“And how long did you study at the heder?”
“Only three years. It was prohibited after 1924.”
“Good. Very good. Now, please spell this word out for me.” The interrogator put a magazine on the table and pointed to its name.
Bohdan was sweating. “I, I don’t know how to read Hebrew.”
The interrogator pulled a pen knife from his pocket and started cleaning his fingernails: “Do you know how many ways there are to pull out someone’s fingernails?” he inquired.
“No - I, I don’t know.” Bohdan stammered. “I am from Lutsk. I really am.”
“I believe that you may actually be from Lutsk, but your name is not Boruch, So what is it?”
“I am Boruch.”
“If you insist, I can teach you, you know, about the fingernail business, and before you lie to me again and make the lesson inevitable: Boruch Katzenelson died in the Lutsk massacre in June. So again: what is your real name?”
Bohdan was thinking furiously. Apparently these Jews knew more than his German masters expected. It was also clear to him that this short, wiry man, who moved like a cat, had the power and the will to do to him anything he wanted. Bohdan’s only thought now was whether he should tell him the truth or continue pretending to being Jewish.
His thoughts were interrupted by the interrogator. “I know you are not Jewish and I know much more than that. So will it be the truth or a nice lesson?” The man was smiling, a very unpleasant smile that sent shivers along Bohdan’s spine. Still he hesitated. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
Bohdan told about his childhood in the Jewish neighborhood, the many Jewish friends he spoke Yiddish with, how the Germans discovered his language skills and sent him on this mission, threatening his family if he failed.
After Bohdan was done with his story the interrogator slapped him on the back: “You see it wasn’t so bad after all. Don’t you feel better now that you don’t have anything to hide?”
Bohdan was surprised that he was actually relived. He expected to be sent to a jail cell now that the interrogation was over. Instead, music started playing and the interrogator took a small box out of his pocket and placed it next to his ear, stopping the tune. “Yes,” the man said, “go ahead.”
“We found your guy in the SS database. He was a sergeant with a Ukrainian guard unit. Fairly smart and not trigger happy it seems, at least there is no verified record of him killing anybody. I need more time to research him.”
“Thank you” the interrogator said.
He was still smiling when he looked at Bohdan again: “I promised you a lesson if you lied to me. Well, I don’t know if not telling the whole truth can be considered lying. I think that it is the same. What do you think, Sergeant Bohdan Kovalenko?”
“Sir, please, I was afraid to tell you I was in the Ukrainian SS. I was afraid you would kill me if you knew. I will tell you everything and do anything you want.”
“I am sure you will.”
The door to the room opened and a tall, heavily muscled man came in: “I see that you are done,” he addressed the interrogator. “I guess it’s my turn.”
Bohdan expected the man to beat him up – that was what he would have done – but he was only asked more questions. The sergeant did not dare lie again. He wasn’t sure what these people knew or which questions were traps. He was sure that another lie would bring terrible suffering. He wasn’t that fond of his German masters anyway. But he was worried about the fate of his family.
The interrogator assured him that they would find a way to keep his family safe. Bohdan wanted to believe them.
At the end of the day, Bohdan was escorted to a concrete building separated from the rest of the sprawling complex. Inside this jail he had a reasonably sized cell, with a desk on which to write detailed reports to his German masters, reports dictated by the military intelligence officer that had taken over from his interrogator. It was Bohdan’s responsibility to rewrite the reports so that the Germans would not suspect that they were fabricated and transmit the encoded reports on his radio set once a week in Morse code from a special room. He was very diligent in his work. He sincerely hoped that the skinny, short man forgot all about him. He also hoped that his German masters believed his reports and left his family alone.
There were several radio sets similar to his in the radio room he used. Apparently he had not been the only spy caught in the Jew’s security net. Many spies were not caught. Those who were Jewish and used their proper identities were extremely difficult to detect. One item that would have been a clear giveaway was a radio transmitter but the Germans issued them only to very few of their spies. The rest were supposed to use local Arab contacts to communicate with their German masters. As far as the Security Service knew none of the Jews tried.
Several Germans using their own names and pretending to be Jewish did get through. The high degree of assimilation of the German Jewish community made post Holocaust records somewhat fuzzy and unreliable. These were trained spies and could have used local connections if they would have traveled to Mandatory Palestine. As it happened they found themselves temporarily helpless in 21st century Israel.
***
“Sir,” Hirshson’s second in command said dubiously, “I think that we may have a security breach. Our people overheard the crew of the German freighter Tannenfels talking about their last visit to Haifa. They were discussing the size of the city and the fact that it was brightly lit at night. Most worrisome was the fact that they saw a couple of Israeli flags on some of the buildings and on one of our naval ships. It seems that they put their binoculars to good use. Is there anything I should do about this?”
“Let’s see. There’s no way for them to send a radio message – the jammers we installed on all the foreign ships will take care of that and our people on board will see that it is not disabled. The crews know that they will die if they don’t follow the exact course we prescribed. So, in my opinion, the danger of information leaking is quite small.”
