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

Chapter Three. And then They Came for Me

One of the maxims of the Holocaust was that first they came for the intellectuals. In reality, they kept coming back just in case they missed some. The SS guards took their time getting to the front door of one of the brightest people in my family. But, just as inevitably as death itself, they eventually turned up in the spring of 1942 and took away Uncle James (he of the bushy eyebrows), married to my wonderful aunt Helen, my father’s sister.

Uncle James was a German Jew. He was a lawyer with a fine mind, and I idolized him. Sitting on his lap and playing with his eyebrows is one of my sharpest first memories. Uncle James had thought that he might be useful to our jailers. He hoped his language skills might save him, securing him work as an interpreter. Poor Uncle James. Like so many Jews, he was deluded. To the Nazis, all Jews were expendable. They didn’t need translators. They weren’t having conversations that required Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew interpretations. They were issuing orders in a language understood by every race on earth. Violence.

Even now, eighty years later, I don’t know precisely how Uncle James’s life ended. But having read various historical accounts, I suspect he was shot outside his home. I just hope his death was instant and painless. I know that his wife, Helen, wasn’t there at the time. She was younger than he, with an enchanting elfin face and a beautiful smile. Helen was about eighteen years old, and like everyone else of her age, she was a forced laborer, possibly in a textiles factory hitched to the German war effort. It was a small mercy that Helen was absent when they came for her husband. She would have done anything for her family. She might have been killed there and then. But her time would come and not in a manner or place that one might imagine.

I remember my father coming back and telling me in the gentlest way possible, “I’m afraid you won’t be seeing your uncle James again. He’s gone and he won’t be coming back”.

I was really upset. I loved Uncle James very much. He was such a handsome man. His murder was part of my ghetto education. Although I was only three and a half, I was learning that people just disappeared. You had to get used to it, along with the numbness that accompanied the feeling of helplessness.

Uncle James’s murder aligns with a series of raids on April 27 and 28, 1942, by the German Security Police. They conducted an Intelligentsia Aktion and rounded up lawyers, doctors, members of the Jewish police and the Judenrat, the Jewish council or administration that nominally ran the ghetto but which had to acquiesce to German demands. Many of the victims were shot for “trying to escape” as they were being arrested. Over the course of those two days, 200 people were murdered.

Mama didn’t cry when Uncle James was killed. As ever, she hid her tears behind an invisible veil. With each new murder, a memorial stone was cemented on top of her spirit. Uncle James’s was laid next to those of her mother and uncle. The cenotaph being constructed inside her mind grew with every passing day. It weighed her down. She was slowly drowning.

As spring turned to summer in 1942, the Germans once again tightened the screws on the ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. I know this because every European Jewish community eradicated in the Shoah has a Yizkor, a book of remembrance. Containing photographs of and tributes to the dead, and written mostly in Yiddish and Hebrew, the Yizkor books were a postwar attempt by survivors to reconstruct and honor the history the Germans tried to wipe out. Included are descriptions of individual tragedies, acts of heroism and revelations about the names of tormentors and criminals.

Ever since I’ve lived in Highland Park, the black leather-bound Yizkor book of Tomaszów Mazowiecki has been in my collection. For decades, it sat untouched in my bookcase. But in the summer of 2021, I took it from the shelf once more and braced myself.

Yiddish was the language of my childhood. I stopped speaking it when my father died, but lately, I have been studying the language again. I found that I was able to read the Yizkor book with ease. It was as if I was reliving my early life and it was mesmerizing.

My father wrote seventeen pages of the Tomaszów Yizkor book. There, he portrays the destruction of the ghetto and the accompanying slaughter. So graphic are his descriptions that his contribution to the Yizkor book has become a cornerstone of the history of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto.

My father knew what was going on, because he was a member of the Ordnungsdienst, the Jewish Order Service or police force. The Germans had ordered the Judenrat to establish a police force in late 1940. Their role was to maintain order, to guard the internal border of the ghetto and to stop people escaping. It was also part of the Nazi strategy of sowing division among the Jewish population. Baruch Szoeps, the first chairman of the Judenrat, was beaten to death by the Gestapo for refusing to cooperate with the Germans. His successor, Lejbusz Warsager, determined it would be wiser to comply.

In ghettos throughout Poland, Jewish councils reluctantly concluded that if they acceded to some of the German demands, they would have a greater chance of saving their people. The councillors might have managed to preserve some lives, although as history sadly demonstrates, all they did was delay the inevitable genocide. The Nazis had no intention of responding with mercy to the Judenrat’s gestures. But how could anyone have imagined that people from a cultured, modern, intelligent country like Germany were planning to exterminate another race? Germany, the birthplace of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, of writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was simply unthinkable.

