with a full stomach in a warm bed. Waking up the next morning, excited about exploring another day ripe with promise.

Within the ghetto of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, the only certainty was my parents’ unconditional love. And I knew that I loved them back with all my heart. Beyond them, however, there was nothing but the abyss. Color drained from our ever-withering universe. We inhabited a monochrome world that was always in the shadows. We were mentally shackled together in a collective state of depression. Nothing ever offered a shaft of light or hope. There was no cure. The cavalry wasn’t ever going to ride in to rescue us. The only release was death.

Every new day brought a different form of terror. I remember soldiers coming for my widowed maternal grandmother, Tema, and her brother, whose name I don’t recall. They ordered them to go downstairs, and they shot them in the street. Two dead Jews out of 6 million. Their ages were a death sentence. The Nazis had no use for old people. Anybody over the age of fifty was regarded as ancient by the Germans. I never saw a person with white hair until I came to America. To the Nazis, older people were useless as Zwangsarbeiter (slave laborers) and an unnecessary burden. There was nothing extraordinary about the summary executions of Tema and her brother. Their killers displayed not a flicker of hesitation. The Germans snuffed out my relatives’ lives, and those of others, as casually as a pest controller might exterminate rodents. Because that is what we were to them. Vermin. I can’t begin to tell you how much it hurts me to use that word.

What I still find hard to comprehend all these years later is the absence of conscience and the casual manner in which the murders of harmless civilians were committed, as if this was just another bodily function.

My father put his hand over my eyes and dragged me away from the window. His first instinct was to protect my innocence — because once seen, murders like that could never be unseen and would be forever imprinted in the mind.

I remember the sound of the guns that cut them down, along with the peal of shell casings cascading onto the sidewalk. The screams I heard were so visceral that if I conjure up the memory, I find that they are still ringing in my ears. A chorus of wails seemed to travel all the way from the center of the earth up to the heavens.

But I didn’t hear Mama cry. She manifested shock in a manner unlike other people. She didn’t allow herself that initial explosion of grief. When my father took his hand from my eyes, I saw her. Mama was silent. It was as if all the air had been punched out of her lungs. She was incapable of making a sound. She took all the tears and torment, plunged them deep inside her and never let them out.

A little piece of my mama was murdered that day. With every new corpse, the Germans were killing us all from the inside. I still feel the mourning cloud that descended on our household and the overwhelming sense of impotence. We, as a people, could do nothing to stop these murders, nor the next. There was no retribution. No eye for an eye. They were killing us with impunity.

I lived with the constant fear that my parents would be butchered in front of my very eyes, or that they would disappear and never come back. From the moment I awoke, I was scared that it would be my turn to be killed next. I went to sleep fretting that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.

All the while, I was crippled by hunger. When the ghetto was established in 1940, the Germans introduced food rationing. We were supposed to live on just six pounds of bread and seven ounces of sugar per person per month. For most adults, that might have lasted for a week, no more. At first, the Germans prohibited us from getting meat from the butchers. Then they restricted access to bread. Bakers’ opening hours were limited. Mothers got out of bed in the middle of the night to queue for a loaf. They risked being shot if caught in the streets before curfew was lifted. Sometimes they would come back empty-handed. Sometimes they didn’t come back at all. As the months passed, food supplies diminished. A soup kitchen was set up to keep the neediest from starving to death.

I remember having difficulty walking. I was a slow developer, probably because my body was deprived of vitamins at a time when it needed to be nurtured, to grow, to be healthy. I didn’t really walk well until the age of four because of malnutrition. Being stuck under the table for such long periods also probably hindered the development of my bones and muscles. I must have been desperate for calcium, essential for bone density and strength. When I got out from under the table, I would walk around the apartment licking the walls. I must have been intuitively trying to extract calcium from the chalk in the paint. Mama tried to curb this habit.

“You’ve been licking the walls”, she said.

“No, I haven’t”, I replied.

