Alexander, Baches, Baras …

ALEXANDER WAS HIS SURNAME and I don’t remember his given name. He was a handsome boy with dark curly hair. His father was a professor at the Lwow University, his parents knew mine and I was encouraged to play with him. Baches, again a surname, was a somewhat overweight boy and wore glasses. Again, his parents knew mine and we were encouraged to play together. The Bacheses lived in the centre of old Lwow (Lemberg of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Lwow of Poland and now Lviv of western Ukraine) a stone’s throw from the rynek (town square) with its imposing ratusz (a Slavonic version of Rathaus—the town hall) topped with its even more imposing square tower—the tallest building in old Lwow. It still stands. I have a photograph with these two boys, all of us seven or eight years old, with me wearing a green felt Tyrolean hat, which for some unfathomable reason earned me the nickname of “Mussolini”.

Mrs Baches, like the other mothers, regularly organised children’s parties, especially for birthdays. Lydia Baras, a small mousy-blonde girl with plaits, was always invited. I think she liked me, but I preferred her cousin, Rita, who was also in our class and was the prettiest girl in it—a taller girl with long brown plaits. As her surname, Reisman, began with R she was way down the roll-call, which I was able to recite from the beginning (Alexander, Baches, Baras …) to the end. Also further down the roll-call was Roman Lisowoder, my best friend and the natural leader of the class. He was the tallest boy in class and had a younger brother Milek (Emil), a smaller version of Roman, two years behind us in the same school. Still further down the roll-call was Emil Tannenbaum.

The five boys and two girls formed the nucleus of the “in-group” in our class in primary school. We had lunches together and we were regularly fed and spoiled by Mrs Baches, Mrs Lisowoder and my mother. The Bacheses’ elegant flat in a seventeenth-century building at 11 Boimow Street was our headquarters.

At the roll-call, we answered with the Hebrew word kein (for yes), for the rule (not really adhered to) was that everything was taught in Hebrew. This gave rise to the joke that our school was populated by Jewish children, who spoke only Polish, but were taught in Hebrew. The idea behind the formation of this school (known by the name of the street it was located on, “Zygmuntowska”) was to provide schooling for the children of the Zionist wing of the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia of Lwow, but the main advantage over other schools was that we were separated from our Gentile fellow scholars. They had to confine themselves to ambushing us after school, particularly in Ogrod Jezuicki (The Jesuits’ Garden), a lovely, large and well-kept mid-town park. We gave as much as we took, the encounters were ritualised, confined to insults, fists and stones, and I don’t remember anyone being seriously hurt.

I attended this school for three years: 1936, 1937 and 1938. The 1939 school year was to start on September 1, but we got the Second World War instead and Lwow was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. The ideologically incorrect Zygmuntowska school was disbanded and the class was dispersed.

My Soviet school had Polish as the language of instruction with Ukrainian as the language of the republic and Russian as the lingua franca of the Soviet Union. Of our old gang, only Roman Lisowoder and I finished up in that school, but we kept in touch with Alexander, Baches, Baras and the others. The school year of 1941 ended in June and I still have the annual report for the year: a flimsy piece of Soviet paper with the insignia of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with the five-pointed star, hammer and sickle. It was the final piece of formal education I was to receive in Europe.

At the end of June 1941, while I was spending my school holidays with relatives in Nadworna, a small town in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union and swiftly occupied its western part. Survivable Stalinist repression gave way to the Holocaust nightmare.

A few months later and after a chilling brush with SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Kruger’s Reserve Police Battalion 133, which on October 6, 1941, killed about 2500 out of about 4500 Jews in Nadworna, I managed to return to Lwow, where my parents tried to attend to my education in the Lwow ghetto. Rita Reisman, Emil Tannenbaum and I were tutored by a tragic, pregnant, widowed young teacher. Her husband had been killed early in July 1941 by Ukrainians, who conducted a major pogrom after the discovery of hundreds of bodies of political prisoners (in fact Jews, as well as Poles and Ukrainians) left in the NKVD prison in Lwow by the retreating Soviets. The Ukrainians and Poles, in Lwow and elsewhere, blamed Jews for NKVD atrocities. This joined the long and venerable list of libels, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, “torturing” the Host and the Jewish habit of draining blood from Christian infants for the making of matzos for Passover.

