Free The Girl in the Green Sweater by Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner

mother’s name. I do not know where he learned this technique or how exactly he managed it. Years later, I watched the movie
The Great Escape,
and there was a scene where the British prisoners made a forgery usinga similar method, and I thought about my father and these men in our apartment.
    The August action was particularly devastating. It lasted for ten days, from August 12, 1942, until August 22. The Germans liquidated over forty thousand Jews during this time, including most of my father’s family and most of my mother’s family. Add to that the tens of thousands who were killed or captured in previous actions and the incidental killings between actions. The Jewish population of Lvov was decimated, and so particularly was our family. After this August action, we had only one another. My father’s father managed to survive, and my stepgrandmother, and so did my uncle Kuba, who had been married to my father’s sister Ceska, Inka’s mother. Also, my mother’s father was still alive at this point. But everyone else—aunts, uncles, cousins—was gone. My father wrote after the war that in all of Lvov only three Jewish families had survived intact. Only three! Ours would be one of them. But this was only nuclear families.
    My father woke up early on the morning the August action began, and he noticed how unusually quiet everything was. The streets were empty. He was curious and wanted to see what was going on, so he went outside and moved carefully among the buildings until he reached the hospital on Zamarstynowska Street. There he saw that all of the Jewish patients had been emptied out onto the street. There were lorries stationed out front, and the patients were being loaded onto the open carts like cattle. Some could not even walk. My father described this for us when he returned. He told us that the German soldiers were standing to the side with guns, ready to shoot any of the patients who complained or tried to escape. The patients were then taken to the Piaski sand pits and emptied onto the ground, where they were promptly shot by German soldiers.
    On August 22, the last night of the action, we were visited by my father’s uncle. He had been living just outside the city, but he had come to see who in his family had survived. Like my father, he was very careful moving about the streets. He moved only at night. My parents were asleep when he arrived. I woke when I heard their voices. I remember that my mother made tea for my father’s uncle and that he sat with my parents at our table, talking. He said to my father that everyone else in their family had been killed or captured. My father was very saddened by this, but he knew as much. He could see the desolation and the killing outside our window. Then my father’s uncle told my parents about some money and valuables he had saved. He told my father where it was hidden and drew him a map. He said that since no one else in the family had survived, he wanted my father to know where these things were located in case anything should happen to him.
    After he left our apartment, my father heard a gunshot. He looked outside into the night and saw his uncle’s body lying in the street. It is possible his uncle was the very last victim of the August action and that his very last act was to pass on his valuables to my father.
    We were right to be afraid of this man Grzymek. The August action was only one indication of his capacity for cruelty, of his madness. He was also a very thorough commandant, very fastidious, and this became apparent when life was supposedly “normal” and there was only the killing in the meantime, between the actions. To Grzymek, order was everything. He placed signs throughout the ghetto declaring, “Order must rule!”
Ordung muss sein!
Also, he was very sadistic. He was famous for giving his prisoners impossible tasks and then killing them when they were unable to meet those impossible tasks. If a man could carry only one hundredpounds,