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The girl in the green sweater lived in the sewers of Lvov, Poland, for 14 months. For 12 months, she lived with the thousands of rats, with the raw sewage, the mold and dankness and cold, underneath the Bernardynski church, in the sewer. For two months before that she lived in a different sewer, underneath a different church, Maria Sniezna, “Our Lady of the Snow,” with the dangerous Peltrew River always close. The river carried away the sewage flowing through the pipes surrounding the girl’s hiding places.
She was seven years old.
She lived there with her mother and her father and her brother Pawel. The four of them were the only intact family to survive the Nazi Holocaust in the city of Lvov, which, before the Nazis, had 150,000 Jews. Exactly one family survived from all those people. The family survived the initial Soviet occupation of Lvov, the subsequent German occupation, the ever constricting ghetto to which the Germans then consigned them, the final liquidation of the ghetto, then 14 months of confinement in the sewers. Amidst it all, ethnic Ukrainians distinguished themselves for hostility and brutality, even in the sewer itself — in “The Palace,” as the survivors called their L-shaped chamber.
Bad becomes good when something else becomes worse. It was bad when the Soviets robbed the populace of its freedom of movement — until the Germans occupied the city and entered the apartment of the girl with the green sweater and helped themselves to the belongings there. Everything from dishes to the piano became free for the occupiers. Gradually, her family’s apartment was stripped bare. Just like that: people came, people took. It was bad. Until it became worse, when the family of the girl with the green sweater was forced from its apartment into the ghetto, from the many rooms of the apartment at Kopernika 12 to a single room with several families. This was bad. Until it became worse, when the “actions,” the Nazi shootings and deportations, began. They, too, were bad, until it became worse, when the ghetto was shrunk, the freedom of movement drastically reduced, the availability of food and water reduced to the barest subsistence. That, too, was bad, until the final liquidation, when the only choice seemed to be escape to the sewers.
It was an escape planned well in advance by the father of the girl in the green sweater, by Ignacy Chiger. If ever there were a hero of the Holocaust, it was he, who always seemed one step ahead of the Nazis, who always saw the next step coming and found a way to prepare for it, who was good with his hands and quick with his tongue; who knew how to construct a false wall in the back of a closet and a crawl space beneath a window ledge; who knew how to build an unseen bunker, who knew how and where to dig through many feet of concrete to locate an entrance to the sewers; who, above all, was not going to be separated from his wife, Paulina, and his two children, seven-year-old Krystyna and four-year-old son Pawel.
Miraculous as it was, the survival of this one intact family was a cursed attenuation, as one by one Ignacy and Paulina and daughter and son watched their grandparents and cousins and siblings and in-laws shot or drowned or deported.
Their spirit was not broken.
That which could break the Chigers’ spirit was bad, until it got worse. Living with the rats, hunted like animals, still, some 21 people initially found themselves safe in the sewer together. Until Paulina’s father got separated and presumably drowned, like so many others, in the Peltrew River, only a single slip away from the small ledge of the sewer pipe; in any case, never heard from again. Still, the nuclear family of the Chiger’s included Paulina’s brother-in-law, Kuba, who was also resourceful, until he was drowned in a sewer pipe that suddenly flooded, leaving the Chigers diminished and Ignacy deeply guilt-ridden. He had allowed Kuba to take his turn fetching the fresh water that day. (The water, gathered in drops, leaked through cracks underneath Lvov’s Neptune Fountain.) Still, the Chigers remained intact — until their lives were threatened by some of their underground “comrades,” Jews who resented the two Chiger children, as they required additional care.
Enter Leopold Socha.
If ever there were a gentile hero of the Holocaust, it was Leopold Socha. As Ignacy Chiger and his co-escapees initially broke through the concrete in their ghetto hideaway to reach the sewers, Socha, a Lvov municipal sewer worker, happened to be there. He could have turned in the Jews on the spot, having discovered their escape plan. He looked at Paulina with her “two chicks,” as he called them — Krystyna in her green sweater, knitted by her father’s mother, and her primary protection throughout 14 months in the sewers, and her little brother Pawel — and Socha looked at all of the Jews gathered there. He decided, on the spot. He would guide them to the sewers and bring them daily bread, in exchange for a fee. He would need money to buy food to sustain 21 people daily; he would need money to pay two co-workers whose help would be indispensable, and he wanted recompense for endangering these three families. Ignacy Chiger, very resourceful, had saved many zlotys, jewels and other valuables for just such an occasion; and the others committed to pay, too.
Enter Kowalow.
He was a co-savior of Socha, whose principal job was to stand guard above. Nazis were always on the lookout for evidence of Jews — such as voices coming from the sewers below, or Jews who exited via a manhole (they were shot). Polish sewer workers were always at work, descending into the sewers. Kowalow knew the sewers like the back of his hand. He stood guard, knew how to move around the Jews underneath and managed to wave away other sewer workers. At one point, when the Russians were closing in on Lvov and the Germans were mining the area around their headquarters, the Germans were digging up the street directly above the Chigers’ underground hideaway. Kowalow confidently strode up to the Nazis, told then that not only were there sewers below, but also gas lines. If they kept digging, they would blow themselves up. He was persuasive; he stopped the Germans.
Socha never stopped. Two kilometers per day, each way, he crawled through the raw sewage to bring food to “his” Jews, as he later proudly called them.
Leopold Socha and his faithful assistant, Wroblewski, kept alive the girl in the green sweater, her mother, her father, her brother, and many others underneath the Bernardynski church — kept them alive seven days a week, crawling through the sewage, two kilometers each way, to bring food.
And not only food.