Authors: Alan Gratz
He liked most to sit on the second-floor balcony of
his house overlooking the camp and shoot Jews with a
rifle while he listened to music on his record player. It
didn’t matter who you were, or what you’d done. If
you hurried through the parade grounds trying not to
get shot, he would shoot at you on purpose. You had
to walk through normally, acting like there wasn’t a
madman on the balcony above you with a rifle ready
to shoot you, and hope he didn’t notice you.
The best way not to get shot was not to be there in
the first place.
I escaped the daily shooting gallery through my job
at the tailor shop. I left early in the morning and
returned in time for roll call, and then hard bread and
thin soup in the barracks each night. Uncle Moshe did
the same, working in a furrier’s shop outside the camp.
There was still a chance Goeth would get me at roll
call — no one was safe, not even the
kapo
s — but with
Moshe’s help, I learned to be anonymous enough to
survive for months.
Then the tailor shop closed down. I was never sure
why, but one morning, when the other tailors and I
assembled, we were told our services at the factory
were no longer required. We looked around nervously
at one another. Without our off-camp job, we would
be around Amon Goeth all day, and without special
skills, we were even less valuable than before.
I was put to work building new barracks for the
never-ceasing truckloads and trainloads of Jews brought
to Plaszów every day. It was backbreaking work:
digging out a level patch of earth, hauling rocks in
wheelbarrows, hammering boards in place. And always
there was the threat of Amon Goeth and his dogs.
After a man on my work detail was killed for moving
too slowly, Uncle Moshe traded his daily rations to a
kapo
to get me assigned to a new job outside the camp.
I reported to my new work detail the next morning
and was loaded into a truck, not knowing where we
were going or what we were doing. None of us did.
This was some new job no one had ever done before,
and we were all a little nervous. There was always a
chance that our work would be to dig graves in the
woods — and then be shot to fill them.
The truck bounced to a stop, and the Nazis ordered
us out. But it wasn’t the woods we had been taken to,
or another factory. It was the Kraków ghetto! We
looked at one another in wonder — why had we been
brought back to the ghetto?
A guard at the gate on Lwowska Street let us
through, and we saw right away what was different:
There were no more people. No one was on the streets,
and no one was in the houses. The entire ghetto had
been liquidated after I’d left. There was no sign of life
anywhere.
“The entire ghetto must be cleaned,” one of the
Nazis told us. “There must be no taint of Jews left.”
We were told how to search each flat for anything of
value, and how to sort what was left into piles on the
floor for removal and disposal— clothes should
be sorted in one way, household items in another.
We were to take nothing out with us, under penalty
of death.
As I walked the empty streets of Podgórze, my
chest felt heavy. I was overwhelmed with emotion. I
hadn’t been gone long, and the last few years I had
lived here had been a nightmare, but what I remembered wasn’t the snow shoveling and the shootings
and the starvation. I remembered walking to the market with my mother. Visiting my father at work.
Playing ball in the street with my friends. This neighborhood had been my home once, and it always
would be, even after the “taint” of Jews had been
scrubbed away.
As if to tear my heart into even more pieces, I was
assigned to clean out the apartment building where I
had lived with my parents. While other boys worked
the bottom floor, I climbed the stairs. I stopped and
stood where no one could see me, remembering.
Mr. Barchwic on the second floor, singing along
with the radio. Mrs. Szymansky sweeping the thirdfloor landing. Any minute now, I thought, my mother’s
voice would come calling down the stairs: “Yanek!
Dinner!” I waited, but there was no radio, no
sweeping, no call from my mother. Nothing but the
quiet shuffling of the boys working the flats on
the first floor.
I climbed the stairs to my old floor and crept down
the hall. This corridor had once been so familiar to me
that I had traveled it without ever really seeing it. But
now it was different. Now I could see the worn spots
in the hall rugs, the broken piece of molding along the
ceiling, the burnt-out bulb in the light fixture. There
was a new smell too, something putrid, like nothing I
had ever smelled before. It was strongest near the door
to Mr. Tatarka’s flat. The door was ajar, and I pushed
it open the rest of the way to look inside.
Mr. Tatarka lay in the middle of the front room of
his apartment beside the chair he’d stolen from the
Immerglicks, dead in a pool of his own blood.
At least I thought it was Mr. Tatarka. The body was
black and shriveled, all rags and bones and —
I stumbled back into the hall and retched. The smell,
the sight of it, it was all just too much. I threw up
again, tears streaming from my burning eyes, and I
ran. I ran not for my old flat, the one we had shared
with three other families. I ran instead for the roof,
where it had just been me and my mother and father,
safe and alone in our little pigeon coop. I burst through
the big metal door and out onto the rooftop, gulping
in big lungfuls of fresh air. The smell eventually went
away, but not the memory of it — nor the vision of
Mr. Tatarka’s decomposing body.
