A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (4 page)

Soon we were on our way to Poland. It took us a while to get very far, however, since we were trapped in the no-man’s-land between
Poland and Czechoslovakia. This strip of land measured some fifty yards from border post to border post. The borders were
connected by a dirt road that cut through a field. On either side of the road ran a deep drainage ditch. The Polish border
post was at one end of the road, the Czech at the other. As soon as we got to the Polish side of the border, the Polish guards
would order us back to the Czech side. The Czechs, in turn, would not allow us to reenter. And so it went for days. To me,
the strip of road seemed much longer than it probably was because of the many times we had to move from one end to the other,
carrying or pushing our suitcases while the border guards kept yelling at us not to show up again.

We must have been stateless and have had no valid travel documents. My father probably lost his Polish citizenship under a
Polish law, enacted in 1938, which stripped all Poles of their citizenship if they remained outside the country for more than
five years. I do not know whether he had earlier acquired German citizenship, but if he had, he would have lost it, as my
mother did, when the Nazis denaturalized Jews living abroad. As stateless persons, once in no-man’s-land we had no right to
enter Poland or to return to Czechoslovakia. Every day and every night, my father would wait for the guards to change shifts
on the Polish side of the border. As soon as he saw new Polish guards there, he would march us up to the guardhouse and ask
to be admitted, claiming that he was a Pole. But since he lacked the necessary papers to prove it, the guards would order
us to return to the Czech side. Back and forth we went, day and night. We would sleep in the field adjacent to the road between
the border posts or in one of the ditches. On rare occasions, we would be allowed to sleep in the waiting room of one of the
guardhouses. While we were cold most of the time, we were not hungry because the Czech or Polish farmers would sell us bread
and sausages. But we were not going very far. I was tired and did not understand why nobody wanted to let us into their country.

A week or so after we had first arrived at the border, on a day when we had again been ordered by the Poles to return to the
Czech side and just as we were dragging our belongings toward that side, we were met by heavily armed German soldiers. It
seems that Germany had occupied Czechoslovakia, and here we were, in the clutches of the very people we were trying to escape.
I could sense that my parents were very afraid. One of the Germans, who appeared to be in charge, wanted to know who we were
and what we were doing in the middle of nowhere. My father, who suddenly spoke very poor German, answered that we were Poles,
that we had been here for more than a week, and that the Poles would not allow us to return to our country. “We shall see
about that,” snarled the German officer. With those words, he ordered two of his soldiers to come over and pick up our suitcases.
I thought that they were going to do something terrible to us, because my mother suddenly grasped my hand very tightly and
stopped me from speaking. But the German soldiers merely walked us back to the Polish border. Once there, they ordered the
Polish border guards to let us pass. “These people are Poles!” yelled one of the soldiers. “I order you to let them in. You
had better not send them to our side again. Things are going to be different from now on!” My father translated what the German
was saying, and the Poles nodded obediently.

That is how we got into Poland. It must have been March of 1939, for that is when Germany marched into Czechoslovakia. I was
almost five years old.

I HAVE NO RECOLLECTION OF THE FIRST DAYS
after we were finally allowed to cross into Poland. We must have stayed in a boardinghouse or a rented room for a short while,
and I must have slept much of the time. My first memory is of the three of us sitting in a horse-drawn hay wagon with our suitcases
piled up at one end. The driver was an old man with a long white beard. He wore a black hat and spoke with my father in a
language that sounded German but which I could barely understand. These were the first Yiddish words I had ever heard, and
he was the first Hasidic Jew I had ever seen. I can still hear the driver say something about “a shoo,” which at the time
made we wonder why he spoke of a
Schuh
(the German word for shoe). Only much later, when I picked up Yiddish from my playmates in the Ghetto of Kielce, did I realize
that “a shoo” meant an hour in Yiddish and that the driver had told my father that it would take about an hour for us to reach
our destination.

