On a recent trip through the Lower East Side of Manhattan—the intersection of Delancey and Essex Streets—I was momentarily struck by a distant memory dating back to when I was just 14-years-old. My grandparents on my mother’s side had come to New York on an extended visit from their home in Israel. Although they had never been to New York before, the trip was not a typical family get-together, let alone a sight-seeing tour. This visit had a purpose. We were walking down Essex Street in search of a Polish typewriter. It was on that very corner that my grandfather, Ignacy Chiger, suddenly stopped, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and began to cry. In his words… he was home.
The push carts, the street vendors, the endless parade of Chasidic men and boys, the hustle and bustle of transplanted Jewish life, had suddenly struck a deep cord. My grandfather simply could not restrain himself.
Before the war, Ignacy was a businessman in Lwów, disciplined and deliberate, proud of the life he had built in a city once bursting with a vibrant Jewish life. Jewish Lwów pulsed with Torah learning, argument, enterprise, and culture. It was a European Jewish world with deep roots and a rich history.
In that very moment… on that very corner in New York City… Ignacy’s pre-war world had come full circle.
Sitting for hours at a time at our dining room table in our modest home in Forest Hills, Queens, Ignacy poured out his darkest memories, day after day, through the keys of that Polish typewriter. After what seemed like an eternity, Ignacy had completed his unpublished memoir, titled, Świat w Mroku (“A World in Darkness”).
Ignacy’s world did not go dark all at once. It was dismantled in stages.
On September 17, 1939, the Red Army entered Lwów under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the agreement between Hitler and Stalin that carved Poland in two. That day was Yom Kippur. Soviet soldiers arrived as “unwanted guests” invoking liberation, equality, and progress. But what followed was something else.
Overnight, my grandfather lost his business, and his home. What had been his became the state’s. Strangers were moved into the family apartment. Privacy became impossible. Trust dissolved, and tensions between the flatmates escalated.
The language of the Soviets sounded utopian, but the atmosphere on the ground told a different story. The grip of communism quickly took a stranglehold on the populus. So, Ignacy adapted, watched, and calculated.
A Soviet NKDV commander, Comrade Yakov Grona, began to recognize Ignacy as “useful,” and fashioned him with the moniker “foreman,” to which he lived up.
Then in June of 1941, Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army retreated east. The Germans entered Lwów. The Ukrainians, craving blood, mercilessly took revenge on the retreating Soviets. There was no shortage of bloodlust for the Jews.
Beatings, humiliation, and murder in the streets became the new normal within the confines of the newly formed Lwów Ghetto. Visible deportations followed. Concealment served no purpose. The Ghetto was now a corridor towards death.
It was on that very corner that my grandfather, Ignacy Chiger, suddenly stopped, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and began to cry. In his words… he was home.
It was within those walls that Ignacy was recognized as “useful” yet again. This time by the most feared SS commandant in lesser Poland, Hauptscharführer Josef Grzimek, earning a new moniker—“engineer.”
He would organize and complete impossible tasks, build elaborate hiding spots, cheat death almost daily, all while saving his family, and many others.
With each Aktion, the population shrank. Deportations led to Janowska and other camps. Others were taken to Piaski, the sand pits, where thousands were executed. Before the war, approximately 150,000 Jews lived in Lwów. By May of 1943, only a fraction remained. The Ghetto had become the Julag.
On May 30, 1943, the final liquidation of the Lwów Julag began. The remaining illusion of survival within the system disappeared.
The decision my grandfather made next defied conventional logic. He chose to lead his family into the sewers of Lwów. This was not as an act of desperation, but as an act of design.
As a young teen, Ignacy sat on a hilltop overlooking the construction of the Poltva, Lwów’s underground sewer system, built by Italian prisoners from WWI. Little did he know how “useful” that memory would be. He calculated gradients and distances based on his knowledge of Lwów’s layout.
Together with two other men, he chose to dig through the basement of the closest barracks toward the Poltva River vaulting.
This was not an escape from prison. It was an entry into one. A prison without bars.
The concrete vaulting had to be broken open. Too shallow and they would miss the structure. Too deep and they risked flooding or collapse. A miscalculation would not delay the plan. It would end it.
After 10 days, they broke through… exactly as Ignacy had calculated.
And then they entered… into complete and horrifying darkness. It was in that darkness that they encountered their guardian angel, Leopold Socha.
Ignacy descended with his wife Paulina, with seven-year-old Krystyna, my mother, and with three-year-old Paweł, my uncle.
Krystyna understood danger. Paweł understood fear.
Imagine telling a three-year-old he must not cry when rats crawl across his body. Imagine asking a seven-year-old to suppress a scream when footsteps echo above. Imagine a mother covering her child’s mouth so breath does not become sound. In the sewer, silence was survival.
The sewers of Lwów were not empty spaces. They were narrow, wet, and hostile to human life. Adults could not stand upright. Water and waste moved constantly through the channels. The air was thick. Light did not exist. Day dissolved into night.
Nearly seventy Jews frantically entered that underground network through manholes in the chaos during the ghetto’s final liquidation. Socha and Chiger had to make a decision.
