Alicia, p.8
Alicia, page 8
My mother and Herzl were the first in our house to become ill. The anguish my mother suffered after Zachary was killed and the lack of food made her a ready victim. Herzl had a bad cold, which further weakened him. My greatest worry was that my mother didn’t seem to care whether she lived or died. I had two very sick people to take care of, and I don’t know what would have happened if Sarah, Shmuel’s mother, hadn’t helped us.
She walked into our room one evening.
“Good evening, Alicia. I have come to help. My husband is away building an aluminum roof for a farmer, so I can stay with you.”
She took my hand gently. “You know, Alicia, I have never forgotten how you tried to save my baby.”
With Sarah’s help we were able to work around the clock, sponging the hot bodies of my mother and brother and forcing hot tea between their parched lips. We kept them covered when they tossed off their blankets and took turns resting. I was not even aware when the day ended and the night began. Sarah disappeared occasionally into the kitchen and came back with tea or soup. Thus passed two nightmarish weeks of worry and devoted nursing.
As suddenly as the fever came, it disappeared. The crisis was over. Mama and Herzl opened their eyes almost at the same hour. Mama smiled when she saw us and went back to sleep. Herzl drank some tea, and then he, too, went to sleep.
Shortly after, I became ill with typhus. I had terrible nightmares. I dreamed that I was trying to escape bullets the Germans were shooting at me, but I couldn’t run. I vaguely remember people saying things to me; I felt very hot; and then one day about two weeks later I awoke. I saw Mama and Herzl, and suddenly I felt peaceful and content.
I remember dozing off and waking, to find my mother near me, saying loving words to me and encouraging me to drink. I was too weak to lift my head, but there was Mother’s arm holding me gently and tilting the cup to my mouth.
Mama came by often and stroked my head. I didn’t know what it was, but her hand, which usually felt soft as it glided over my hair, now felt strange. I lifted my hand to my hair and was shocked. My hair was short and bristly. All my curls were gone. Suddenly I understood. My mother must have cut my hair to stop it from falling out during my illness. I remembered that my mother had told me about this. I had not known about it in time to cut her hair when she was ill, and as a result her beautiful hair was now very thin. But Mama wasn’t taking any chances with me; she just cut my hair off. I was going to look terrible and would have to wear a kerchief on my head like others who had survived the typhus epidemic.
Soon I was feeling much better, although still weak. We needed food desperately. I decided to try to get more soap from Mr. Gruber, who had been supplying it to me. I took the road to his house, hoping he would let me have a piece of soap on credit. I could go to the market and try to sell it.
It was a short walk, and soon I saw the house. It looked so majestic in the sun. I quickened my steps and was about to knock on the door, when I noticed something unusual. Chickens were walking around the yard. Chickens? I hadn’t seen chickens for such a long time that I stood hypnotized. What’s more, they were picking corn seeds from the ground where the snow had melted.
I was just about to knock on the door, when it opened and a woman I had never seen before said in an angry voice, “What do you want here? Be gone or I will set the dogs on you!”
“I mean you no harm. I am looking for Mr. Gruber,” I said.
“They took him and his family away. I live here now.”
I got out of her way just in time. She was about to hit me. A crazy woman, I thought as I walked backward still looking at her. I wondered if she hadn’t deliberately sent the Germans to kill the Grubers so that she could live in their house. She sure acted guilty.
I dismissed her from my mind, but I couldn’t dismiss the Gruber family. They had had four children.
I felt a burning sensation inside me again, a feeling of hatred for the Germans, the Ukrainians, and for our former neighbors who had helped kill us in order to get our homes. I hoped God would punish them for their evil deeds.
Thinking again of God, I thought of Reb Srool. I hadn’t seen him for some time, and I also needed to ask him to add Zachary’s name to the mourners’ prayers he was already saying for my family.
