The period from January 1942 through the middle of 1943, was a critical time for the entire population in Lodz ghetto, and the most devastating period of my own life.
In January of 1942, my beloved grandmother, who was approximately eighty-four years of age, died of malnutrition. Her death was the first that I had ever witnessed personally. Her agony, as she fought for her life, remains singed in my memory. Her body was convulsing, her limbs shaking, rising and falling.
With her last words, she recalled the fate of another dying relative: “When my cousin Feygele, who was one hundred and four years old, was dying, I wished her a speedy recovery and many years of continued ‘nakhes’ (fulfillment) from her great grandchildren. Her answer was: “Oy, Fradele, umayn” (Amen). My own interpretation of these words was that she considered herself relatively young and surely had the desire to live on. My Buba died, still surrounded by four of her daughters, her younger sister Khayele, a number of her grandchildren, and a number of other relatives and neighbors. She was respected and adored by everyone who knew her, mainly because of her genuine goodness and devotion to the poor and homeless.
I loved my grandmother dearly and thought of her as one of my three mothers (in addition to my mother and my Aunt Laytshe), but it was too scary to stand near her deathbed and watch her suffer —struggling for her life. So, with the exception of the one time when she called me over to present me with her exquisite, golden cameo brooch— a gift from her son in England — I stood at the far end of the room, trembling and looking on from a distance.
At times, one or another individual in the room began to weep.
Sometimes, the wail rose to a chorus and all were crying at the same time. I heard my mother mutter: “I know that she has had a long and happy life, but if she hadn’t returned from England, or hadn’t been caught in the war and been a victim of Nazi discrimination and persecution, she would have lived on and on.” She hugged grandmother (or buba, as I called her) and said: “Mame, you were my friend, my support and my advisor, and in my eyes you are still very young.”
During the same month, mass deportations were speeded up. Among the deportees were my oldest cousin Malke Rakhl Wolkowicz (or Wolfowicz) with her three children (one of whom was my playmate Esther), and my grandmother’s younger sister, Khayele Fridman. Malke Rakhl’s husband had previously been deported to Czestochow — to work. My Great-Aunt Khayele’s husband, Avreml, had died in the ghetto during an epidemic of dysentery, and her children (Leybesh Wolf and Ratse) had gone off at the outbreak of the war with their immediate families to a small town in the hope that it would be easier to survive the Nazi occupation there. Both of them — Malke Rakhl and Aunt Khayele — were among the ghetto welfare recipients. The former, as the wife of a deportee who was allegedly employed by the Germans in Czestochow, was receiving twelve marks per month. The latter, as an unemployable elderly person, was receiving nine marks per month.
It was a bitterly cold winter, and tragedy was rampant in the ghetto. People actually froze to death in their beds and in the streets. Often, they just dropped down dead. Despite the fact that there was an increased number of gravediggers and that there were dozens of burials daily, numerous bodies were waiting — often for weeks, for burial. And there was more talk about deportations.
Approximately one month later, on March 6, 1942, my younger brother Elek died. He had just turned nineteen. He was brought home in mortal agony from the Tishler Resort. Earlier that morning, when Elek was getting ready to go to work, he had complained that his trepes (clogs produced in the ghetto – cloth with wooden soles) were too heavy and that he had difficulty tying his shoelaces. Mama bent down to help him and pleaded: “Elek, don’t go to work today. Stay home and rest your swollen feet.” But my brother would not hear of it. He kept on insisting that he had to finish the work on a beautiful credenza. Elek was a conscientious workaholic, and at work he was loved both by his superiors and his co-workers. Mama evidently knew that he was already very sick, but she was also aware of the fact that for Elek to stay home in the freezing cold room without the food allocation provided for workers at the Resort was neither beneficial, nor a cure for his rapidly spreading disease.
Elek kissed my mother and me as if he would never see us again. After he left the house, mama turned her unusually pale face and trembling lips away from me.
She was crying. When she turned her face toward me again, her eyes seemed to be unusually red and the black rings under her eyes were swollen. She said to me in a whisper: “Feygele, my child, your brother Elek is very, very sick.” I noticed that when she turned away from me again, she was wiping tears from her eyes.
“Elek, Elek, why did you return to this hell from the Soviet occupied territory?” mama asked him almost with reproach. “Didn’t your cousins Note and Khane (in Pruzany) treat you well?”
“Oh, mama, they treated me very, very well. They were like a brother and sister toward me. Only — I felt very guilty that I left you and Feygele. I didn’t think that Shimon, the intellect in the household, had the courage, the street smarts, the drive or the ability for self-sacrifice to help in your survival of the war.”
“Yes, mama! I wanted to live, I wanted to save my own skin, but I thought that if I returned here, I could somehow also save the rest of you!”
“Elek, Elek”, my mother responded, “you are such a good son, but I wish you hadn’t sacrificed your life for ours!” Mama spoon-fed Elek with the food “specialties” she prepared just for him, but Elek had lost his appetite. She caressed him, put compresses on his head and tried to conceal her broken heart from me. She also tried to restrain herself from shedding tears, to prevent Elek from seeing them.
Next evening, Elek became incomprehensible, his speech slurred, and though he continued to fight for his life for another day, he had lost consciousness. It was awful to watch my handsome, devoted brother lose his fight against death. The doctor, who had visited him, said that it was only a question of hours. Several times Elek asked whether mama could see the rackets up in the sky. Mama explained to me that he was in a coma and hallucinating.
I was asleep in the bed next to Elek. Our faces almost touched. Aunt Laytshe and my mother were standing over him on the other side of his bed, near the window, wiping the cold sweat from his face and pouring liquids between his lips. Occasionally their faces took on grimaces, and they expressed great helplessness and despair. Sometimes, they would just break out in tears
Intermittently, they would listen to Elek’s heartbeat and put their fingers to his wrist to hear his pulse. The dim wick in the glass of oil flickered and threw shadows over the room. When my aunt decided that Elek was no longer breathing, she pulled the sheet over Elek’s face. For a while, my mother and aunt Leytshe stood around — lamenting. I was trembling and shivering again. Neither my mother nor my aunt came over this time to calm me down. The tragedy of losing their son and nephew overpowered their desire to calm me. Eventually, they sat down at the foot of the bed that I was resting in, pulled the down quilt to cover their clothed bodies and sat up for the remainder of the night. I fell asleep several times. Whenever I woke up, I heard them talking in a whisper. Whenever they realized that I was awake, they stopped talking. When I asked them why they wouldn’t lie down to sleep, they explained that they were keeping watch over Elek’s body.
At one time, Elek’s dead left arm was suddenly lifted and just as suddenly fell down over my body. At first, it was scary — but then I cried out: “Elek is still alive! He is not dead! He just moved his arm! His hand fell right over my body!”
I am not sure whether mama and Aunt Laytshe noticed it too, but they had a difficult time calming me down. They explained to me that some limbs might still move after the person had died. “Get up, Elek, you can get up and walk!” I continued to cry. But when Aunt Leytshe checked again, I noticed that Elek lay there motionless, colorless, and that he was not responding to my request.
(to be continued…)
©2001 Fela Infeld Glaser and Marty Capsuto
©2009 First Look Marketing All Rights Reserved
Child In Captivity 