To my mother, Robin Rozines
Text copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Roy
Jacket photo © 2006 by George C. Beresford/Getty Images
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Marshall Cavendish Corporation
99 White Plains Road
Tarrytown, NY 10591
www.marshallcavendish.us
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roy, Jennifer Rozines, 1967-
Yellow star / by Jennifer Roy.
p. cm.
Summary: From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland’s Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7614-5277-5
ISBN-10: 0-7614-5277-X
1. Jews—Persecutions—Poland—Lódz—Juvenile fiction. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Juvenile fiction. [1. Jews—Poland—Fiction. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Fiction. 3. Family life—Poland—Fiction. 4. Poland—History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R812185Yel 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2005050788
Book design by Alex Ferrari
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my twin sister, Julia DeVillers (an amazing author), and my sister Amy Rozines. Also, thank you to my editor, Margery Cuyler, and to Michelle Bisson.
This book would not have existed if it weren’t for Sylvia Perlmutter Rozines and her courageous testimony. This work also honors the memory of Samuel Rozines, David Rozines, Rachel Rozines, and Isaac and Dora Perlmutter.
Many thanks to Gregory Rozines, Harriet Diller, Gwen Rudnick, Gail Aldous, Karen Hesse, Jane Yolen, Sharon Aibel, and Quinn and Jack DeVillers.
Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my husband, Gregory, and son, Adam, for bringing me so much joy.
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
Part One
FALL 1939
FEBRUARY 1940
SUMMER 1940
FALL 1940
WINTER 1940
Part Two
SPRING 1941
SUMMER 1941
FALL 1941
WINTER 1941
Part Three
WINTER 1942
SUMMER 1942
Part Four
WINTER 1942–SPRING 1944
Part Five
SUMMER 1944
LATE FALL–WINTER 1944
WINTER 1945
Author’s Note
Time Line
Prologue
“In 1939, the Germans invaded the town of Lodz, Poland. They forced all of the Jewish people to live in a small part of the city called a ghetto. They built a barbed-wire fence around it and posted Nazi guards to keep everyone inside it. Two hundred and seventy thousand people lived in the Lodz ghetto.
“In 1945, the war ended. The Germans surrendered, and the ghetto was liberated. Out of more than a quarter of a million people, only about 800 walked out of the ghetto. Of those who survived, only twelve were children.
“I was one of the twelve.”
—Excerpt from interview with Sylvia Perlmutter, March 2003
Introduction
This is the true story of Syvia, now called Sylvia, Perlmutter. When World War II began, she was four and a half years old. When it ended, she was ten.
For more than fifty years after the war, Syvia, like many Holocaust survivors, did not talk about her experiences.
But as she grew older, it was time. Time to remember. Time to share. Memories were coming back to her in dreams. Details popped into her head during the day. Syvia’s story was bursting to the surface, demanding to be told.
So she told it to me, her niece.
For the first time, I heard a survivor’s story from start to finish.
When I learned that my aunt, now called Sylvia, was one of the twelve children who survived the Lodz ghetto, I was stunned. How come we didn’t know this about her?
I asked my aunt to tell me a little about it. And I asked if it would be all right if I tape-recorded her. She agreed. So over the telephone, long-distance from her apartment in Maryland to my house in upstate New York, Sylvia talked. The more she spoke, the more she remembered. That got me thinking.
I was a published author, and I wondered if I could narrate her story. But was I the right person to write it? I have always been afraid of anything relating to the Holocaust. As a Jewish child I grew up aware of it, because every year in Hebrew school I saw films of Holocaust atrocities. Piles of dead children’s shoes, mass graves of bones, skeletal survivors being liberated. But the teachers never explained these in a historical context so that we could understand it. No Holocaust curriculum or discussions back then. Just images of one of the worst periods in modern history. The murder of 6 million Jews.
As an American Jewish girl, I grew up knowing that the world was not always a safe place, that people could turn on you, even in a civilized society. The Holocaust was something huge and unimaginable. Terrifying and traumatic. But it was also something nobody talked about. Ask a Holocaust survivor a question about it, and he or she is likely to change the subject. When I was growing up in the suburbs of upstate New York, my family talked about everything but the war. The survivors’ motto was “Never forget!” But the survivors I knew didn’t tell me what to remember. Even my dad.