Members of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki Judenrat were highly selective about which men they chose to be police officers. Some councillors instructed their sons to join. They also sought out men from “good” families. The Judenrat was determined to exclude types who might be either violent or corruptible. According to a Judenrat wages ledger discovered by archivists in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, my father was paid twenty-five Polish zlotys a month. The salary was effectively worthless at a time when food and other staples were difficult to find because the Germans controlled the supply chain.

In the black market for Poles, people paid fifteen zlotys for a loaf of bread weighing 2.25 pounds. But in Jewish ghettos, the black-market rate more than doubled to thirty-two zlotys. Bear in mind that as part of the Nazi campaign to wipe us out, Jews only obtained a third of the rations that Poles were getting, and so black-market prices for Jews were twice as high.

As the ledger suggests, there was no financial incentive for joining the police — the only real motivation for the Jews was to obtain information. In the ghetto, information might make the difference between life and death. Mama told me that my father was trusted, presumably by the Judenrat, to get intelligence that might help save his friends and neighbors, and that he could be relied upon to soften German orders. So when he was recruited, together with his friend Aaron Greenspan and several others on February 1, 1942, as life in the ghetto was becoming increasingly perilous, he must have seen it as a way to protect Mama and me. As far as I’m concerned, my father was a hero.

There has long been a casual misconception that the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter — that they were passive and didn’t fight back. That is simplistic and inaccurate. The Jews were certainly overwhelmed, but there was a spirit of resistance across occupied Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Underground movements sprang up across the Nazi empire. There were uprisings in a hundred Jewish ghettos. That’s one in every four. The participants weren’t naive enough to believe they could defeat the Germans, but where they could be, they were disruptive.

By watering down the Germans’ orders, by being kind and humane in the face of unbelievable sadism and by picking up information he thought might help save some people, my father, in his own small way, was a rebel who hid in plain sight. This is the conclusion I reached after reexamining his contribution to the Yizkor book: “In the summer of 1942, there was a spate of rumors that strange things were going on in the towns and neighboring townlets”. He continues:

Sure enough, something terrible did happen when I was about four years old. I can place it back to that time because the table in 24 Krzyżowa Street was still my reference point. When I was four, my shoulders reached the tabletop and I no longer had to stand on tiptoe to see what was on it.

The apartment door opened. My father entered and slumped into a chair. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. I remember it as if it happened today. I remember where I was standing and where my father was sitting and where my mother was. Mama was to the left of me and Papa was to the right.

“I took them to the truck. I had to help them climb up”, he said. “The truck was full. Full of old people. They were sitting right at the back next to the tailgate”.

My father was talking about his parents, Emanuel and Pearl.

“We just looked at each other. I saw the look in their eyes. They knew where they were going. I couldn’t save them. There was nothing I could do”.

The Germans must have taken sadistic pleasure in forcing a Jewish policeman to lead his own parents to their death. Two or three days earlier, my father and other men of his generation had been ordered to dig a mass grave for their parents. Papa knew what was coming and was powerless to prevent it. Having repeatedly considered this crime over the years, I have tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that he was able to help them in a small way at the end, just by being there.

But how traumatic must it have been for my father to know that he was unable to save them? If he had tried to thwart the Germans, he undoubtedly would have been killed, and Mama and I would have been more vulnerable than we already were. He was caught between the hammer and the anvil. He was damned whatever he did. Every day presented him with new insoluble moral dilemmas.

In the ghettos and the camps, Jews like my father were compelled to make impossible choices several times a day, every day, every week, every month, every year. As a Jew in occupied Europe, there were no good decisions. There were only bad and worse ones. All you could do was make a less bad decision. Make the wrong one and you were dead, and your family would probably join you shortly afterward. Anyone who has ever faced imminent annihilation knows that you do what you must to survive.

I’m convinced my father didn’t have a choice about becoming a policeman. There was no guarantee that those who enlisted would be safe. The Germans killed some officers within the force, and the Judenrat was obliged to maintain the numbers. It appears he was selected as a replacement officer. I don’t think he would have volunteered. He would only have enlisted if asked to do so by Jewish community leaders who were keen to maintain the best possible standards under the most impossible circumstances. It was a position he detested, because, despite his good intentions, he was required to perform duties that were abhorrent. Jewish police officers had to enforce the orders of their Nazi controllers or put themselves and their families at risk. Plain and simple, it was blackmail.

