No one described the children’s courage better than the Polish Jewish poet Henryka Łazowertówna in this historic work, “The Little Smuggler”, written in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, where she lived and died. The poem is specifically about child smugglers in Warsaw, but it honors every one of them in every ghetto in every town occupied by the Nazis, including Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
Some parents may have told their children to ask for help from sympathetic former Polish neighbors. Others gave them money or valuables to barter with Poles outside the wire. Some of these young couriers also carried letters to try to get word to the outside world about the nature of our suffering. Their size meant there was less chance of them being spotted. But if they were caught, that household had one less mouth to feed.
An Austrian called Johann Kropfitsch used to wait near a secret entrance to the ghetto and shoot children as they returned with their bounty. Their bodies were taken to the Jewish cemetery and unceremoniously buried in unmarked graves. All their parents heard was a distant shot in the night. And their child vanished.
At thirty-nine years old, Kropfitsch was old enough to avoid military service, but young enough to be a Nazi policeman. He developed a passion for his nocturnal “hunting” expeditions. Kropfitsch prided himself on being some kind of gamekeeper. As if children were badgers or foxes that needed to be culled. What type of sick individual does such a thing? Despite a lifetime of exposure to all manner of human frailties, I struggle to understand how such depravity is possible. Kropfitsch was a serial killer responsible for the slaughter of scores of children. A photograph of him in his Nazi uniform reveals a man with cold, psychopathic eyes. After the war, he was hanged as a war criminal. What a pity he only died once. He deserved to be killed a thousand times over.
In the ghetto, there were no smiling faces. Especially among the men in field gray with knives in their belts and a gun always close at hand. On the rare occasions I ventured over the threshold of the ghetto with my parents, these men looked at me as if they wanted to kill me. Others, the ones in the sharp black uniforms, with the sinister peaked caps and the red band on their arms with the white circle and swastika in the middle, wanted to kill me even more. Me. An innocent child. All because I was born Jewish. Before the war, Jews comprised about 30 percent of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s population. But out of the 13,000 Jews resident in 1939, just 200 were still breathing at the end of the war in 1945. Only five were children. It is extraordinary that I was among them.
Reizel gave birth to me almost exactly a year before war broke out. At the time, she and Machel were living in Gdynia, a city close to Danzig, a beautiful, international free port on the Baltic Sea coast in Northern Poland. Danzig was predominantly populated by people with an ethnic German background. You’ll know the city today by its Polish name, Gdańsk. Its shipyards were the birthplace of the Solidarity trade-union movement led by Lech Wałęsa in the 1980s and whose Solidarność anti-Communist rebellion led, ultimately, to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
My father first went there in 1932 as a delegate to a conference on Zionism. He was just twenty-two years old. Representing his hometown of Tomaszów Mazowiecki was a great honor. I have a photograph of him taken just before he headed off to the conference. In it, he has a full head of wavy hair and he’s very much a confident young man about town. His face is a combination of innocence, youthful optimism and determination. His soft eyes betray a sensitive, artistic personality. How soon those eyes would become accustomed to horror.
Papa was a highly intelligent man and an idealist. Along with other Zionists, he believed that the diaspora — Jewish people scattered around the world — should move to the land of their ancestors, then called Palestine. He was a follower of Theodor Herzl, a charismatic Austrian Jewish journalist, playwright and lawyer, considered the founder of modern Zionism and author of a trailblazing manifesto called The Jewish State.
“We want to lay the foundation stone”, Herzl declared, “for the house which will become the refuge of the Jewish nation”.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Herzl believed that anti-Semitism in Europe was so virulent that it was impossible for Jewish people to live alongside or assimilate with the Gentiles of other nations. He argued that the only solution for Jews was to create their own state and emigrate from Europe.
“If you will it, it is no dream”, Herzl wrote.
By the 1930s, the Zionists’ goal became more urgent. Hitler’s rise, accompanied by surging anti-Semitism across Europe, accelerated the need for a Jewish haven. But the Zionists failed to convince the world’s major powers to permit the establishment of a Jewish state. They were thwarted by concerns about a backlash from Arab nationalists, who opposed Jewish immigration. Great Britain was the principal impediment to the dream of a Jewish state. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, Britain was given an international mandate to govern Palestine. British opposition to Jewish immigration intensified as the Second World War approached.
British self-interest outweighed concern for endangered European Jews. The Suez Canal, sandwiched between Palestine and Egypt, was a key artery for ships carrying British imported goods. Britain didn’t want any trouble on the Palestinian flank of the canal. And the last thing it needed was to intervene in possible clashes between Zionists and Arabs.
In 1939, the British government laid down a new policy that limited Jewish migration to 75,000 people over five years. That amounted to 15,000 a year. Thereafter, any further immigrants would have to be approved by the Arab majority.
With millions of European Jews at risk from the Nazis, the Zionist movement was outraged at British intransigence. My father was among those who were dismayed and angry at what was regarded as a betrayal of the Jewish people.
But back in 1932, when his political principles were developing, my father was full of the optimism of youth. As a delegate to the Zionist conference, Papa was intoxicated both by the debate about Israel and by Danzig. It was springtime and the city was in full bloom.
“I felt that I was at the center of a bouquet of beautiful flowers”, he once told me. “Even the air was perfumed”.
This was his first adventure away from provincial Tomaszów Mazowiecki, and he was entranced by Danzig’s relative grandeur, with its wide, sweeping boulevards, as well as its quaint harbor, lined with brightly painted fifteenth-century timber buildings.
The desire to spread his wings was energized by promenades next to the Baltic Sea, past fine, sandy beaches, and observing the busy traffic of pleasure boats and cargo vessels heading to all corners of the world. He was also drawn to Danzig by the Great Synagogue, with its vaulted ceilings and large dome. It was one of the most distinctive buildings in the city, but while the architecture may have been aesthetically pleasing, it was the spiritual power within that fostered his sense of belonging.