Born Survivors by Wendy Holden

house!” They selected people. They took fifty or sixty of them away in buses,’ said Sala. ‘That happened again and again and again.’ All the family could do was say a silent farewell to friends and neighbours lost for ever.
    Behind the barricades, few knew what was happening in the wider world or fully appreciated what would become of their loved ones who had been sent away. In effective quarantine from any news, they could have no idea that the only choice was between death by a bullet or suffocation by carbon monoxide at Chełmno. Hidden in the cracks of some of the cattle cars that came back from the East were found secret notes hinting at the horrors ahead and urging their fellow Jews not to board the trains. Clothing and possessions belonging to deportees from across occupied Europe were also sent back to the ghetto to be recycled for the war effort and some bore the names of people known to those left behind. Increasingly, the Jews of Łódź began to suspect the worst and came to believe the rumours about what ‘the frying pan’ really meant.
    Fearing Nazi retaliation if their quotas weren’t met, Rumkowski and his deputies repeatedly tried to assure the populace that those deported would be looked after in new camps and allowed to remain together as families. They would help with the war effort and enjoy better living conditions in military barracks, they promised. But as the transports continued relentlessly and no word ever came back from those sent away, few believed the reassurances. In the end, even Rumkowski stopped pretending.
    His master plan was failing. Having set up what he’d consideredto be a model work camp with its own schools, hospitals, fire service and police force, within a community in which he was the supreme ruler – he even conducted marriage ceremonies – his authority was being systematically undermined. Not only had thousands been sent away but the Nazis persistently failed to provide enough food in return for the labour his ghetto provided. Desperate to quell the increasing numbers of strikes and demonstrations by the hungry and the angry, Rumkowski became ever more dictatorial and threatened to arrest those who resisted his attempts to keep the ghetto working.
    Determined to hasten the pace of Jewish annihilation still further, the Nazis broke their pact with him and demanded even greater numbers for the transports. Then they made their cruellest demand yet – the deportation of every child under the age of ten and every adult over sixty-five, which amounted to 3,000 lives every day for eight days.
    The Abramczyks’ hiding place was what saved them on 5 September 1942, when from 5 p.m. the Allgemeine Gehsperre , or Groyse Sphere (great curfew) in Yiddish, began. During that week more than 20,000 people were called for. Few families were left untouched.
    Having spent days, hat in hand, pleading unsuccessfully with his masters to revoke the order or at least reduce the quotas, Rumkowski – who prided himself on his love of children – finally accepted that he could never sway the Nazis from their own master plan. A ‘broken Jew’, he summoned his people to Fire Station Yard the day before the great curfew began. That humid autumn afternoon he took a breath and announced to the vast gathering: ‘A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly … I never thought I would be forced to deliver the sacrifice to the altar with my own hands … I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’
    Amid screams and wails, he told his people that he’d only been able to negotiate a reduction in the original demand of 24,000 people, plus the preservation of children over the age of ten. He said the numbers of qualifying children and old people amounted to 13,000, so the rest of the allocation would have to be met elsewhere. He had