Born Survivors by Wendy Holden Page B

after escaping from Warsaw with his false papers, he travelled to Łódź to try to see her. ‘He thought I was too weak to live in that ghetto on my own, but he couldn’t get me out,’ Rachel said. ‘My brother Berek who was working in a nearby camp saw him going back and forth on the tram. In the end he risked his life and came through the barbed wire with the Germans all around just to be with me in the ghetto because he was sure I would have a better chance. He didn’t want to live through the war without me … so he came in to be with me.’
    Giving up his opportunity to escape for ever, Monik moved in with Rachel’s family, into an already overcrowded room. His biggest problem was that he was now an illegal alien within a meticulously regimented Nazi system that didn’t feature his name on any of itslists. Before the war Rumkowski had been a personal acquaintance of Monik’s mother Ita, so the family called in a favour. The ‘king of the ghetto’ told Monik that the only place nobody would ask questions about where he came from would be in a division of the Jewish Sonderpolizei or special police. He readily agreed and was put into quarters with the rest. ‘He did whatever they told him to do,’ Rachel said. Like all those fighting for survival under Nazi rule, he didn’t have much choice.
    Monik also became a volunteer fireman with Rachel’s brother Berek in what had, by necessity, to be a self-regulating community with its own emergency services. Those who were lucky enough to get government posts such as theirs were billeted together in the police headquarters or the fire station, where they were slightly better fed. Then Rachel was allocated a small room to herself in an apartment on a nearby street. It was somewhere she could finally enjoy some privacy with her husband, whenever he was able to join her.
    There were other surprises too. ‘Someone who was a representative from our company before the war took us to a big stockroom and helped us to some clothes and blankets – because we came with just the clothes on our backs.’ With the ghetto in the grip of winter and blizzards coating everything in deep layers of snow that lent even the most squalid streets a deceptive air of innocence, an extra blanket meant the difference between life and death.
    Everyone did what they could to keep up morale by organising musical and cultural events. There were jazz bands and classical concerts, plays, and pantomimes for children. Sala – who’d danced and sung in amateur theatre productions since childhood and in the Pabianice ghetto – featured prominently in several of the performances. Education wasn’t forgotten either and in Rachel’s factory, teachers were employed alongside children to give them lessons while they all worked. ‘They taught them without books or papers, just by mouth, or by listening or spelling and telling them stories.’
    From September 1942 until May 1944, the 75,000-strong workforce of Judische Arbeitskräfte (Jewish slaves) was so productive for the SS that it earned the ghetto a respite from transportations. But the tide of war was turning and Allied bombers now began to target German cities for the first time, including a mass bombing of Hamburg and the Ruhr industrial region that killed or injured thousands. Then in May, Heinrich Himmler – the second-most powerful man in the Reich – ordered the liquidation of the ghetto. In the next three months 7,000 Jews were sent to their death at Chełmno, but when the special death vans couldn’t keep up with the numbers, transports were switched to Auschwitz. The hapless ghetto postmen whose task it was to deliver the notices to those expected to report for a transport became known as ‘Angels of Death’.
    With food in such short supply, there was a need to reduce the number of mouths to feed, so more of the remaining children and the elderly were put on trains to the unknown. By rights, the youngest of Rachel’s family should