*
One morning, the dreaded knock. The militia. An order. The Jewish community was directed to select 220 strong, healthy men to be taken to a forced-labor camp outside of town. Renia’s younger brother Aaron was on the list.
The Kukielkas pleaded with him not to go, but he feared the threat of noncompliance: that his whole family would be executed. Renia’s insides burnt as she watched his tall, blond figure disappear out the door. The group was gathered in the firehouse, where they were examined by doctors and tortured by the Gestapo, forced to sing Jewish songs, dance Jewish dances, and beat one another up until they bled, while the Gestapo laughed. When the bus arrived to take them away, the Gestapo—armed with dogs and machine guns—hit any lingerers with such force that the other boys had to carry them onto the bus.
Renia’s brother told her later that he’d been sure he was being taken to his execution, but to his surprise, he was delivered to a forced-labor camp near Lvov. This may have been the Janowska camp, a transit camp that also had a factory where Jews were made to toil for free in carpentry and metalwork. The Nazis established more than forty thousand camps to facilitate the murder of “undesirable races,” including transit camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, labor camps, and combinations. The SS leased some of the labor camps to private companies, which paid it per slave. Women cost less, and so companies were drawn to “leasing” them and putting them to work at arduous hard labor. At state-owned and private labor camps across Poland, conditions were atrocious, and people died from starvation, constant beatings, illness from the unsanitary surrounds, and exhaustion from overwork. In the early years of war, labor camp prisoners were demoralized by being forced to carry out humiliating and often pointless tasks, like stone breaking; with time, the need for workers to help meet the demands of the German army intensified as did the tasks. The daily menu at one camp consisted of a slice of bread and a bowl of black soup made with vetch, a crop that fed animals and tasted like boiled pepper. The prospect of being enslaved in a forced labor camp terrified the Jewish youth.
Despite the country’s utter social collapse, postal networks still functioned, and one day a letter arrived. Shaking, Renia unfolded the pages to find that Aaron was alive. But the horrors of his life shocked her: the boys slept in animal stables on straw that was never changed; they worked from dawn to dusk, and were starving and freezing, eating wild berries and weeds picked from the ground. They were beaten daily, carried home on their friends’ shoulders. At night, they were forced to do calisthenics, and if they couldn’t keep up—death. Lice chewed through their flesh. There was no sink. No toilet. The stench was deadly. Then came dysentery. Realizing their days were numbered, many boys escaped; because of their conspicuous clothing in the winter cold they had to avoid towns and cut through forests and fields. The Gestapo started chasing after the escapees, while torturing the boys who remained.
Renia immediately sent her brother care packages. She included clothes with money sewn into the pockets so that he could buy a ticket home if he managed to run away. She watched out daily for any retuning escapees. The sight of them was sickening: skin and bones, bodies covered with ulcers and rashes, clothes full of insects, limbs swollen. Boys suddenly looked like frail old men. Where was Aaron?
So many Jews were sent to the unknown. “A father, brother, sister, or mother,” Renia wrote. “Every family had one person missing.”
But everything can become relative. Renia would soon come to know that only “one person missing” was good. Even “one person alive” meant you were lucky.
Renia knew that she had to make her own luck.
*
One night, dusk weighing down on the ghetto’s ramshackle roofs, a notice arrived. Each message, every thin note, had the potential to change your life forever; to smash whatever fragile comfort you had managed to construct in order to cope. Now the Kukielkas, along with the other 399 wealthiest families in the ghetto, were being forced to leave town. By midnight.
Renia had seen how the rich tried to pay their way out of decrees, bribing the Judenrat to put workers in their place, or hiring laborers to work instead of them. People dealt with hardship in the ways they knew, playing systems the way they always had—only now the games had no rules. The rich were respected only by other Jews; Germans didn’t care. The wealthiest families tried to pay their way out of this forced departure too, but the Judenrat’s coffers were filled from previous bribes—in fact, they gave each wealthy family fifty z?otys toward relocation costs.