How did a ‘girl in the green sweater’ survive the sewers?

The green sweater that Kristine Keren wore as a child still exists, and like its former owner herself, has become an icon, both of unimaginable tragedy and inconceivable resilience.

The sweater has become part of the title of a book, The Girl in the Green Sweater, not to mention an exhibit in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

And the woman who once wore that sweater — and who as a young girl not only survived the Holocaust but spent 14 months hiding from the Nazis with her family and others in a horrific sewer beneath the streets of Lvov, Ukraine — is an infinitely more powerful icon than a mute garment.

For Keren — who was named Krystyna Chiger in her childhood — has decided no longer to be mute.

With the assistance of a professional writer, she has told the terrifying, tragic and amazing details of her family’s survival — in the book mentioned above — and testified to those events in a television documentary.

Last week, in Denver, she did the same, in a compelling program entitled “Underground Alliances: Survival and Redemption in the Sewers of Lvov,” the central component of Governor Bill Ritter’s Holocaust Remembrance Program, sponsored by the Mountain States ADL.

Close-up and in person, Keren doesn’t seem an icon.

She is soft-spoken and pleasant, with a gentle sense of humor and a lilting Slavic accent. She seems exactly what she is — a wife, mother and grandmother; a retired dentist from Europe who spent the postwar years first in Israel and then in New York.

In this calm and composed person, one sees no outward evidence of the titanic struggles of her youthful years, of the perils and horrors faced, endured and ultimately overcome, of the scars these experiences must have left behind.

Those are only manifest in the words she speaks.

The day before coming to Denver, she notes, the president of Iran once again called for the elimination of the State of Israel.

The parallel was not lost on this Holocaust survivor.

“It’s not over,” she says simply. “This was one of the reasons that I agreed to come and talk. I see what’s going on in the world. If the new generation does not know about what happened in the past, the future will be very grim.”

The story of Keren’s survival in the sewers — and that of her father Ignacy, mother Paulina, brother Pawel and a handful of other Jews — is more powerful than any novel or film. It is a story of incredible drama, sadness, resilience and ultimate triumph, not to mention the realities of darkness, stench, drowning, rats, lice, cold and the constant threat of discovery.

It is also the story of the compassion and courage of a few gentiles who supported those in the subterranean hiding place, one of whom, a Lvov sewer worker and former convicted thief named Leopold Socha, is arguably the central figure in the book.

Although the central drama in Keren’s story is the time spent hiding in the sewers, the earlier stages, in which the family were uprooted from their home and forced into Lvov’s crowded and desperate ghetto, represented even greater danger, she says. In the ghetto, the threat of death was much more tangible and considerably closer.

Keren’s father was a clever and able carpenter. In their apartment, he devised hiding places for his children, instructing them to remain there during the day, when both parents had to be gone.

“Those were the most terrifying times,” Keren says, “because I was alone then, with my brother. I didn’t have my parents. And I didn’t know if they would come back, because they could be shot on the street.”

Little Krystyna, however, was no less clever and able than her father.

“I understood everything,” she says. “Everything. I had instincts like an animal. I knew when to run and when to hide. And not only this — I took care of my brother. He was three years old.”

Only six years old herself, she learned to recognize the unique sound of German boots on the pavement outside the building, and was able to respond quickly. In one instance, she improvised as German soldiers began searching the home.

“I took my brother and put him in a suitcase — pushed it under the bed. And I was hiding in the corner before my mother’s long robe, making sure that my feet weren’t sticking out. And after they came, I was waiting a little bit, to see if they would come back, but then I ran to open the suitcase because I was afraid that he would suffocate.”

The child did all this on her own, without any rehearsal or advance instruction from her parents.

She takes no credit for the intelligence or skill of the achievement. “Everybody was fighting to stay alive,” she says simply.

She still recalls, by the way, that distinct sound of German boots. It is one of the memories of those days that haunts her to this day.

“This is why I can’t go see movies when I see the Germans walking,” she says. “Immediately, I recognize it.”

Later, in the sewers, survival depended on many things. Would people slip off the edge into the charging river and drown? Would their helpers aboveground arrive with food? Would they keep the secret? Would the Germans stumble onto the hiding place?

And would the Jews themselves stay sane in such an environment?

Not all of them did, as The Girl in the Green Sweater describes. Some simply couldn’t stand it and sought to escape via the manhole covers. To Keren’s knowledge, only one such escapee managed to survive without being shot by Germans.

“It was very difficult,” she says of the challenge of keeping up spirits in such a place. “But I was lucky that I was with my parents. My father and mother always gave me hope.

“In the sewers, my father was teaching me how to write, how to read, math, so that I would be ready to go to school when we left. He projected already that I would go to school and this gave me some strength to go through this. I adjusted to the environment — the rats, the darkness.

“Besides, my father tried to keep us all civilized. He wrote poems and satire. He made like a theater. We were playing our own roles and laughing at each other. No matter how bad it was, we were always laughing. I think a sense of humor is very important to keep you in difficult circumstances.

“My mother was a very strong person too. She was the support for my father. Whatever he had to do, he would always ask her. There’s an old Jewish saying that in the family, the father is the head and the mother is the neck.”

After about a year in the sewers, however, the girl was finally overcome with depression.

“I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” Keren says. “I didn’t even want to talk to my mother and father. They were trying to talk to me and I was unresponsive.”

The worried parents sent their daughter to Socha, their Polish helper from the world above. Socha’s response to the situation is one of the most touching and revealing parts of Keren’s story.

“Socha said, ‘Come with me.’ And we crawled together through the pipes to a space where there was an opening and I could see the daylight. And he picked me up and said, ‘Breathe the fresh air. Soon you will be there, and you will play there. You need to be strong right now, but you will be there.’ He took me back and I changed. It made a difference.”

