Among the Reeds Page 9

  So I trusted no-one. I kept to myself mostly. I didn’t chat with neighbors, I didn’t make friends. I lived with Genek, and sometimes I saw my sister, but that was it.

  Inge, as I said, was working at Lustra. This factory where she worked had been confiscated by the Nazis, of course, and the fur jackets assembled there went straight to the officers in the Wehrmacht, the German army. It shows you how bizarre our world had become. None of us thought twice about doing work to help the Germans. Nobody had any choice. Inge was happy to have a job.

  She had been working at the fur factory for about a year when the Gestapo raided the place. This was in 1942, when roundups were escalating all over. Inge, seated by the window at her sewing machine, saw the Germans’ trucks pull up in front of Lustra. Terrified, she ran into the bathroom. The Gestapo marched into the factory, demanding to see everyone’s identification. They forced the Jewish girls to go outside, down to the waiting trucks. Inge heard the pandemonium from her hiding place in the bathroom, the yelling soldiers, the screaming girls, the gunshots, the crying.

  Desperately she looked around the tiny bathroom. There was a small window above the toilet. Could she get it open? Would she be able to get through it? Where did it lead? Inge climbed up on the toilet and, trying not to make any noise, terrified that the Gestapo would hear her and run in to investigate, she pushed frantically at the window mechanism. She managed to open the window, and to hoist herself up. She shimmied through and saw that she could jump out onto the roof of the Lustra factory. She got onto the roof and ran, leaping from one roof to the next, all the way to the end of the block, and then down a fire escape. She kept running. Unbelievably, she managed to get away. All the other Jewish girls she worked with were captured that day by the Nazis.

  Inge knew she was being hunted then. She was sure her name had also been on the Gestapo’s list of Jews. She was afraid to go home, afraid that the Nazis would come to her flat and find her there. She was distraught by the raid at the factory, by her Jewish co-workers’ terrible fate. But Inge was lucky; she had a very good friend. Friends were rare in those dark times, but Inge was always such a beautiful person that people adored her.

  Anyway, this friend, Emma, who worked with Inge at Lustra, came to her rescue. I seem to recall that Emma’s father owned the factory, but I’m not certain. At any rate, Emma had a small apartment in Avenue Chazal, and, after the raid, she let Inge stay there. Emma was not Jewish, and the risk she took by hiding Inge was enormous. But she did it. For most of the rest of the war Inge remained in hiding in Emma’s apartment. Inge tried to pay Emma back by cooking and cleaning.

  Usually this arrangement worked out fine. But sometimes there was a catch. You see Emma had a boyfriend, and when the boyfriend came to visit, Emma asked Inge to leave so they could have some privacy. Inge was in no position to argue, although she had nowhere safe to go, and felt completely exposed and vulnerable walking the city streets until she could return to the safety of Emma’s apartment.

  Sometimes when this happened Inge would come by to see me. For safety, we rarely got together, because we were conscious that we could be followed, and we didn’t want to lead the Nazis to each other’s apartments. But sometimes we did manage to see each other.

  One day when Inge had to leave her hiding place she came over, and I noticed that she didn’t look well. Her face was very flushed, and she was barely able to walk because she was so weak. When I put my hand on her cheek I realized she was burning up with fever. Inge, you're sick, what’s wrong? I asked her. She said she had a sore throat and headache and felt very ill. I begged her to lie down, and she did for a little while, but then insisted on going back to her own apartment. Genek, usually impatient and angry when others were ill, was unusually solicitous of Inge, I noticed. Inge had that effect on people. He told her to stay with us for a while, but she refused. I don’t know how she managed to walk back to Emma’s, she really was in such bad shape.

  A week or so later, worried, I decided to go visit my sister to see if she was recovered. She looked worse than before. She felt even more feverish, and she had a fine red rash all over her body. She said her throat felt a bit better, but that her joints really hurt. Also, she was having pains in her chest. I didn’t know how to help her. There was no way she would go see a doctor: it was way too risky. She tried to reassure me but I realized she was very sick. I hoped Emma wouldn’t kick her onto the streets in this condition.

