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

Chapter Five. The Churchyard

We had passed through the first selection process but were far from safe.

In the graveyard, Mama must have felt so alone. Having ensured that we made it past the officer, my father was obliged to leave us and return to the deportation of the Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. People were marched to the railway station. Their shoes and possessions were taken away and they were crammed into cattle wagons.

My father writes that by the end of that day, some 6,000 Jews had been expelled from the ghetto. In just one day, the Nazis transported almost half the Jews of our town on their last journey.

We were just one component of Operation Reinhard, the sick brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. Operation Reinhard was designed to achieve the physical annihilation of every Jew who lived in occupied Poland. Ultimately, it was responsible for the murder of approximately 2 million children, women and men, most of them Polish Jews.

The logistics for Operation Reinhard were devised with chilling clarity. Those who were too old, sick or frail were meant to be shot while still in the ghetto or on their way to the station. These murders were committed because the smooth operation of the extermination camps relied on victims being able to walk from the platform to the gas chambers on their own. Those who couldn’t do that were killed immediately. Ordnung muss sein—there must be order. German efficiency and thoroughness at its most despicable.

That first selection, where my cousins, their parents and most of my mother’s family were taken away, was not the last. The Germans continued to reduce the numbers of people they considered would be useful workers. In the Yizkor book, my father talks of at least two further selections. The first was on that Sabbath, October 31. Papa writes that even those with working papers were detained for a while in a factory, before some of them were sent back to the hospital courtyard, one of several staging posts before the gas chamber.

Somehow, Mama and I, just a four-year-old child, survived that process. Time has blurred my memory, and I have no recollection of being in the factory. So my father’s testimony in the Yizkor book is the most accurate guide to what happened. He paints images I could not begin to convey. “Next day there was a lull in the killings”, he writes, then goes on:

Here, I’m fairly sure my father is making a reference to himself. One of the main duties of a Jewish policeman was to guard the perimeter of the ghetto, to prevent internees from fleeing. The Nazis used the policemen to distance themselves from their victims and to make their own lives easier. If, indeed, my father was obliged to act as a sentinel by the barbed-wire fence enclosing the ghetto’s remaining Jews, I can only imagine the mental anguish he endured. Every second must have been an ethical and moral minefield. How did he manage to resolve the quandary that being a policeman probably enabled his immediate family to survive, while simultaneously meaning he was obliged to escort his friends, neighbors and other family toward their deaths?

“The tension and the horror into which those remaining in the ghetto were plunged on that day defy description”, writes my father. “Nevertheless — they still hoped the spirit of evil would abate and that they would be allowed to stay alive”.

But any such hopes were crushed on Tuesday, November 2, 1942, when the events of the previous Sabbath were repeated with “even greater cruelty and energy”. As my father writes:

It was then that there was another selection:

As I was so young at the time, I can’t remember the exact sequence of events. I can’t be sure whether what happened to me in the churchyard took place on October 31 or on November 2, but whenever it was, it is imprinted in my memory.

We were ordered to kneel and I kneeled close to Mama. After a while, I was able to shift and sit on her lap. She bent over me and whispered words of encouragement in that kind, gentle voice.

“Tola. We will be all right, just as long as you don’t cry out or move. Stay as still as you can”.

In the churchyard, the air was filled with shooting and screams of terror and pain. A massacre was taking place all around us. Mama bent down lower and clutched me even tighter. My face was almost touching the ground. I could feel Mama’s weight on my back. Although she was thin, she was still heavy for me. I couldn’t see what was going on. My ears were ringing. The soldiers must have been shooting with those frightening new guns I’d seen as we’d marched through the streets. They fired bullets much faster than rifles. Mama’s body jerked and twitched involuntarily with every burst. Haunting cries accompanied the metallic churning of the guns. The chemical smell from the muzzles hung in the air and filled my nose.

All the while, through her fear, Mama kept trying to reassure me. She did her utmost to be my physical and psychological shield. Her fragile body was all that stood between me and a hail of Nazi bullets. The Germans were capricious. The slightest irritation and German trigger fingers were liable to twitch and squeeze. Mama was making herself small and insignificant. I felt her anxiety as she sought to avoid drawing attention to herself and, therefore, to me. I took comfort from nestling in her lap. Her touch always made me feel safe.

