After we had driven for a short time, I sensed that my fellow passengers exhaled a collective sigh of relief. I didn’t know then why the tension eased. But now I do. We had driven beyond the Jewish cemetery. And we hadn’t stopped. Perhaps this time the Germans were telling the truth. Perhaps we would survive this day. And wake up the next. Maybe we were really going to the stated destination. Starachowice.
We bounced up and down on our suitcases in solemn silence. My fellow passengers were in mourning. They were leaving behind childhood homes, murdered parents, spouses, children and friends, some of whom had no known graves, although their bodies lay close to the tombs of generations of ancestors in the Jewish cemetery. Would they ever return, to place stones on the graves, as Jews do, to signify that their dead are not forgotten? We were being exiled from our history. A people which loses its past faces a desolate future.
I was fortunate. I still had my mother and father. I snuggled up close to Mama, seeking comfort from her scent and the familiar outline of her body. A sense of security and the hypnotic rumbling of the wheels lulled me to sleep. Once, I was jolted awake, and she fed me a piece of bread.
After two or three hours, traveling at a sedate pace, our journey came to an end. From the back of the truck, I saw soldiers closing security gates behind us, and as we drove deeper into the camp, the panorama of our new prison revealed itself. It was surrounded by tall, barbed-wire fences, just like those that had encircled the ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. But tall watchtowers in strategic positions around the perimeter made it significantly different. I noticed those immediately. The lookout points on top were equipped with bigger guns than I’d ever seen before. And in their crow’s nests, the guards kept their eyes trained on us as we rattled along.
“You see those towers and those guns, Tola?” my mother whispered. “From there, the guards can always observe you. You must always behave in a way that you won’t be shot”.
“Yes, Mama”.
The truck came to a halt in the middle of an open square.
After dismounting, everyone from the truck was scattered around this new, sinister labor camp. A guard with a machine gun directed us to our accommodation. After three years living in squalid, overcrowded rooms, we had no idea what to expect. We had become accustomed to our conditions constantly deteriorating. So it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that we had been allocated a room all to ourselves.
Even more astonishing was the realization that, for the first time in my life, I had my own bunk. We were in the family barrack. Apparently, Jews were provided with reasonable quarters because they were the best factory workers — more productive than Gentile Polish civilians who were forced to work there as well. We were also informed that the quality of our food would improve.
What was this extraordinary place? Why were conditions here better than in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, just seventy miles away?
Within the city of Starachowice were four labor camps providing workers for a sprawling armaments and industrial complex. It was a critical component of Nazi Germany’s war machine, supplying a third of all the munitions for every branch of the German military. There was an enormous steel plant connected to a wide array of production lines manufacturing shell casings for artillery and bombs, stick grenades and bullets of various calibers. The air was badly polluted from the furnaces and chemical works that were an integral part of the weapons industry. Smog from the chimneys was accompanied by the low-frequency grinding of heavy machinery. The war might have been a long way from Starachowice, but it was far from peaceful there. The engine room of German aggression never slept. There was no escape from its all-pervasive hum.
The most critical factor for my family now was that my mother and father were useful. They may have been slave laborers, but their ability to work afforded us a protective shield, albeit one without a guarantee.
With the benefit of nearly eighty years’ hindsight, it’s now possible to say that the attitude of the Germans running Starachowice provided us with a lifeline. They were far more pragmatic than the Nazis in Berlin, who were ideologically committed to the complete annihilation of the Jews. The main concerns of the Starachowice directors were meeting production targets and ensuring that ammunition supplies to the Wehrmacht—the German military — were maintained.
After the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad a few months earlier, German forces were engaged in a debilitating rearguard action. Soviet confidence surged, as did production rates in the Communist arms industry. The rate of attrition along the eight-hundred-mile-long Eastern Front, where the two mighty armies clashed, was crippling. German ammunition stocks needed constant replenishment.
So the simple logic at Starachowice was that the munitions factories required a steady supply of workers to keep production lines operating. If large numbers of laborers were sent to the gas chambers, production would falter and so would the German army.
Therefore, it made sense to keep the Jews alive. In this small corner of the Third Reich, we were fortunate that there were some influential Germans who were bold enough to defy Hitler’s zealots.
But that didn’t mean we were safe. Far from it. We were now isolated from our friends from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Back there, we knew who we could trust. We had been among them all our lives. We had a network we could rely on. Here, we were strangers, and so was everyone else. We had to be more wary and tread carefully. The guards ringing Starachowice and posted in the towers were Ukrainian volunteers. They had joined the Nazi forces of their own free will because they shared their pathological hatred of the Jews. If anything, the Ukrainians were more fanatical than some Germans. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill us, given half a chance.
As we unpacked and settled in, Mama laid out the rules to ensure that I stayed alive.
“Your father and I will be gone most of the day. We will be working at the ammunition factory. You will be on your own and responsible for your own safety. During the day, someone will give you something to eat, and we will give you something more when we return at night”.
This was going to be a radically new experience. I had never been on my own before. I knew no one here apart from Rutka, one of my friends from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, who was among those who’d been brought to Starachowice. But we had no idea where she and her family had been billeted. As it transpired, during our entire incarceration in the Arbeitslager—the labor camp — I never once saw Rutka. That’s how big it was.
On the night of September 5, 1943, I could have slept on my own for the very first time. But I didn’t dare, and instead, I climbed into bed with my parents.
The next morning, before she went to work, Mama drilled into me the rules of Starachowice etiquette.
“You must behave like this. If you don’t, the Germans might kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mama”.
“Always step to the side when a German is passing you. Do not run, just step to the side”.
“Yes, Mama”.
“Whatever you do, do not look them in the eye. You mustn’t do it. Look at something else. Like their belt. No higher than that. And make sure that if you have a head covering, like a scarf or a hat, you take it off.
“And last of all, put your hands behind your back and clasp them together. Do you understand? Are you sure?”
“Yes, Mama”.
To make sure this submissive behavior became ingrained as second nature, she practiced with me every day before heading to the factory. She woke me up at five o’clock in the morning and pretended to be a German, strutting loudly around the room, as if she was wearing jackboots. I did exactly what she taught me: I stepped out of the way, bowed my head and put my hands behind my back.