Claiming My Place by Planaria Price

Author:Planaria Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

The Beginning of the End

One way or another—I will tell you quite openly—we must finish off the Jews.

—Hans Frank (1900–1946), governor of occupied Poland, December 16, 1941

MAY–AUGUST 1942

They sealed the Piotrków ghetto tight last month. What did it matter to us? What more could they do? Before, we could put on those hated blue-and-white armbands and go out before the curfew. Now we are animals trapped in our cage.

We kept hearing more and more horror stories about Jews being taken off to be systematically killed—not just men but women and children, old people. We heard that the Jews were put in trucks or trains or marched, shot in forests, or put in work camps and concentration camps where thousands died from illness and exhaustion. True, we had seen the cruelty of the Nazis from that very first day in September 1939: the blood flowing in our streets, the humiliation, the beards cruelly torn off the faces of the old Hasids, the vicious dogs terrifying the children, but that was just a few madmen. Some soldiers are always brutal. We couldn’t believe that the whole country of Germany—a culture that gave the world Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, Goethe and Heine and Schiller, a culture of brilliance and elegance—could methodically be planning the final extermination of the Jews. It just could not be true. It had to be hysterical rumors of war.

Many years before the war, Heniek and I had read parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was frightening and disturbing, but mostly we thought it was rambling and boring. We had wanted to understand who this chancellor of Germany was. He published his book in 1925, raging about “the Jewish peril.” We understood that Hitler viewed the Germans, the Aryans, as Übermenschen, supermen, and we Jews were as low as the Germans were high. Hitler said that Jews were parasites and maggots and bloodsuckers and monsters and filthy and that we Jews were conspiring to keep the Aryans from ruling the world. At the end of Mein Kampf Hitler suggested that twelve to fifteen thousand Jews should have been gassed during World War I instead of the German soldiers.

We saw what horrors Hitler created in Germany in the 1930s, especially the horror of Kristallnacht. And yet, with all the venom and anti-Semitism and racism and hatred and murder and destruction, we had heard it all before. The possibility that Hitler planned to exterminate all the Jews never entered our minds. We had survived pogroms before and we could survive them again.

By December 1941 America had finally entered the war and we knew that, in the end, America would win. We simply needed to hold on, be patient, and wait it out.

* * *

Now Uncle Josef comes to live with us. He is afraid the authorities will come after him at his home because of the rumors that his son, Janek, has escaped the ghetto. This is true. He tells us that Janek has been living as a gentile in Warsaw, where he has Polish connections and some money.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.