Chapter seventeen

On Christmas of 1944, Violette was still at Juziek's house. On this day, all Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus the Messiah. At midnight, on December 24, Violette and Juziek attended a church filled during Mass when explosions were heard outside. The sky was red from the bombardment of the Russian planes, but no one left the church. Everyone prayed with growing feelings in the hope that God would hear their prayers and eradicate the inhuman evil that had covered the soil with the blood of millions of Poles and Jews. Still, Violette prayed to her private God - hoping that her beloved red-haired Jaroslaw would return to her. She hoped that he would return even disabled or sick with tuberculosis or typhus, the important thing that he would return.

The Germans scanned the ghetto thoroughly, going from house to house and murdering anyone they found on the spot. Many of the camp inmates on Lipowa Street managed to escape to the forests and joined camps of Jewish partisan groups in the area.

Rumors spread that all 1,600 prisoners from the 'Zamek' - the citadel prison, including many Jews, were marched to the forest outside the city. They were surrounded by armed soldiers, who took out a hundred men and women at a time, walked them about three hundred meters beyond a small hill. There were pits dug already, and trucks were brought to the scene with giant speakers that played loud music. The prisoners were forced to undress and lie inside the pits naked in crowded rows. Then, shot by SS men standing on the edge of the pits with machine guns. The noise of the loudspeakers overwhelmed the sound of gunfire and the screams of terror of victims.

As the Russians advanced overland, so the extermination of the prisoners increased.

Violette never returned to the woods. Instead, she stayed in Juziek's house following Shalma's instructions and, together with Danuta, served as couriers of written orders and documents, taking significant risks.

One day, Juziek, who was in contact with Armia Krajowa headquarters, was asked to deliver an encrypted letter to a courier to arrive at a meeting point set up at the Aryan side of town - "Karola" beauty salon.

As they set out on a street corner, Danuta arrived, and they both walked hand in hand, as friends from the gymnasium days to their meeting at the beauty salon. Violette went inside, and Danuta stayed outside to warn when necessary. A young man covered in an oversized coat and a hat low on his face came in a few minutes later. Violette was waiting for him in the back room that served as a storage room and toilet. She took out the letter and hid it beneath the rug she was standing on.

"Henrik? Henrik Neruda? Is that you?" Violette looked at him wide-eyed.

Henrik glanced at her, "Is this Bozena?" Then he cleared his throat, "Actually, Violette." He stood embarrassed and looked at her. "I'm not a leper; you can hug me" she laughed and walked over to him with open arms.

After handing him the letter, she stroked his wild beard. "It suits you; you were such an urban nerd, now you're a real man."

Henrik hugged her and kissed her with a kind of "meet again, promise" and left without looking back.

The ghetto was liquidated. The chairmen of the Judenrat - the Jewish administration, were executed. In addition, Hermann Worthoff personally shot Doctor Mark Altan and Muniek Goldfarb, the Jewish ghetto police commander.

In July 1944, the extermination camp Majdanek was abandoned due to the attacks by the Red Army, and approximately a thousand prisoners were evacuated. Half of them were transferred to Auschwitz. However, before their leaving, the camp staff destroyed documents and set fire to the buildings of the Great Crematorium. Still, due to their hasty retreat, the Germans did not manage to destroy the gas chambers and most of the inmates' barracks.

On July 24, 1944, Violette and Juziek saw the Russian soldiers marching in a convoy of victory through the streets from their apartment window. A few of the residents left their homes and threw flowers and sweets at them. Some stood and cried, and some hugged the soldiers and applauded them. The feeling was mixed. On the one hand, they defeated the Germans, but the future did not bode well. The Poles perceived the Communists as enemies of the people. They knew that this was the end of Poland as a democracy. Stalin's terror regime would rule with the same harsh hand that the Germans had treated them, and perhaps even more so because there are many Jews in key positions under Stalin's leadership. There will come an hour of reckoning with a large section of the polish people who collaborated with the Nazis.

Violette desperately wanted to get to the Majdanek concentration camp. She stopped some vehicles and asked if the camp had been liberated and could be reached. One of the jeeps, driven by an officer whose eye caught the attractive woman trying to extract information from the soldiers. Stopped next to her. "chto ty ishchesh? -

What are you looking for?" He shouted in Russian.