“Sir, the Germans are not stupid and will, eventually, realize that something is not kosher,” the officer insisted.
Hirshson was losing his patience. “They certainly will, and they’ll be right, it is more like halal,” referring to the Islamic definition of foods allowed for consumption by Muslims. “Whether it will happen because somebody on one of the ships finds a way to communicate, or, more likely, through their spies in Britain, or even some that will slip through our security, is immaterial. Our time will run out. We need to make sure that when it does, there are few Jews left vulnerable. I’m sure that some people will decide to stay where they are and will pay the price. There’s nothing we can do about that. The scouts have increased the numbers willing to escape by so much that we will soon have problems shipping everybody.
”In the meantime, we need a reevaluation of our transportation and housing capabilities. I believe we’ll reach about fifty thousand a day soon. This means that our refugee population here will grow by ten thousand a day. We need to accommodate them. As I ordered you yesterday, I need plans for expanding the base. In a couple of months we may have to keep close to a million people here. I hope it won’t come to that, but we have to be ready in case it does. I’d rather have them waiting here than in territory controlled by the Nazis.”
Chapter 15
A group of fifteen scouts sent by the Vilnius Jewish groups went to the railway station in Brindisi, from there to Rome, and from Rome, on a commercial flight, to Berlin continuing on a military transport to Warsaw. They were harassed by the Germans only once – When they got off the plane in Warsaw a Gestapo agent checking their documents took them to a small office and questioned each of them at length. The Israeli who accompanied them threatened the Nazi, but to no avail. The man seemed to be ignorant of what their ID cards meant. The whole debacle ended when the door opened with a crash and a SS major stormed into the room. “Are you crazy?” he yelled at the confused Gestapo man. “These are representatives of a
friendly foreign power. I am taking them with me. You will report to your superior and ask to be punished for this. I will make sure that you go to the Eastern Front for this stupidity.” The Gestapo agent opened his mouth but closed it when two more SS came into the small room.
In Vilnius the scouts were escorted into the larger ghetto and left there. Jacob immediately went to the headquarters of the Revisionist movement on Strashuna 25, not far from where he had lived in the ghetto. He was greeted with surprise. “That was a fast trip,” the young guard in the inner courtyard said. The three leaders of the movement, its chairman, secretary and defense coordinator, were also surprised. Jacob told his story. He did mention that the commander of the Brindisi facility was his relative and explained that he was the son of a cousin who had left for Palestine at the beginning of the Great War.
The discussion of what to do and how to do it took up the rest of the day. By the time they were done, it was too late to go anywhere. The ghetto was under curfew and breaking it meant, if one was caught, spending a week or so in jail on half rations.
The next day Jacob went to visit his uncle Chaim’s family. The visit was difficult. None of the family members were Zionists and they saw no good reason to move to the backwards land of Palestine. At yesterday’s meeting everyone had been dubious about his story. They had difficulty believing in a large compound in Brindisi free of Germans or Italians let alone a British troop carrier waiting in port to transport Jews to the Promised Land. They were finally convinced by Jacob’s eagerness to return to Italy and his story about his relative. An equally convincing argument, at least for his uncle, was that if he didn’t like Palestine he would be able to go somewhere safer and more developed. Chaim conceded that there was no future for them in Vilnius.
“I can’t tell you all I saw. You will understand when you get there. But please, go as soon as you can. There is a train later today, do your best to be on it.”
“Will you come with us?” Chaim asked.
“I wish I could, but I want to convince as many of my friends as I can to go. There are also Grandma’s cousins. Everyone should leave as soon as they can. When I’ve met with everyone here, I’ll go to the ghetto in Kaunas with some others that came back from Italy with me. There are people there that know us and will believe what we say. We are trying to save as many as we can.”
“You’re not staying here then?” Jacob’s cousin Tzipora asked.
“Oh no! I don’t want to die! I’ll do my best to get on a train after we are done in Kaunas. Probably in two weeks. When you get to the compound in Italy, tell my mother and sister that I will be there as soon as I can. They’ll get reports about me every couple of days but will want to hear from you.”
Chaim hesitated for a day, but in the end decided he trusted his nephew and got on a train with his family. So many people had been contacted and convinced by the Jewish agents, that the Germans started loading a hundred people per car, which made the passage very hard.
Jacob’s friend Zalman was convinced more easily. After their conversation he got on a train as soon as he gathered his extended family.
Not everyone in Vilnius and Kaunas believed the story. There were people who knew Jacob and other members of the scout group, mainly through their Zionist organizations. They listened and got out as fast as they could. Other groups, including the Kaunas Yeshiva and, paradoxically, the local Bund leadership, concluded the whole thing was just propaganda and refused to go. The head of the Yeshiva changed his mind after meeting with two agents who were making the rounds of religious institutions.
A large portion of the Bund members ignored their leadership and went anyway as word spread about the scouts and as their friends left. Those unaffiliated with any political or religious group – a large majority in both cities – were mostly leaving as well. The Germans were of some help, in their usual brutal way. They cut the rations while at the same time allowing the Ukrainians and Lithuanians to beat up Jews. They tried to be careful not to kill anyone, but they really didn’t care.