My father, Sam, lived through the Holocaust. Along with his mother, sister, and three brothers, he narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp in Poland. My grandfather, my father’s father, was separated from his family and killed in the Black Forest massacres in Germany. The remaining members of the family fled to a refugee camp in Siberia. My dad spent his childhood in that camp, struggling to survive until the war ended. My father rarely discussed it. When he died, his story was lost.
Aunt Sylvia was my father’s brother’s wife. It seemed an honor to listen to her, to be trusted as the guardian of her memories. I vowed to do her story justice.
And then…I ran into trouble. First I tried to write the story as a straight nonfiction account. Too dry. Next, I rewrote it in the third person narrative. But that didn’t quite work, either. Frustrated, I went back to the tapes and listened again to my aunt’s lilting, European-accented voice. Suddenly, the voices of all my Jewish relatives came flooding back to me. American English tinged with Yiddish and Polish, with anxiety and resilience. The voices of my grandma, my uncles, my dad. All now deceased. And that’s when I knew that I would write my aunt’s story in the first person, as if she were telling the story herself.
This book is written for all my relatives—for my grandmother, Rachel, who left Siberia after the war. She split up her children—sending the oldest to the new Jewish homeland, Israel. She took the other three to America, settling in upstate New York. The baby of their family was Sam, my father. The next youngest was Nathan. Then came David, who fell in love with and married Sylvia Perlmutter. My aunt Sylvia, known when she was younger as Syvia. One of the twelve surviving children of the Lodz ghetto. When my aunt recounted her childhood to me, she spoke as if looking through a child’s eyes. She made her experiences feel real, immediate, urgent. In the poetry of a survivor’s words, this is Syvia’s story.
Part One
Before the Second World War, 233,000 Jews lived in the city of Lodz, Poland. They made up one-third of the city’s total population and were the second largest Jewish
community in Poland.
Many of the Jewish people in Lodz were educated professionals. They were businesspeople, schoolteachers, scientists, and artists. Parents raised their children to be productive citizens.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Adolf Hitler had risen to power. Hitler believed that certain people he called Aryans were superior to others of “inferior” races. Although Judaism is a religion, not a race, Hitler claimed that Jewishness was in a person’s blood. His plan to create a “master race” did not include Jews.
On September 1, 1939, the German Nazis invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. The Nazis prepared to isolate Poland’s Jews in designated areas called ghettos. One of the ghettos was Lodz. It had 31,721 apartments—most with just one room and no running water. In the spring, 160,000 Jewish men, women, and children walked into the Lodz ghetto. On May 1, 1940, the ghetto was sealed off by a barbed-wire fence. The Jews were isolated from the rest of Poland and cut off from the outside world.
FALL 1939
How It Begins
I am four and a half years old, going on five,
hiding in my special place behind the armchair in
the parlor,
brushing my doll’s hair,
listening.
The worry of grown-ups fills the air,
mingling with the lemony smell of the just-baked
cake cooling on the serving platter.
Clink, clink, Mother’s teacup trembles on its saucer.
“Must we go, Isaac?” she says to my father, who has
come home from work
unexpectedly,
interrupting the weekly tea.
“We must leave Lodz right away,” Papa says. “This
city is unsafe for Jews.”
Stroke, stroke, my hand keeps brushing
my doll’s hair.
My mind freezes
on one word—
Jews.
Jews.
We are Jews.
I am Jewish.
We observe the Jewish holidays
and keep kosher,
but that is all I know.
What does it matter that we are Jews?
I whisper the question into my doll’s ear. She just stares back at me.
Questions
I do not ask Mother or Papa until later,
after the aunts leave,
the lemon cake untouched.
I am too shy to speak in front of visitors,
even the aunts
who pinch my cheeks
and give me hair bows for my braids.
My aunts are Jewish, my uncles and cousins, too.
Is my doll Jewish?
No one responds to my questions.
They are too busy putting things into suitcases—
forks, knives, cups,
the photo of my parents on their wedding day,
items of clothing,
some for me and some for my older sister, Dora.
“Hush, Syvia,” Mother tells me
when I ask more questions,
so I go back to my hiding place
behind the armchair…
and wait.
The Journey
It is midnight, but
no one in my family
is sleeping.
We are joggling up and down,
side to side,
traveling to Warsaw
under cover of darkness and forest
in the back of a buggy
pulled by a horse.
Even huddled near me, Mother,
Dora, Aunt Sara, and my two little cousins
cannot keep me warm.
