Read All but My Life: A Memoir for Free Online

stamped in red: MOVED WITHOUT LEAVING FORWARDING ADDRESS. We never learned what happened to them, except that they never reached Czortkow.
     
    Several days after Aunt Anna left, shortly before noon on a bitter cold day, a woman we knew came to tell us that she had heard the Gestapo was making the rounds looking for Mr. Pipersberg.
    “Try to find him,” she said to my father, “and tell him to hide.”
    Such warnings were not ignored. We knew that Mr. Pipersberg would probably be in the home of his former secretary, not far from the factory. From a window in her house, he could watch it in comparative safety.
    “I had better go,” I said.
    It was icy. The snow was blown by a strong wind. There was hardly a road to follow. I saw a horse-drawn sleigh with two peasants inside wrapped in blankets. I asked them to give me a lift, which they did. The tired old horse painfully pulled the creaking sled. I was half-frozen before I reached the little house.
    Mr. Pipersberg was there. He was about to eat but when he saw me, he jumped up from the table. When I explained why I had come he told me to return home quickly, then he ran out of the house to find a place to hide.
    I hadn’t gone a hundred yards when I saw a big black car with uniformed men pulling up to the house. They went in. I started to run. After a few minutes the car passed me again, speeding back. Suddenly, the magnitude of what I had just done struck me. I could visualize the Gestapo questioning Mr. Pipersberg’s secretary. How could the frightened woman avoid telling them that the daughter of his best friend had been there? I reproached myself bitterly for not having stopped the car to admit that I had warned Mr. Pipersberg,
that I alone was responsible, that my parents had known nothing about it. But it was too late.
    I pictured my homecoming, finding my parents gone. Perhaps I had saved Mr. Pipersberg, but endangered my parents! Breathless, hoping against hope, I ran. My parents were home. The relief of seeing them was so great that I did not immediately notice how excited they were. I started to tell them everything, but Papa just numbly shook his head. I knew then that something else had disturbed him. He soon told me what it was. Word had just come about the transport that had taken Arthur away. For eight days the boys had been locked in cattle cars, taken to the Gouvernement, and turned loose in the woods. Then the SS troops had beat and shot them at random. Those who were able to ran away. Thirty-six prisoners were said to have been killed. Someone brought this news to the wife of a man who had escaped.
    We heard nothing direct about Arthur. Perhaps in defense, a belief was born in me. “Arthur is living,” I kept saying to myself. “He must be.” But now my parents’ worry suddenly turned to me. If Mr. Pipersberg were not to be found, the Gestapo might look for us. We spent a terrible, anxious night. Something snapped in my mother’s mind. She kept mumbling over and over, “Arthur, Arthur, where are you?” She was beyond fear for herself.
    I could not sleep, I could not lie down. I sat at the window of my bedroom and watched night fade into morning. The Gestapo, did not come.
    Two weeks passed. Then one day, late in November, the mailman stopped. He delivered a printed card ordering all Jews to report on Monday, December 2, 1939, at six o’clock in the morning, to an armory on Hermann Goering Strasse. Each person was allowed twenty pounds of clothing. All valuable objects, money, and keys to all closets, clearly tagged to indicate to which lock they belonged, should be put on a table in the front hall of each house. Violators of this order would be punished by death.
    There it was! We were to leave our home. That well-known silence again engulfed us, broken only later that night when
Mama resumed her cry of “Arthur, Arthur!”
    In the morning a man stopped by to say that we could sell some of our things. Papa did not want to leave Mama’s side,