“The house stood on fire,” Ilza described. “The dark smoke bellowed to the skies and with it, the stench of burning bodies and hair. One could hear shots, sighs, cries, moans, curses, German voices—deafening. The feathers from cushions wafted through the air. An ocean of flames.”
The Gestapo ordered the Jewish militia to extinguish the blaze; a German put the barrel of his revolver to militiaman Abram Potasz, a member of the corpse unit, and told him to bring out the bodies. Abram climbed into the bunker through the hole made by a thirty-minute hail of machine-gun bullets. On the ground, black, charred bodies, some half alive, twitching and wriggling, barely human. Abram saw smashed skulls, brains pouring out. “An inhuman moan resembling a hum of a whole aircraft squadron was coming from the mouths of the prostrate chalutzim [pioneers],” he later described. The pillows and eiderdowns had caught fire from the fusillade, giving off a column of thick smoke. Teeth clenched, Abram pulled each deformed body, one after the other, out to the garden. Frumka, half burnt, was still clutching a six-shot revolver.
Seven blistered skeletons, broken heads, exposed skulls, frozen eyes. Abram was ordered to lay the bodies face up and strip the women naked.
Frumka lifted the upper part of her body—the lower part was entirely scorched. Proud, she wanted to speak, but her expression was horrible, she seemed blind. She murmured something, looked around, and then her head drooped. One of the Gestapo men leaned in to hear her in case she was offering useful information. But a second one quickly jumped in, laughing, and kicked her in the face with his heavy boot. He trampled over her body “with perfect stoic, sadistic calm.” They shot her in the head and heart, attacking her dead body over and over again.
The Gestapo fired at all seven corpses from seven machine guns. But bodies as “full of holes as sieves” wasn’t enough. Chajka described how they stamped on the half-dead cadavers. Kicking, shooting at corpses, they “pounced on them like hyenas on carrion,” until their faces were a “sticky, red pulp of blood and flesh” and their bodies “blue, bloodied, smashed pieces of humans.”
The next day, what remained of Frumka’s body was shipped to Auschwitz to be burnt.
*
Around the time of Renia’s return to B?dzin, as she sat in the mechanic’s apartment, Chajka was alive and working in the liquidation camp kitchen, preparing food for the people who were clearing out objects from the now-vacant Jewish apartments. She was the last leader of The Young Guard, of the B?dzin resistance. The other Jews pitied Chajka’s wounds. Yet they taunted her and wanted her to run away—they were afraid they’d all be killed if the Gestapo remembered who she was. Whenever the man who had beat her entered the quarters, Chajka hid under the bathtub.
She witnessed the barracks where the murdered Jews’ possessions were collected. She was left “speechless” by “the German pace and organization.” She saw a whole series of huts, each one dedicated to a specific type of object, curated like a gallery. Chajka later described the meticulousness: “One barrack contains carefully arranged blue kitchen utensils. They have been beautifully sorted according to quality.” There were barracks for pots, glassware, silk, silverware, everything. When ordered to do organizing work herself, she wanted to smash the porcelain sets into a million bits. German women wearing stolen Jewish two-piece suits and fox furs came into the camp to select objects for their families, showing off to one another, trying to prove their superior taste.
Chajka was no more fond of “the chosen” Jewish girls: the pretty ones who worked in the kitchens and were given goose and layer cakes to eat, dresses, their own rooms, and three pillows. They shared nothing with anyone else. “Oh, you Jewish whores!” she later wrote. “I would strangle you.”
In an environment of constant selections, each Jew was balancing on the thinnest edge of life, a fingernail from death. Camp life was particularly untamed and morally corrupt: beatings, stealing, looting Jewish homes, black-market sales. Not to mention Jews gorging on food and sex, predeath hedonists seizing the day. Vodka, wine. Men harassed Chajka constantly. “No, I don’t want to be with you!” she wanted to scream at them all. “I somehow don’t want to indulge myself before death. It makes me want to vomit.”