Then my parents would kiss me and climb onto one of the waiting trucks. The factory where they worked was about half an hour away. It would barely be dawn, and I would not see them until late at night.
I could have stayed alone at the barrack, but the silence scared me. All the adults had gone to work, and at first, I didn’t see or hear any other children. The place seemed to be totally empty. So I went outside, because that felt safer, even though the Ukrainians were watching me from the towers. Other children must have made the same decision. I did not see many girls, but I spotted a group of boys running around and playing rough games beneath the gaze of the guards.
When I tried to join in the boys’ games, they would only accept me if I played the Jew. They were all Jewish and always wanted to be the Nazis. (Children often identify with an aggressor, and having been exposed to such behavior, it’s not surprising the boys wanted to replicate the power and supremacy of the Germans.) Being a girl and younger, I never got a chance to play the Nazi. And as I couldn’t fight, I was always the victim. They pretended sticks were rifles, and I had to run as fast as I could while they chased me, making gun noises and yelling, “Stop, you dirty Jew. Or we’ll kill you”.
If they caught me, they would hit me gently with sticks. Sometimes, one of the boys would get carried away, forget it was just a game and hurt me. Then I’d run and hide among the barracks and wait until my parents came home. Or I would run to our building and shelter underneath. But I soon forgot the pain. I chose to be outside with the other children and risk a beating. It was more important for me to have any kind of relationship than none. What’s interesting to me now is that I preferred to be frightened than alone. Psychologists would recognize that I was presenting the characteristics of someone in an abusive relationship. That’s an understatement when it comes to describing my life at the time.
Reenacting our daily tribulations in play made us even hungrier than usual. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, someone would give us some food. It was usually a piece of bread or some soup. But it was never enough, and we were constantly hungry. We used to head to a building containing a kitchen and scour the garbage bins. We rarely found anything edible. If we did, we devoured it. But at the end of the working day, I was always certain to eat. My parents were fed during their shift at the factory. The German management wanted their slaves to keep their energy levels up. And Mama would always save something for me.
All the while, we were acting out childhood fantasies under the watchful gaze of the Ukrainian guards in their towers. Although they looked menacing, I never saw them open fire. But there were frequent reminders that the boundary between life and death in Starachowice was razor thin.
One day everyone in the camp was summoned to the central parade ground, the Appellplatz. There were loudspeakers throughout the complex and the tone of the harsh voice making the announcement left no room for doubt. Attendance was compulsory.
“I’m going to take you now, and I’m going to show you what’s going to happen to you if you don’t follow the rules”, my mama said. “And the reason I’m doing this is because I’m not here to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself”.
Hundreds of people shuffled into the square looking nervous. I gripped Mama’s hand as tightly as possible. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to a woman who was attached to a pole with a rope. Her hands were tied behind her back.
Putting a bullhorn to his mouth, a uniformed officer outlined the nature of her “crime”. The woman had, in the Germans’ eyes, broken one of the cardinal rules of the Starachowice camp. She had displayed disrespect.
The woman had had the audacity to come face-to-face with a German soldier inside the camp. She had maintained eye contact and refused to yield the right of way. As a child, I was shocked that an adult didn’t know the rules as well as my mama and had behaved wrongly. There was only one sentence for such a willful act of defiance.
Mama squeezed my hand and whispered, “Remember what I taught you? Watch”.
Most mothers would have urged their children to look away, or clasped a hand over their eyes to shield them from witnessing further atrocities. Not my mama. These were extraordinary times and Mama was doing her utmost to keep me alive. She was trying to teach me that actions had consequences and I needed to see them for myself to understand the reality of the world we inhabited.
I watched as the officer walked up to the woman. He pulled the pistol from his holster and shot her in the head at point-blank range. She slumped to the ground. Her husband and their three children screamed and ran sobbing to her body as it lay contorted around the pole. All four of them collapsed on the ground next to her, rocking back and forth, weeping hysterically. The crowd dispersed, abandoning them to their grief.
I turned to my mother and whispered, “Mama, you promise me you will obey all the rules?”
She nodded and replied, “And so will you”.
That night, silence descended on the camp as people contemplated the execution and its implication. Even here, although the Jews were useful as slave laborers, they were, ultimately, dispensable.
Over the ensuing months, fewer and fewer people came home from the factories. There were industrial accidents in the steelworks. Some died in the weapons plants following exposure to toxic chemicals.
“Some workers are careless”, Mama said. “They inhale a yellow powder which destroys their lungs. You always have to be on guard, even at work”.
I remember they called it the yellow death. I now understand that the victims were poisoned by TNT, the explosive compound in bombs and shells. There was probably little the slave laborers could do to protect themselves from chemicals, short of covering their faces with a damp cloth.
Almost every night, my parents had a similar conversation: as long as they were careful and useful, they would be kept alive. But how long would it last?
Time passed slowly in Starachowice. A long, frigid winter came and went. My routine never seemed to vary. The most important thing for us as a family was that we were still alive and together, although my parents spent most of their waking hours on the factory floor.
The major discomfort was our growing hunger. The amount of food we were given started to tail off. I had no concept of measuring time, apart from an innate sense of when I expected to be fed. My stomach was a very reliable clock. I would look forward to lunchtimes, when Rivka, a pregnant Jewish woman who lived in the family barracks, provided us with a small serving of soup and bread. Normally, after eating, we would return to our rough game of Catch the Jew.
But one afternoon, in the spring of 1944, when I was about five and a half years old, Rivka kept us with her longer. I remember the day well. It was sunny and warm. On the floor, next to our table, Rivka had constructed a makeshift stove by laying a square of bricks, covered with a piece of tin. She had left enough space to ignite a small fire from paper and twigs. We all had a mess tin each, into which she poured some flour. She mixed some flour and water in her own mess tin to create a simple dough. Then she poured just the right amount of water into our tins and said, “Now copy what I have done. Try to make sure all the flour is moist and make the dough as smooth as possible”.
All the children embraced the lesson. I remember the sense of joy of being taught something new and of my fingers getting sticky.
“Now flatten the dough with your fists, until it is as even as you can make it. Use your hands to get rid of any lumps. It has to be as flat as possible”.