Forbidden Pregnancy

In the Kovno Ghetto, pregnancy was not a condition of life but a death sentence. The German occupiers decreed that any woman found to be pregnant would be taken away and murdered, and that if the child was born, both mother and child would be murdered. This single edict transformed the most intimate and natural of human states into a capital crime, one that the ghetto's Jewish leadership refused to accept. The result was a vast, secret, and extraordinarily dangerous network of concealment, midwifery, and escape that ran beneath the surface of daily life in the ghetto, and which became one of the defining acts of moral resistance against the Nazi machinery of destruction.

The Edict and Its Scope

The prohibition on pregnancy was absolute and enforced with brutal efficiency. As Sarah Blumenthal's father, a former runner for the Kovno Ghetto Council, recalled, pregnant mothers, along with old people, homeless children, and the physically incapacitated, were kept illegally in houses all through the ghetto. When a search was coming, each runner had a number of houses to cover, dashing to their allotted homes and knocking on doors in a special way that signaled people had to hide. The searches were conducted quietly and efficiently, with no screaming or shouting, but the terror was absolute. The illegals would be dispersed into all manner of hiding places: cupboards, empty potato bins, root cellars, attic closets, wells, and underground crypts. From his hiding spot, often on the roof of an empty house huddling against a chimney, the young runner would listen as inevitably some of these hiding places were discovered, hearing the running feet of a squad of soldiers, guttural shouts, the screams of someone, or sometimes a pistol shot. The Germans brought Jewish ghetto policemen with them on these searches and tortured them on the spot to find out what they knew.

The Hospital and the Doctors

The medical establishment of the ghetto became the frontline of this resistance. After the Germans burned the old hospital, a group of houses at the south end of the ghetto was converted into a new small hospital of thirty or forty bunk beds. The same Germans who had burned the old hospital decided that those with infectious diseases must after all continue to be isolated, identified, and then dealt with in a more precise and perhaps less wasteful way. But Dr. Koenig, the community leader, was resolved never again to hospitalize a patient with typhus or any other infectious disease. At great risk to himself, he treated such patients at home and wrote false diagnoses on their charts. With the complicity of the one other Jewish doctor and Miss Margolin, Koenig would occasionally admit someone for a hospital stay who was not ill but in some way at risk of discovery and execution. The hospital was thus an extremely vulnerable area, its security constantly monitored by the council, because it was the site of illegal midwifing and the sheltering of those who could not be allowed to be seen.

Greta Margolin and the Smuggling of Mothers

The central figure in this clandestine operation was Greta Margolin, a nurse at the hospital and the lover of Josef Barbanel, the chief assistant to Dr. Koenig. She was involved in the very dangerous business of smuggling women who were pregnant out of the ghetto, and in at least one case of a woman who had somehow escaped attention, delivering the baby and taking them both out, how and where, the young runner did not know. She was a real nurse, the only real nurse there, a woman in her thirties with prominent cheekbones, a good well-defined jaw, and straight straw-colored hair tied behind her. To the ten-year-old Yehoshua, who carried packets to her from Barbanel, she was an object of adoration, and her smile, which broke out spontaneously with such affection, seemed to him the inviolable state of human love that was the true natural thing. She was every bit as brave as Barbanel, not only because she kept the diary for him, but because she risked her life daily in the work of saving pregnant women and their newborns.

The Archive and the Memory of the Forbidden

The fate of the forbidden pregnancies is inseparable from the fate of the ghetto's archival memory. Barbanel kept a diary in which he reported everything that happened, along with the relevant documentation, the latest regulations, the execution orders, the deaths, minutes of the council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for the work details. He used whatever paper he had on hand, including unused student exercise books, writing in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day. The diary, by the time the young runner was aware of it, must have run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Since neither Barbanel nor Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, those papers remained hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. When the chest was finally recovered and impounded at JFK Airport, and later cracked open in the presence of a U.S. Attorney, the inspectors found packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest, the fierce preservation of these materials unmistakable and, to Sarah, itself an urgent message that brought a sob to her throat. Among the sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script, were the records of the ghetto's life, including the regulations that made pregnancy a capital crime.

The Photograph and the Survivor's Legacy

Among the forbidden little black-and-white photos that Pem handed to Sarah at the unsealing of the chest was a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire, a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken with cloth stars sewn to their coats, a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden, the members of the council posing in business suits with stars, and a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows, the head awry, staring heavenward. And there, seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council. Unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they had outgrown, each of them at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah found her father in the first row. The runner who had carried the warnings about the searches, who had hidden on rooftops while pregnant women were dragged away, had survived to tell the story. His testimony, and the archive that preserved it, ensured that the forbidden pregnancies of the Kovno Ghetto would not be forgotten, even as the Nazi who decreed them, S.S. Major Schmitz, died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers, never having stood up in court to let the world take a look at him for what he was.