THE LITTLE INSURGENTS THEY CALLED US
Vilho, Bill to you, was born an adult on November 13, 1940 at the age of sixteen. He rushes on with his story for whoever you are while hovering at the closed entrance to the Irish Spike and before it escaped from recall again.
It was the day the S.S. sealed our family apartment where we children sang and danced and made our own amusement inside the ghetto under the automatic machine guns in towers that cornered the ten foot walls the ghettos construction company built of brick, concerto wire and cemented glass crowning the tops.
Seuchensperrgebiet.
The area of typhus it was called. Before it became even fewer after the transports, eleven miles of walls formed what the Nazis termed sanitary blockades to quarantine typhus - carried by Jews as a race; three hundred thousand of our race lived seven to a room without running water - transmitted by bugs that inhabit your hair and face. Broadsides pasted on synagogues and buildings across the Generalgovernment depicted us as hawked nosed with bugs crawling out the eyes. Jews and lice one in the same to Aryans; outside the walls was Judenfriae, safe from alien invasion.
At first some commerce took place with them throwing old cabbages from the Aryan side in negotiation for valuables, and surprised us the time a rosary crossed over on the High Holy Days, when Nazi high Kommand scheduled surprise Aktions, the time Jews reviewed the idea that deprivation is only skin deep and to seek forgiveness for wrongs done during the past year or at Passover when we became free from slavery; for that week over the wall, attached to our building, came matzos patted round by hand by babushkas in exchange for all my grandmothers valuable keepsakes, and our parents’ wedding rings of interrupted gold, or a beet root in exchange for a watch and a gold leafed Torah traded to a Catholic boy, a talisman to tempt or please fate, a curiosity, so to speak. An exotic. And later when our ration was one hundred eighty calories each, only gold for bread. The Jewish Council’s police clubbed us from the walls enough times for the S.S. to gun down, some of the hopeless ending life that way, and public hangings, nothing got in. Nothing got out.
Forgive me. That’s not entirely accurate. There were certain places. Our smallness made the walls porous and children into saviors of our mothers and fathers, family members, if we had any left around for the remains of community soup made of turnip water and crusts stolen from the dead who were all too accessible before the wagons gathered them from the streets at dawn. Thus in our smallness, we became the bread winners. Bread baking was forbidden. After all, only a small child could be thrown over the wall or slip under it. I still had a paltry physique but already too big to slip under the wall undetected. another technique for a while was under potatoes in the incoming cart of a Carmelite nun clothed as a vendor. By her side she held a lurching Alsatian in a choke hold at the end of a short rope which she yanked, causing its yelps to cover up the cries of “Maaaaman,” of my Stella and the other five year olds smuggled under the exchange goods of tin cups, underwear, and coats off our backs, through the gates guarded by police outfitted. best they could in belted Gestapo greatcoats, hard brimmed caps and arm bands with the blue Stars of David, later yellow, on field of white custom sewn on and one or two S.S. aiming machine guns for sport. After its excavation by the Home Army, we grappled through a dark tunnel to a bunker under a crypt of medieval merchants. Church people gave children, who made it out, food and medicine to take back, or hid us in the cupboards of the righteous, sometimes even without payment, until reported, caught and shot point blank.
I climbed a ladder fashioned from branches and then with extreme care removed floor boards to enter the crypt. Ten heart pounding foot falls away the vestibule of Church of The Most Blessed Virgin Mary, where operatives of the Zegota, as it was called in Polish, the Council for Aid to Jews to you, issued identification cards and work permits without “J” for Jude.
My mother whose given name was Sarah was an American from the the city of Chicago. Her sirname, Wandowska, was not Jewish as she was Catholic which made me not Jewish by Judaic Law for two thousand years. Jewish belonging follows the mother, you see. But Hitler mandated it in a stroke of a pen to be either side within five generations, which made him Jewish. But no of us claimed him.
My father was a Krol which had been Polish since our conversion by Inquisition half a millennium previous. My documents proved my name, Wilhelm Krol is not a pseudonym. Unusual for a ghetto boy, you understand. By then I was everyone, Aryan, Jew, Pole, even American thus my adequate command of the language of you, the Americans.
Bathed and clothed presentably at the Church, I slipped legally out the Cathedral doors to Leszno Street, even strolled the Aleje Jerozolimskie to stop at a cafe, tip my Polish Army beret to the damsels. Jerusalem Avenues to you, busy thoroughfares open to papered Aryans, provided only erratic checking and transporting to Gestapo headquarters or wanton shootings, major exits crossed by tramway from the west of the city and across by hired boat the luxuriant Vistula River to parts east from which blew intoxicating breezes of escape to where our fate could be related in hopes of rescue by those who's reason was backed by bravery and military might. The English? The Americans?
But before I arrived here to your Montana shores I endured capture and once again escape this time into the Weimarandt, ectera. I hope my my race to recall of such incidents holds your interest, I realizing, as Sarah told her radio audience and me that day - The race to death is mundane.
I returned by that crypt tunnel time and time again. I brought butter and guns to those remaining. And the most important commodity? News from the underground. The little insurgents they called us. Even Stella slipped under the wall gone for days, hauling back meat her own weight
Her memory should be depicted by a statue. It is.