Honorable policemen like my father strove, wherever possible, to mitigate German orders, or to send people discreet warnings that gave them a chance to save their lives, or at least choose the least bad option. I believe that he did his best to ease the suffering of the Jews of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Mama was his conscience, and she helped him navigate that terrible moral maze.

That day, when my father told us about his parents, not only was Mama internally grieving the murder of family and friends, but her grief was exacerbated by the pain borne by my father, the man she married for love. At the table, Mama tried in vain to console my father while silently putting two more bricks in her invisible memorial wall.

It was hard for me to imagine not seeing my grandparents again, but I had to come to terms with it almost straight away. Today, I struggle to picture their faces. They have faded over the years. The abiding image that keeps coming to me is of my grandfather with a yellow measuring tape around his neck in his tailor’s store in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

But what I do clearly remember are my father’s tears. I recall his sense of resignation. He talked very quietly. He wasn’t surprised that they were taken away to be shot. They lived with the expectation that we would all be killed. My father was numb. The way he and Mama accepted death is very frightening to me today. It shows just how surreal life and death were in the ghetto.

My grandparents were taken to the woods on the outskirts of the town. I have no proof of what happened to them, but I imagine they would have done their best to follow a traditional Jewish ritual when death is imminent. When we know we are about to die, we recite a prayer called Shema Yisrael.

“Listen Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and all your might”.

I wonder if they had time to make their peace in that way, as did other Jews heading for the gas chambers in Birkenau. I can picture what happened to them. After struggling to climb down from the truck, along with other Jews condemned to death, they would have heard guttural German voices ordering them to walk toward the pit dug by their son and others. Pearl and Emanuel didn’t speak German; they must have been completely confused. I suspect their last moments were spent agonizing over what the Nazis might do to the rest of their family.

I doubt they would have stared at the muzzles pointing at them. So many were shot in the back. One would have heard the bullets that killed the other, a fraction of a second before he or she fell, too. Sometimes, after a massacre, the ground would heave as those buried alive tried in vain to dig themselves out. More than anything, I hope they weren’t still breathing when the earth was heaped upon them. I pray the soil didn’t move after the shovels were tossed into the back of the truck that had been their hearse, and the slave laborers were driven away to perform that task again another day.

All the while, life was getting harder in the ghetto. Every household was stricken with hunger. Old people collapsed and died in the streets. Children who were allowed out of their homes begged for food on the sidewalks. A soup kitchen set up by community leaders had long ceased operating. A good-hearted young man called David Goldman, who’d prepared meals specifically for children, contracted typhus and passed away. The cramped, unhygienic living conditions meant typhus ripped through the ghetto like wildfire.

And things were about to get worse. For two years, we had lived in darkness after sunset. But on October 23, the ghetto was suddenly brightly illuminated by streetlights that hadn’t operated since 1940. All the lights on the perimeter of our prison were turned on. People were dazzled by the glare and their broken spirits darkened further. If I think back hard enough, I can recall looking out of the window after dusk and thinking the street was brighter than in daytime. The lights made us realize that we had nowhere to hide.

Nazi volunteers from Ukraine materialized, dressed in black uniforms and carrying submachine guns. They were joined by men from Poland and Lithuania.

“They were all wearing steel helmets and armed for battle. Sounds of firing were soon heard and first victims fell”, recalls my father in the Yizkor book. “In the light, the angels of death who surrounded the ghetto had a better view of the living targets they would fire at and could thus relish the horrors they would inflict on the ghetto”.

Reading such descriptions in the Yizkor book helped to rekindle memories buried deep inside me. I always had a vague recollection of hearing shooting, feeling terrified and watching the traumatized faces of the people with whom I lived. It was painful to relive those terrible days. At the same time, thanks to my father’s witness testimony, written after the war, I was able to put that part of my childhood into context and in a historical timeline.

Six days after the ghetto was floodlit, Jewish anxieties reached fever pitch. Ghetto inhabitants were convinced there were going to be deportations to death camps. In a swirling fog of rumor and counter rumor, they gathered outside the headquarters of the Judenrat, demanding answers. The crowd’s agitation was a source of potential trouble for Hans Pichler, the regional commander of the Schutzpolizei, the Nazi Reich police. He wanted to calm the mood and calculated that using his troops would not have the desired effect. So he passed the problem to the Judenrat—in other words, Jewish community leaders — giving them the unenviable task of implementing German decrees.

