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

Chapter Six. The Block

Our world had shrunk. The surviving Jews of Tomaszów Mazowiecki were confined to four streets: Wachodnia, Pierkarska, Handlova and Jerozolimska. We were now prisoners in the small ghetto that was known as the Block. There were about 900 or so of us, including Mama, Papa and me. A barbed-wire fence sealed us in and separated us from the buildings that comprised the old, larger ghetto. We were guarded by Germans, Ukrainians and Poles. From their shoulders dangled the submachine guns that had irrigated the ground by St. Wenceslas Church with the blood of our people.

The northern end of Jerozolimska was the only official way in and out. It was the portal to the outside world. As we all now knew, from there, it was a two-mile walk to the rail tracks, and extinction.

“I guess there’s no way they would let us go back into our buildings”.

I overheard Mama whispering to Papa as we were marched back under guard to our new quarters.

“We can’t go back to the old buildings. I guess they’re going to kill us a different way”, she said.

The sound of steam engines and shunting cars in the middle distance provoked looks of concern among the adults. But for the time being, the normal railway schedule was restored. The trains weren’t for us. An eerie silence descended on the ghetto’s four streets. The wall of sound made by 15,000 people had blown away over the horizon in the direction of Treblinka. A sense of shock and collective depression descended over those still breathing.

Over the coming days and weeks, it became clear that those souls would never return. Our guards didn’t tell us about their fate. News filtered through because some Jewish craftsmen, such as carpenters and painters, were allowed to work outside the barbed wire, escorted to and fro by policemen.

What my father writes in the Yizkor book is important:

The Germans were masters of deception. They wanted surviving Jews to believe that the deportees were still alive. In their final hours before being murdered, some were coerced into writing letters or postcards to relatives saying that they were happy and healthy, laboring in some distant corner of the Third Reich.

My father recalled that people in the Block heard a rumor that a woman on the last train to Treblinka had written a letter saying she was working on a farm in Germany and her children were with her. No one could confirm the rumor, but they wanted to believe in it. The hope it provided was sufficient to keep us all in a state of denial. The survivors refused to believe the implications of the slaughter they had witnessed with their own eyes. It was beyond their comprehension that the Nazis intended to keep murdering us until the Jewish race was extinct.

Looking back, I realize that most of those in the Block were suffering from “the delusion of reprieve”—a condition identified by Viktor Frankl, an eminent Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist from Vienna, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, written after he’d survived three years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Frankl writes, “The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad”.

In the Yizkor book, my father records something similar: “…the Jews fooled themselves and grew accustomed to their daily routine, guarding in their hearts the hope of better times to come”.

For Mama and me, that daily routine involved going to the Sammlungstelle. The literal translation is “collection point”. What a misleading euphemism for a repository of all the personal artifacts, photographs, pictures, books and heirlooms of an entire community that had disappeared. Fifteen thousand personal histories stretching back centuries were contained within. Their ties and hats and sweaters and socks and shoes and suits and shirts and skirts each diffused a lingering intensely individual perfume. It was the job of those left behind to categorize and sort the possessions of the murdered Jews, dumped in undulating hillocks on the floor of a disused factory, pack the items into crates and dispatch them to Germany. The owners’ bodies had gone. Their belongings soon followed. Before long, it was as if those people and their families had never existed.

The Nazis were obsessive about not wasting any useful material. As we now know, even bodies weren’t sacrosanct to the Third Reich. Not only did they humiliate us while we were breathing, but they subjected our remains to the ultimate indignity after they slaughtered us. The manner in which they disposed of Jewish bodies defiled every precept of our religious traditions. Jews are obliged to bury a body as close to the moment of death as possible. This compassionate obligation applies to executed criminals, to the fallen on a battlefield, to every human being. To be denied burial is a grievous insult. No doubt that is one of the reasons why, in the extermination camps, the Nazis desecrated the victims of the gas chambers. Our hair was used for stuffing mattresses. Our gold teeth were extracted and melted down for jewelry. The rapacious German war machine demanded that no resource be wasted. Mercifully, at the Sammlungstelle, we were required to process possessions and not human remains.

While we performed our duties, the Germans who weren’t guarding us pillaged the empty homes within the former larger ghetto. They tore down walls and jimmied ceilings in a voracious treasure hunt for jewelry, gold coins or other valuables secreted by the deportees. As they ransacked what they presumed were empty houses and apartments, they found people who were too old, frail or sick to move, or had been missed during the first raid. These poor Jews were murdered in their beds. Once cleared of any salvageable items, the properties were torched. Reading my father’s eyewitness account was heartrending:

The guards didn’t oblige me to accompany Mama to the Sammlungstelle, but I stayed by her side all day long, every day, as together we sifted through the possessions. I was too scared to remain in our room by myself. One day, as she was separating boys’ garments from girls’, an article of clothing caught my eye.

“I like that sweater”, I whispered to Mama.

I kept my voice low, so as not to attract the attention of the guards watching over us with guns at the ready. The sweater was white and adorned with small white and pink mock pearls.

Mama took it out of my hands, folded it and placed it on a table on top of a pile of other similar pieces of clothing. She looked at me with those intense green eyes and raised her eyebrows. No words were needed. I knew better than to protest. Mama didn’t speak until we were back in our room in the Block.

“Tola, that sweater you wanted once belonged to a four-year-old girl like you. She is no longer here. And soon, all these clothes will be gone as well”.

I didn’t need any further explanation. From then on, I never coveted another piece of clothing. As she toiled alongside other ghetto survivors, my mother nurtured in me the idea that I should learn to be satisfied with less.

