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And There was Love in the Ghetto
By Marek Edelman
Tags: Marek Edelman, Israel news 

Mrs. Tenenbaum was a nurse in the Berenson and Baumann hospital, and also a friend of attorney Berenson. Each day she would prepare his lunch. After lunch he would have his nap, and then her daughter would come to see her, a well behaved 17-year-old girl, spruced up, with her hair neatly combed, in a white starched shirt. She would help her mother with the cleaning.

When the Big Akcja [the first deportation of the Jews from Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, in July 1942] was over, 44,000 people got "life tickets" [cards with numbers for them, distributed to those who were "needed" in the ghetto]. Mrs. Tenenbaum was one of them. When all those who got the tickets crossed over to the "life" side, someone noticed Mrs. Tenebaum lying in bed, and on the side table, empty bottles of Luminal tablets, a letter and her life ticket. Mrs. Tenenbaum wrote in the letter that she was leaving her ticket to her daughter, and that she had committed suicide. I will not write here about the dispute over whether to try and resuscitate her. Some thought that we should have tried; others were against it, as that was her will. And that was what happened.

Deda, that was Mrs. Tenenbaum's daughter's name, got her life ticket. That shy girl was left alone. And suddenly she fell in love with a boy. Probably she had some money, as the boy managed to find a flat for them on the Aryan side. She bloomed in that love. For three months she lived with that boy extremely happily in that flat on the Aryan side. It was evident to all those who saw her that nothing else mattered to her but that love. All who met her in those days said that she beamed with happiness. To Marysia, who visited her, she confided that those were the happiest months of her life. The warmth she shared with that boy allowed her to forget about the ghetto. That happiness lasted for three months. Then - possibly the money ran out - the landlords turned her and the boy in.
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Between the Akcja in January and April we were coming back from our raid on the bakeries (we demanded of each baker 40 loaves of bread, and usually we would have come for them in the early morning, after the baking had just ended) through the fifth floor of a big apartment building. All the doors of the flats, to the stairway as well, were open, to allow for an easy way through (one enters through the front door, goes through the flat and leaves through the back door to the stairway in the back, and so on through the next flat). All the corridors and hallways were full of beds.

I saw Zlotogorski. He was huge. I don't know why in my memory I still see his big tanned chest (summer hadn't started yet and he couldn't have been in the sun). On his arm lay a tiny 17-year-old girl with blond hair. She was asleep, curled into him, on her face a divinely serene smile. A couple of days later they were caught in yet another raid and deported to Treblinka.




She was a physician, about 40 years old, and so was her husband, an officer in the air force. He went missing during the war. She did not know what had happened to him. Today we know that he perished in Katyn [The Russians captured and executed about 15,000 Polish officers at the beginning of World War II]. On the second day of the war she came to the hospital, where she had worked, and never left her post after that. She was very lonely. She felt lost. A love story developed between her and a boy 15 years younger. He got sick; she had taken him into her bed, and somehow miraculously saved his life. They slept together in her bed a couple of days. Afterward she would say that for the first time in her loneliness she was with someone, and from that moment on she would always try to be with someone.

In the Warsaw uprising she again remained alone. She had a small vial with four grams (a huge dose) of morphine. She drank those four grams, and when she was already unstable, someone came and forced her to swallow a glass of soapy water. She vomited and woke up in the middle of the night, clear-headed.

And then began her big love story with a boy 20 years her junior. She survived happily with him from the end of the uprising until she was released through Zoliborz, happy, smiling, and willing to help everyone. The war ended; she went to live in Lodz. One day somebody came to visit her and found the door open. He thought there was no one in. It turned out that she was in the kitchen, burrowed and wrapped up in a blanket that was covering her head. Sleeping, maybe dozing. Suddenly she sat up and said: "I will never be alone here." And that coming from someone as brave as she was. "I'm afraid; I have to flee from here."

How she managed to get to Australia is unknown. There she was also alone. She became an authority in her field of medicine. A ship with Jewish children was cruising in the Pacific Ocean, but no state was willing to let them disembark. It was anchored 12 nautical miles from the shore. People on boats would sail to the ship and pick up a few kids at a time. My physician also went to the shore. She took two boys and a girl to live with her. One of the boys grew up to be an architect and worked in Shanghai, the other one become a professor of shipping construction, and the girl qualified as a medical laboratory technician. When one of her boys matured into an adult she fell in love with him and spent many happy years with him. She wrote later, in a letter, that although she knew now what had happened to her husband, whom she had loved dearly, it was love that kept her alive. The love and warmth she got from her [adopted] son, who in due time became her lover. She died at over 90 years of age.