I stood with my hands on my knees for a while until
my breathing returned to normal, but I knew I’d have
to get back soon. It wouldn’t do for the Nazis to notice
me for any reason. I went into the pigeon coop, fighting back all the memories of my mother and father. I
sifted through what was left. Someone else had lived
here after I had been taken— there was a tattered
scarf I didn’t remember, and a red blanket that hadn’t
been mine. But my father’s old coat was still there in
the corner. I knew I couldn’t take it with me, but I
picked it up and put it on, more to remember the smell
of him than anything. It fit me better than it ever
had, and I realized suddenly that, even though I was
thin and starving, I had still grown. I was fourteen
now, and almost as tall as my father had been.
I was pulling the coat off when I felt a lump in one
of the sleeves. I felt it with my fingers. Something was
sewn into the sleeve. Of course! Mother had sewn our
extra money into our coats so it couldn’t be stolen in a
raid! I glanced outside the coop to make sure no one
else had made it to the roof yet, and I hastily ripped
the seams of my father’s coat apart. There were a
thousand zloty
inside! I dug through the pile of things,
found my old coat as well, and ripped out the seams.
Another thousand zloty!
Two thousand zloty!
The
Nazis didn’t sell food in the labor camp, of course, but
there were ways to buy food smuggled in from the
outside. Uncle Moshe would know how!
Using a needle and thread of my mother’s that had
been left behind, I tore out one of the seams in my
prisoner coat and sewed the money inside. I knew
how to sew beautifully now from my work in the tailor shop. I finished quickly and was pleased with my
work. Only the closest examination would find the
money hidden inside.
I hurried to put the rest of the few things in the
pigeon coop into piles, in case someone did come up
here to clean up, and went back down to find the boys
from my work detail. They had already made it to the
top floor, and I joined in with the group cleaning out
my family’s old flat, carefully avoiding Mr. Tatarka’s
apartment.
We worked the rest of the day, putting clothes in
one pile, household goods in another. I always went
for the clothes first, running my hands along the seams
to see if anyone else had had the same idea as my
mother, and once found a pair of diamond earrings. I
hooked them inside my jacket under my arms and
hoped they wouldn’t fall out. Uncle Moshe and I were
going to eat well tonight!
All the way back to the camp, I worried I would be
discovered. But the guards either didn’t think we
would try to sneak anything back in or figured there
wasn’t anything left of value in the ghetto to smuggle.
For the most part they were right— more than just
the people had been taken from the ghetto. Two years
of imprisonment and starvation and raids had bled the
ghetto dry of almost anything worth owning.
As we assembled for roll call, I whispered for Uncle
Moshe to come to my barracks at dinner. I also asked
him what the score was.
“Goeth nineteen, Jews nil,” he whispered back. “It
was a good day to get you out of the camp.”
I nodded. A very good day indeed.
uncle moshe couldn’t belIeve It when I
showed him the money and the earrings. He hugged
me and kissed me before remembering his own
warning not to let anyone else see you care about
anything.
“I know a man who works in the munitions plant,”
Uncle Moshe whispered. “He smuggles in bread sometimes and sells it— for a price. I’ll buy us a little
something to eat. You’ve saved us, Yanek!”
Later that night, Moshe brought me half a loaf of
bread— a feast! He took it out from under his shirt
and gestured for me to hide it quickly.
“You mustn’t let any of the other prisoners see you
with it. They’ll try to take it. And don’t share it with
anyone. Not if you want to survive, right?”
I nodded.
“The money will buy us more,” Moshe whispered.
“I’ve hidden the rest to keep it safe.”
“Where?” I asked.
“I have a place no one will find.”
“The
kapo
,” someone near a window said. Someone
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Moshe said. “Remember
what I told you! Don’t let anyone see.”
“I won’t.”
Uncle Moshe slipped out, and I climbed into my
bunk. The bread lay against my cold skin. It wasn’t
warm anymore, the bread, but my heart beat faster
and my mouth watered at the thought of eating it. An
extra half a loaf! In Plaszów I was a rich man, which
suddenly struck me as funny. Before the war, there
had been loaves of bread aplenty — always one or two
in the kitchen, brought back fresh from the bakery
every day by my mother— and I had never thought
twice about them. Now a half a loaf of bread was life
itself, and my mother was gone.