The door of his room was closed, and at first I thought he might not welcome a visitor. But it was winter, and I concluded that his door must be closed to keep out the cold. I knocked several times. When I didn’t get an answer I turned the doorknob and entered the room. For a moment I just stood staring. The room was in shambles. The books normally stacked neatly on shelves were thrown around, the bed linen lay crumpled on the floor, and I saw his tefillin (phylacteries) near the sink with their straps spread about like winding snakes. My head started pounding with fear, and I ran out of the room. I saw a woman standing on the steps outside the house.
“Have you seen Reb Srool? He is the old man who lives downstairs, the one with the long white beard.”
She said something to me in a language I couldn’t understand. She kept repeating the word nem. Suddenly I was screaming at her.
“What happened to Reb Srool? What happened to Reb Srool?”
Something snapped inside me because I was screaming loudly and crying at the same time.
A man suddenly appeared, grasped my arm, and was pulling me away, saying, “Stop, you crazy girl! Stop screaming! Do you want to scare the people here? Don’t they have enough trouble already? If you don’t shut up, I will hit you!”
“I am not a crazy girl, and you should apologize to me for calling me such a name.” Then I added, “I had a bad day today.”
“I know you are not crazy,” he answered. “I will take you to meet someone who they say is crazy but just had a bad time, like you.”
And that was how I came to meet Crazy Bella, who wasn’t crazy at all.
“Bella, my dear, let me introduce you to a ghetto rat,” the man said. “I caught her when she came out of a basement and began screaming at a poor Hungarian woman, whom she scared half to death.
“She is really a good girl, though,” he added with a smile.
“What is your name?”
“Alicia Jurman, and my mother is a Kurtz from the Carpathian Mountains,” I answered with dignity as I looked up at the lady.
Before me stood a woman who looked like a princess in biblical stories I had read.
Bella was about six feet tall with two long red braids hanging down on her chest. She had green eyes and lots of freckles. She wore an embroidered peasant blouse and a wide peasant skirt. On her feet she wore high-heeled red boots. She looked like a flaming torch. In her arms she was holding a little girl about two years old who had the same coloring but short, curly red hair. Sitting at the kitchen table was a young girl about my age, with the same red hair falling in gentle curls to her shoulders, apparently Bella’s sister. The third child, a boy of about six, had brown hair and brown eyes.
I looked closely at the man who had brought me there. He was very handsome, as tall as Bella, with blond hair and brown eyes. Bella called him Beniek.
I had never seen these people before. Apparently they had come to live in the ghetto after the second action. There was something about them I couldn’t understand at the time, but I felt drawn to them. I wished that they would let me stay with them for a while. I didn’t know what impression I made on them. Before them was a skinny twelve-year-old girl with a kerchief on her head and a tear-stained face, with a trace of a smile on her lips but not in her eyes.
“Why don’t you sit down near my sister Rachel and have some soup? Would you like that, Alicia?”
What a gracious lady, I thought as I curtsied and sat down. The boy made space for me at the table. He was Bella’s son, and his name was Danny. He was six years old, and I liked him. I also liked Rachel and Bella very much. I was hoping that they would like me too.
Our life in the ghetto, the constant hunger, the gradual loss of family members, the horror of being hunted by the Gestapo and killed, left very little hope of survival in the hearts of the Jewish children. I wasn’t different from the others. What kept me going was my love for my mother and brother and the wish to see our murderers punished for their crimes. There was a balance between love and hate in my heart. Meeting Bella and her family tipped the scale a little in favor of love.
Every day I stopped by to say hello to my new friends, and when I found out that Rachel was very ill with tuberculosis, I spent hours with her, just talking and reading aloud to her from the many books she had found when they moved into their home.
One of the books interested me because it dealt with the changes that were taking place in my body. The book was written in Polish and was called Zagadnienie Seksualne, “Sexual Problems.” Rachel, who was two years older than I, was glad to enlighten me when I couldn’t understand some of the words. As we became close friends we talked about our families. Rachel told me about hers and how they had come to Buczacz.
