Born Survivors by Wendy Holden Page A

agreed to hand over the sick, he said, ‘in order to save the healthy’. If the deportations were met with any resistance he’d been assured that they would be carried out by brutal means.
    Rachel’s youngest sister Maniusia was eleven years old and just safe under the impossible edict. But that didn’t diminish the horror of what was being demanded, or the manner in which the operation was carried out. Rachel said, ‘We thought they were sending them to work until they started to take the children and the sick from hospitals. Then we knew they were taking them to kill them. They took away the children in such a terrible way. Children were thrown out of the windows down to the trucks so we knew nothing good would come of it.’
    Already on the brink of madness because of the conditions they were forced to live in, some parents went insane once they lost the children they’d fought so hard to protect. There were rumours of mothers smothering their babies rather than hand them over to the Nazis, who prowled the streets with guns and dogs.
    Sala said, ‘We stayed in our hiding place whenever we heard the Germans looking for people and then we stayed there until we knew it was safe to come out.’ When everything had quietened down after an hour or more, they crawled back through the dresser and wandered about their building to check on who’d been seized. The sight of an apartment door kicked in and swinging on its hinges meant that those neighbours wouldn’t be coming back, so they helped themselves to any food or useful items left behind. ‘That’s how we lived through those few weeks … we took it and ate it like animals, not like people.’
    The prisoners of Łódź continued to exist like this from day today, sometimes from minute to minute, and certainly from meal to meal. Polish zlotys , Reichsmarks, or the Litzmannstadt ghetto money known as ‘Rumkies’ or ‘Chaimkas’ (in an early nod to Chaim Rumkowski), became largely meaningless as the only currency became food. Rations remained unpredictable, not least because the Nazis restricted deliveries whenever a fresh transport was imminent in order to wear down any resistance. They would then offer free meals to any who volunteered to be resettled elsewhere. For those who stayed, the daily calorie intake was also cut by two-thirds at a time when growing corruption meant that many supplies were being illegally diverted anyway.

    Radegast station, Łódź, from where Rachel and 200,000 Jews were transported
    Those worst affected by malnutrition, often barefoot and in rags, their bodies misshapen, were known as ‘hourglass’ people. It was common for these cadaverous souls with swollen bellies and legs totake to their beds, eyes gleaming feverishly, and die within days. Epidemics of scabies, typhus and TB carried off hundreds more. As conditions worsened, an increasingly beleaguered Rumkowski vowed to keep the lamp of industry burning in the ghetto. In another speech, he promised, ‘I can’t save everyone so instead of having the entire population exposed to a slow death by hunger, I’ll save at least the top 10,000.’
    With people collapsing in the street to be covered by swarms of blowflies in the summer or for the ice to claim them in winter, the need for food became all-consuming. Getting hold of even a few vegetable peelings or a rotten potato became an obsession in the ghetto.
    Rachel, a young wife from a once wealthy and prominent family, was more fortunate than many because of their connections. But she still had to work – twelve hours a day in the office of a straw factory that made footwear for soldiers on the Russian front. These huge overshoes were so rigid that they were almost impossible to walk in but they protected Wehrmacht toes against frostbite. Three of her sisters worked in that factory too – even the youngest.
    Beyond the ghetto walls, Rachel’s husband Monik continued to try to find ways to rescue his wife. Risking everything