“Yes, you have. Don’t lie to me. I can see the tongue marks. The wall is wet”.

She would smack me. It didn’t really hurt. And at the first opportunity, as soon as her back was turned or she left the room, I’d start licking again.

We were subjected to an ever-worsening famine. The most desperate parents sent their children beyond the ghetto perimeters to forage for food, despite the threat of a death sentence the Nazis imposed without even the most rudimentary trial.

No one described the children’s courage better than the Polish Jewish poet Henryka Łazowertówna in this historic work, “The Little Smuggler”, written in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she lived and died. The poem is specifically about child smugglers in Warsaw, but it honors every one of them in every ghetto in every town occupied by the Nazis, including Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

Some parents may have told their children to ask for help from sympathetic former Polish neighbors. Others gave them money or valuables to barter with Poles outside the wire. Some of these young couriers also carried letters to try to get word to the outside world about the nature of our suffering. Their size meant there was less chance of them being spotted. But if they were caught, that household had one less mouth to feed.

An Austrian called Johann Kropfitsch used to wait near a secret entrance to the ghetto and shoot children as they returned with their bounty. Their bodies were taken to the Jewish cemetery and unceremoniously buried in unmarked graves. All their parents heard was a distant shot in the night. And their child vanished.

At thirty-nine years old, Kropfitsch was old enough to avoid military service, but young enough to be a Nazi policeman. He developed a passion for his nocturnal “hunting” expeditions. Kropfitsch prided himself on being some kind of gamekeeper. As if children were badgers or foxes that needed to be culled. What type of sick individual does such a thing? Despite a lifetime of exposure to all manner of human frailties, I struggle to understand how such depravity is possible. Kropfitsch was a serial killer responsible for the slaughter of scores of children. A photograph of him in his Nazi uniform reveals a man with cold, psychopathic eyes. After the war, he was hanged as a war criminal. What a pity he only died once. He deserved to be killed a thousand times over.

In the ghetto, there were no smiling faces. Especially among the men in field gray with knives in their belts and a gun always close at hand. On the rare occasions I ventured over the threshold of the ghetto with my parents, these men looked at me as if they wanted to kill me. Others, the ones in the sharp black uniforms, with the sinister peaked caps and the red band on their arms with the white circle and swastika in the middle, wanted to kill me even more. Me. An innocent child. All because I was born Jewish. Before the war, Jews comprised about 30 percent of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s population. But out of the 13,000 Jews resident in 1939, just 200 were still breathing at the end of the war in 1945. Only five were children. It is extraordinary that I was among them.

Reizel gave birth to me almost exactly a year before war broke out. At the time, she and Machel were living in Gdynia, a city close to Danzig, a beautiful, international free port on the Baltic Sea coast in Northern Poland. Danzig was predominantly populated by people with an ethnic German background. You’ll know the city today by its Polish name, Gdańsk. Its shipyards were the birthplace of the Solidarity trade-union movement led by Lech Wałęsa in the 1980s and whose Solidarność anti-Communist rebellion led, ultimately, to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

My father first went there in 1932 as a delegate to a conference on Zionism. He was just twenty-two years old. Representing his hometown of Tomaszów Mazowiecki was a great honor. I have a photograph of him taken just before he headed off to the conference. In it, he has a full head of wavy hair and he’s very much a confident young man about town. His face is a combination of innocence, youthful optimism and determination. His soft eyes betray a sensitive, artistic personality. How soon those eyes would become accustomed to horror.

Papa was a highly intelligent man and an idealist. Along with other Zionists, he believed that the diaspora — Jewish people scattered around the world — should move to the land of their ancestors, then called Palestine. He was a follower of Theodor Herzl, a charismatic Austrian Jewish journalist, playwright and lawyer, considered the founder of modern Zionism and author of a trailblazing manifesto called The Jewish State.