They had lived in a small village nearby. Her father was a furrier who made fur coats out of lambskins for farmers in the neighboring villages. He made a good living and was able to send Bella to school in Buczacz. Bella was a free spirit. She rode horses with the village boys and swam in the river. Here Rachel stopped her story and smiled.
“This worried Father, and do you know what he did?” Rachel said, lowering her voice.
“No, what did he do?” I asked somewhat worriedly.
“He married Bella off to a very religious yeshiva boy in order to tame her.”
“And what happened next?” I asked.
“Well, she had children. Danny is six now and Hanale two. Danny is a quiet boy, just like his father, but Hanale is a little red-haired flame,” she said with pride.
The Russians took Bella’s husband into the army in 1941 and they hadn’t heard from him since. I could sense that Rachel was getting tired, so I suggested that she finish the story another time. I could not have been very convincing, because Rachel continued. I really did want to hear the rest of the story.
“My father and mother disappeared shortly after the Germans came. I was visiting Bella, who lived at the other end of the village. No one could tell us what had happened to them. But we found out that the Ukrainian police had taken them away, and we assume they were killed.
“Can you imagine such a thing?” Rachel was crying now. “Someone told me it was the son of one of the farmers who brought the police to our house. His father owed my father for a fur.”
Here I really had to stop Rachel. A week passed before I heard how they had left Bella’s home and moved into a hiding place in the forest.
For a while they managed well. Bella would go out and get food from some of the farmers who owed her father for fur coats. Bella, as always, carried a whip in her boot, so she felt relatively safe.
Then one night Bella was followed by farmers to her hiding place. They waited long enough for Bella, her children, and Rachel to fall asleep, and then attacked them. The farmers bound them with ropes, put them on a wagon, put rags in their mouths, and then covered them with straw. The other farmers went home while one of the farmers drove the wagon. Sometime later the wagon stopped and the farmer pulled Bella down by her hair. Rachel couldn’t see what happened next, but suddenly her sister was screaming, and she heard the whip whistling and the farmer yelling and cursing. Bella eventually untied the others and, whipping the horses with all her might, drove into Buczacz.
Sometime later Rachel heard Bella tell Beniek what had happened. The farmer decided to rape Bella before bringing her and the children to the police in Buczacz. Bella managed to free her hands and nearly whipped the farmer to death. She then took off his boots and his clothing and left him naked on the road. Before leaving she made sure he understood that if he told anyone what had happened she would come back and burn his home and the homes of the other farmers who had been with him.
I could see that Rachel was glad to have finished telling this horror story, but I wanted to know one more thing.
“What happened to the wagon and horses?” I asked Rachel.
“Oh, Bella sold them in the market. How do you think we can buy food now?”
“But aren’t you afraid that the farmer will find you and kill you?”
She frowned.
“Well, yes, that is why we stay in this house and try to keep watch from the balcony.”
I was really in awe of Bella’s bravery and wondered why she was staying in the ghetto. Surely she could hide somewhere else. Then I realized that Rachel was too ill. She couldn’t live in a hole in the ground anymore. My heart went out to them. Trapped, I thought. We were all trapped, one way or another.
CHAPTER 10
In Chortkov Prison
“I said Alicia can’t see you now,” came Herzl’s angry voice from outside. “She’s busy. Come back another time.”
“I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.”
“You have to wait outside,” Herzl said.
“I will wait inside,” the visitor said firmly.
If this visitor insisted on entering our room, I thought, Herzl would have to prevent him by force, and there might be a fight. He had orders not to let anyone into our room while I was under the bed digging a new bunker. I pulled myself out of the hole and crawled out from under the bed.
Not taking time to brush the soil from my clothing, I went to the door.
“What’s so urgent that you have to make my brother angry?” I asked the intruder. He was facing me now, and as we stood looking at each other, I recognized him. He had grown a lot since I last saw him four years before. He was very slender and his clothes were about two sizes too small, but his eyes were the same deep blue, with a special twinkle in them that gave the impression of a lingering smile.