The mother of that girl became ill. She was alone with her twin sister and they were afraid to remain alone in the night with the ailing mother. A boy who had a rickshaw started visiting her. When her mother's condition grew worse, he would stay the night, and she, out of fear that something might happen, would cuddle up to him. She slept in a silk nightdress. She would cling to him and fall asleep serenely at his side. Possibly they started making love. I'm not sure if they did, or if they even knew how to, but thanks to him being there she calmed down. The mother started to get better, so she went out to work. One day they were hunting down people on Karmelicka Street. When she heard about it, she rushed home, but her mother was not there anymore. A crowd of many thousands was being forcibly led to Umschlagplatz. The boy with the rickshaw happened to be there as well. They started to chase the walking crowd, caught up with it, and riding along started looking for the mother. They saw her right at the entrance to the Umschlagplatz. She got out of the rickshaw, he remained at the curb. She told him: "Sorry, we have to part; mother cannot go that way alone." And she followed her mother to the wagon. The fate of the other twin is unknown.

?

It was Christmas Eve. Two of our girl couriers lived on Miodowa Street, in the building that today houses the High State Theater School. They came home when it got dark and started unpacking their purchases. They were taking out various food products when there was a knock at the door. It was an elderly man with a long beard, a Jew, who had managed half an hour earlier to escape from the police station where he was detained. It's hard to tell if they had met him before that. Possibly, and that was why he came there. He stayed. Other girlfriends came by, as if to celebrate Christmas Eve, and four or five of them stayed the night. They slept on the floor. One of our couriers made love to him all through the night, in full view. She could have been bisexual, as before that she was with one of our older woman physicians who was caught on the Aryan side and deported to Auschwitz. And that old Jew with his long white beard stayed there. He fell in love with our courier and they lived together until the Warsaw uprising. They were so in love that they neglected to take any precautions and strolled hand in hand through the city. They looked so happy that they could walk the streets freely, hand in hand, without fear. The Warsaw uprising separated them. He said: "I have nobody to go to. I'm all alone. No one will give me a hand." He survived four weeks sitting on the stairs in the Old Town. She worked as a nurse in one of the hospitals in another neighborhood. They met in the center and lived together for another week. Both came back to life, and again they knew no fear.

He survived the uprising, but after the war the Security Services arrested him and he disappeared. She stayed in Warsaw, alone, then gave birth to two children. She passed on all her feeling for him to these children - so she said. She never married. And she was beautiful.




She was a technical assistant in the ghetto hospital. She was beautiful, but stupid. Somehow she managed to get to the Aryan side. She became our courier. Her eyes were blue; they said that she had the eyes of a cow. During the Warsaw uprising she was in Zoliborz. One day a grenade exploded near her and severely wounded one of the soldiers. She took care of him and of course immediately fell in love with him. For six weeks she tended the wounds in his head, and she thought herself extremely qualified to do that, as she had worked in a hospital. Zoliborz surrendered, but he still could not walk. She stayed with him in the neighborhood deserted by civilians. Sometime in November a Red Cross patrol found them. They carried him out and she followed the stretcher. They remained together till the end of his life. Our stupid courier used to say that it was worthwhile to live through the ghetto and the Warsaw uprising, as thanks to those days she knows what love is, and how much one can give of oneself to another. When he died, she passed on all her love to her son. But her love was very burdensome.




It was getting dark. Another half an hour until the curfew. But he was sent on an errand to the little ghetto. He was young, healthy, and fast. He went. Delivered. When he started on his way back it was already dark. Leapfrogging from one house gate to another he reached home. In the dark entrance there stood a shadow. He touched it and sensed two thick braids. They embraced and together climbed to the first floor. And so they stayed together through the war. They survived together all the worst and the best of the occupation. After the war she left for America, alone. He stayed. They learned from each other, they learned how to be one entity. Although each one of them led a separate life, they remained one entity. When she was dying, her caregiver called and asked him if she could stop her treatment.




During the July Akcja I happened to cross Mylna Street, and in a window of a basement of the last house before Karmelicka Street, facing the adjacent square I saw the face of Hendusia Himelfarb. We were at the same school, and her father was a public figure, a leader of one of the unions. During the war she worked at the Medem sanatorium in Miedzeszyn, near Warsaw. Children who were in danger of developing tuberculosis from the Warsaw Ghetto were sent there, as if there was a chance for them to get better in warm and homely surroundings.

She had a fair face, and fair, thick braids. She used to pin them up in a sort of crown on her head, but now they were let down. "Hendusia, come - I called her - there is a way to get out, for the likes of you. Tomorrow we will get you to the Aryan side." A pavement and fenced square separated us. "I have 150 children here, and I cannot leave them. They will not go to the wagons on their own for that trip," she shouted to me over the width of the pavement. The building used to be the Evangelical hospital. Now the children from the Medem sanatorium were staying there. Hendusia knew where their way was leading. So did Roza Eichner, the old teacher from Vilnius who also stayed with them. All the other teachers and nurses ran away when the clinic was deported from Miedzeszyn. The wife of Artur Zygelboim and her son had hidden in the bushes between Miedzeszyn and Wozownia. But someone must have turned them in, and they were killed there, in the bushes. The children went to Warsaw, and then on their last excursion only with Hendusia and Roza. Hendusia could have got out, survived, saved her life. But she did not want the children to be afraid, to be crying. She stayed with them, although she knew what was going to happen. Was it a sense of duty, or her love for them? In those days there was no difference.