I could still feel her heart thumping. I can remember the sensation as if it were yesterday. Her body was quivering from fear and the distress of knowing her sister and nieces were going to die, if not already dead. She didn’t make a sound, despite no doubt screaming inside from the pain of her snap decision. Her sister would have watched as Mama removed her children’s hands from her skirt. Mama resisted crying out loud, but I felt her tears tumbling onto my face.

Whenever those dreadful days resurface in my mind, my reverence for my mother is rekindled. The image I hold and cherish is not just of my own mother defending me, but one of a universal mother fulfilling the primal covenant to safeguard her child, no matter what the cost. From the moment of creation, a woman carries her children in her soul, as well as her womb, and would sacrifice herself willingly to ensure that life continues for them.

Hitler tried to eradicate the Jews by exterminating their children. So my mother was not just trying to preserve her own family by saving me. She fought for my survival as an act of defiance on behalf of her people. When faced with complete annihilation, just one child could offer the Jewish race a lifeline. As she sheltered in the graveyard next to St. Wenceslas Church, Mama could never have imagined that by the end of the Holocaust, 150 members of her family would have perished, and that the only person left to tell her story would be me.

Every day of my life, I honor her. I see my mother, Reizel, much like the Old Testament matriarch Rachel, who protected and wept for her children and became a universal icon of motherhood. As the symbolic mother of a nation, Rachel wept for the children of Israel when they were sent into exile; Mama’s tears that fell on me in the graveyard were as powerful as hers.

Back then, I was relieved that my mama was protecting me. That relief, I recall, along with the sounds of genocide. Greased gun bolts sliding rounds into chambers. Guttural insults and curses before murder was committed. And fading away in the distance, the rhythmic panting of a steam engine slowly heading north.

Why wasn’t I shot? At the time, I thought it was a miracle I survived the carnage. The shooting seemed to go on forever. I attempted to shut out the noise and willed the gunfire to cease. And then it did. The ringing slackened. That muffled sense of being deafened subsided. The silence was chilling. My ears took a while to acclimatize to the hush, although the churchyard wasn’t completely quiet. I heard moaning and weeping and people trying to suppress groans. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could sense agony rippling among the survivors.

After a moment, I felt my mother relax and she lifted herself up a little. I was no longer crushed.

“They’ve stopped shooting, Tola. You can stop feeling afraid”, Mama whispered. “They aren’t going to shoot anymore. They’ve killed enough people”.

How did she know that? But she was right. The massacre was over.

The pain of having been fixed in one position was now aggravated by hunger pangs. I could barely feel my legs when, eventually, we were ordered to stand up. I looked around and caught the faint, strangely metallic smell of blood. There were bodies everywhere. So many dead, locked in unnatural poses. Among them were children I recognized. But I do recall that Mama and I were in a daze as we were marched back under guard to the ghetto, in the blackness of mid-autumn, past even more corpses.

Not far away, my father witnessed the courage of my mother’s niece. Her name was Pesska Pinkusewicz. Pesska was allowed to stay behind in the ghetto because she was in possession of an authorized work permit. But she ran to a Gestapo soldier and told him that she wanted to stay with her parents and the rest of her family. My father wrote that the Gestapo soldier cautioned Pesska that her request meant “an ascent to heaven through the chimney”.

But Pesska ignored his warning and tearfully repeated her entreaty, despite knowing that the German was telling her the truth. My father must have been close by when the soldier opened the gate because he overheard the German shouting to Pesska, “Go, go, stupid goose”.

“Her tear-dimmed eyes are radiant”, writes my father. “She embraces her mother and father and cries out: ‘Let us be in heaven, but together!’”

That particular German was honest about the Jews’ fate, but those in charge of the ghetto engaged in subterfuge to make it easier to herd people onto the trains. Horse-drawn carts headed to the station loaded with baggage the deportees were told they could take with them — a measure designed to fool them into thinking they were bound for a work camp and to rob them of their belongings.

My father wrote next:

I’m positive my father is talking about himself here, because I distinctly recall him coming back to our apartment covered in blood. He was lucky to escape with his life.