“Milek? Milek?”
“Yes, it is I in person. How are you, Alicia?” he asked softly. Then, changing his tone, he said, “My, you look like … like”—he paused—“a chimney sweep,” and began to laugh.
“Oh, no, Milek, you are wrong, very wrong. I look more like a gravedigger,” and I also burst out laughing. It was just like old times in Stanislavov. Milek would say something funny and I would become hysterical. My dear friend from Stanislavov had come, and there I stood all covered with dirt and not even able to offer him a chair to sit on. We had traded all our chairs for food.
Milek had escaped from Stanislavov with his friend, Bolek, just before the ghetto was made Judenrein, or free of Jews. I never asked him about his family, or about my uncle. From the way Milek and Bolek looked, I could see that they had suffered a lot. They were now living with Bolek’s aunt, who had lost all of her family and was glad to have them in her house.
In a very short time Milek became a member of our family as well as that of Rachel’s. Rachel and I tried our best to interest Milek in our books, or just in storytelling; but although he would listen for a while, we could see that he was only being polite to us, and his thoughts were far away. The only times he showed genuine interest were when Beniek was visiting Bella. Beniek usually had some kind of news—sometimes good but mostly bad—which he told us in such a way that we could handle it and not get too upset. Beniek was an optimist in a pessimistic world.
Beniek and his friends were well known in the ghetto. There were ten of them living across from Bella’s house. They had escaped from Horodenko ghetto, which was quite a distance from Buczacz. Rumor had it that they had fought the Germans and the Ukrainian police in their area and were planning to do the same in Buczacz. Perhaps, I thought, they will be able to do what my poor brother Zachary couldn’t. Fight back. We all knew that our chances for survival were very small and that the Germans planned to destroy all of us.
Milek wasn’t the only one to enter our lives as a dear friend. One day I came home from visiting Rachel and found a woman and two boys in our room. My mother introduced them as Mrs. Eckerberg from Bielsko and her sons, Samuel and Joshua. Samuel was about fifteen years old and Joshua looked about my age. Mrs. Eckerberg was a very beautiful lady. I remembered that Mr. Eckerberg and Papa had been business partners in Bielsko. For a moment I wondered where Mr. Eckerberg was, but I didn’t ask. If he were alive, he would have been with his family. Poor people. They must have had a very difficult time getting to Buczacz. Bielsko was occupied by the Germans in 1939, and it was now 1942. Three years of hell, I thought as I looked at them.
Mama and Mrs. Eckerberg became good friends. The Eckerbergs lived in a room one street below ours. Mama told me that the house had a bunker, a necessary part of every ghetto home. Mrs. Eckerberg had brought very little money with her and practically no clothing. We shared what little we had with them. The boys were given some of my brothers’ clothing. When I saw them wearing the familiar garments, I found it hard to go near them. Mama must have cared very deeply for these boys to give them her dead children’s clothing. She hadn’t even touched it when we were starving during the famine.
The new people who had entered our lives put additional pressure on me to look for new sources of food. One day, as I was standing on Rachel’s balcony looking down on Chechego Maya Street, one of Buczacz’s main streets, I had an idea. I saw the farmers bringing their quotas of sugar beets to the Germans. I stood watching as sleighs, heavily loaded with sugar beets, moved slowly along the street. They were coming from the Charny Most (the Black Bridge), which was the western entrance to our city. I knew the place well. The sleighs coming that way had to pass a hill in order to get onto the bridge. That’s it, I told myself. That could be the place where I could get some beets.
“I will see you later,” I said to Rachel. “I have to go and talk with Herzl.”
“Wait a minute, Alicia; here, take this.” She handed me a piece of white pork fat. “Eat it here. It will take only a moment. I don’t want anybody to see you eat it. It will help your cough, although you don’t seem to be coughing much lately.