The head nurse, tall, handsome, with a mane of golden-red blond hair. She lives in a former operating theater, where a window serves as one of the walls. She stands in her house-gown at the window and beckons to a youth crossing the courtyard. She opens the door for him, lets the gown open and unveils a beautiful milky-white body. The youth, though flustered, enters. The head nurse injects him with a dose of morphine and lies naked on the bed, but he, confused, runs away.

And then came the time of the Big Deportation Akcja. A physician, volksdeutsch of the fifth category, who was appointed by the Germans to be the hospitals' commissioner, falls in love with her. During the Big Akcja, when the children's hospital on Sienna street is evacuated, she is taken with the children to Umschlagplatz. The commissioner is told about it in the evening; he uses his German ID and is allowed to enter the Umschlagplatz. He finds her in the dense crowd and takes her out. After the curfew they are already in his flat. They make mad love all through the night, and than he sneaks her and her husband, ill with tuberculosis, out of the ghetto, and rents a flat for them in Swider. He comes to see them every day and brings food. Each time they take a stroll in the woods for half an hour. One day he comes and finds the flat empty. The neighbors tell him that they were just taken away and shot near the railway. He goes there, kneels and prays for a long time. He runs away only when a German patrol arrives. That was the end of that mad love story.

Maybe I'll tell you about the love of older people...

I was always in the company of young people. To tell the truth, they were actually children, young or a bit older, 20 at the most, but the faces were very young, almost childish. The adults were old in my eyes. They were not my kind. I would see those adult married couples, sitting together all through the whole day at the table. They grow thin together, they are silent together, and they usually die together. Sometimes I would manage to bring the old - in my eyes - couple I was living with, a portion of soup. There was not even a glitter in their eyes. I would sometimes see how the wife gives the husband a spoonful of soup from her plate, and keeps sitting motionless at the table.

Estusia

Estusia, who took care of me after my mother's death, was the mother of my classmate Rubin, and the wife of a very rich dentist. She lived on Pawia Street, on the first floor. She remained alone, as her husband and son, like other males, escaped from Warsaw in September. I thought I was leading a revolution by printing a "Bulletin," and did not visit her. Once I dropped by and found only Rubin's nanny. The surgery was very well taken care of. The chair, the instruments, all were covered with white sheets. I asked the nanny about Estusia, and she told me that she would leave every morning and return at the last moment before the curfew. I didn't go there again and Mrs. Estusia didn't look for me. I even wondered why, but she didn't. Estusia was a very handsome woman, of medium height, always very elegant. Through all the ghetto times I practically didn't see her.

That was probably after the second Akcja in January. I don't remember how it was that I happened to be on Wronia Street. I entered the attic, and on the floor, on mattresses, people were lying everywhere. There I saw Estusia. She was lying on a mattress. A man was serving her tea or hot water. I tell her: "Madam, there is a flat for you on the Aryan side. You have a lot of money, you can get away." Then it was supposed to be a way to survive. "You have enough to keep you there until the end of the war." She almost did not reply. She just said: "No, I'll stay with him. Either we will survive together somehow, or we will perish together. I've never been so happily in love like those four years. That is why I did not look for you." "Mrs. Estusia, you do not have a chance here," I pleaded. I don't remember her answer, but she said something like: "My chance was those four years, and I used it."

If only I had remembered her name

She had two children, twin girls. One was thin as a thread, the other like her mother, round with chubby cheeks. She was a teacher. Her husband was in London. Before the war he was the chairman or the secretary of a Jewish youth organization. He was in Kujbyszew when Erlich and Alter were arrested. We thought it was our duty to take care of his family. Vladka Peltel, the chief courier of Mikolaj Fajner, found a very good flat for the whole family. I don't know why I didn't remember it all, and after the war I heard the story from one of the twins.

One day after dark I came for them. I led them to the wall in Swietojerska Street and without any problems I delivered the children to the other side. We would bring a ladder, climb up, and then one had to drop down. If there was no one to help you on the other side, you could have twisted your ankle, like Stasia. But this time a friend waited there to pick up the twins. It was quite a miracle that at that moment and in that spot there were no blackmailers who would threaten to turn you in unless you paid a ransom. Now it's the mother's turn, and she says she is not going. She has been in a relationship for a year already, and it is the happiest year of her life. She stayed. We stood there together until we saw the daughters waving to us from a window on the Aryan side, as we had arranged. The next morning Vladka took them to the flat that was awaiting them, where they lived until the end of the occupation. After the war I had many problems with them. Until they left to be with their father they stayed with a friend of the mother, but kept running away from her to me.

I met her once again during the last Akcja, the one that today is referred to as the Ghetto Uprising. In the bunker on Nalewki Street, when we were looking for Celina, who fell through a basement on our way to Mila, suddenly a covered-up hole opened and I saw her and the man she stayed with. He was handsome, tall, with a soft face. He stood there and held her hand. "I cannot help you any more now," I said. She looked at me peacefully, unaware of the smile that was on her face. "I don't want anything from you. That was the happiest year of my life."

Translated from the Polish by Michael Handelzalts
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