And then she knew: We are too late.
*
To say the clock was ticking down is a grotesque understatement. This was the summer of 1942, when the main Aktion, a Nazi euphemism for mass deportation and murder of Jews, occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. It had started in April, on “Bloody Sabbath,” when SS units invaded the ghetto at night and, following preprepared lists of names, gathered and murdered the intelligentsia. From that moment on, the entire ghetto became a killing field, and terror reigned. In June Frumka arrived with news about the existence of Sobibor, yet another death camp, 150 miles to the east.
Vladka Meed （nee Feigele Peltel）， a twenty-one-year-old Bundist who helped print the underground Bund newspaper and run illegal youth groups, later wrote about July 1942 in the ghetto. The rumors of impending doom, stories of roundups, constant shootings. A little boy, a smuggler, told them that the other side of the wall was lined with German and Ukrainian soldiers. Fear. Confusion.
And then the poster appeared.
The Jews crowded into the otherwise deserted streets to read for themselves: anyone who did not work for the Germans would be deported. Vladka spent days scurrying around the ghetto, frantic, wild, looking for work papers, for “life papers” for her and her family. Hundreds of anguished Jews cued up in the scorching heat, pushing, waiting in front of factories and workshops, desperate for any job, any papers. Some lucky ones clutched their own sewing machines, which they hoped would get them hired more easily. Scalpers forged work documents, bribes were rampant, family heirlooms were offered in return for official employment. Mothers wandered in a daze, deciding what to do with their children. Those who had jobs—who’d temporarily secured life—avoided any conversation, out of guilt. Wagons filled with weeping children taken from their parents passed by.
“Fear of what awaited us there,” Vladka wrote later, “dulled our ability to think about anything except saving ourselves.”
Sensing the futility of standing in endless lines, Vladka was elated to receive a message from an underground friend. She was to appear with photos of herself and her family, and would receive work cards. She ran to the address. Inside, thick cigarette smoke and pandemonium. Vladka spotted Bund leaders and historian Ringelblum, and heard about how they’d obtained false work cards and were trying to set up new workshops—all to help save youth. But the leaders felt that hiding was still the best bet, even though being found by the Nazis meant certain death. “What to do?” they mumbled.
And then, panic: the building was surrounded. Vladka ran to grab the falsified work papers and managed to stick with a group who bribed a Jewish police guard—a common sight as more and more Jews were snatched, and were always resisting, Vladka noticed, albeit unsuccessfully. Women physically fought the policemen who pushed them up onto trucks; they jumped from trains, usually in vain. But why hadn’t Vladka done anything to help?
The deportations went on and on, with Germans and Ukrainians joining the Jewish police in conducting roundups. The Jewish police had quotas for how many Jews they had to apprehend each day—if not, they and their families would be taken. After grabbing the young and the elderly, nonworkers, and the names on the list, the deportations were carried out by street. People waited in terror for their street to be blockaded; then many tried to go into hiding, crawling onto rooftops or locking themselves in cellars and attics. Vladka’s fictitious papers were no longer valid. She had no secure hiding place. Jews were urged to appear voluntarily at the umschlagplatz—the departure point from which Jews were deported to death camps—to receive three kilos of bread and one kilo of marmalade. Again, people hoped and believed it was for the best. Many, starving and desolate, keen to stick with family members, went there—and were taken away. “That’s how the life of a Jew became worth a slice of bread,” wrote one underground leader.
And then, her street. Vladka ran to hide, but a fellow hider decided to open the locked door when the soldiers pounded on it. Resigned to her fate, searching the crowd for her family, who had been hiding a few houses over, Vladka was herded to the “selection,” and handed over a friend’s scribbled work paper. For some reason, it was accepted. She was sent to the right, to live. Her family, to the left.