“We want to lay the foundation stone”, Herzl declared, “for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation”.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Herzl believed that anti-Semitism in Europe was so virulent that it was impossible for Jewish people to live alongside or assimilate with the Gentiles of other nations. He argued that the only solution for Jews was to create their own state and emigrate from Europe.

“If you will it, it is no dream”, Herzl wrote.

By the 1930s, the Zionists’ goal became more urgent. Hitler’s rise, accompanied by surging anti-Semitism across Europe, accelerated the need for a Jewish haven. But the Zionists failed to convince the world’s major powers to permit the establishment of a Jewish state. They were thwarted by concerns about a backlash from Arab nationalists, who opposed Jewish immigration. Great Britain was the principal impediment to the dream of a Jewish state. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, Britain was given an international mandate to govern Palestine. British opposition to Jewish immigration intensified as the Second World War approached.

British self-interest outweighed concern for endangered European Jews. The Suez Canal, sandwiched between Palestine and Egypt, was a key artery for ships carrying British imported goods. Britain didn’t want any trouble on the Palestinian flank of the canal. And the last thing it needed was to intervene in possible clashes between Zionists and Arabs.

In 1939, the British government laid down a new policy that limited Jewish migration to 75,000 people over five years. That amounted to 15,000 a year. Thereafter, any further immigrants would have to be approved by the Arab majority.

With millions of European Jews at risk from the Nazis, the Zionist movement was outraged at British intransigence. My father was among those who were dismayed and angry at what was regarded as a betrayal of the Jewish people.

But back in 1932, when his political principles were developing, my father was full of the optimism of youth. As a delegate to the Zionist conference, Papa was intoxicated both by the debate about Israel and by Danzig. It was springtime and the city was in full bloom.

“I felt that I was at the center of a bouquet of beautiful flowers”, he once told me. “Even the air was perfumed”.

This was his first adventure away from provincial Tomaszów Mazowiecki, and he was entranced by Danzig’s relative grandeur, with its wide, sweeping boulevards, as well as its quaint harbor, lined with brightly painted fifteenth-century timber buildings.

The desire to spread his wings was energized by promenades next to the Baltic Sea, past fine, sandy beaches, and observing the busy traffic of pleasure boats and cargo vessels heading to all corners of the world. He was also drawn to Danzig by the Great Synagogue, with its vaulted ceilings and large dome. It was one of the most distinctive buildings in the city, but while the architecture may have been aesthetically pleasing, it was the spiritual power within that fostered his sense of belonging.

When the conference ended, Papa was reluctant to leave Danzig. He resolved to return, to make it his home and to improve his knowledge of German, which was the city’s official language. How could he have known that his linguistic skills would become so useful, so soon, for all the wrong reasons?

Papa could quite easily have remained in Danzig, but he was drawn back to Tomaszów Mazowiecki for one very good reason: a beautiful young woman who worked in a bridal store, embroidering gowns. Her name was Reizel Pinkusewicz, and she was two years younger than my father. Reizel shared Machel’s vision of exploring the world beyond the confines of provincial Poland. She was studying Esperanto, the fledgling international language, so that she could communicate with people everywhere.

Mama was born in a village just outside Tomaszów called Paradyż. How profoundly ironic a name for a place that in 1939 became a living hell. For two hundred years, the region was something of an idyll for the Jewish community. Jewish children enjoyed a high level of private education from good schools. The town had a thriving textile industry. Factories made silk, carpets and all manner of clothing fabrics. Our family had a presence in Tomaszów for over two centuries.

Mama came from deeply religious orthodox Hasidic Jewish stock. Some members of the Pinkusewicz family were devout scholars. They came from a rabbinical dynasty stretching back two hundred years. They disapproved of my father, who was far more liberal in his outlook. For a start, he was clean-shaven. Within the Jewish community, a beard was a sign of profound religious faith, as was a hat or head covering. Papa rarely wore a hat, another thing that was unacceptable to the Pinkusewicz family.

