Then she showed us how to take a fork and put holes in the dough.
“Children, you have to do this as quickly as possible. Hurry up”.
We all responded to the urgency in her voice. I assumed she was exhorting us to speed up because what we were doing was illicit. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the guard towers. Their machine guns were pointing in our direction. I was afraid the soldiers would cut us down if we didn’t finish quickly enough.
Rivka put each of the mess tins in turn over the flames. The dough baked very quickly. And the finished product smelled delicious. I wanted to feast on mine straight away.
“Now, children, I know you are starving”, she said, “but you are not allowed to take even one bite. Under any circumstances. What you must do is to take it home to your parents, and then you will share it tonight. Do you understand?”
It was difficult for me to comply because Rivka was right — I was starving. But by now, being obedient was second nature to me.
As usual, my parents returned to the family barracks late. It might have been ten or eleven o’clock in the evening. I was fast asleep, clutching my creation. Gently, they woke me up.
“Look what I’ve made for you”, I said, bursting with pride.
My father carefully broke the cracker into three equal pieces and said a prayer. My mother burst into tears. “Oh, it’s the first night of Passover”, she sobbed.
Mama had toiled so hard in the weapons factory that she had lost track of time.
“Do you remember Passover last year?” she asked my father.
“Yes”, he replied. “It was the day the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began”.
“So much has happened since then”, said Mama. “I simply can’t believe it”.
“And we didn’t have matzah to break”, said my father. “But we still had family and friends. Thank you, Tola, for this wonderful, thoughtful gift”.
Tears flowed down Mama’s cheeks as she thought about the loss of her family and their Passover celebrations in the past.
Passover is one of the most important festivals in the Jewish calendar. Each springtime we celebrate Moses leading the escape of the children of Israel from Egypt after two hundred years of servitude. The essence of that story is liberation, and matzah symbolizes the hardship of slavery and the Jewish people’s escape to freedom. We call it the bread of affliction.
Passover during the Holocaust years was especially poignant. It’s hard to imagine another time in the entire history of the Jewish people when its symbolism would have evoked more pain.
When I look back, I realize that as I let the cracker melt in my mouth, savoring the taste and the time capsule it was creating, that was the moment I understood that certain foods have spiritual significance that transcend the notion of fuel for the body.
For the first time in my life, I was eating something that was fuel for the soul. When Rivka told us to hurry up, it wasn’t because the guards were going to shoot us, although if they had known what we were doing, they might have been tempted. It was because Jewish tradition dictates that the process of making matzah is concluded within eighteen minutes, from the first moment the dough is prepared to the second it is fully baked. We were replicating the experience of our ancestors all those centuries earlier: back then, the matzah ingredients were the only provisions the Jews had and they didn’t have enough time to let their dough rise as they made their escape. The message is that they trusted God to provide. And He didn’t fail them.
Baking matzah in wartime conditions, under the noses of the guards, was a lesson with several layers of significance that has stayed with me all my life. Not only was it an act of self-determination and sedition, but Rivka was also imbuing us with dignity and self-respect. The Germans were wiping us out, but as long as there were children who understood the traditions that formed our identity, our people had a chance of renaissance one day in the future.
On April 7, 1944, in the family barracks in Starachowice, encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers and trigger-happy Ukrainian fascists, my parents wondered how much longer they would have to endure their own slavery. As my little family finished off the last crumbs of our matzah in deepest, darkest occupied Central Poland, the question hanging in the air was: When will God deliver us from the evil of the Nazis? No answer was forthcoming.
In fact, life was about to become more precarious. And I was the canary in the coal mine who detected that the air was becoming toxic. I didn’t realize it back then, but the long hours I spent apart from my parents were helping to make me street-smart. I was developing a strong inner core of self-reliance and independence. I was observant, and my radar for detecting potential trouble improved with every passing day. Little did I know that those skills would soon be invaluable.
Roaming relatively freely within the confines of the barbed wire, I began to notice that people were disappearing. I wandered around the family quarters looking for friends to play with and discovered that more and more rooms were empty. Most doors were ajar, and when I went inside, I understood what had happened. The ghetto had schooled me well. I saw the abandoned furniture, clothes and toys. I knew these people would never return.
Occasionally, I found some leftover food. I ate it but touched nothing else. I was troubled when I went in search of one of my closest friends on the other side of the main square and there was no trace of her or her family. The other rooms nearby were also silent. I broke the news to my parents when they returned home that night.
“I knew it”, my mother gasped. “That whole street has probably been taken. The rumors about Selektions must be true”.
“We’ve got to find a hiding place”, said my father.
A few days later, early in the morning, just as my parents were due to start their shift at the munitions plant, we heard that the SS were rounding up children from the family barracks.
“Quick, they’re coming. You’ve got to hide”, Papa shouted.
I watched as he opened a trapdoor that he had created in the ceiling. I hadn’t realized it was there. He had camouflaged it with a small rack of hanging clothes. Papa stood on a bed, lifted me up and pushed me into the gap between the ceiling and the sloping roof. I looked down and saw Mama squeezing herself through the trapdoor, being pushed from behind by my father.
As soon as she was in, he closed the flap and rearranged the clothes below. I crouched in my mother’s lap, and she clasped her hand over my mouth. I couldn’t believe the strength in her hand. She had my face in a viselike grip.
“Tola, you’ve got to stay completely silent”, she said. “It’s absolutely essential. Don’t make a sound. If you do, we both could die”.
I grunted an indecipherable response. Then I heard the door of our barrack block burst open, along with the terrifying fusion of running jackboots, guttural commands and weapons being cocked. My father had closed the trapdoor just in time.
Through the thin ceiling boards, I heard soldiers shouting at him.
“We told you to get out. Why are you still here? Get out!”
“Okay, I’m leaving”.
I heard Papa walk out of the room. Suddenly, there was a burst of gunfire through the ceiling. I felt a gale of bullets whistling past my body. Some of them slammed into the beams of the attic above my head. I felt like screaming. But my mother had her hand so tightly over my mouth, I couldn’t make a sound, even if I’d wanted to.
Her breathing was slow and quiet. I exhaled in sync with her. Eventually, we heard the soldiers leave the room and Mama slightly relaxed her grip. There was a chink of light through a rotten wooden plank in the roof and I was able to look down into the square. I had a clear view of soldiers manhandling children into trucks. I think they were SS, as they looked similar to the troops at the massacre at St. Wenceslas Church in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.