There was only money for twenty.
After fourteen months of disease, flooding, fire, psychological collapse, and the constant threat of discovery, only ten would emerge.
And yet, somehow, even there… human structure persisted.
Not only did my grandfather organize the group’s survival, but he maintained a fragile sense of order and humanity in a place designed to erase it.
Among the 10 was a pregnant woman. And, in the sewer, a child was born. Ignacy was the midwife. The child did not survive. The mother made sure of that… for the baby’s cries would have endangered the entire group.
The sewer became both a womb and a grave.
And then there was their savior, Leopold Socha—a Polish sewer worker, a devout Catholic, and a petty thief who spent most of his life in and out of prison.
At first, he helped for money. Ignacy had cleverly struck a deal during their first encounter. But eventually the money ran out. That’s when the angel emerged from the darkness.
Socha made his choice… to continue without pay. He saw Ignacy and his family’s survival as his salvation.
At some point, the transaction became something else.
He descended into the sewers again and again, bringing bread, potatoes, and news from the world above. If discovered, he would have been executed immediately. In occupied Poland, aiding Jews was punishable by death.
Not declared. Not announced. Demonstrated through action. A redemption for a life of crime.
In the language of history, he would later be recognized in Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. But, in the moment, he was simply a man making a decision, repeatedly, under risk.
Imagine telling a three-year-old he must not cry when rats crawl across his body. Imagine asking a seven-year-old to suppress a scream when footsteps echo above. Imagine a mother covering her child’s mouth so breath does not become sound. In the sewer, silence was survival.
Socha had led the group to a safer, dryer, and less hospitable corner of the sewer, referred to by my grandmother, as the “Palace.” Soon a routine had unfolded. Ignacy wrote plays for the group to perform. Comedy in the sewer maintained some shred of humanity.
During this past Pesach, my mother, now 90, revealed something astonishing. The fragile group celebrated Passover in the sewer… with matzah, proudly provided by their savior.
Above ground, the city continued its descent. Below, a fragile form of life persisted.
On July 27, 1944, as the Soviet army advanced and German forces retreated, the moment of emergence came.
After 14 months underground, Leopold Socha led the survivors out… deciding the order in which they would emerge. Ignacy—the “Superintendent” or the “Captain,” as Socha referred to him—was last.
The sunlight was so blinding and the space so unfamiliar that my four-year-old uncle, Paweł, cried out to return to the only life he knew—the sewer.
Thirty years later, my grandfather, the bravest man I had ever known, finally summoned the courage to begin to reconstruct what had happened. He wrote from memory. Not from notes. Not from records. From memory.
Six months later, in 1975, at age 69, Ignacy suddenly passed.
Ignacy never got a chance to see his story resonate with the world. He had written his memoir in careful and deliberate detail. It was not composed as literature. It was testimony. A reconstruction of events that demanded precision because they had once determined whether his children would live or die. The memoir was not intended as nostalgia for his family, but for the world to understand the human capacity for evil, as well as bravery, and what the world could look like if we did not recognize the signs.
My mother, Krystyna Chiger Keren, used the memoir as the cornerstone for her best-seller, The Girl in the Green Sweater, which inspired the 2011 Academy Award nominated film, In Darkness.
The memoir was eventually published in Poland in 2011, under its original title, Świat w Mroku. In 2026, it finally appears in English as Beneath the Lightless Sky.
The memoir does not ask for sympathy. It demands attention.
And it exists alongside another story… in another city.
At the very moment my grandfather was descending into the sewers of Lwów to preserve life, a small group of students in Munich were choosing a different form of resistance above ground. The White Rose, led by siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, stood at the center of a quiet but defiant moral uprising. Most were in their twenties, students and young soldiers who refused to accept the world as it had become. Alongside them were Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and their mentor, Kurt Huber.
Beginning in mid-1942, they wrote and distributed a series of six leaflets that exposed Nazi crimes and called on ordinary Germans to resist. They gathered names from the Munich telephone book and mailed their message across the country. The leaflets spoke of mass murder and urged resistance. They asked readers not only to understand, but to act, to duplicate, and to distribute.
The name they chose, Weiße Rose, the “White Rose,” a symbol of spiritual love, stood for moral clarity in a time of distortion.
On February 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught placing leaflets in the University of Munich. They were arrested by the Gestapo, tried, and executed by guillotine four days later. Their fellow members were also executed.
Yet their final leaflet survived them. It was smuggled to London, reproduced, and dropped over Germany by Allied aircraft.
Their voices continued.
Their resistance and my grandfather’s survival unfolded at the same time. Different methods. Different conditions. The same refusal to surrender humanity.
Ignacy preserved life. The White Rose confronted silence. Socha chose to help.
These are not separate stories. They are variations of the same question: what does a human being do when pressed into impossible corners?
The memoir does not answer this in theory. It shows it in action.
Choice remains. Even when options are reduced. Even when risk is constant. Even when outcomes are uncertain.
This is why Beneath the Lightless Sky and the White Rose matter.
Not only as history, but as a framework for thinking… and what follows from it.
