Another group of 17 showed up. Of 180 who had run together, only they had survived. They’d been attacked by Poles, robbed of everything, and threatened with exposure. The men wore only underwear or covered themselves with handkerchiefs; the children were naked. They were sickeningly thirsty, not having drunk or eaten in days, and all seemed half dead. Yet they were happy—they’d sidestepped death. The others had perished, or sliced their own veins so as not to fall into German hands, or just disappeared. Young people’s hair went gray overnight.
Renia, shocked at the sight of them, gave out clothes and food. She had to do something, anything, to help.
One of the most difficult experiences Renia faced was when she met five young siblings who explained that when their mother realized that the Germans were rounding up Jews, she hid them in closets, under beds, inside blankets. Minutes later, they heard the rumble of German boots. They fell into a frozen silence. A Nazi entered their room with a rifle and started searching. He found them all.
But instead of killing them, he quietly gave them each a slice of bread. “Hide still until nightfall,” he urged them. He promised that their mother would return and escape with them. The children exploded with gratitude, and the Nazi laughed, then began to cry, patting them on their heads, saying that he was a father; that his heart would not allow him to kill children. At night, the city quiet as death, the youngsters emerged to find that their two-month-old baby sister had suffocated under the blanket where she was hidden, her body cold. The eldest girl, aged eleven, picked up little Rosa, heavy in death, and took her to the basement out of fear of being caught outside. She dressed her siblings and waited for their mother. Had she forgotten them?
Their mother never returned. At dawn, the sister held the others’ hands and led them out through the window, looking for neighbors, all the time feeling that their mother was walking behind them. She led her siblings out of the town, asking peasants for bread, sleeping on the ground, avoiding farm boys who threw stones at them. The girl told the peasants that their mother had died, but nothing else. They had heard that there were still Jews alive in Wodzis?aw, so they came there, their bare feet cut from walking, their faces and bodies swollen, their clothes torn and dirty. They were afraid to talk to anyone, in case he or she might be a German in disguise. “Mother is surely looking for us and crying. What happens if we don’t find her? The poor babies can’t stop crying ‘Where is Mother? Where is Mother?’” The children were taken in by wealthy families, but, Renia asked, where would they go now? Anyone who escaped the hand of the hangman would be subject to this kind of wandering, barefoot and naked, crazed, begging for a slice of bread.
Panic, pure panic. It felt to Renia like the situation was unraveling by the minute. Every moment was the most crucial of their lives. Every day she survived was pure luck. No one slept at night, which was probably best, since that’s when the Nazis usually operated. “The wise have suddenly lost their wisdom. The rabbis have no advice. They shaved off their moustaches and beards, but still they look like Jews,” Renia later wrote. “Where can they go?”
Everyone was trying to leave. But to where? What was safe? How would they hide? All day, groups huddled in the streets, questioning obsessively. Did any towns still have Jews? What if they fell into German hands? They had no weapons, nothing. People traded furniture for bread. Despite the ghetto crowding, Renia found her home eerily empty. Everything had been sold to the Poles for pennies, and she feared that the little that was left would be stolen by them soon.
A large number of ghetto Jews escaped one night, running to the forests and the fields. The rich bribed the townspeople to hide them in attics, cellars, and sheds, but most Jews set off wandering with no guide or destination. Most, in the end, were killed.
*
Renia knew that while scaling the ghetto walls was risky, surviving on the outside was wildly perilous. One way to get by in Aryan territory was to physically hide. Jews with semitic features often paid hefty fees to Poles who were willing to conceal and feed them. Some Poles acted benevolently, risking their own lives to help, but others extorted Jews financially （and even sexually）， threatening to turn them in to the police. Hiding places were frequently discovered, so that at any moment, Jewish exiles might have to hasten off into the night and relocate.