Vilho, Bill to you, was born an adult on November 13, 1940 at the age of sixteen. He rushes on with his story for whoever you are while hovering at the closed entrance to the Irish Spike and before it escaped from recall again.
It was the day the S.S. sealed our family apartment where we children sang and danced and made our own amusement inside the ghetto under the automatic machine guns in towers that cornered the ten foot walls the ghettos construction company built of brick, concerto wire and cemented glass crowning the tops.
Seuchensperrgebiet.
The area of typhus it was called. Before it became even fewer after the transports, eleven miles of walls formed what the Nazis termed sanitary blockades to quarantine typhus - carried by Jews as a race; three hundred thousand of our race lived seven to a room without running water - transmitted by bugs that inhabit your hair and face. Broadsides pasted on synagogues and buildings across the Generalgovernment depicted us as hawked nosed with bugs crawling out the eyes. Jews and lice one in the same to Aryans; outside the walls was Judenfriae, safe from alien invasion.
At first some commerce took place with them throwing old cabbages from the Aryan side in negotiation for valuables, and surprised us the time a rosary crossed over on the High Holy Days, when Nazi high Kommand scheduled surprise Aktions, the time Jews reviewed the idea that deprivation is only skin deep and to seek forgiveness for wrongs done during the past year or at Passover when we became free from slavery; for that week over the wall, attached to our building, came matzos patted round by hand by babushkas in exchange for all my grandmothers valuable keepsakes, and our parents’ wedding rings of interrupted gold, or a beet root in exchange for a watch and a gold leafed Torah traded to a Catholic boy, a talisman to tempt or please fate, a curiosity, so to speak. An exotic. And later when our ration was one hundred eighty calories each, only gold for bread. The Jewish Council’s police clubbed us from the walls enough times for the S.S. to gun down, some of the hopeless ending life that way, and public hangings, nothing got in. Nothing got out.
Forgive me. That’s not entirely accurate. There were certain places. Our smallness made the walls porous and children into saviors of our mothers and fathers, family members, if we had any left around for the remains of community soup made of turnip water and crusts stolen from the dead who were all too accessible before the wagons gathered them from the streets at dawn. Thus in our smallness, we became the bread winners. Bread baking was forbidden. After all, only a small child could be thrown over the wall or slip under it. I still had a paltry physique but already too big to slip under the wall undetected. another technique for a while was under potatoes in the incoming cart of a Carmelite nun clothed as a vendor. By her side she held a lurching Alsatian in a choke hold at the end of a short rope which she yanked, causing its yelps to cover up the cries of “Maaaaman,” of my Stella and the other five year olds smuggled under the exchange goods of tin cups, underwear, and coats off our backs, through the gates guarded by police outfitted. best they could in belted Gestapo greatcoats, hard brimmed caps and arm bands with the blue Stars of David, later yellow, on field of white custom sewn on and one or two S.S. aiming machine guns for sport. After its excavation by the Home Army, we grappled through a dark tunnel to a bunker under a crypt of medieval merchants. Church people gave children, who made it out, food and medicine to take back, or hid us in the cupboards of the righteous, sometimes even without payment, until reported, caught and shot point blank.
I climbed a ladder fashioned from branches and then with extreme care removed floor boards to enter the crypt. Ten heart pounding foot falls away the vestibule of Church of The Most Blessed Virgin Mary, where operatives of the Zegota, as it was called in Polish, the Council for Aid to Jews to you, issued identification cards and work permits without “J” for Jude.
My mother whose given name was Sarah was an American from the the city of Chicago. Her sirname, Wandowska, was not Jewish as she was Catholic which made me not Jewish by Judaic Law for two thousand years. Jewish belonging follows the mother, you see. But Hitler mandated it in a stroke of a pen to be either side within five generations, which made him Jewish. But no of us claimed him.
My father was a Krol which had been Polish since our conversion by Inquisition half a millennium previous. My documents proved my name, Wilhelm Krol is not a pseudonym. Unusual for a ghetto boy, you understand. By then I was everyone, Aryan, Jew, Pole, even American thus my adequate command of the language of you, the Americans.
Bathed and clothed presentably at the Church, I slipped legally out the Cathedral doors to Leszno Street, even strolled the Aleje Jerozolimskie to stop at a cafe, tip my Polish Army beret to the damsels. Jerusalem Avenues to you, busy thoroughfares open to papered Aryans, provided only erratic checking and transporting to Gestapo headquarters or wanton shootings, major exits crossed by tramway from the west of the city and across by hired boat the luxuriant Vistula River to parts east from which blew intoxicating breezes of escape to where our fate could be related in hopes of rescue by those who's reason was backed by bravery and military might. The English? The Americans?
But before I arrived here to your Montana shores I endured capture and once again escape this time into the Weimarandt, ectera. I hope my my race to recall of such incidents holds your interest, I realizing, as Sarah told her radio audience and me that day - The race to death is mundane.
I returned by that crypt tunnel time and time again. I brought butter and guns to those remaining. And the most important commodity? News from the underground. The little insurgents they called us. Even Stella slipped under the wall gone for days, hauling back meat her own weight
Her memory should be depicted by a statue. It is.
