The Memories We Keep. Walter Zacharius
German soldier looked so big in his uniform at first I was frightened, but when I saw his soft blue eyes and he spoke, I relaxed. “You’re a pretty girl,” he said. “I’ve a daughter of my own. Annaliese.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket and showed me a picture. “She’s four years old, a charmer. That’s my wife next to her.” The picture was torn at the edges; a crack ran down its center. Evidently he had looked at it often. He shook his head. “This war. It drives us all crazy. Here I am, showing off my family to some Hebrew, as if she were my niece. Now listen, I’ll escort you to Wolnosci Plaza. This area is no place for you—it’s filled with scum. Times have changed at the Café Astoria. When you told me you were heading there, I thought…Well, the girls are…Understand?”
Heat flooded my face. I nodded.
“Good. So let me escort you out of this neighborhood. I’ll walk two paces behind you. Keeping company with a Jew—even a pretty one like you—is forbidden in the SS. Now, let’s find you a cart before it gets any darker.”
He pointed down a narrow alley, and I led the way. I could feel his eyes roaming over my back, my hips, my legs, and I almost bolted. Images of my humiliation at the train station plagued me, and this time there was no crowd to protect me, even as silent witnesses. I forced my legs forward in rapid, even steps, dreading his touch, the feel of his breath on my back.
We emerged into Wolnosci Plaza. He stepped past me and commandeered a cart drawn by two burly boys, tossing aside the protests of the family walking beside it. “Hurry up and take your things or I’ll give you a hard kick,” he growled. “Jewish swine.”
My heart grieved. My father would never have taken the cart that belonged to another family; he would have searched until he found one not in use. But the search might have been fruitless, I told myself. Everyone needed carts, everyone was moving. It was cold. We had little time. I still had to get as much food and coal as I could. It shames me to admit that after grief came relief, and that as the family unloaded their belongings, I willed them to be quick about it.
“Take this girl where she wants to go,” my benefactor snarled at the drivers. “If I find you’ve overcharged her family, I’ll have you sent to the labor camps.” He winked at me and handed me a bar of chocolate. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
“Auf Wiedersehen,” I murmured. “Danke schöen.”
The boys helped me onto the cart, and we set off to find provisions that I would take back to my family for our last night in our home.
CHAPTER 5
My father’s dream of going to Warsaw did not happen. We were forced to move to the Baluty, a large industrial area the Germans created so we Jews could help the Nazi war machine. My assignment was to sew buttons on German uniforms six days a week, ten hours a day. (In an “act of friendship,” the authorities let us have the Sabbath off.) We worked in a hot, airless room on the second floor of a warehouse. In the summer it became so oppressive many of the girls fainted. I was able to withstand the heat, but my skin turned a dull yellow.
The Baluty was cold, dirty, and disease ridden. It had been a slum even before the Germans came. The buildings were old and crumbling; many of the streets had never been paved. As fall approached, the Nazis cut off our water supply and stopped all refuse collection. The result was a typhus epidemic, which cut our population nearly in half. We were hungry all the time. Hungry people get angry easily, and we fought over trifles. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday by having an apple all to myself.
In November, fuel was rationed, and when there was nothing left to burn a mob demolished a wooden shed on Brzezinska Street for firewood. An old woman was crushed to death in an attempt to collect some of it.
Nate Kolleck, Jozef’s schoolmate who, like him, had made his way back to Lodz, said we were becoming like the legendary golem: the soulless walking dead. I despised the comparison, but it was obvious he was right. I knew I could look forward to my sallow skin turning corpse-gray.
Nate lived in our tenement. I knew him from Lodz. He wasn’t much older than I, although he always seemed so much more mature. Maybe it was because he was so thin and had lost some of his hair. He was always interested in people, and I thought that someday he would become a psychologist.
Each family was allotted one room, no matter how many members there were. Nate was “lucky,” for he lived alone, even though it was in a closet. He had no brothers or sisters, and his father, David, had been beaten to death at the Café Astoria on the first day of the occupation for attempting to stop the rape of a waitress. His mother had later leapt out of her third-story window rather than watch the Volksdeutscher take her home. The Jewish Ministry of Finance seized all their valuables.
Nate, like the rest of us, was reimbursed in “rumkes,” currency engraved with “King Chaim” Rumkowski’s profile. Rumkes were the only legal tender in the Baluty and useless outside of it. Marks, zlotys, even American dollars, all had to be surrendered. The smuggling trade died overnight, and with it our contact with the outside world.
And then the rumkes became useless as well. Eventually there was nothing left to buy. In Chaim’s ghetto the rule was “work or starve.” Every man, woman, and child was harnessed to a factory as part of Rumkowski’s plan to make us indispensable to the new masters.
From his apartment in the Summer Palace Fronic just inside the far walls of the Baluty, Chaim ordered the diversion of the railroad tracks of Litzmannstadt onto a special line, which terminated inside the ghetto. There, raw materials—scrap leather, confiscated furs, quilts, down comforters, and pillows—were off-loaded at the Umschlagplatz, where a transport picked up reconditioned winter uniforms and reclaimed steel and aluminum from our salvage plants. There was work to do, and the inhabitants of the Baluty were grateful.
But when the German war effort started to bog down, life in the Baluty also began to collapse. Work and starve was what we ultimately did. Rations for bread, meat, and dairy products were cut in half, then halved again. Whether one’s share was a pound a week or a ton, it mattered little. There was no meat to buy. Even those on double rations—the Judenrat families, members of the Jewish police, doctors, those who collected human refuse in the pushcarts—all were slowly starving together.
Mama and Papa fell into a torpor that made me feel I was living with mechanical toy robots. Listlessly, my mother cooked the meager meals and my father tended an ever-growing list of patients with similar complaints: dysentery, rickets, anemia—starvation. Jozef, now that he had recovered from his injuries, was in a perpetual rage, inveighing against the gods and the Germans with an energy that seemed boundless, as though he were the sea crashing endlessly on an unyielding shore.
As for me, I disappeared into a world of fantasies lit by chandeliers from L’Opéra, where I starred as Sophie or Suzanna, depending on whether I was in the mood for Strauss or Mozart. Jean-Phillipe attended every performance, always picking me up backstage after the performance and taking me to Maxim’s, where we would get dizzy on wine before going back to his flat or mine to make languorous love amid a landscape of pillows. These visions sustained me. When, because of a scream, a collision, a fight, an accident, I was forced to open my eyes to reality, I would cry until the music in my brain would once again bring comfort.
Thousands of Jews died of starvation during the winter of 1940, and the survivors quickly began to succumb to typhus, doubling my father’s already inhuman workload. Even as the epidemic spread, however, the Baluty’s factories continued running nonstop. Work crews kept improving the roadways and installing new trolley lines, and we developed a halfhearted respect for Rumkowski: at least he was keeping us busy in jobs that held some hope for the future of our enclave. Working for him, Jozef said, was better than being sent to the camps.
When a worker was needed for a special job, Nate Kolleck volunteered. For each job, summer or winter, he would arrive wearing a heavy wool coat, which concealed his ancient Rolleiflex camera. With it he recorded every atrocity he saw on film he’d been hoarding for months before the ghetto was established. Old men with long sideburns and beards, their black wool coats dragging in the mud; women with screaming babies trying to suckle