In the Sewers of Lvov Read Online Free PDF Page A

some kind of sanctuary for the children while he, Kuba and his wife were away at work.
    Day after day, Grzymek’s footsteps echoed up and down the corridors. Kristina and Pawel clutched each other in their narrow space, trying to control the urge to cry out. She recalled:
    ‘I will never forget the fear I had, being alone there with my little brother. Sometimes we were on our own all day. We didn’t cry. We weren’t allowed to cry and when we heard something, we hardly even breathed. The fear was unimaginable …’
    In fact the Julag had become riddled with hiding places. Not, by any means, all Chiger’s work. It seemed as though everyone had constructed disguised bunkers and false cavities in the backs of cupboards, under floor-boards or in ceilings. One of the most ingenious had been built in a cellar beneath a kitchen, where a false wall had been constructed providing a space of some three metres by ten, but with no access to it from the cellar. The entrance was through a hole in the ceiling, that is, through the floor of the kitchen above. In fact, through a cast-iron stove. To get into the bunker, the iron top of the stove, the grates and ashes, had to be lifted and slid to one side. Then the fugitives lowered themselves through the body of the stove, through the floor and down a rope into the cavity below. The last one down slid the cast iron top and grates back into place.
    As if Grzymek’s patrols weren’t enough for the Chigers, a few weeks after the March Action, Untersturmführer Gebauer paid a visit to Schwartz und Comp. He was the second-in-command at the Janowska camp and his visit meant only one thing, he needed more labourers. The women were assembled outside, while he marched between them directing them to the left or the right. There had been rumours that the factory would soon be closed down and now Gebauer’s presence seemed to confirm it.
    At the end of the counting, Paulina found herself chosen for the camp, and was marched with about 500 women down the Janowska Road. At the end of the day, Chiger was given the news and with it, small comfort. The women had not been transported permanently, but would return to the Julag at the end of each day and be marched back to the camp in the morning.
    The regime inside the Janowska camp bore no resemblance to the Julag in town. Fritz Gebauer shared responsibility with his superior, Obersturmführer Gustav Wilhaus, for creating that regime. Apparently there was little love lost and much less co-operation between these two men, yet together they had succeeded in creating an establishment that had no rival in eastern Poland. Conditions behind the tall brick and concrete walls were so nightmarish, that the men who had created them acknowledged the hopelessness of the place with their own black humour. Just inside the gates, Gebauer had erected a scaffold from which a number of nooses were slung. Each morning, he suggested to the workers that whenever it became too much for anyone, they had his personal permission to climb the scaffold and put his or her head inside the noose. Many took this option.
    Wilhaus was something of a sportsman. He rode the grounds of his establishment on horseback with a favourite Alsatian at his heels. It was not uncommon for him to be seen on the front porch of his house with a rifle, shooting at people on the parade ground as though they were ducks in a shooting gallery.
    In April the tension was raised higher than usual by stirring news from Warsaw. There were rumours of a revolt in the ghetto. On 19 April 1943, underground elements in the Warsaw ghetto, armed with rifles and light machine-guns, began firing upon German guards. Having raised the Polish Flag and the Jewish Star of David on the roof of the tallest building in the ghetto, the declaration of defiance was made. Rumours and then rumours of rumours filtered down through the various partisan groups at bay in the countryside about the heroic uprising in Warsaw. Soon a band