  When she eventually felt better, a few weeks later, Inge came back to see me. Her fever was gone, she said, although the chest pains were still coming and going. Emma had talked to her father about the symptoms, and they thought she might have rheumatic fever, Inge told me, which could damage the valves in her heart. We spoke about this for a little while – it sounded bad, and we weren’t sure what it meant for her future – and then Inge stopped talking and looked at me carefully. Melly, she said, oh my God, Melly. Are you pregnant?

  I was shocked. And then I realized that maybe Inge was right. I had been so despondent since Bobby was sent away that I hadn’t noticed. I was barely able to function, so I hadn’t paid attention to the signs: I was exhausted and nauseous all the time, and I hadn’t been menstruating. I hadn’t thought about it, really, assuming I was sick with grief. But yes, once again, I was in fact pregnant.

  By the time I realized, it was too late to get an abortion. And anyway, the nice Jewish doctor who had done the procedures was gone, picked up and deported. I did find that out. Even if I had wanted to terminate, I didn’t know where or how to do it anymore. So I had no choice. I continued on with the pregnancy.

  I think I was in shock at this time. I could not process the loss of my little boy. Grief consumed me. I just couldn’t believe that I had sent Bobby away for his own safekeeping and now was going to have another child. I vowed that this would be the last. The torment of imagining what Bobby was going through, wherever he was, was already as much as I could bear.

  Bobby

  1942

  The lady with the yellow hair was nice. She took him on the streetcar and gave him chocolate. That was fun. But she spoke funny, and he didn’t understand what she was saying. Plus she clutched his hand too tight when they got off the streetcar. She walked fast too. He had to run to keep up with her. He wanted his mama.

  But Mama said it was important to go with the lady with the yellow hair, so Bobby followed her onto the train. They sat by the window and the lady sang some pretty songs to him. He didn’t understand what she was singing, but the music was nice. He saw a cow from the train window. He ate his chocolate. He sat quietly. Bobby nischt dreiden. He knew that was important. Don’t talk, Bobby. He hoped he could go home soon.

  After a while the train stopped and the lady took his hand and they got off the train. He didn’t know this place. He felt a bit scared. But the lady smiled at him and held his hand and then they walked for a long time. At last they came to a big building and the lady knocked on the door. A really scary-looking person answered the door. At first he didn’t know it was a lady, but then the scary person spoke and she had a lady voice. She had on a big black-and-white costume and you couldn’t see her hair. She looked like a giant black-and-white bird. The lady with the yellow hair and the bird lady spoke to each other in that way he couldn’t understand and they both kept looking at him. Bobby felt more scared. He really wanted to go home.

  After a bit the lady with the yellow hair gave him a hug and then she left. Why was she leaving? He wanted her to stay with him. He wanted her to bring him back home. Now he was alone with the scary bird lady. She took his hand and they walked down some stairs. It was dark down here and Bobby started to cry. Shhhh! the bird lady said, putting her finger to her lips. Shhhhh! Bobby tried to cry more quietly. The bird lady spoke to him then, but he didn’t know what she was saying. She looked kind of mad.

  She brought him to another room where there were some other bird ladies. They all looked at him. They spoke to each other. Then Bobby noticed there was a
row of beds in the room and there were children sleeping in the beds. It was very cold in this room downstairs and he needed to pee but he didn’t know how to ask and he was even more scared. When would Mama and Papa come to get him?

  Finally the bird lady brought him to an outhouse so he could pee. Then she brought him to a bed at the end of a row and she motioned that he should get in the bed. Bobby didn’t want to. He didn’t want to sleep here. He wanted to go home. But the lady looked mad so he climbed into the bed to wait for Mama and Papa. He was very hungry but the ladies didn’t give him any food. The bed smelled kind of funny and the blanket was really scratchy but Bobby got in and waited.