A tailor by trade, in his soul, Papa was an actor and singer who loved to dance at every opportunity. He adored the theater and never missed a show when traveling performers came to town. The Pinkusewicz elders regarded the theater as frivolous. They believed a man should study the scriptures and holy matters. In their view, people who sang secular songs on stage were immodest. They didn’t approve of theater and even less so cinema, where performance was filmed close-up and, once projected on screen, was larger than life itself.

In 1936, Papa secured a small part alongside the former silent-movie star Molly Picon in Yiddle with His Fiddle, critically acclaimed as one of the greatest Yiddish films of all time. In truth, he was an extra and participated in a dance scene. The film was shot on location in Warsaw and in shtetls in the Polish countryside. Molly starred as Yiddle, a woman who masquerades as a man to land a gig as a fiddle player in a traveling band, playing klezmer music, the popular Yiddish genre of the time. Life becomes complicated and comical when she falls in love with one of her fellow musicians.

Full of energetic songs and dancing, the images in this road movie reveal a genuine slice of Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Poland. At a time of fascism and endemic anti-Semitism, it provided Central Europe’s Jewish communities with a resounding sense of identity and solidarity. Now, gathering dust in film archives and institutes, Yiddle with His Fiddle stands as an epitaph to a culture that the Nazis attempted to eradicate.

My father traveled a long way to Warsaw just to be in Molly’s presence. If you blink, you might miss him. Still, although he only had a small cameo, I’m proud that he is part of this historic work.

Given the opposition of the Pinkusewicz family, Papa held back from approaching Mama. Fortunately for him, the attraction was mutual, although she also hesitated about making the first move. The impasse was finally broken when she joined the Zionist organization together with a few of her girlfriends. Machel and Reizel started talking, and then they began meeting in secret. They took long walks, avoiding familiar streets and people.

Papa had a fine tenor voice, and when he was courting my mother, he used to serenade her with a popular Yiddish song called “Reizel”. It was written by Mordechai Gebirtig, an influential interwar poet and self-taught musician who tapped out compositions on a piano with one finger. Gebirtig was shot dead by the Germans in the Kraków Ghetto in 1942.

Gebirtig’s lyrics almost exactly mirrored the nature of my parents’ relationship and my grandparents’ displeasure. In the song, Reizel replies:

In the summer of 2021, as I looked at old photographs and books to remind myself of my past, I listened to that song for the first time in maybe fifty years. There’s a charming live recording on YouTube. I sat at home in Highland Park and wept. I’m no longer the girl who couldn’t cry.

I never heard my father singing to my mother. The eternal darkness that engulfed our apartment in the ghetto prohibited the simplest acts of pleasure. Singing such flippant popular songs would have felt almost immoral. Consequently, for my father, music also died in the Holocaust.

In Reizel’s orthodox family, it wasn’t customary for a girl of marriageable age to choose her own partner. Within the Pinkusewicz circle, it was unheard of. In their world, marriages were organized by a schadchanit, or matchmaker — a woman who knew the family background of both parties and almost everything about them. The theory was that if a couple were well matched, they would learn to love each other. Reizel, however, wasn’t prepared to tolerate such anachronistic tyranny and made it abundantly clear that she would rather remain single than succumb to an arranged marriage.

If her father had been alive, perhaps he might have been able to ban the wedding. But Mama overruled her widowed mother and married for love. My parents’ nuptials took place on August 23, 1936. As both families had limited means, it was a modest affair. And despite their initial objections, my father was accepted into the Pinkusewicz family with open arms after the wedding.

Six months later, the newlyweds shocked both sides of the family by moving five hundred miles north, from Tomaszów Mazowiecki to Danzig. No one ever moved away from family and friends. But Papa’s resolve to go back had not subsided. He wanted to open his own clothing store, but he also harbored dreams of joining a Yiddish theater that was starting in Danzig.