Violette approached him and said, "I am a Jew; I want to go to Majdanek." The officer made an inviting hand gesture, "Get in the car."

During the short trip, Violette found out that the officer was a Jew from Leningrad named Leonid Mikhailson, "what a coincidence," she laughed, "my last name is Michalson."

On the way, she saw military ambulances operating deafening sirens passing by. As they got closer, the horrible smell of cremation increased. At the entrance to the camp stood guards who hold back the few prisoners from gathering in front of the gate. "They need to be given small amounts of food; otherwise, they will die of suffocation," Leonid explained to her.

The Russian officer armed with a pistol accompanied Violette; they entered through the front gate on foot as the guards saluted him and cleared the way.

The prisoners walked around in striped clothes like sleepwalkers, medical staff moved among them, and the sick and those who had difficulty walking were treated in one of the pavilions. Piles of corpses that the Nazis did not manage to burn stank in the heat of July as they piled up in pits. Violette searched among the survivors but did not see Jaroslaw; she realized he didn't make it.

Documents were found partially burned in the Gestapo offices. Fortunately, the Germans did not have time to eliminate all the evidence for what happened in this dark place called Majdanek.

After hours of searching as she occasionally vomited and covered her mouth in a thick scarf, she decided to return to the apartment. She asked Leonid to accompany her, and he willingly agreed.

Before she said goodbye, they hugged warmly, "If you stay in Lublin, I would be happy to meet again," she told him. "We continue; west, the Germans are still in Poland. We are on our way to Berlin. Do not despair about the man you are looking for; he may have been taken to Auschwitz by train. We are shelling all the railway tracks to make it difficult to retreat." '

Violette went up to Juziek's apartment with a heavy heart. As he opened the door, she fell into his arms and swelled for a long time.

All night she turned from side to side and could not fall asleep. The joy that the war was over and that she would be able to see her parents again mingled with a sense of pain that she would never again get to see her beloved red-haired Jaroslaw.

In the morning, she got up, determined to revisit the camp, and obtain more information from the survivors. Juziek offered to accompany her, but she spared him, asking him to let her go alone.

When she went down to the street, she immediately felt a sense of freedom. She no longer had to hide being a Jew. She no longer had to evade documents checkpoints. She knew that the German extermination machine was still operating in western Poland but did not imagine the magnitude of the tragedy that occurred to her people.

When she arrived at the camp, which was six kilometers from the city center, there was still a heavy stench in the air. Newspaper reporters and military and civilian photographers came and went. She passed by the guards without being checked. The sick prisoners were taken to the hospitals, while the strongest among them wandered within the camp as if they were afraid to leave. They were insecure and did not believe that the Germans had fled. Captured German and Ukrainian soldiers buried the corpses, dug long trenches, and lay the bodies in piles near the crematorium building.

Violette approached one woman wearing a Star of David badge on the front of the prisoner's garment. "How long have you been in the camp?" She asked her. The young woman, skinny and shaved-headed, sat and ate soup from a plate she held on her knees. "I do not remember," she replied in a hushed voice, barely audible.

"I'm Jewish. My name is Violette Michalson; what's your name?" She asked and sat down next to her.

"45228," she answered indifferently and looked into her plate.

"The war is over; you are no longer a number. You have a name your parents gave you at your birth."

"Gita," she replied quietly, looking suspiciously around her.

"Tell me, Gita, where are you from?"

"Mianow Lubelski, small Shtetl," she replied.

"Did you come here with your family?"

"They brought us by train to Lublin; we drove for two days without food or water or the possibility of using toilets; when the carriages opened, we jumped down on snowy ground. Then, we set out on foot surrounded by Ukrainian guards with guns. We walked three kilometers in frozen mud and arrived to this scary camp surrounded by barbed wire fences lit by bright spotlights like the sunlight. As we approached, there was a sign that read "KL." My four brothers, father and mother, grandmother, and two aunts with their husbands and children. When we arrived, they made a selection; the little children and grandmother were sent to the right and us to the left. Mother held my two-year-old little Yankee in her arms and refused to leave him; he cried non-stop. The German SS man pulled him from mother's hands, so she threw herself on the frozen ground and kissed his boots, He kicked her in the face and broke her nose and teeth, and she fainted, then gave Yankee to Grandma, who was directed to the right. After that, we saw them no more, neither Mom, Grandma, nor Yankee. Lucky Mom was unconscious when they took her."

