*
The sisters, needing a plan to save their parents, spent days rolling through ideas, but there were no good ones. The smuggler’s promise of bringing them back, it turned out, had been a lie—a betrayal that Renia refused to dwell on for fear her anger would consume her. Sarah and Renia faced a multitude of problems. To begin with, the kibbutz didn’t have room for the Kukielkas. And besides, the fee for smuggling them over was extraordinary. Impossible.
Then a letter from Renia’s parents arrived, the contents horrifying.
Moshe and Leah had spent the past days in a small, dirty neighborhood in Sandomierz, a town east of Miechów, living like animals. The Jews huddled in tiny, moldy rooms, where they slept on the floor or on a thin mattress of hay. They had no food and no fuel for heating. Their days were filled with fear: deportation, extermination, execution, the whole ghetto could be set on fire. Any of these atrocities, at any moment.
Yankeleh, too, composed a letter, begging his siblings for help and to bring him to B?dzin, even just temporarily. All he wanted was to be with his sisters, the only people he could count on. Despite the inhuman horrors he’d witnessed, he clung to life. “Our parents may do the unthinkable and commit suicide,” he wrote. “But as long as I am with them, I keep them sane.” He escaped from the ghetto each day, trying to earn some money. Every grosz he received went to the 120 z?otys per night they had to pay to sleep on exposed board, crammed together like fish in a barrel. Mother, father, and son warmed one another, “as worms ate our flesh,” Yankeleh described. They hadn’t changed clothes or underwear in months. There was no detergent, no running water.
As Renia’s eyes galloped over the words, she felt sick. What could she do? She lay awake for several nights, terrified that the end was coming for them all.
And then, the last letter, the final farewell: “If we don’t survive,” her mother and father wrote, “then please fight for your lives. So you can bear witness. So you can recount how your loved ones, your people, were murdered by sheer evil. May God save you. We are about to die, knowing that you are going to stay alive. Our greatest pain is the fate of Yankel, our youngest. But there’s no anger toward you. We know that you would do everything possible to save us. This is our fate. If this is God’s will, we must accept it.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the letter also told of the fate of Renia’s sisters Esther and Bela. They had stopped in Wodzis?aw, and, sensing a roundup of Jews, hid in an outhouse. The landlady’s seventeen-year-old son came out to use the facilities, discovered them, and alerted the Gestapo.
They were sent to Treblinka.
Lost. All was lost.
But Renia shed no tears. “My heart,” she later wrote, “turned to stone.”
These were horrible days for Renia. “I am an orphan,” she repeated to herself, the sick reality sinking in. Renia felt disoriented, as if she were lacking her memory, her sense of place, of self. She had to realign her being, remind herself that now she lived for her sister, for her comrades. This was her new family. Without them to ground her, to provide her with a sense of reality and personhood, she would have gone mad.
Then the girls lost contact with Aaron. Rumor had it he was transferred to the arms factory at Skar?ysko-Kamienna, where Jews were forced to perform brutal labor, barefoot, clothes torn, for a mere slice of bread and cold water. More than twenty-five thousand Jewish men and women were brought to this labor camp; the vast majority did not survive the unsanitary conditions and exposure to toxins that turned hair green and skin red. Aaron, Renia heard, contracted typhus. His superiors liked him, which saved him from immediate execution, but his health was fragile. As an “unproductive,” he was barely fed.
And yet.
Renia and Sarah were alive. They were shadows of selves, empty shades, but still, alive. As with so many of the Jewish youth who lost their parents, their newfound freedom accompanied grief and guilt but also energy. The ties binding them to normal life had been severed; they were no longer responsible to others. To live, to retain any sense of human spirit, they needed to stay active, to blur their intense and overwhelming pain by plunging into demanding work that would curb introspection.