  The next thing he knew there were a bunch of faces staring at him and he didn’t know them and he didn’t know where he was and he wanted Mama. He looked around and saw he was in the bed in that dark room that the bird lady had brought him to. Did he sleep here? The faces surrounding him were young. They were children like him. Why were there so many children here? Where were their parents? Bobby curled up in his bed and tried to hide from the faces. The children just looked at him. Nobody spoke.

  Then a bird lady came and she made Bobby get up and all the children walked to the outhouse and then to a big room with long tables and benches. The children sat down and he did too. They gave him a bowl and he saw that the other children were eating. He picked up his spoon and put it in the bowl of food. It looked maybe like porridge. Mama made him yummy porridge at home. But when he tasted it he didn’t like this porridge. It was really bad. He put his spoon down. The bird lady came and knelt beside him and she tried to spoon-feed him the food but he turned his head and cried and wouldn’t eat it. He was really, really scared now. He didn’t understand where his parents were. They would never leave him in a place like this.

  The children walked quietly back to the room with the beds. It was really cold and there was hardly any light and the children were very quiet. He got back into his bed and curled up in a ball. Sometimes he heard someone crying and then a bird lady would rush over and shush the crying child and then it would be quiet again. He tried to sleep but the bed smelt bad and he was itchy.

  Bobby thought maybe he had been a bad boy and that’s why Mama and Papa had let the lady with the yellow hair bring him here. He didn’t remember what he had done. But he was sorry. He would tell Mama and Papa that he wouldn’t be bad again. He really didn’t like it here. He hoped they would come back to get him really soon. Or maybe Nathan would come get him. Nathan liked to go on streetcars. So maybe Nathan would get on the streetcar and come to get him and bring him home. Bobby waited.

  Lots and lots of days went by. It was always cold and the food was always bad. They always had to be quiet. The only sound he heard was coughing. The children were always coughing. And crying too. The bird ladies got mad if the children coughed too loud or if they talked above a whisper. He could tell they were mad but he still didn’t understand what they were saying. They never went outside, they never played, they never laughed. Mostly he stayed in his bed and slept. Soon he was coughing too.

  He didn’t like it here and he wanted to sleep until it was over. Bobby curled up in his bed and waited. He waited to go home.

  Belgium and Holland

  1943

  It was a time of crisis. Nathan ran away from the farm where he had been placed for safekeeping and returned to Brussels. There he found that little Bobby was no longer at home; he too had been sent into hiding. And Melly, emotionally wrecked, was about to give birth again. Their mother Gertrude was in hiding with a family up north. Their father was still in the psychiatric hospital in Holland.

  It turned out, although the family didn’t know it at the time, that Leopold was in fact no longer at Apeldoornse Bos. In January 1943 the Gestapo invaded the Jewish psychiatric hospital and deported the entire thousand souls who lived and worked there. Even in a time of great horror the evacuation of this institution was marked by particular brutality. Many of the patients were quite compromised psychologically – developmentally disabled adults, neurologically impaired children, hallucinating people wearing straitjackets. Eye witnesses remember Nazis beating confused and frightened naked women with clubs. The Gestapo stormtroopers screamed at and violently pushed the bewildered patients onto the waiting trucks. The cold was fierce. Patients who fell to the ground were picked up and thrown like lumber on top of each other onto the trucks.

  One eye witness, Dr. Jacob Presser, reported:

  I saw them place a row of patients, many of them older women on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these lorries that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tailboards.

  In the end, some patients had their fingers severed when the Nazis closed the truck doors on top of them.

  The transport headed east.

  Rudolf Vrba was a prisoner who later escaped from Birkenau. His job in the camp was the unloading of the new transport trains as they pulled in. He was at the camp when the transport from Apeldoornse Bos arrived. He gave an eye-witness report, recalling:

  In some of the trucks nearly half the occupants were dead or dying, more than I have ever seen. Many obviously had been dead for several days, for the bodies were decomposing and the stench of disintegrating flesh gushed from the open doors.

