My mother and grandmother were too afraid to come out. I wasn’t afraid that day. Of course, I had no idea what was coming, no one did.’
The next day, Monday the fourth of September, later became known as Black Monday, or as the Częstochowa massacre. More than three hundred Jews were killed that day, as well as seven hundred Poles.
I found this out from reading books, not from my mother. She must have been aware of what happened, it would have been impossible not to. When I asked her about it, she looked at me, shook her head and turned away.
Over the coming months, Jewish households and property were confiscated. Jews were mocked, beaten and degraded incessantly. I can only imagine what my mother and her family had to endure during those months. But she never spoke about it, not once.
In the first half of nineteen forty-one, the Jewish ghetto was created. Around forty thousand people were confined there. Most were from Częstochowa but there were also others, from nearby towns and villages. That is where my mother lived with her two sisters, her mother and her grandmother.
The term ‘ghetto’ originates from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice where the authorities compelled the Jews to live in fifteen sixteen. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, other Jewish ghettos sprung up in various European cities, but not in Poland.
Poland had a long history of tolerance towards their Jewish community, whose history there dates back to the twelve hundreds. In the sixteenth century, eighty per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. It was the centre of Jewish culture.
Jews did not live in ghettos in Poland before World War Two. The Nazis confined the Jews to ghettos in many Polish cities both as a means of ensuring that they had a supply of slave labour and to ultimately facilitate the transportation of the Jews to the death camps. The Nazis set up Jewish Councils in the ghettos, the Judenrat, whose role was to administer the occupants of the ghetto and eventually to help organise their orderly deportation.
I once asked my mother what life in the ghetto was like. I received a one word answer: ‘Hard’.
My father was more forthcoming. ‘Your mother does not want to speak about those times, Arnold. But I do.’
Tell me something I didn’t know, I thought, but I remained silent.
‘The ghetto was worse than hard. People died every day from disease, from starvation. There was not enough food, not enough medicines. I managed to smuggle in some food for my family the few times I snuck in but it wasn’t enough.’
‘Leave the boy alone, Jacob,’ my mother would say. ‘He doesn’t need to hear all this.’
‘But he does,’ was my father’s reply. ‘If he doesn’t hear our stories, then how will he know?’
My mother did not say anything more.
I thought about what my father had said. Did I really want to know more? I wasn’t so sure that I did. Knowing about the Holocaust was one thing, but did I really want to know the specifics of what my parents and their families had to endure? I wasn’t sure how I would cope with that knowledge. And it was clear to me that my mother didn’t want to talk about her experiences. It had been a mistake to ask her, I realised that and I had no intention of upsetting her by ever asking her again.
In September nineteen forty-two, a so-called ‘Aktion’, a large-scale deportation took place. It was known as Operation Reinhard, named after Reinhard Heydrich, its architect. Over the next two weeks almost forty thousand of the ghetto’s inhabitants were put onto trains and transported to Treblinka, the concentration camp, where the vast majority was murdered.
It was sheer chance, an act of inexplicable kindness, that prevented my mother from being sent to Treblinka, where her whole family was killed. My mother spoke little of her wartime experiences but this was one story that she did share with us.
‘I was in the line for deportation. My mother, my grandmother and my sisters were somewhere in that line too. I had lost sight of them in all the chaos and the screaming. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a German officer came up to me and pulled me out of the line. He was yelling at me but I couldn’t understand a word he said. He motioned for me to go back into the ghetto, which I did. As a result, I survived, while my whole family was killed. I never saw them again.’
At that point of the story, there were tears in my mother’s eyes, I was sobbing and years later, when she retold the story to my younger sister, Sandra, when she was old enough to understand, all three of us would cry.
And I used to be naive enough to think that these stories left me unscathed.
The next year, in June nineteen forty-three, the ghetto was liquidated and the four thousand or so remaining Jews were sent to HASAG factories to work. At the end of June an uprising broke out. The Organisation of Jewish Fighters barricaded themselves in bunkers to fight the Germans. The Jews were poorly armed and the uprising was short lived and led to the deaths of over fifteen hundred of them. My mother must have been aware of this event but never spoke about it and I knew better than to ask her.
My mother, who was by then twenty years old, was also sent to HASAG to work.
‘We worked long hours, every day, seven days a week,’ she told me. While my mother used the term HASAG, she didn’t explain what it was. I assumed it was a place. Years later I looked up HASAG. It was an acronym. It stood for Hugo Schneider and then a long word in German starting with ‘A’ and some other unpronounceable words. In essence, HASAG were a number of factories. My mother then lived in the so-called Small Ghetto and worked in the munitions factory of the HASAG group.
‘The factory I worked in made bullets,’ my mother told us. ‘I must have made thousands of bullets for the German army. I hate to think who those bullets killed,’ she added. ‘But there is no point in thinking about it. I had no choice, none of us did, not if we wanted to survive.’
After almost two years working in the munitions factory, the war came to an end for my mother when the Soviets marched in and liberated Częstochowa.
‘It was a happy day for me. The war was finally over and I was free. But it was also a very sad time. I was alone, all alone. My entire family were gone and before long I found out that they had all been killed in Treblinka.’
The arrival of the Soviets meant liberation for my mother and it also led to my mother and father meeting, or to be more precise, re-meeting.
‘He looked thinner than I remembered him, but he was just as handsome, especially in that uniform.’
My parents bumped into each other in the street a few weeks later, literally. My father was hurrying on some errand when he almost knocked my mother over.
‘I apologised,’ my father said. ‘I then realised that the pretty young woman looked familiar.’
That chance meeting led to my parents reconnecting and slowly a romance bloomed. They were married two months later.
‘We were married by a rabbi,’ my father told us. ‘It came as somewhat of a surprise to me that there were still any rabbis left alive after the war. We also had a civil wedding, which the authorities required,’ he added.
Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of the times, my parents had no documentary evidence of either marriage. Under normal circumstances, the absence of a Ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, written in ancient Aramaic, would have made the marriage invalid. But those were not normal circumstances and after the war, the religious authorities were prepared to overlook this.
My father extricated himself from the Soviets, and he and my mother began to plan the rest of their lives together. His oldest brother, Avraham, had gone to New York before the war and his sister, Ruthie, who survived one of the camps, had made her way to the United States, which is where my father also desperately wanted to go.
First, my parents knew they had to get out of Poland, which they did by a combination of walking and train travel. By then, my mother was already pregnant with me.
‘You should have seen