My fingers are icy sticks.
I’m afraid they will snap
like the twigs that are
crackling into pieces under the wagon wheels.
When I say War-Saw,
two clouds of cold air puff from my mouth.
My father and Uncle Shmuel sit up front
and take turns driving.
The trip is long.
When we arrive in Warsaw,
for a couple of days
we search for a place to live.
No one will rent to us.
Sorry, no jobs.
It is wartime.
We are Jews.
We return to our home in Lodz.
The trip back
seems even colder.
The Star of David
Orange
is the color of my coat
with matching muffler
that I got as a present
before the war.
Dora got the same set,
only larger and in blue.
Yellow
is the color of
the felt six-pointed star
that is sewn onto my coat.
It is the law
that all Jews have to wear the
Star of David
when they leave their house,
or else be arrested.
I wish I could
rip the star off
(carefully, stitch by stitch, so as not to ruin
my lovely coat),
because yellow is meant to be
a happy color,
not the color of
hate.
Ghetto
The Nazis closed down
a small section of the city.
They said it is swarming
with infectious disease,
but still,
they ordered all Jews of Lodz
to leave their homes
immediately
and move into that space.
It is called a ghetto.
All the Jews?
That must be more than one hundred!
(One hundred is the largest number I know.)
Papa corrects me.
“Over one hundred thousand people,
maybe twice that.”
The Rest of Poland
There are many more people
in Poland
who are not Jews.
They are staying in their homes.
That doesn’t seem fair.
Dora says they were our neighbors,
but they aren’t our friends anymore.
Many of the Polish people have been
saying mean things and
beating and tormenting Jews.
“They hate us,” says Dora.
“They are happy we are leaving.”
FEBRUARY 1940
Relocation
I am walking
into the ghetto.
My sister holds my hand
so that I don’t
get lost
or trampled
by the crowd of people
wearing yellow stars,
carrying possessions,
moving
into the ghetto.
New Home
The first time
we enter the small apartment
on the second floor,
we look around the two rooms.
Mother raises an eyebrow and frowns.
Papa shrugs.
“Nu,” he says,
“what can we do but make the best of it?”
My sister says,
“Our real home is much nicer.”
I want to know where the toilet is.
“Outside the apartment building,
in the courtyard,” says Papa.
We will have to share it with all the other families.
The Toilet
The bathroom is tiny.
There are no windows.
I’m careful to lock the door
behind me.
I peel off my mittens,
my coat,
my layers—
I have to go so badly!
I sit on the toilet just in time.
It is so dark in here.
I feel so alone.
What if I can’t get out?
What if I’m trapped in this toilet, and no
body hears me?
At home they would hear me and rescue me,
but here it is different.
Why does everything have to be
different now? Why won’t they let us go home?
I finish up and push open the door,
holding my breath.
It opens.
I exhale with relief and walk back
into the building,
through the hallway,
to our new life.
Relatives
Papa’s and Mother’s parents, my grandparents,
are dead,
but I have many aunts and uncles.
Mother’s sisters—Sara and Rose and Malka.
Her brothers—Label and Herschel.
They are all living in the ghetto now
with my cousins.
Papa’s brother Haskel and his half sisters—
Edit and Esther and Sura—
are in the ghetto, too, with their children.
Papa’s brother Luzer lives in Russia
and his half brother, Joseph, lives in Paris, France.
I have many cousins, too.
Everybody is very busy now
or far away
so I don’t see my relatives much.
But it is good to belong to a large family,
even when we can’t be together.
The Flour Man
In the ghetto
Papa has a job
delivering flour
to stores and bakeries.
Of course, now,
most of the baked goods
go to the Germans,
since our rations
allow only brown bread.
Before the war, Papa worked as a salesman.
He worked hard
and made a good living.
We were not rich.
“Comfortable,” Mother called our family.
My parents dressed up
and went out to the theater and to movies.
Now when Papa arrives home from work,
he and Mother don’t go anywhere.
Papa is very, very tired.
I sit on his lap and comb his hair.
I kiss his flour-dusted face
and taste his sweetness,
imagining cookies and pastries.
Then Mother gives Papa a
cloth so he can wash up
for dinner.
Plain round bread again.
Women’s Work
Mother and Dora
work in a factory
that makes ladies’ underwear.
Dora says Polish women outside the ghetto
must eat very well,
because some of the underwear