Our next stop was Warsaw. Here my father had some relatives, and since my mother had never met any of them, we were greeted
by them with much rejoicing and kissing, lots of laughter, and enormous amounts of food. I hated these visits because all
the women kept kissing me and stuffing me with food. Fortunately, there were always some children around with whom I could
escape from the grown-ups and play.

These visits came to an end when I caught a severe case of whooping cough from one of my playmates. The doctor told my parents
that inhaling river air would do wonders for me. To my delight, my parents acted almost immediately on the doctor’s recommendation
and hired a horse-drawn carriage to drive me back and forth across a bridge over the Vistula River that connected Warsaw with
Praga, its eastern suburb. I loved these daily excursions and was very sad when my cough gradually subsided and my parents
decided that we could leave Warsaw and travel to Katowice.

By 1939, Katowice, a city in the southern part of Poland, had become a gathering point for German Jewish refugees. Here they
registered with the British consulate in the hope of obtaining the necessary documents allowing them to travel to England.
My parents had been told in Warsaw that the British consulate in Katowice would handle our visa applications, and that the
sooner we got there the sooner we would be able to leave for England. My whooping cough had delayed our arrival in Katowice.

In Katowice we moved into a small apartment. I’ll never forget our first night in that apartment. My parents had barely turned
off the lights when the room we shared seemed to come alive. My mother screamed that she was being bitten to death. When my
father jumped out of bed and switched on the light, we found the walls of the room and our beds covered with bedbugs. They
were crawling all over us. It was quite a sight to behold: there seemed to be hundreds of ugly orange yellow bugs, and their
vicious bites itched intolerably.

My mother wanted to leave right away, but my father calmed her down and explained to her that we were lucky to have this place.
Once they had convinced themselves that we had no choice but to stay, my parents mounted a veritable bedbug extermination
campaign. They found some candles and began to burn the bugs off the walls; they shook them out of the sheets and stepped
on them on the floor. There was a sink in the room, and my mother started shaking the bedbugs from the sheets into the sink
in the hope of drowning them. These desperate efforts to rid us of bedbugs must have gone on all night. I fell asleep after
a while without realizing that bedbugs would be the least of our problems in the years ahead.

I had a lot of fun in Katowice. There the refugees formed their own little community. My parents became part of it and soon
made many friends in this group. As was customary in Germany, these friends immediately became my “uncles” and “aunts.” I
played with their children, and they kept an eye on me when my parents had to be away on an errand. They usually gathered
in some café or park. Here they played cards, read newspapers, whispered a lot about the war that was coming, and worried.
Everybody was waiting for their “lucky day.” And every so often, there would be a celebration, much kissing, and many tears:
somebody’s lucky day had arrived in the form of a long-awaited visa from the British consulate, allowing the recipient to travel
to England. Soon those who had been granted visas would leave Katowice, usually in small groups or transports put together
by the British consulate.

Our lucky day was not to come for some time. In the meantime, I remember playing in a lovely park in Katowice and swimming
in a nearby lake. The Jewish community in the city apparently provided some help for needy refugees, as did various individuals
associated with it. I remember being taken shopping by a very nice man who had befriended my parents and returning home with
toys and wearing a completely new outfit: new pants, shirt, and jacket. He had thought I looked too German in the clothes
my mother liked me to wear. From time to time, we would also be invited to dinner in Jewish homes, although this did not happen
all that often, and certainly not as often as I would have liked; I would have been happy to escape our ugly room and meager
meals.

One day my mother came home in a very excited state. She told my father that she and a girlfriend had gone to a famous fortune-teller.
Before going in, Mutti had taken off her wedding ring, and, because she looked much younger than her age — she was twenty-seven
years old at the time — she was very surprised when the fortune-teller, after studying her cards, proclaimed that my mother
was married and had one child. In addition to knowing a great deal about our family background, the fortune-teller told my
mother that her son was “
ein Glückskind
” — a lucky child — and that he would emerge unscathed from the future that awaited us.

