That night, somehow, Renia was back on her feet. Two and half miles to Michalkowice. At least the darkness would help conceal their limping and loping.
They reached the village at eleven o’clock and headed to the house of Polish peasants. Mr. and Mrs. Kobiletz greeted them warmly. They’d heard of Renia and were full of praise for Sarah’s skills. They offered Renia food, but she couldn’t stay in the main room for long—she was there to enter the bunker. She slipped through a window underneath the stairs to the basement. It was so small that even emaciated Renia could barely fit through. Then she climbed down the ladder. Twenty comrades greeted her with joy, “as if I was just born.”
They wanted to know everything, right away.
She was too weak and had to lie down, but Sarah told them the tale of her escape. Her head was spinning, as was her heart. She was here, with her comrades, her sister, and, for a moment, safe.
Renia observed everyone in the bunker as they listened. She was still burning up with fever, still felt as if she were in prison, still felt like she was being chased. Would that feeling ever leave her?
*
A few hours later, Halina arrived and regaled them with her story:
“As I started walking away from you, I turned my jacket inside out and took off my kerchief. Ahead of me, I saw a railroad worker. I asked him if he cared to join me as we walked. He took one look at me and said, ‘Happily.’ I held his arm, and we strolled and chatted about this and that. He probably thought I was a prostitute. Within ten minutes, we came across two guards who were maniacally running toward the camp. They asked if we’d seen three women escaping and described our clothes. I took such joy seeing them scramble. I continued talking to the railroad worker, as if nothing had happened. The worker accompanied me to the tram. We said we’d get together tomorrow!”
The next morning, Halina, in good spirits, left for Warsaw. A week later, they received a letter from her. Her journey had been uneventful. She’d crossed the border by foot. She was happy to have taken part in Renia’s escape. A touching letter came from Marek Folman’s mother and another from Zivia, Antek and Rivka Moscovitch, who had healed and was working as a courier, smuggling weapons and bringing aid to those in hiding—the trio were so happy that she’d gotten out.
Marek, on the other hand, met a less fortunate end. After he left B?dzin for Warsaw, crippled with guilt about the Socha setup, he was so distraught that Nazis noticed him when he switched trains at Cz?stochowa. He was shot on the spot.
*
Day in, day out, Renia sat in the Kobiletz bunker, which had been built by Meir Schulman. Meir had been friends with the Kobiletz’s eldest son, Mitek, before the war. Mitek had worked for the Gestapo in Kraków but had been in contact with the ghetto Jews. When one of his friends got drunk and spilled his secret, Mitek jumped on his motorcycle and fled. Meir learned that Mitek had been paid to arrange for Jews to stay with his friends in the city of Bielsko. That’s when Meir got the idea to ask him to let Meir build a bunker underneath his parents’ house. At first, Mr. Kobiletz refused, but his son’s pleas convinced him, especially when he told his father that he could use it to hide from the Gestapo himself.
A few Jews hid in their small attic until the bunker was built. Meir had to construct it at night so that the neighbors wouldn’t notice. In Renia’s memoirs, she wrote that Kobiletz was paid a fortune to hide them. “He said he did it out of pity, but in fact, he did it for profit.” Other accounts suggest that though the Kobiletzes took payment, they were motivated by anti-German politics and compassion. The question of whether Poles who received payment for helping Jews should be considered “righteous” remains a heated one.
Renia was secure and free—relatively—but life in the Kobiletz bunker was not a permanent solution. The shelter had been built to house two or three people, but more ghetto escapees kept arriving. People slept together on a few beds. Food was purchased with counterfeit ration tickets collected every few days by one of the girls, who risked her life to travel to the village of Jablonka. Lunch was prepared by Mrs. Kobiletz. At first, the comrades used their own money from the ghetto to pay for all this, but later, Halina brought additional funds from Zivia.