The
kapo
did his checks to make sure everyone was
in their bunks. He didn’t have to worry about the man
in the bunk below mine.
The man beneath me had crawled back after roll
call, and hadn’t moved since. He was what the others
called a Muselmann. He was so thin you could count
his ribs and see the bones in his arms and legs,
but it wasn’t just that. We were all skin and bones.
Muselmanners were different in the way they breathed
through their mouths, in the way they dragged their
feet when they walked — if they
could
walk. Most of
them just huddled on the ground on their hands and
knees no matter how much the Germans or the
kapo
s
beat them.
But no matter how he was standing, you always
knew a Muselmann from his eyes. There wasn’t anything left there. Muselmanners had given up, and there
was no life in their expression, no spark of a soul. They
were zombies, worked and starved into a living death
by our captors. If the man below me wasn’t dead when
they came for us tomorrow, the morning roll call
would kill him.
Half a loaf of bread might have saved him, if he
could even eat it. Starvation did that to you after a
while. Your body got so used to not having food it got
sick if you ate even half a bowl of soup. I could hear
him down there, breathing his ragged breath. I could
hear him dying of starvation, and I had food. Half a
loaf of bread! If I just gave him part of it . . .
But Moshe had warned me: Don’t share with anyone else. Not if you wanted to survive.
Not if you wanted to make sure you never became a
Muselmann yourself.
So I huddled on my bunk sneaking bites of bread
in the dark, listening to the nameless man beneath
My old apartment building was finished, but there
were other buildings to clean in the ghetto. We worked
for days, and I looked for hidden money and valuables
wherever I went, but there was nothing. The place had
already been picked clean before the liquidation. The
Nazis had seen to that.
One night, Uncle Moshe brought me a carrot he’d
bought with the money I’d found in the old coats. A
whole carrot! I hadn’t had a carrot since the early days
in the ghetto. It was soft and mushy, but it was the
most delicious thing I had ever eaten, I was sure. There
was still money left, Moshe told me, lots of it. Even if
I never found more money, we could keep buying a
little extra food here and there for quite a while. Long
enough maybe to survive. There were rumors the Russians and the Germans had abandoned their pact and
were at war with each other now, making Hitler fight
the English and French and Americans in the west,
and the Russians in the east. One way or another,
people whispered, we would be free by year’s end. I
couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. Not until I saw
an American or Russian tank rolling down the road.
In the meantime, thanks to the money Moshe and I
had hidden away, we would survive. No matter how
long it took.
One evening when we returned to camp from cleaning the ghetto, I asked a boy in my barracks who
worked inside Plaszów what the score was that day.
He looked away and wouldn’t answer me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him, but still he said nothing. I spun him around. “Hey! Thomas, why won’t
you tell me? What’s the score?”
“Just one,” Thomas said, looking at his feet.
“Who is it? Someone we know?”
“It was your uncle,” he said at last. “The man who
comes to visit you at night.”
I staggered back, knocking my head on my bunk.
“No,” I told him. “No, that’s impossible. You’re
wrong. Moshe doesn’t work in the camp. He
works at the furrier’s outside Plaszów. You saw someone else.”
Thomas shook his head. “They closed the furrier’s
and reassigned all the workers inside the camp. Your
uncle was made leader of a group breaking rocks.
When Goeth demanded to know how much work had
been done . . .”
“What? Tell me,” I demanded. My stomach was
squeezing itself into a hard knot of fear.
Thomas shook his head. “Goeth didn’t like his
answer.”
“No,” I told him. “No, you’re wrong. Moshe went
to work today at the furrier’s like always. You’ll see. It
was someone else.”
“I’m sorry, Yanek.”
“It was someone else! You’ll see at roll call.”
But Uncle Moshe wasn’t at roll call. I searched for
him where we usually met. I looked up and down the
rows for him. Nothing. I wanted to call out for him,
but I knew that was suicide. Moshe had taught me: Do
nothing to stand out. I had to be anonymous. I had to
be no one, with no name, no personality, and no family or friends to care about.
But I did care. Uncle Moshe was the last of my family. The only person I could trust in Plaszów. My only
friend.
And the money I had found! Moshe had hidden it,
and he had never told me where. I’d never thought to
press him on it, because Moshe would always be there.
We were going to survive, the two of us. We were
going to survive— the last two men in the Gruener
family written on the pages of the world.
Now there was only me. Yanek. I was fourteen
years old, and I was alone in the world again. This
time for good.
As the Nazis went through roll call I fought back
my tears. If Amon Goeth saw me crying, he would
kill me too.