Adam Nowicki, born in 1935

From the Vilnius Ghetto

They began rounding up Jews to the Vilnius ghetto on September 6, 1941. The incessant flow of people poured down the road filling it from sidewalk to  sidewalk. I remember a Lithuanian policeman clubbing a young woman carrying an infant. He was doing it with all his strength, ruthlessly and for no reason.

Ten people were living in a medium-sized room, including a displaced German, Mr. Lehmann. Always smiling, courteous and excessively polite, he spoke no Polish or Yiddish. We listened to his literary High German (my father knew this language well, so he could evaluate it) with mixed feelings. He had a German decoration from the First World War, in which he took a lot of pride. However it may sound, he was still a real patriot. I remember how satisfied he was browsing the issues of Signal, an illustrated weekly published in Berlin at  the time, and highlighting their editorial qualities. Mr. Lehmann got sick with typhoid fever and initially, he lay by himself on his bunkbed (we moved to the adjacent rooms). Later he was taken in an unknown, or actually known, direction.

There were no schools in the ghetto. I was taught several basic subjects by a young man, not much older than me, who was found somewhere by my parents. Mrs. Kapłańska, who lived in the adjacent room, taught me English. At that time, learning English was an unambiguous challenge directed against the Germans. Mrs. Kapłańska had studied in England before the war and had a lovely Oxford accent. When my mother mentioned that it was clear what awaited us at the hands of the Germans, Mrs. Kapłańska replied with indignation, “Don’t you dare say such things! The Germans are a civilized nation.” If she had survived the ghetto, she’d be one of the most prominent postwar Anglicists. She perished, like most of the ghetto’s residents, executed in Ponary near Vilnius.

The ghetto was fenced off from the rest of the town not with a brick wall, as it was in Warsaw, but with planks marking the ends of the streets. Between the planks, there were cracks that allowed you to watch what was going on on the other side. I admit that I watched the view through the cracks with fascination and bated breath.

I have never envied anyone nor have I ever desired anything as badly as this open space and the possibility to move from place to place; being able to walk over here or over there in any direction you pleased, simply straight ahead without brick or wooden walls suddenly closing in on you. I was obsessed with a piercing and irresistible yearning to be able to go the edge of the city, to a meadow, into a field, to the forest, by the river bank. I wished I could lie down on the grass with a paper or book and stare into the sky unobscured by the roofs of the houses where people swarmed like insects. It seemed to me that those on the other side were heroic figures from some wonderland filled with joy. In reality, they were impoverished and oppressed city dwellers worn down by the war. This was the most distinct illustration in my life of the subjectivity of our feelings and assessments.

There was one single tree that was spared in the whole area of the ghetto. It grew in the courtyard of the library. Under the tree was some grass. This tree with this tuft of grass became the object of a certain kind of sacral adoration. It attracted kids, it attracted adults, who would stare at it with reverie and fascination, like people today in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome who examine the beauty of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Aside from the solitary tree, there were several bushes surrounded by a metal fencing in the courtyard of the Judenrat. A crowd of people, thirsty for any contact with nature, constantly circled around the bushes. This was the ghetto’s park. There was nothing else.

In the ghetto I experienced acute and incessant hunger. When my mother sent me to the bakery for the bread ration, of which there was never enough, I would nibble around its crust on the way home so cleverly that no one would suspect anything. I made the following proposition to my 4-year-old brother (I was 10 at that time): “Put a piece of bread (with lard or onion) in your mouth, then take it out and I’ll eat it.” Once or twice my brother was intrigued and agreed, but since he was just as hungry as I was, this source of additional food provision dried up for me.

Shortly before the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto (September 23, 1943), when the interior tension was clearly and palpably increasing because the Germans and Lithuanians had been conducting test pacification-liquidation actions, we hid for several days in a large well- concealed basement prepared for this eventuality by the men of our house. There were several families—mothers, fathers, and children—down there. There were no elderly people. Everyone over 60 had been deported to Ponary and executed in the fateful massacre on December 22, 1941. We lay curled up and crammed onto plank beds, which creaked dangerously from overload. It was almost completely dark except for carbide lamps or a handful of candles. I remember that I would read English fairy tales by the wobbly flame of one of the carbide lamps!