  This, however, was no novelty to me. What appalled me was the state of the living. Some were drooling, imbecile, live people with dead minds. Some were raving, tearing at their neighbours, even at their own flesh.

  Some were naked, though the cold was petrifying; and above everything, above the moans of the dying or the despairing, the cries of pain, of fear, the sound of wild, frightening, lunatic laughter rose and fell.

  The Gestapo asked the nurses at the hospital to accompany their patients as caretakers, and promised that if they volunteered to go they would be given the chance to return or to be reassigned to a new hospital. The nurses, almost all Jewish, readily came to their patients’ aid, trying to comfort the frightened, alleviate pain, reassure. After the volunteer nurses were loaded onto the transport the Gestapo picked out most of the rest of the staff and made them get on the trucks too.

  Rudolf Vrba recalls:

  amidst all this bedlam, there was one spark of splendid, unselfish sanity … nurses, young girls, their uniforms torn and grimy, but their faces calm and their hands never idle. Their medicine bags were still over their shoulders and they had to fight to keep their feet, but all the time they were working, soothing, bandaging, giving an injection here, an aspirin there.

  Of course, the fifty nurses that accompanied their charges from Apeldoornse Bos did not return. They shared the fate of their patients.

  The transport reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on January 24, 1943, with 921 Jewish patients and medical staff, some of whom were children. Upon arrival, sixteen men and thirty-six women were selected to be admitted into the camp. The remaining 869 people were murdered in the gas chambers. Leopold Offner was one of those gassed upon arrival. He had been born in Auschwitz and he died in Auschwitz.

  But the family in Brussels knew nothing about what had occurred at Apeldoornse Bos or of Leopold’s fate until much, much later.

  After spending about six months on the farm, Nathan fled and returned to Brussels in February of 1943. He had run away from the hiding place the Resistance had found for him. The farmers had treated him like a slave, forcing him to spend long back-breaking days in the fields searching for rodents and to spend his nights in the barn with the animals. They had not even allowed him to sleep inside the house as the cold of winter mounted. He had had enough. He made his way back to the city and found his sister Inge. Despite her own precarious situation she took him in.

  Nathan was always close to Inge, and she doted on him. Melly was more aloof, more self-involved. Nathan did not feel as close to her. Nor did he feel much affinity for his brother-in-law Genek; the man was so much older than him, and they had very little in common
. With his mother away, Nathan was happy enough to move in with Inge.

  Inge was of course delighted to see him, but very worried about his return. She and Melly had promised their mother that they would keep Nathan safe. Nathan argued that he was as competent to take care of himself as his sisters were, more so probably, and he wanted to stay in Brussels. But so many people were disappearing by now that staying was out of the question. Inge contacted the Resistance about finding a new hiding place for Nathan.

  Melly was preoccupied with her own problems. She was determined that this pregnancy would be her last. Despite the risk, she decided that she would have the baby in the hospital so she could make sure the doctors put an end to her fertility once and for all. On March 1, 1943, she went into labor. Genek could not accompany her to the hospital. He was so clearly a foreigner and a Jew – it would be madness for him to come. Likely Melly told the hospital staff that her husband was off fighting, that was why she was alone. It was a plausible excuse; most men were off fighting at the front.

  She used false papers to register at the hospital as a German woman, an Aryan. And although she screamed her head off during the delivery it was lucky that she swore in German. Nobody realized she was a Jew. Later that day Melly was delivered of a healthy baby girl. She begged her doctor to perform a hysterectomy. But maybe he did not feel comfortable doing so. She was only twenty-one years old. She pleaded with him to do something; she told him she couldn’t feed another child, she needed contraception. The doctor may have eventually agreed to perform a tubal ligation, to tie her tubes, a relatively new procedure. Or perhaps he found another way to end Melly's fertility. Whatever the procedure, it seems that Melly did manage to convince the doctor to help her.