Marek Edelman

And there was love, too, in the ghetto

About the book

And so Deda – that was the name of Mrs Tenenbaum’s daughter – got her mother’s ‘life number’. Such a shy girl, and now she was all alone. And suddenly she fell in love with some boy. She must have had a bit of money, because the boy organised them an apartment on the Aryan side . She really blossomed with that love. She lived in bliss with that boy for three months in the apartment on the Aryan side. That was all you could see on her face: love. Everyone who saw her then, without exception, said she radiated with happiness. She told Marysia, who visited her, that they were the happiest months of her life. The boy's warmth towards her made her forget about the ghetto. Her happiness lasted three months. Then the owners – perhaps the money had run out – turned her and her boyfriend in to the Nazis.
Between the January operation and April, we always returned from our bakery missions via the fifth floor of an enormous tenement building with enormous apartments (every baker had to give us 40 loaves of bread, and that usually happened after baking had finished in the morning). All the apartment doors were open, including those onto the stairwell, to make it easier to pass through (you entered by the front door, went through the entire apartment, and left by the servants’ entrance, and from there you went through to the next apartment). Beds were set up in the corridors and hallways.
I saw Złotogórski there. He was a huge fellow. I don’t know why it’s his huge, tanned torso I still see in my mind’s eye (seeing as it wasn’t summer yet and so he hadn’t had any opportunity to sunbathe). A blonde, seventeen-year-old girl was resting on his shoulder. She slept nestled against him, her face lit up by a blissful smile that radiated peace. They were both caught a few days later in some special raid and deported to Treblinka.
She was a doctor who was nearing forty; her husband was a medic, too, an airforce officer. He went missing during the war; she didn’t know what had happened to him. Later it turned out that he’d died at Katyn. She came to the hospital for her shift on the second day of the war and didn’t leave anymore. She was very lonely. She felt dreadful. A romance sprang up between her and a boy fifteen years younger than her. The lad had fallen ill very suddenly, and she’d taken him into her own bed and by some miracle saved him. She slept in the same bed as him for several days.
She said afterwards that it was the first time in all that loneliness that she had found someone and been with him, and she would always try to be with someone from that moment on.
During the Warsaw Uprising, she found herself alone again. She had a flask with 4 grammes (a colossal dose!) of morphine in it. She drank those 4 grammes of morphine and was already beginning to stagger, when someone came and forced a mug of soapy water down her throat. She vomited and woke up in the middle of the night, fully conscious.
And it was then that a great love arose between her and a boy twenty years her junior. She spent a a few happy months with him from the end of the uprising until November, when she was evacuated from Żoliborz, a joyful, smiling woman willing to help anyone. After the war she went to live in Łodź. One day someone went to visit her. The door was open, and he thought the apartment was empty. As it turned out, though, Madam Doctor was lying under a blanket in the kitchen, with her head wrapped up in the blanket. Perhaps she was asleep; perhaps she was just dozing. Suddenly she sat up and said: “I’m not going to stay here alone anymore.” And that from a person as brave as she was. “I’m frightened, I have to escape from here.”
Nobody knows how it was she got to Australia. She was alone there, too. A great specialist in her field. Then came a ship with Jewish children on it that had been sailing around the Pacific; no country wanted to admit them. It lay in the roadstead, twelve miles from the shore. The inhabitants sailed out to the ship on boats and each took a few of the children with them. My doctor went down to the shore as well. She took two boys and a girl home with her. One of the boys became an architect in Shanghai and the other a professor of shipbuilding, and the girl became an outstandingly qualified lab technician. She fell in love with one of the sons when he grew up, and they spent many happy years together. She once wrote in a letter that although she already knew what had happened to her husband, of whom she had been very fond, it was love that had kept her alive. Love and the warmth of her son, who later became her lover. She was over 90 when she died.

The girl’s mother fell ill. She was left with her twin sister. They were afraid to stay at home alone with their sick mama. A young boy began visiting them, a rickshaw driver. When the mama was feeling very bad, he stayed the night, and she, afraid that something terrible was going to happen, snuggled up to him. She slept with him in her cambric nightdress. She snuggled up against him and fell asleep peacefully at his side. They probably began to love each other. It’s not certain whether they made love, or even if they knew how it’s done; but his presence brought her peace. The mama's health began to improve, and she went out to work. One day there was a raid on Karmelicka Street. When the girl heard about it, she ran home, but the mama was already gone. A huge crowd, a few thousand people, had been driven to the Umschlagplatz . Her friend turned up by chance with his rickshaw. They caught up with the procession and began to search among the crowd of thousands for the mama. They saw her just before the Umschlagplatz. She got off the rickshaw; he remained on the kerb of the pavement. She told him: “I’m afraid our paths must part here, mama can’t make a journey like that by herself.” And she joined her mother in the train wagon. What happened to her sister, nobody knows.  

It was Christmas Eve. Two of our liaison girls lived on Miodowa Street in the building that now houses the Theatre Academy. They returned home at dusk and began to unpack their shopping. They were just taking out the food when someone knocked at the door. It was an older man with a long beard. A Jew who had succeeded half an hour earlier in escaping from the police station where he’d been held. Whether they knew each other already is difficult to say. Perhaps they did and that’s why he'd turned up there. He stayed. Some more girls came by, ostensibly to celebrate Christmas Eve, and four or five remained for the night. They slept on the floor. One of our liaison girls made love to him the whole night, in front of everyone. It seemed perhaps this girl was bisexual, because until then she’d been very close to an older lady doctor, who was caught during a raid on the Aryan side and deported to Auschwitz. And the old Jew with the long, greying beard stayed. He fell in love with our liaison girl, and they lived together until the Warsaw Uprising. Their love was so great that they gave up all attempt at safety measures and simply walked through the city, holding hands. They looked so happy that they were able to walk the streets, holding hands, without feeling any fear. They were parted by the Warsaw Uprising. He said at the time: “I don’t have anyone anymore, I’m all alone and nobody will ever help me out ever again.” He survived four weeks of the uprising sitting on some steps in the Old Town. She worked as a nurse in some hospital in another district. They met in the centre of town, where they spent a week together. Both of them again began t thrive, and their fear left them again.

Translated by Katya Andrusz