The sanitary conditions were appalling. The musty air in the basement was filled with the stench of feces from the half-open toilet. My mother even demanded that my father take out and empty the feces bucket. We mostly ate rusks, that is, brown bread dried out to such a degree that you had to soak it in warm water for a long time to make it edible.

After some time, when the machine-gun shooting quieted down, we decided to come out of hiding and return to the apartments. At that point, a neighbor offered me a piece of bread with some margarine. After the rusks, it was a flavor explosion which I never experienced later. No delicacies, fancy dishes, or exquisite meals, at home or abroad, that I would later be treated to (especially in postwar Germany where we were treated almost as guests of honor) tasted even remotely close to that piece of bread, which was not all that fresh, with a thin layer of fat. It was an indescribable moment of culinary ecstasy. For all the decades that have passed since those days, I’ve remained  deeply  grateful  to that woman. Not everyone would have done it. A simple gesture, but so meaningful in those times, at that moment.

They would sometimes sell chocolate in the ghetto. Not by the bar, naturally, but by the squares of which it was made. Once I gave into temptation and bought one square. It cost a fortune. Later, I bitterly regretted it because I experienced a flash of inexpressible pleasure and then, an overwhelming and unfulfilled desire to swallow multiple squares just like that.

Right before the liquidation of the ghetto, in early September 1943, men under fifty were transported to a labor camp in Estonia. My father was among them (he later died there). My mother realized that the end of the ghetto was inevitable and it was coming soon. That’s why she decided to get to the Aryan side with me and my brother. Before she did, she got a short note from my father. He wrote: “Do with Adaś what you were planning.” It was about leaving the ghetto. He wrote that (implying the sacrifice of my younger brother) because he couldn’t believe that my mother was capable of taking both of us and surviving! But she did.

First, she left by herself and found a suitable person and place—Mrs. Marynia’s attic. Then, she came back for me. To this day, I can’t say why she didn’t take both of us together. Maybe she was afraid that we would behave strangely in a different environment, which could have awakened suspicion. In any case, she returned to fetch my brother. After she brought him, she wanted to go back for our things. Luckily, Mrs. Marynia managed to convince her that it was too risky. Luckily, because she might not have returned from that last expedition.

Our stay at Marynia’s became dangerous, as  we  were  noticed and there were whispers going around about some suspicious people. My mother decided that it was time to leave Vilnius altogether. We simply went to the train station. On the way there, a person wearing a German or Lithuanian uniform started watching us closely. We were probably saved by the appearance of my younger brother, who had been written off by my father. He had “Aryan” features, blue eyes, and a full head of fair, sunny hair. And not only then but also when crossing onto the platform, which was guarded  by  a  tall,  broad-shouldered man in a German uniform and a helmet. It should be noted that the station in Vilnius was particularly closely guarded as one of the nodal transportation connections to the Eastern front.

The folder, which my mother was holding in her hand, stored almost all our Jewish documents. I don’t understand how and why my mother decided to take it with us. It would have been enough to open the folder, and we would have been dead. On top of this, her forged Kennkarte read “ledig” (single). Who were the two boys by her side then? In order to distract the Germans, she made a scene. She started shoving us, yelling at us and calling us names. Seeing this behavior, the German must have thought that my mother was a stupid country woman and dismissed it.

By train, and later by horse-drawn cart, we finally reached a small settlement at the edge of the Rudninkai Forest, where her doctor friend lived. He put us in a tiny cabin by a peasant family, and later we moved to a forester’s lodge. After the oppressive isolation and harassment of the ghetto, after being cut off from nature, this undulating ocean of trees, the simultaneous closeness and vastness of the surrounding green and the feeling of being exposed to endlessness was something liberating and stupefying at the same time.

Here, except for the presence of the partisans, you could forget not only about the ongoing war but about the world of human relations altogether. Here life pulsated with its eternal, natural rhythm. Paradoxically, this period became etched in my memory as a time of great calm that came to me so suddenly and abruptly after the previously experienced horrors.