In keeping with her independent spirit, Mama rebelled against the orthodox Jewish convention of a married woman wearing a wig as a sign of modesty. Mama knew her refusal to conform to orthodox principles caused hurt and possibly an element of shame for some of her relatives. So although Machel was welcomed after the wedding, her desire to choose love over her family’s faith created a fault line for which she felt entirely responsible. Moving to Danzig made things worse. Seeds of guilt had been sown. And they grew.

The early days of my parents’ marriage in Danzig were complex and conflicted. The young couple were overjoyed to be in each other’s company. Papa was a talented tailor and his clothing store flourished. But with Danzig’s local authority in the grip of the Nazi party, anti-Semitism was rampant. In 1937, about 12,000 Jews resided in Danzig. Within a year, half had decided it was too dangerous and abandoned the city, driven out after a pogrom in October 1937 in which sixty Jewish homes and businesses were damaged by anti-Semitic thugs. They had been inflamed by a speech by Albert Forster, the Nazi head of the city state, who labeled Jews as Untermenschen—subhumans.

In 1938, Forster tightened the screws of repression. Some Jewish businesses were seized, and the deeds transferred to Gentiles. Jews were also banned from cinemas and theaters. They were barred from public baths and swimming pools and denied the right to become lawyers, doctors or any other type of professional.

Persecution reached its zenith on Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), on November 9, 1938, when I was just two months old. The name refers to the shards of glass that littered the streets of Germany, Austria and some parts of Czechoslovakia, after Nazis rioted and destroyed synagogues, Jewish businesses, homes, schools and cemeteries. The official Jewish death toll was recorded as ninety-one, but the true number of victims ran to several hundred.

Kristallnacht was a turning point in Hitler’s grand scheme to eradicate the Jews. The acquiescence of the German population at large and the lack of any significant objections gave the Nazis the confidence to ratchet up anti-Semitism and institutionalize it as German government policy.

The destruction on Kristallnacht was most severe in Berlin and Vienna. The Nazis in Danzig also went on the rampage. They intended to burn down the Great Synagogue. But the building was defended by a ring of Jewish First World War veterans who had fought in the trenches on the German side.

Being a Jew in Danzig was now extremely precarious, but my parents continued to stick it out. Then, in late August 1939, with my first birthday looming, Mama was anxious to return to Tomaszów Mazowiecki to mark the occasion. Papa’s parents, Emanuel and Pearl, hadn’t seen me since my birth. Nor had Mama’s family. She wanted to show me off and try to heal divisions. Mama kept pushing Papa to leave and they argued.

“Who is going to look after the store while we’re away?” Papa complained.

Mama was insistent. She had a premonition. Something told her we had to leave immediately. Her arguments were so persuasive that Papa relented. His younger brother, whose name I can’t recall, had also moved to Gdynia, and Papa convinced him to hold the fort while we took a series of trains south.

As a major port, Danzig was a key strategic target for Hitler’s armed forces on September 1, 1939, the day their blitzkrieg began. Squadrons of Stuka dive-bombers attacked a flotilla of Polish warships in Danzig Bay. The aircraft roared over Gdynia’s waterfront, one of them scoring a direct hit on Papa’s clothing store. My poor uncle was killed. He was one of the first civilian casualties of the Second World War. It could so easily have been us.

The German army, the Wehrmacht, swept through Poland at such a pace that it had reached Tomaszów Mazowiecki by September 6, 1939, just three days after the conflict escalated into a world war. My parents’ hometown was attacked on land and from the sky. We were living with Mama’s mother and her family at the time.

Tanks from two German Panzer units bombarded a lightly armed Polish infantry division while Stukas terrorized civilians. The Stukas were fitted with sirens called Jericho Trumpets, which screamed as they plunged into vertical dives. The sirens’ wail intensified as the planes accelerated and amplified the panic of those in the line of fire. Just as they did in the battle for Old Testament Jericho, the trumpets shattered the psychological defenses of their victims. Bombs fell near my grandparents’ home with some fatalities, but we all escaped injury.