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In Keren’s written account, Leopold Socha becomes no less an icon than Keren herself.

He was also a profound enigma, she says.

Despite the fact that he had spent his earlier years as a thief — he once admitted, in fact, to having robbed the store of Krystyna’s own aunt before the war — he was a “devoted Christian” and ultimately proved to be her family’s “guardian angel.”

During the first months of the family’s period of hiding, Socha charged the family for the rescue work he and his assistants were performing. When the family’s cash and jewelry ran out, however, Socha surprised them.

He told the family that he had saved all the money they had already paid. He returned the money to Keren’s father, telling him to continue paying off his two accomplices, who were less likely to take the risk without payment. Thus, a charade of regular payoffs continued.

“We were always talking amongst ourselves about Socha, what motivated him to do it,” Keren reflects. “He was a thief, a criminal who was sent to prison a few times, until he found a job as a sewer worker. At the beginning, I think what motivated him was money. And it was a lot of money.”

Keren believes that Socha, who grew up as an orphan, eventually grew personally fond of her family. He once told the girl that when he first saw Keren’s mother embracing her two children — he called them “the hen and her chicks” — he became emotionally attached.

“It was something that moved him. He was a very good man and it was only the situation that brought him to be a thief. He was also very religious and I think that he was looking for something like redemption; that he was doing something to pay for what he had done.

“He became so close with us. He became part of the family. At the beginning, he would come for 15 minutes, maybe half an hour, only to give us supplies. But then he stayed with us and talked to us and told us what was happening on the outside.”

When Keren speaks of the accident in which Socha was killed by a Russian army truck — which came so shortly after her family’s liberation — her eyes still grow misty with tears.

Keren never kept the story of her survival from her own children and grandchildren. She told it freely to them, and in time they were the ones who encouraged her to take the story to a broader audience.

“My family were always asking — my sons, my grandsons. They were very interested. They wanted to know. My son was always saying, ‘write it down, write it down.’ It pushed me. I don’t know how many years I have in front of me. And I wanted to commemorate my parents, and Socha, and I wanted the story to be told for the young people, for the future generation.”

She first spoke publicly about the sewers in Lvov in the aptly-named 1989 BBC documentary “Light in the Dark,” which included interviews with others who had survived alongside Keren.

Several years later, her son introduced her to a neighbor, Daniel Paisner, a successful ghostwriter who had helped others, both famous and obscure, compose their autobiographies.

Buttressed by Paisner’s skills, Keren drew upon her own memories and a memoir her father had written years ago to put the whole story together in The Girl in the Green Dress.

Paisner, who accompanied Keren on recent visit to Denver, told the IJN why he found her story so compelling.

“I’m a professional writer and I do a lot of work helping people write their stories. In many cases, they’re well-known — actors, athletes, politicians, business leaders. And in other cases — the more interesting cases, as far as I’m concerned — they’re less well-known. They’re ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances.”

Not infrequently, Paisner gets suggestions about potential subjects for his books.

“Because that’s what I do for a living,” he says, “I do get those taps on the shoulder a lot. Most of these stories should remain at the family dinner table and not between hardcovers. But with Kristine, I knew immediately that there was a story there.”

Not only did he find the story profoundly compelling, he adds, but one which he thought others should hear.  He says he was proud to be able to help her share it.

“When you ask why she sat on that story for 60-plus years, it’s because it’s so difficult emotionally to go through that territory again, “ he says. “I also think it’s difficult and intimidating to think, ‘where to start, how do I do this.’ There are all these memories out there, not just Holocaust survivors but people who have lived interesting lives, and they have no way to download that and for people to share the experience.”

Keren agrees that the process of raking over her own memories — especially of reading her father’s memoir — was painful indeed.

“Emotionally, it was very difficult. Sometimes I had to stop. I was crying. But Dan was very patient.”

Still, although it was challenging, Keren says the process of writing down the story of her survival in Lvov was really not more difficult than living her day-to-day life.

“The memories are always with me,” she says, adding that she has nightmares about those events even to this day. “Anything can trigger a flashback.”

No less challenging, Keren says, is figuring out how to feel about those who did such terrible things to the Jewish people.

“For years after the war I really hated Germans and Ukrainians and some Poles,” she says quietly.

“But time goes forward and the new generation is coming. Right now you have almost the third generation. I don’t want to blame them for the faults and atrocities of their ancestors.

“The thing that I recognize in Germany now is that they admit what they did. But other countries, like Poland and Ukraine, they never admit this. They always say that they were suffering too. This is what bothers me.”

Three years ago, Keren returned to Lvov for the first time, but the visit was a short one and she didn’t have enough time to go out and explore her hometown.

Last November, she was invited by the New York University Department of Jewish History to accompany a group of 12 female students — only one of whom was Jewish — on a trip to Lvov.

“I went from place to place and showed them where I was born, where I lived,” she says.

“In the ghetto I even found the place — right now only a plaque exists — where my parents got married in the temple.

“My home is still standing. The apartment is still there. I rang the bell, I wanted to go in, but nobody was there. The courtyard where I played when I was little is still there.”

She also found an ordinary manhole, located in a courtyard, through which, more than 60 years earlier, Keren and her family had emerged at last from the sewers below, having survived the worst that humanity can offer.

Lvov once had a thriving community of 150,000 Jewish people. Of that community, Keren says, her own family was the only one to survive intact.

And of that family, she is the last still living.

She has appeared on film, and written in a book, and speaks before large audiences — all despite her self-confessed shy and retiring nature — because of a responsibility which she feels her survival places upon her shoulders.

“I feel that I am obligated to the memory of my parents,” she says quietly, “and to the memory of those six million.”

Read also Rabbi Hillel Goldberg’s review of the The Girl in the Green Sweater.