My father scolded my mother for believing this nonsense and for spending money on it when we had barely any left. But my mother
claimed that her girlfriend had paid for the visit because she wanted someone to accompany her. “Besides, maybe the fortune-teller
knows something we don’t know, for how else could she have known so much about me?” she retorted. “The only thing the fortune-teller
knows that we don’t know is how to make money in these bad times,” barked my father. The argument between them continued for
a while.

None of us knew at the time, and I only found out much later, that the fortune-teller’s prediction about me would sustain
my mother’s hopes in the years ahead, when we were separated. Even after the war, when friends tried to convince her to give
up searching for me and not to continue torturing herself, for “Tommy could not possibly have survived,” she would reply that
she knew I was alive. To me, she insisted years later that everything the fortune-teller had told her had come true. “Of course,
I don’t believe in this hocus-pocus,” she would add in all earnestness, only to contradict herself immediately by asking,
“but how do you explain that she was right about you and me?”

Our lucky day came a few weeks after my mother’s visit to the fortune-teller. We received the prized visas for travel to England
and were scheduled to leave Katowice on September 1, 1939. There was the usual excitement among our friends, with everybody
wishing us well and expressing the hope that we would all soon be reunited in England. I was told that we would be in England
in a few weeks and that once there we would no longer have to be afraid of the Nazis.

But it was not to be. On our “lucky day,” Hitler decided to invade Poland. When we arrived at the Katowice railroad station,
where our transport was to be put together, the people from the British consulate told us that it was no longer possible to
leave from a Polish port. Arrangements had therefore been made to get us to England via the Balkans. Despite the onrush of
people who were trying to leave Katowice that morning, probably because it was not far from the German border, we eventually
got to board the railroad car that had been reserved for us and for some other refugees who had also received their visas.
Finally, after a long delay, the train moved out of the station. We seemed to have made it.

I don’t know how long we traveled on that train. For the most part, though, the train was stopped more than it moved, waiting
for other trains loaded with soldiers to pass. The roads along the railroad lines were crowded with people walking or riding
in horse-drawn carriages and wagons. Everywhere there were long columns of soldiers, marching and on horseback and in trucks,
pulling artillery pieces and supplies. The soldiers were moving toward the front in the direction opposite that of the civilians,
who had to make room for them to pass, not always an easy task on the narrow roads.

For me, all this commotion was very exciting. I spent much time waving to the passing soldiers and admiring their uniforms
and three-cornered hats. And then, suddenly, the fun stopped. Our train had again halted, this time next to a Polish military
train. That train was filled with soldiers and military equipment. On each side of the tracks were open fields. We had probably
not been there for more than a few minutes when we began to hear the far-off sounds of approaching airplanes. Then they were
above us — two or three planes. People began to scream,
“Niemcy! Niemcy!”
(“Germans! Germans!”), and the air resounded with the rattle of machine-gun fire and the thump of exploding bombs. The train
began to shake. The noise was terrible.

My father grabbed my mother and me and pushed us out of the train. “They are attacking the military train!” he screamed above
the noise. “We must get out, we must get out.” Some people had already jumped from the train and were scrambling across the
tracks into the fields. We followed them, pushed on by others. The Polish soldiers began to shoot at the German planes with
rifles held out of their train’s windows. They did not have much luck. The planes kept swooping down on the trains and the
railroad tracks, blowing up some of the carriages. They kept repeating this maneuver for what seemed like a very long time.

Once we managed to get to the nearby field, my mother threw herself on top of me while my father shielded both of us with
his body. People were screaming as the planes flew over us with their machine guns blazing. They could easily have killed
all of us, but it seemed we were not their targets. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the planes were gone. We
waited for a while for them to return, and when they did not, we got up and started to look around. No one on our side of
the field seemed to have been hit, but people were wailing, and a few children were crying. Some railroad cars were on fire;
there was smoke everywhere. Many injured and dead soldiers were lying on the other side of the tracks and near their train.
The tracks had been destroyed as far as the eye could see.