This “school” lasted for about two months. We were taught arithmetic, Latin and Polish literature, presumably in the hope of eventual normality after the war. No one had any inkling that the Final Solution was already in progress and that there was to be no “after the war” for practically any of us. The schooling ended with the first major aktion in Lwow at Easter 1942, when about 30,000 Jews were taken to the newly established extermination camp at Belzec. The victims were people without jobs useful to the Germans, mainly the old, the young and the sick. Our teacher and her newborn baby were among them.

AKTION FOLLOWED AKTION, culminating in the horrendous great aktion of August 1942, when about 55,000 of Lwow’s Jews were taken to the extermination camps of Belzec and Sobibor. All my old school friends, including Rita and Emil, were taken as well as my maternal grandparents and countless relatives and friends. The Lisowoder family had disappeared a little earlier.

Odyssey followed. Aryan papers. My life was saved by a courageous Pole, who also saved many of our photographs, including the one with Alexander and Baches. Hiding indoors for months on end. Horrendously dangerous train journeys. Crossing the Carpathians in knee-deep snow, dodging German patrols. More Aryan papers in Hungary. Then in June 1944 what became known as the Rozse Kasztner project dumped my father and me in Bergen-Belsen.

A Nazi concentration camp was not a single entity: it actually consisted of contiguous sub-camps, segregated from their neighbouring sub-camps by barbed-wire fences in a single checked pattern about three meters high. The real fence, vastly more formidable and studded with watchtowers, went around all the sub-camps. My father and I were in the so-called “Hungarian Camp” with 1680 mainly Hungarian Jews and we occupied all of the Barracke 11 and most of the Barracke 10, that is “rooms” 10A, 10B, 10C, 10D and 10E. Each of the rooms housed between 120 and 150 inmates and the remaining three rooms of Barracke 10 housed 300 “Poles”, in fact Polish Jews with various dodgy South American papers. My father and I could communicate with them by walking back and forth about two metres from the fence and talking loudly in Polish apparently to each other, but really to similar pairs on the other side. My father found people there whom he knew in pre-Holocaust Lwow and we quickly learned that the 300 were a remnant of an original group of 2000. Shortly before our arrival in Belsen, 1700 of them had their papers re-examined and found wanting, which resulted in a one-way trip to Auschwitz. More conversations yielded the identities of some of the murdered “Poles”, among them the Lisowoder family, including my best friend Roman.

All the people in the Rozse Kasztner group, including my father and me, were handed over—in fact sold—to the Swiss in December 1944 and survived. The remnant “Polish” camp lasted nearly to the liberation by Canadian troops in April 1945, but a little earlier the camp Kommandant, the notorious Joseph Kramer, later tried and executed by the British, decided that those still left alive were to be exterminated. This was to be done somewhere in the countryside as the “facilities” of Auschwitz were no longer available, having fallen to the Red Army in January 1945. In 1946 in Jerusalem, then part of the British mandate of Palestine, I met a young man a couple of years older then me who was part of this transport. He told me what happened: the short transport train carrying the remnant of the 300 “Poles” and their SS escort was heading towards death in the marshes on the Elbe River, when it was intercepted by a spearhead of American armour. The prisoners were liberated and there was no trial for their would-be executioners: they were executed. This young man also remembered the Lisowoders very well. To the end Roman, then fourteen, and Milek were studying English in the hope of a normal life “after the war”. That was the last echo of my best childhood friend.

I have never been able, internet and all, to find any of my classmates from Zygmuntowska. Perhaps one or two survived, who knows. A number like 6 million slips glibly off the tongue, but all my murdered relatives and friends and all the children whose names began with Alexander, Baches, Baras … were one-off, each one with a story.