"What would you do all day?"

"We did never bathed, the paradox that whoever went to the shower did not come back, so we said it was better to be full of lice and stinking. At least we're alive. There was a joke in the camp: how do you get out of here? And everyone pointed to the chimneys. That's the way to freedom."

"Was there a division between men and women?"

"The whole camp was divided into six blocks, and double barbed-wire fences surrounded each block. In each block, there were twenty barracks. In one bloc, 25,000 Jews were imprisoned, most of them from Czechoslovakia and most were Musulmans. "

"You said they were Jews."

"Yes, they were Jews, but Musulmans, a Musulman means a skinny man with a bloated stomach."

"And where were the women?"

'In one of the other blocks, some died every day, either from hunger or cold. The Germans would hang somebody for every minor offense. One day, there was a whistle, and we had to go to the 'Appel' - order, and I started having diarrhea that dripped on my legs, so I went to the bathroom instead of going to the Prisoners count. The Capo came; this is a Jewish policeman, he was Lithuanian, he appeared in the bathroom, and while I was shitting, he hit me on my head and did not let me clean myself. Blood dripped on my face. He brought me before an SS man who asked me why I was not in the census, and when I told him the reason, he shot the Capo in the head. It was impossible to understand the Germans. But I must speak to you about Davidek. It was a ten-year-old boy whose parents were gassed in the camp. He spoke Yiddish and a little Polish; he was a German amusement toy, they gave him a whip to use for his enjoyment on anyone he wanted, the boy got for his cruel behavior bread and some potatoes. He became the terror for the prisoners in the camp; he beat them to death without showing mercy. The bodies would remain on the frozen ground until they were collected and sent to the crematorium. '

"Were there any escapes from the camp?"

"Yes, there was one with red hair, a strong young man, he was waiting for a car to carry groceries, he crawled under it, grabbed the front axle with his hands and his feet pushed over the rear axle, and hung by his muscle power as the car began to move, he nearly fell, but the car had to stop for inspection "So he gathered his strength and again clung to the body of the car that left the camp without him being caught."

"Do you know what his name was?"

"No, they did not talk about it, someone claimed that he must have died, but the Germans who were very accurate did not understand where the man disappeared, and they thought he died when they found an unidentified body in the shitting hole."

Violette wrote down Juziek's address on a small note and gave it to her. "When you get out of here, come to me. I'll take care of your recovery." The two women hugged warmly before they parted.

When she returned to Juziek's house, Violette could not calm down; she cried in her room for a long time. Juziek let her cry; he thought it is for the better. The great tension that had built up inside her must erupt, "crying is the valve that regulates the mental stress in the body," he explained to her apologetically when he did not enter her room to calm her down.

Then she went into the living room and sat down in front of the window, peeking into the neighbors' apartments in the opposite building. The lights were on in many flats, and life was going on as usual. Some sat at the dining table and ate dinner together; one stood by the window and smoked one last cigarette before bed, a woman caring for the sick mother lying on a mountain of pillows.

Tomorrow the sun will rise, and another normal day will begin for them. But a few minutes' drive away, there is another reality, which everyone knows about but acts as if it does not exist. They see its chimneys, the black smoke that turns into a thick cloud over the city, and smell the stench of the victims' bodies. In that reality are living shadows, people who have lost their humanity, who have lost faith in God, who have lost faith in other people, who have lost everything they had in their lives before, and their lives will never be the same again. Those people will not forget until their last day what they went through in this place. The horrors will remain etched in their memory forever. Every morning when they open their eyes, they will pinch themselves to be sure they are alive. Every evening before falling asleep, they will recall the filthy and hard wooden bunks, the bitter cold, the lice sucking their blood, and the hunger that plagued them; they will feel on their scarred bodies the whiplash and kicks that broke their bones.

They came out of the barbed wire fences alone, leaving behind the ashes of their parents, brothers, sons, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who had turned to black ashes. They will be free to go out, but without any purpose, because they have nowhere to go, no one is waiting for them.

The knock on the door brought Violette back to reality. First, she looked at Juziek and him at her. Then, without a second thought, she regained her composure and ran to open the door. "Jaroslaw survived, and he came looking for me," the thought went through her mind.

