On the day before the Nazis permanently locked down the Lesko concentration camp, preparatory to shipping its last inhabitants out for extermination in nearby Belzec, Wallach and her companions left the camp for the last time to meet Zwonarz, who sealed them into their living grave. Dependent on Zwonarz for their very survival now, they got by on the few scraps of food and what little water he could pilfer for them each day. Afraid to let the secret out, he never told his wife or anyone else of their presence.
As the war raged above them and the clothes rotted off their bodies from the damp underground conditions; as they shared their living space with the mice and insects that crawled endlessly across their flesh; as they lived and slept in their tomb-like sanctuary each day and came alive nightly when no one else was in the building (relying on the dim light provided by their meager bulb), they struggled to hang onto life, hunkered down on their knees and barely speaking to one another for fear of giving there presence away to the Polish workers who went in and out above them almost daily.
Zwonarz saved their lives at great risk to his own. And his small network of family and friends saved the life of little Rena, Jafa’s daughter, deep in the forest and far from the sight of the ever present Gestapo. Zwonarz also worked with the Polish underground to save others of the Wallach family, all the while secretly sabotaging Nazi equipment he was being employed to maintain.
When the Soviets finally fought their way back into Poland, as the Nazi lines collapsed before the onslaught of the Red Army and as the daily Soviet artillery bombardments began to undermine the foundations of the house in which Jafa Wallach and her family they were hidden, their cave walls began to collapse around them. Wallach and her husband, along with two brothers and a sister whom Zwonarz had brought to them near the end of their ordeal, emerged from their hole emaciated and jaundiced, bodies shrunken, limbs weakened and atrophied. But they had survived.
Though most of their family members perished at Belzec and other death camps, the Wallachs and the Manaster siblings lived to reclaim the child who had also miraculously survived their joint nightmare.
That child, Rena Wallach Bernstein, now a mature woman, still recalls the life of abandonment she led deep in the nearby forest in the care of a Polish forest watchman, a relative of Zwonarz who, fearing discovery by the Nazis and the consequent loss of his own life, at least once had to wrestle with himself over whether to kill her. The manuscript, as I edited it, had me in its grip. More than once tears filled my eyes and my throat caught. I was barely able to believe, and yet unable to disbelieve, the conditions and events these people had endured.
Each day I arose from my desk physically drained, thinking of the horrors of cowering there for nearly two years under the earth, unable to lift one’s head or breathe unfetid air or see the sun’s light. When at last I finished the work, I just slumped back in my chair, staring, thinking of what I’d read, of those who had survived and those who hadn’t, still seeing the small ragged clusters of people hobbling home from Leskow amidst the streaming refugees and the Soviet troops on the long dirt road that led out of the city . . . hunched over and leaning on their canes and other makeshift supports, leaving forever that place in which they’d lived their nightmare.