My father takes up the story in the Yizkor book:

I presume my father was one of the policemen commanded to get the crowd under control on that day, October 29, 1942. If so, he would have had to pass on the Gestapo edict that anyone caught spreading false rumors about deportations would be shot. The crowd had little alternative but to disperse. It goes without saying that the assurances were a lie.

Then my father writes, “But later that evening a group of Jewish policemen, and with them German and Ukrainian police armed with submachine guns, appeared at the station, where hundreds of Jewish men, women, children and even tiny babies born that day or the day before were already assembled”.

It’s important to emphasize that the Jewish police didn’t have guns. They had truncheons for crowd control. The Germans didn’t arm the Jewish police in case they turned on their tormentors and opened fire. As I sat reading the Yizkor book, I could sense the pain my father went through as the noose tightened around the ghetto.

Throughout that day, hundreds of Jews from neighboring towns and villages were funneled at gunpoint into a barbed-wire stockade, hastily erected in a field next to the station, about a mile northeast of the ghetto.

The crowd became increasingly agitated as the hours went by. Day turned into night, and all the while, more Jews were pushed into the field, taunted and prodded with rifle butts. The Gestapo berated the Jewish policemen. Here again, I’m sure my father is talking about orders he received himself: “Mach mal ordnung mit dem Juden-Gesindel”[2].

It’s obvious the Germans wanted the Jewish policemen to use violence against their own people. But I’m certain that when those like my father failed to carry out the Germans’ demands, the Gestapo piled into the stockade and began lashing out. Because my father wrote that the Gestapo “hurled themselves into the crowd to impose order on the babies and their mothers, who were waiting for the train to take them somewhere or other..”.

My father doesn’t identify the train’s destination. Perhaps at that stage, he genuinely didn’t know, because I think it’s highly unlikely the Germans would have revealed that the train was heading to Treblinka.

Treblinka is a name that makes me shudder to this day. It’s a name the world needs to remember, even though it no longer exists. The Germans destroyed the camp in 1943 to try to hide evidence of their war crimes. All that stands in its place is a giant Neolithic-style stone memorial, surrounded by a sea of sharp rocks, shaped like sharks’ teeth, pointing toward the sky. At the foot of the centerpiece is a stone, chiseled into the form of a burned book, inscribed with the words “Never Again”.

Treblinka was hidden in a forest, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw. It contained six gas chambers and was one of six extermination camps built by the Nazis with the sole intention of eradicating Poland’s 2 million Jews. With characteristic German efficiency, the Nazis improved the rail connections to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto and Central Poland, where I lived, to accelerate the mass murder of Jews.

That means that somewhere in an office within the Third Reich, there was a master statistician with a warped mind, who calculated the extra number of railway tracks and switch points and signals required to ensure the death trains ran like clockwork. Psychopaths alone were incapable of implementing the Holocaust. And they were dependent on an army of complicit drones, as well as highly educated professionals to lubricate the mundane logistics of industrial slaughter. I wonder what happened to that little man with his pencil sharpener, his pristine blue-squared math books and his multiplication tables. Did he survive the war? Did he end up in the dock at the Nuremberg trials? Or did he manage to slip away and reinvent himself as a railway administrator after the armistice? The statistician may not have pulled a trigger or popped a Zyklon B canister down a gas-chamber chute, but he surely was a war criminal.

The last major deportation from Warsaw to Treblinka took place on Monday, September 21, 1942. Just another day for most of the world, but for us it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. We believe it’s the day when God decides each person’s fate, and on it, we ask for forgiveness for sins we have committed during the previous year.

The timing of that train journey could not have been more sadistic. The Jews’ fate was decided by the Nazis. All hope was extinguished.

Then they came for us.

My father describes the night before the first of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s Jews boarded the trains to Treblinka:

I know this was my father’s own personal experience. He was beaten with rifle butts for trying to be kind. I remember seeing him coming home that night with dried blood caked on his face and my mother trying to clean him up. The next day, he was obliged to go out again. He writes:

On October 30, the cattle trains from Tomaszów Mazowiecki transported over 7,500 Jewish people to Treblinka. They were all gassed and then cremated on open pyres.

The apocalypse alighted upon the ghetto the next day, our Sabbath. We awoke to a dawn chorus of rifle butts smashing front doors open.

They had come for me. A four-year-old.

We were heading for Selektion.

Selection.

A word as chilling as Treblinka.

Its meaning?

Life or death.