Chajka watched people “dash for the water buckets like wild animals.” The thirst was unbearable. They hadn’t had proper water in weeks, drinking rainwater or even urine. Chajka pitied the elderly and the children, so scared, so dirty.
Jews tried to bribe Germans to get work. But they had nothing left to bribe them with. Chajka’s group volunteered—they were ignored. Chajka wanted to live, but how? She did not believe in miracles.
The Nazis called her and Aliza.
This was it. Chajka’s execution.
“Farewell,” she said, and strutted boldly, head up.
They marched her to the building of the former militia—a closed building, no witnesses. Aliza went in. Chajka was told to wait outside. A Judenrat clerk walked by, looking frightened. “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing really,” Chajka said. “They want to execute me.”
“How come? What for?”
“They found something in our bunker.”
He was carrying a tray with apples. Chajka leisurely stretched out her arm, took one, and bit into it. He looked at her as if she were out of her mind. Was she? While still chewing, she was called into the building. She threw the apple core to the ground and rehearsed the line she planned to say in her final moment: “Murderers, your day of reckoning will come. Our blood will be avenged. Your end is already near.”
As Chajka walked to her execution site, she wanted to scream—but it was desolate, no one would hear her. She controlled herself for the sake of the others. Though not under orders to do so, she remained silent. And self-critical.
Aliza was in the corner of the room. Bloody. Severely beaten. Broken.
Now Chajka realized that she would be tortured.
They ordered her to lie down. The command came: beat her to death. The blows began. Her whole body. Relentless, fierce. Then, they started on her head. She wanted to refrain from shouting and show them “what a lousy Jewess was capable of.” But she was disclaiming them, so she had to scream out her innocence.
“Say whose gun this is, and we’ll leave you alone!” they shouted.
“I don’t know,” Chajka answered. “I’m innocent. Mama! Mama!”
Finally, they stopped and moved back to Aliza. “I must be a vile animal,” Chajka later wrote, “because I didn’t react.” How could she have covered her face and not gone over and slapped them for beating her friend? But she was in too much pain, and also, felt a perversely fierce joy—she was sure she could endure.
Then they started on her again. A Nazi approached. “A tall, skinny greyhound,” she wrote. “[The] familiar eyes of a snoop.” Chajka gave him a derisive look. It seemed to her that that’s why he beat her.
Cheek, face, eyes. Blood gushed out. “One more centimeter, and I would have lost my eye.” He put his sinewy arms right around her thin neck, strangling her. She began to wheeze. He released his hold. “I was about to find out at what point one can die,” she reflected. “I’d always been curious when the process of agony began.” But he stopped choking her, and they were escorted out. She overheard the mention of Auschwitz.
Chajka could barely drag herself back to the group. When the comrades saw her and Aliza, they all burst into tears.
People with towels or shirts offered them to Chajka to sit on. Her body was “hard as stone, hard as rubber. And so black. Not blue, but black,” she described. “Instead of sitting, I curled up like a cat and was lying on Pesa.” No coat, shoes, stockings. It was dark, cold. The soldiers were cutting up old furniture for a bonfire.
Suddenly Zvi sprang to his feet.
He rushed ahead so fast that Chajka’s eyes could not even follow him.