My father barged into our room looking terrible.
“I’ve managed to get us off the list”, he told my mother, in tears and out of breath. “But it was really hard”.
Then he dashed out of the door again, saying he had to warn other people to try to remove their names as well. Somebody was clearly profiting from the panic sweeping through the Block. Carefully reading his account in the Yizkor book, I now understand that he had to bribe someone, with whatever little money he had left. As he writes, “The middlemen who had previously been bribed to include people in the list now demanded new bribes to take them off it and replace them with other names”.
Reality kicked in at dawn on January 5, 1943. The ghetto was encircled by Ukrainian and German troops. My father remembers several hundred Jews being loaded onto carts and trucks. The Germans maintained the charade that they were all being taken to Palestine.
According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, some sixty-seven Jews from Tomaszów Mazowiecki made it to Palestine. They were first transported to Vienna, then to Turkey and on to the Holy Land after being exchanged for German prisoners of war. Sadly, the majority didn’t get more than seven miles down the road to the small town of Ujazd. There, in the shadow of a ghostly, ruined seventeenth-century castle, several dozen Jews were gunned down. The remainder were transported to the gas chambers of Treblinka.
Without doubt, our little family had been fortunate to escape with our lives, as had those my father managed to alert. He was crestfallen that he hadn’t been able to warn more people. From that moment onward, however, my father was powerless to subvert the Nazis’ inexorable progress toward the final liquidation of the ghetto.
Mama and I continued our daily routine of sorting, stacking and packing clothes in the Sammlungstelle. Added to the piles now were the belongings of the victims of the Palestine deception.
The monotony was disrupted early one March morning when we were roused with the familiar cries that filled everyone with dread.
“Alle Juden raus”.
We were ordered to line up along Pierkarska, one of the four streets of the Block. A basket was placed in front of us, and a Gestapo officer addressed us brusquely. The basket was to be filled with jewelry and any other valuables we still possessed. It wasn’t a request.
You could almost touch the air of unease that rippled through the crowd. The Germans knew that people were reluctant to surrender possessions that might be useful in the future, to barter for food, or life itself.
Suddenly, soldiers pulled four men out of the line at random and shot them. This had the desired effect. On the Germans’ command, the remaining Jews returned to their homes and dug out any small remaining valuables from their hiding places. The basket soon filled up. Of course, people prized life above material goods. But the loss of money, jewels, gold or silver was debilitating. It removed the possibility of buying a path to safety whenever the specter of sudden death next loomed. The cloud of depression that hung over the Block darkened.
However, the mood lifted marginally by the time Purim came around a few weeks later. Traditionally, one of the most joyous festivals in the Jewish calendar, Purim commemorates the survival of Jews in the fifth century BC, when their Persian rulers intended to wipe them out. Some describe Purim as the Jewish equivalent of carnival, when we are supposed to celebrate family, unity, togetherness and triumph over adversity. At that stage of the German occupation, three and a half years in, and especially after the previous six months, the idea of overcoming our oppressors was in the realm of fantasy. Still, the festival gave us a much-needed lift. As my father writes: “March 20, 1943. Today is Purim Eve, a warm, sunny day. Even the work of collecting and sorting Jewish belongings proceeds in a lighter spirit”.
There would be “a tinge of festivity”, he continues, following the traditional reading of the sacred scroll of Esther (a Jew who became Queen of Persia and is celebrated as a heroine in Judaism). The scroll tells of how a plot to destroy the Jews (hatched by Haman, a vizier, or high official of the Persian court) was foiled by Esther, together with one of her cousins.
“Anyway, that evening, all would be forgotten”, writes my father. “The survivors in the ghetto would gather in fellowship, eat a little, drink a glass or two, maybe even sing, and maybe for an hour or so the burden of their tragedy would be finished”.
But at five o’clock that evening, a truck drove up to the ghetto gate and a German police officer yelled, “Aufmachen ihr dreckige Juden-schwein”[6].
Meister Pichler strode into the ghetto and presented the Jewish policemen with a list of names. He told them that all of those on the roll had to assemble immediately as they were to be sent to a labor camp. The most important person on the list was Dr. Efraim Mordkowicz, a genuine hero of the ghetto who had performed miracles through the occupation. Despite a paucity of medical supplies, and the murder of so many colleagues, he had worked tirelessly to heal the sick and alleviate the suffering of his fellow Jews, especially during the typhus epidemic.
Dr. Mordkowicz duly arrived at the assembly point with his nine-year-old daughter, Krisza, who was clinging to him with one hand while clutching a bundle of belongings in the other. He turned to the police chief Hans Pichler and asked him where they were going. My blood ran cold as I read my father’s description in the Yizkor book:
Pichler burst out sarcastically, “You are being sent to a place of rest”. Little Krisza asks tearfully, “Why do we have to be sent just today?” for she had invited her friends to [celebrate Purim] that very evening. “Perhaps we could postpone our journey to tomorrow?” Pichler placed his hand on her head, and she sensed it was the hand of a murderer and, wrenching herself free of him, clung tearfully to her father. Meanwhile, everyone on the list had arrived and they were loaded onto the truck with their baggage. There were twenty-one of them.
Among their number were the ghetto’s remaining physicians, patients from the makeshift hospital, several Jewish policemen and the last surviving members of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s intelligentsia.
The procession proceeded to the cemetery. Helped by blows from rifle butts, the victims jumped from the truck, which had stopped beside an open grave (to avoid attention this had been dug by Poles). At once, Pichler ordered the unfortunate Jews to take off their clothes. Terrible cries then rang through the cemetery. Two women, Yazda Rejgrodska and her sister, refused and one of them began to struggle with the murderers. The two women now started to run, screaming, toward the fence. Krisza also burst into tears and began to make for the fence.
Just then, Johann Kropfitsch, the notorious Austrian policeman who had killed so many children, appeared: “Kropfitsch, who was known for his sadistic trait of firing at the heads of small children, put a bullet into the head of little Krisza and thus staunched her tears. The other butchers began firing at the Jews standing on the edge of the grave”.
Pichler and two other Nazis ran after the two sisters, opened fire with pistols and killed them. My father witnessed the Germans’ reaction: “Die verfluchten Hunde haben die Kleider verseucht”[7].