The group waited for a comrade to lift the stove top. “Who knows if they are still there?” asked Frumka, her hope deflating. No one came.
At last, footsteps. The door was opened.
Comrades Max Fischer, who’d cared for the Atid orphans, and the young Ilza Hansdorf were back. Thanks to a mishap, they alone were not deported. A howl rose from Renia’s throat: seven of their best people. Gone.
It took great effort for Renia to even hear what the comrades were relaying. Everyone had been driven into an empty lot cordoned off by a rope that was held by the Jewish militia. The Jews were put into a long line. The Germans did not look at work certificates, did not differentiate between young and old. A Gestapo walked around with a stick, dividing the people: some he sent to the right, others to the left. Which group would be driven to their murders and which would stay and live? Finally, the right wing was taken to the train station to be shipped off; the others, sent home. With a small wave of a small baton, left or right, a Jew was sentenced to life or death.
Many bolted and were shot while trying to run away.
Renia and her comrades went outside and stood in front of their little house. All was futile. It was impossible to remove people from the group destined for the trains. Around them, people ran to and from the police station, wailing. One was missing his mother, another her father, husband, son, daughter, brother, sister. From everyone who remained, “they had torn one away.” People fainted in the streets. A mother who’d gone half crazy wanted to join the deportation group—the Nazis had grabbed her two grown sons. Five children returned with a cry: they had taken their father and mother. They had nowhere to go. The eldest was fifteen. The daughter of the Judenrat’s vice chair fell to the ground, tore off her clothes. They had deported her father, mother, and brother; she was alone. Why should she live? Cries, despair. All, useless. Those taken would never return.
Including Hershel Springer. Hershel, who spent his days and nights helping and saving people, loved by all the Jews, respected by the community. People cried over him like they would over their own fathers, including Renia.
The street was lined with the unconscious, with people who wriggled in agony, their bodies disfigured by poisonous dumdum bullets. Their relatives had brought them outside and helpless to relieve their agony, left them there to flail. Passersby stepped over their bodies. No one tried to resuscitate them. There was no help. Each person had her own torments, thought her own pain was the worst. Bullet-riddled corpses were placed on wagons. The grains in the field were trampled upon by people who’d hidden between stalks of corn; the rotting dead were strewn all over. All around her, Renia could hear the sighs of the dying.
It was too difficult for Renia, for anyone, to witness this. The group returned to the house. The beds were turned over; in each corner, a person lay on the ground and wailed. The children from Atid were inconsolable. Renia could not quiet their sobs.
Frumka tore the hair from her scalp, then banged her head on the wall. “I am guilty!” she screamed. “Why did I tell them to stay in their rooms? I murdered them, I sent them to their deaths,” Once again, Renia tried to calm her.
Minutes later, the comrades found her in the next room with a knife aimed at herself. They wrestled it from her hand as she screamed, “I am their killer!”
The shooting did not stop. The group to be deported stood at the station, guarded by armed soldiers. A few attempted to run and jump over the metal barrier that separated them from the road. On the other side of the barrier, Poles and Germans watched, seemingly content. “It’s a shame that a few are left, but their end will come soon,” Renia heard one say. “They couldn’t send everyone at once.” Others replied, “Whomever Hitler will not kill now, we will murder after the war.”
The train arrived. The Nazis shoved people into overpacked cattle cars. There was not enough space. The leftover Jews were pushed into a large building that had once served as an orphanage and senior home.
Renia watched as the wagons left for Auschwitz.