“Zivia” became the secret code name for the entire movement in Poland.
Chapter 4
To See Another Morning—Terror in the Ghetto
Renia
APRIL 1940
While it’s true that the horrors of the Holocaust evolved as a series of small steps, each one a mild escalation compared with the last, building toward mass genocide, for Renia, the terror of the early war cleaved her life irreparably into “before” and “after.” The job she’d successfully found as a court secretary disappeared, her hopes for a future vanished. Renia’s life was turned inside out.
In 1940 decree upon decree was passed in communities throughout Poland, including the tiny town of J?drzejów. These rulings were intended to single out, humiliate, and weaken the Jews. Also, to identify them. The Germans could not differentiate between a Pole and a Jew, so Renia and all Jews older than ten were forced to wear a white ribbon with a blue Star of David at the elbow. If the ribbon was dirty, or its width incorrect, they could be punished by death. Jews had to take off their hats when they passed Nazis; they could not walk on the sidewalk. Renia watched, sickened, as Jewish property was seized and gifted over to folksdeutsch: Poles of part-German heritage who applied for this elevated status. Suddenly, she wrote, the poorest Poles became millionaires, and Jews became servants in their own homes, forced to pay rent and teach the folksdeutsch to manage their former mansions. Then the Jewish families were thrown out altogether, becoming panhandlers on the streets. Their shops were taken over. Their belongings, especially gold, fur, jewels, and valuables that they hadn’t managed to hide in their gardens or tuck under loose kitchen tiles, were confiscated. Leah passed her Singer sewing machine and fine candlesticks to a Polish neighbor for safekeeping. Renia overheard Poles window-shopping as they walked through town, fantasizing about what might become theirs next.
In April a forced “Jewish neighborhood” was established, an initiative that many Jews hoped would help protect them. Renia’s family—except for Sarah, who had already joined a Freedom kibbutz; and Zvi, who had escaped to Russia—were told that they had two days to relocate their entire lives to an area a few blocks off the town’s main square: a squalid locale of small low-rise buildings and narrow alleys that had previously housed the town’s riffraff. They had to abandon furniture, property—almost everything, except a small satchel and some linen. Accounts tell of mothers who did not sleep all night as they frantically packed, their children running to and fro, moving all they could carry on their backs or in baskets: clothing, food, pots, pets, soap, coats, shoehorns, sewing materials, and other means of livelihood. Hidden jewels were plastered to bodies. A gold bracelet was sewn into the sleeve of a sweater. Money was baked into cookies.
The crowding was impossible. Every apartment housed several families, sleeping on floors or improvised bunkbeds—Renia slept on a sack of flour. Fifty people could be crammed into a small home. Rare photos of ghetto dwellings show multiple families sharing a former synagogue sanctuary, rows of siblings sleeping on the bimah and under pews. A person barely had room to stretch his or her arms. Personal space did not exist. Sometimes Jews were lucky to know someone who lived in the ghetto area and moved in with them; most, though, had to live with strangers, often with differing habits. Jews from surrounding villages and from varying classes were forced together, increasing tension, disrupting the normal social order.
Even if people brought furniture, there was no room for it. Makeshift beds were dismantled during the days to make space for washing and eating; clothes hung from single nails attached to walls; small tubs were used to wash body parts and the laundry, which dried on neighbors’ roofs. Tables and chairs sat in piles outside. As the weeks dragged on, Renia’s family used the staples of their old life as firewood. Fundamentals up in flames.
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All told, the Germans established more than four hundred ghettos in Poland, with the objective of decimating the Jewish population through disease and starvation and concentrating the Jews so they could easily be rounded up and transported to labor and death camps. This was a massive operation, and each ghetto had slightly different rules and qualities, depending on local Jewish culture, local Nazi rule, its natural landscape, and its internal leadership. Still, many elements of ghetto policy were standard across the country, from remote town to even more remote village, including imprisonment.