When she opened the door, Gita stood there. The little figure, shy without raising her head, dressed in the clothes she had received from the Red Cross.

"Gita, come in, sweetheart, come in," she pulled her in and gave her a big hug. "I had nowhere to go," she said in a whisper.

"Well, you came to the right place; let me introduce you to Juziek, a wonderful man with a golden heart."

"We'll take care of you, stay here as long as you want," Juziek said. "I'll make us a good meal, home-cooked food." Then he turned to Violette, "and I made you a surprise too; you'll get it later," he said, smiling his little smile.

Gita went into Violette's room and lay down on the bed; she was treated at the hospital before leaving the camp. She was now tired and fell asleep within a few minutes.

Violette was sitting in the living room reading a book while Juziek was busy in the kitchen preparing delicacies. Slight knocks on the door made Violette jump again, but Juziek hurried to open this time.

"Sarah! I can't believe it; you brought Sarah." Violette jumped up and ran to hug her," I told you it'd be over soon."

The two hugged and cried, and the nun who accompanied her also wiped a tear from her eyes. 'What a tragedy, and God is silent. Why? Why do they deserve to die? Even babies who have not harm anyone," the nun wept.

Towards evening the table was ready and packed with all the goodies. The nun sat between Sarah and Violette; on the other side sat Gita and Juziek.

"We'll raise a glass of vodka to the end of the war, to defeat evil, and to our survival," Juziek said.

"Raise a glass for a new beginning, which for many will no longer be, but those who survive must live for those who are not here anymore, for their memory."

"Never forget all those who perished!" They all said unanimously and sipped their drink.

For a few days, Gita and Sarah stayed at Juziek's house. Eventually, Juziek went to sleep in the living room on the couch and gave Gita and Sarah his double bed; Violette slept alone in her room.

Every night Gita would scream and wake everyone up. They understood her nightmares and did not mention them the next day.

After a week of staying at Juziek's home, Violette went to look for a Jewish organization that helps the survivors. She arrived at the "Hatzalah - Rescue" office, founded by the Jewish partisans who left the forests and began gathering the survivors and organizing them in training camps to be sent to Eretz Israel.

Anti-Semitism on the streets of Poland raised its head. Rumors reached committee members in Lublin that in various places, Poles were harassing Jews who returned to their homes and demanded their property back, property that the Poles looted during the war when the homeowners were evicted by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camps.

Suddenly the Poles realized that their country had been "almost cleansed of their hated Jews. For many, the danger of contaminating the Polish culture by the Jewish one, has vanished. Jewish trade and industry doesn't exist anymore. The phrase; "it is a pity that Hitler did not finish the job" is heard everywhere on the streets. "

Together with the Red Army arrived some divisions of Polish Jewish soldiers and officers. The medals that adorned their chests, the polished pistol hanging from their belts, and their shiny leather boots were another evidence in the eyes of the Poles who saw them as imposters and Bolsheviks who came with the help of the Russians to suppress them.

Killing and mass harassment began. Dozens of Jews were murdered in cities and villages every day. Those survivors who went through the inferno of the camps and had not yet recovered from the loss of their families, the hunger and tortures, only wanted their homes back taken from them by their Polish neighbors.

The city of Rovno was liberated by the Red Army and a partisan brigade in February 1944. They set up a cooperative that began operating as an aid and assistance to survivors and searching for Jewish children hidden in monasteries and Christian homes.

As the days passed and pogroms of Jews became a reality to the Rescue Committee members, they came to the conclusion that survivors should be encouraged to leave the hostile land of Poland and immigrate to Eretz Israel in any possible way. The group of leaders now also joined the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Abba Kovner, Mordechai Rozman, Zivia Lubetkin, and Yitzhak Zuckerman. The route of escape was first to Romania, then to Hungary, Austria, and Italy. Countries that will turn a blind eye to illegal emigration through their ports. It was a period of migration, thirty million people moving to return to their lands and homes, all without certificates and nobody to stop them. Unfortunately, the Jewish people, who suffered more than any other nation in the war, were denied the opportunity to immigrate to Eretz Israel under British White Paper laws. So a whole industry of forgery of documents began for the sake of helping them to escape.

Violette organized documents for Sarah and connected her with the organization's members, and she was taken under their care. Her farewell from her was difficult, but Violette knew it was the right solution for her.