The Sammlungstelle was a petri dish where my strong will and sense of self-discipline grew roots and flourished. My young mind grasped the concept that having less was just a fact. In our lopsided war, a child’s ability to handle deprivation was invaluable. Ultimately, in my case, it might have made the difference between survival and death.

However, that brief conversation with my mother was not just a lesson about materialism and possessions; it delivered a much more profound message about our very existence. Every hour of every day, the Germans chiseled away at our self-esteem and our very being. They sought to demoralize us and break our spirits. Every action they performed was aimed at coercing us into a state of acquiescence, whereby we accepted their definition of us as subhuman. My mother taught me that it was important to honor our dead. In the absence of memorial stones, we could at least treat their possessions with dignity and respect. She was infusing me with the principle that even in the bleakest of times, we must not lose our own humanity, sensitivity and sense of self-worth. My mother was encouraging me to be a mensch — a person of integrity and honor. It was a lesson I took to heart.

Thereafter, even when a beautiful pair of red boots surfaced from beneath a heap, I managed to resist. Despite imagining myself wearing them, I put the boots onto a pile of children’s shoes. I helped organize the clothes. If I found a skirt, I put it on the mountain of girls’ clothes. The same with shoes and boys’ clothes. I spent seven months of my life as a four-year-old slave laborer. Had peace existed, I might have been at kindergarten. But what was peace? I had known only war. I was getting an education in the most extraordinary school of life, and death.

I couldn’t fail to understand the significance of the articles that surrounded us. They were evidence of a terrible war crime. But no investigators would ever come. Would the perpetrators ever be brought to justice? Would we be next to be killed? All these questions hung in the courtyard while the women worked in silence. It wasn’t always possible for them to suppress their emotions, however. Occasionally, someone would cry out as she recognized a garment that belonged to her mother or a child. Yet she carried on sorting. To stop would have tempted execution. We were trapped and grief had no avenue of escape. Our life of drudgery continued for a seven-month stretch.

Some years ago — I can’t remember precisely when, but sometime in the past decade — I received a check in the post from the German government in Berlin. It was for two thousand dollars, and it was a reparation for my time as a Zwangsarbeiter—slave laborer. The figure was derisory. An insult. There isn’t a big enough check in the world to compensate for what I endured, or the sights I witnessed in the ghetto.

As a four-year-old, my horizons were limited to the Block and the Sammlungstelle. I was not aware of the changes that occurred in our society after the deportation. But my father saw everything. Thanks to his testimony, it seems obvious that our persecutors relaxed a little after their murderous exertions of late October and early November 1942. Food suddenly became more plentiful. For those who came into contact with Poles outside the barbed wire, it became possible to barter clothes or household goods for food.

It was then that I encountered eggs for the first time. Their taste and texture were a revelation. What a change a fried egg made from potato-skin soup. It was heaven. The yolk was my favorite part. For a treat, my mother would sometimes mix sugar with milk and an egg yolk, whipping up a mixture that was also an excellent balm for a sore throat. It’s known in Yiddish as gogl mogl. Italians have something similar called zabaglione. Eggs had a transformative power in that they made life immeasurably better and raised my morale. And I didn’t just savor the yolk as it rolled over my taste buds. I took pleasure from watching my mother preparing the egg, anticipating the wholesome flavor. After I had consumed the last morsel, I relished the lingering taste in my mouth and the glow of warmth in my stomach. Eggs elevated my appreciation of food. For a starving child, potato-skin soup was fuel to fight the process of the body devouring itself, but eggs represented love then — and they still do today. Because my mother prepared my eggs with love. And I felt it. When you are denied sustenance for such a long time, food assumes an almost spiritual significance.

Nowadays, I have a special relationship with food. It is sacred to me, and I never take it for granted. Eggs remain my go-to comfort food. If I’m feeling unhappy, I’ll treat myself to a fried egg, sunny-side up.

While having access to better food made a difference to our physical well-being in late 1942, psychological stresses remained oppressive in the extreme. It was still forbidden to leave the Block without authorization. As a deterrent, the Germans decreed that if anyone escaped, another inmate would be shot dead. In that climate, the 900 survivors of Tomaszów Mazowiecki discovered a new unity of purpose and recognized that solidarity was essential. Class and wealth barriers that previously separated us broke down and there was shared anger that we had been abandoned by the world. Many turned to alcohol to ease their pain. Some contemplated suicide but decided against it because our extinction was, according to my father, “the aim of the Nazi butchers”.

“Therefore”, my father writes, “despite all the suffering and lamentation, the wish of the murderers should not be fulfilled! No surrender, no bowing to their wishes! And maybe, maybe we will yet succeed in seeing our loved ones alive and our murderers dead!”

Was this wishful thinking or was it a real declaration of intent? Whatever the real meaning behind my father’s words, our community was clearly at the end of its tether and couldn’t take much more. “Morals, integrity, the sanctity of family life began to disintegrate”, Papa writes.

By previous Jewish behavioral standards, it certainly appears that a cloud of immorality engulfed a significant number of ghetto inhabitants. But how could anyone be blamed for seeking a tender caress when our existence hung by the most delicate of threads?

Not everyone surrendered their old values, though. Religiously observant Jews refused to succumb to the outbreak of permissiveness. They didn’t want to shame their ancestors, as they saw it, and they clung to the hope that as there were so few Jews left who were productive workers, the Germans would leave the ghetto alone. And they did. Until the bells rang out the end of 1942 and welcomed in 1943.