The battle for Tomaszów Mazowiecki was brief and one-sided. The Polish defenders fought with courage, destroying twenty-one German tanks and killing 100 enemy troops. But they were quickly overwhelmed. After 770 men were killed, and more than 1,000 wounded, the Polish division retreated, abandoning Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s civilians to their fate.

One of the Germans’ first acts was to demand from Jewish leaders one million zlotys in hard cash from the local bank. That’s the equivalent today of five million dollars. When the men failed to raise the money in time, they were gunned down.

Within a week of occupying Tomaszów, the Germans inflicted another taste of the future. At first, the soldiers abused Jews by hacking off the beards of the religiously devout, often tearing at flesh in the process. They used knives or bayonets to lop off the side curls that traditionally dangled in front of the men’s ears. They were shredding the self-esteem of our most venerated people and undermining the fabric of our civic society.

Sidling up to German soldiers, clusters of Aryan Poles looked on with approval as Jews were humiliated. The Nazis ascended to power in Germany by legitimizing the muscle of the mob and appealing to thug mentality. Immediately after the invasion, they likewise encouraged anti-Semitic Poles to give vent to their most base instincts. Other Poles watched and concluded that adopting German attitudes offered them the best chance of survival within the growing boundaries of Hitler’s Third Reich. And they joined in.

Seven days after seizing control of Tomaszów, the Germans rounded up 1,000 inhabitants, targeting the intelligentsia and professional classes. Three hundred of them were Jews. Rabbis, lawyers, teachers, doctors — the very fiber of our society. They neutralized the brightest minds who might possibly have been a threat. It was a form of decapitation. Cutting off the head to get rid of the brains, so lessening the chances of rebellion. As far as the Germans were concerned, the only Jew with a purpose was one with a skill or strength to work for the Nazi war machine. They were lining us up for slave labor.

Ninety Jews were imprisoned at Buchenwald near Weimar, 170 miles southwest of Berlin. Buchenwald was one of Germany’s first concentration camps and a test bed for Hitler’s Final Solution. Of the 300 Jews arrested in Tomaszów Mazowiecki on that day, September 13, 1939, only thirteen survived the Holocaust.

The Germans were just getting started. A month later, on October 16, they burned down the Great Synagogue of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Then, another month later, they razed the town’s two remaining places of Jewish worship. Jewish businesses were ordered to display the Star of David. Many families were evicted from their homes to make way for the Germans who would rule over us.

The early days of occupation set the tone for my childhood. The events of 1939 molded my life, just as they did for every Jew on earth. So did the ensuing liquidation of the Jewish ghetto. I’m not claiming that my experiences are the worst of the Second World War. But the scenes I witnessed were some of the most depraved in the history of humankind. Because I was a child, and it was so long ago, I don’t remember the specific dates or details of all that took place in front of my eyes. Names from the past that were once familiar have faded from my memory. Although their faces have not.

Still, everything I do, every decision I make today, is forged by the forces that surrounded me in my formative years. I believe in God. According to our Torah, the scriptures that guide us, we understand that God taught humanity the difference between good and evil. We believe that God gave us all free will. One of the consequences of free will is that humans can choose to follow a dark path.

No child should see what I have seen. No child should be starved or tortured or treated like a subhuman. My childhood was stolen from me as soon as I learned to communicate. Perhaps the innate innocence of youth enabled me to live a full and relatively happy life. But I took my experiences and used them as fuel to move forward. Children the world over are resilient and, given a fair wind, can rebound from the darkest of experiences.

Adults are less fortunate. In my experience, they suffer far more, because they understand more. I know that because of what happened to my beautiful, wonderful, brilliant mama, whose light was extinguished prematurely. To this day, I cherish her memory, not least for her courage and the wisdom she imparted.

I lost my innocence in the Jewish ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, the moment I looked beyond the tablecloth.

Throughout the early years of my childhood, evil was riding on my shoulder every step of the way. As far as I’m concerned, the common postwar German excuse of “I was just following orders” has no validity. So many chose the dark side.