My father describes how, in a “blood orgy”, the Germans and Ukrainians forced up to 120 Jews into each cattle wagon. There was no water or any other provision for human needs:

By the end of that day, about 8,000 more Jews had been placed in cattle cars and sent to their deaths. Hundreds more were slaughtered on the spot. Over the course of those three days, some 15,000 Jews were transported to the Treblinka gas chambers. The precise death toll has never been confirmed. Most records of that time simply state that hundreds were murdered during the liquidation of the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto.

Sitting at home in New Jersey reading the Yizkor book brought occupied Poland back to life and my heart bled for my father, who consigned to memory everything he had witnessed. He recorded the last known words of Rabbi Gedaliahu Shochet, one of the most devout people in the ghetto. The rabbi was hiding his salt-and-pepper beard behind a scarf, for fear the Germans would unsheathe their bayonets and cut it off, along with the skin beneath it.

My father describes how, as his congregation was being exterminated all around him, the rabbi threw off his “kerchief” and covered his head with it, as he would at prayer in the synagogue. “Suddenly”, my father writes, “he lifted his head to the skies and cried, ‘And thou, Lord of the Universe, sitting on high, see all this and art silent?’”

How striking that a rabbi should turn on his God and condemn Him. It’s not surprising that his faith was shaken to its core. The brutality of the Holocaust led some of us to conclude that God did not exist because He did not intervene. But in the charnel house of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, another rabbi, Emanuel Grossman, maintained that humans were to blame because God gave them the power of individual choice. Grossman had the same name as my paternal grandfather, although I’m not sure if he was connected to us by blood.

Reading the Yizkor book in Yiddish is a more powerful experience for me than the English version, translated by Morris Gradel, a gifted linguist who died in 2010. The Yiddish is more precise, and I hear the cadence of the words that were used at the time, reconnecting me to the agony of November 2, 1942, when my father heard Rabbi Grossman’s final pleas.

My father writes that as the rabbi walked with his family to the station, his “usual self-confidence had faltered, although his face showed no signs of the struggle that was going on inside him”:

I don’t know whether the rabbi’s children survived. I doubt it. But my father took his words to heart and did his duty by bearing witness and relating in graphic detail the nature of the Nazis’ crimes in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

My father is no longer here to tell that story. But I am. He passed the baton to me. I am speaking on behalf of Rabbi Emanuel Grossman and his family. Now I’m passing the baton to my own children and grandchildren.

The same day, after the deportation, the remaining Jews were ordered to assemble, according to my father’s notes. I don’t remember being there. But reading through my father’s account, it seems clear that the crowd of survivors from the ghetto must have included Mama and me. We were allowed to live because the Nazis deemed that we were still of some use to them. After forcing us to watch genocide taking place, the Germans compounded our distress by compelling us to clean up the massacre they had perpetrated. At gunpoint, we were forced to sanitize the scene of the crime to comply with the Nazi dictum: leave no witnesses, leave no traces.

“There were clearly distinguishable bloodstains in the houses — the blood of aged and ailing Jews, who had been unable or unwilling to leave their beds and who were shot on the spot”, writes my father in the Yizkor book. “On the tables were plates with soup the Jews did not have time to eat, glasses of tea they had not drunk”.

As a four-year-old, I couldn’t process the images that passed in front of my eyes. There’s no doubt that I was traumatized by the brutality of the sights I witnessed. But my heart aches for my father. I believe his torment was more profound. He saw the same war crimes as I did, and many more at closer quarters, but he understood much better than I could the magnitude of what had taken place. He had hoped that his position would allow him to save more of his family and friends. But instead, he had to stand by, helpless, as they were slaughtered in front of him. “Again, there were heartrending scenes”, he recalls:

According to the archives of the Jewish council, my father stopped being paid as a policeman from that day forward. But he and other members of the Jewish Order Service were compelled to dispose of the remains of those killed during the liquidation of the main ghetto. In all, about 250 corpses lay contorted in apartments, on cobbles and in the churchyard. The Jewish policemen were under constant German military escort as they removed the bodies of friends, relatives, neighbors and strangers alike, and buried them without ceremony in the Jewish cemetery of Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

Their skeletons lie there still. Entwined. Somewhere, beneath the mulch. Trampled underfoot. They have no headstones. But they are remembered. If you go there, look down and think of them. Maybe say a prayer that it should never happen again.