Jacob’s family decided to wait in Brindisi. They studied Hebrew. Both Sheina and Chaim’s daughter Tzipora were making great progress. Their parents were acclimatizing at a slower pace. Their main concern was with finding good jobs when they finally got to Israel. They did not want to be a burden on anybody and state handouts were an alien idea to them.
***
Jacob’s group, like others that operated throughout Europe, carried with them a short wave radio transmitter. Theirs was state of the art for 1941, made by Blaupunkt and supplied to the Caliph by the Germans. Other groups carried German, British or American made radios. The group’s leader, an Israeli, used it to send messages to the Brindisi base. The messages followed a predefined pattern and reassured the people in Brindisi that the team was OK. Since the pattern of the messages was agreed upon before the groups left and was calculated to last for a month, there was no code to break and the Germans could not send a fake message without being caught.
The group Jacob traveled with consisted of four people: Mordechai, a native of Palestine, was the leader and carried the radio, Jacob from the Revisionists, Hirsh Goldstein from the Zionist Halutz movement, and Rabbi Zerah Litvin from the Yeshiva of the Forty in Vilna.
They finished their assignment in Vilna a week after arriving there. They spoke to all the leaders and did their best to convince them to go. It was time to cover more territory. The plan was to travel from Vilna to Mariampole, from there to Kaunas and then return to Vilna. Some towns had no Jews – they had already been deported by the Germans to one of the larger ghettos. This made the job a bit more manageable.
The three Vilna natives carried letters from their respective organizations attesting to their membership and explaining that these organizations asked their members to move to Palestine. They also had personal connections they used. Mordechai was there to witness to the safety of Palestine and to persuade those who wanted to go to America or other places that they would be able to do so from Palestine. It also helped that people who arrived at the Brindisi base were encouraged to send letters to their friends and family. Many did.
Their mission went well. Traveling in a horse drawn cart was not the fastest way, but it aroused minimal suspicion. They went unmolested from ghetto to ghetto delivering their message. The Germans and their helpers, the Ukrainian and Lithuanian police, recognized their special ID cards and mostly cooperated, though from time to time the group was subjected to verbal harassment.
They arrived in Kaunas almost two weeks after leaving Brindisi. It was close to the end of August. The sky was leaden and a fine rain was falling. Something was different here. Instead of inspecting their IDs as usual and letting them into the ghetto, the Germans politely but firmly escorted the group to waiting a truck and took them to the Ninth Fort.
The Fort had been built by the Russians as a military fortification before the First World War; it was never used for its intended purpose. After the Russian Empire disintegrated, beginning in 1924, the Fort was used as a prison by the independent Lithuanian state. The Germans used it as a torture and extermination camp. Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and other undesirables from the surrounding area were brought to the Ninth Fort, “interrogated” and executed.
Mordechai, the “Palestinian”, was the only one in the group familiar with the Fort’s infamous history. He was shocked to discover that the facility seemed to be busy. All the guard towers were manned – some by Ukrainians and some by Germans – and prisoners were going about their business in the inner courtyard where the truck stopped and the group got off. They were searched and all their meager possessions were confiscated – including the special ID cards and the radio. When Mordechai protested, a guard hit him in the stomach with his rifle butt and proceeded to break his nose and split his right ear. At this point the prisoners were separated and locked in solitary cells. Mordechai, as the leader, was locked up in a cell under the main staircase. Three times a day, when the prisone
rs ran down the stairs to be counted, the noise in the cell was deafening. The rest of the time Mordechai couldn’t fall asleep because of the reverberating noise of footsteps. This went on day and night.
Jacob spent two days in his cell. It had a small window with a reasonable view of the fields and he could hear noises from the outside. On the second day he heard shots. They came from the right, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t see what was happening. It sounded like a machine gun, then single shots. After about an hour the machine gun again, then single shots again. The sequence repeated the whole day. In the evening his cell door opened and he was taken to a small room with no windows. A table and chair were in the middle of the room. He was told to wait standing in the corner. Several hours later a dapper looking civilian accompanied by a uniformed guard came in. The civilian sat in front of the table, took out a notebook and a pen from the elegant leather briefcase he was carrying, and started the interrogation.
“What is your name?”
“Jacob Hirshson.”
“Is the information on your ID card correct?” he showed the card to Jacob.
“Yes.”
“Who gave you this card?”
“A clerk at the Palestinian transit camp in Brindisi.”
The questions went on for several hours. The interrogator was polite but relentless. He kept repeating the same questions in different forms trying to catch Jacob in an inconsistency. Finally Jacob decided that he couldn’t stand on his feet anymore and instead of answering the next question asked the interrogator for permission to sit on the floor.
The response came from the guard. The rifle butt hit Jacob in the stomach and he found himself on the floor gasping for breath.
“Since you asked for it, you may stay there for a couple of minutes.” The interrogator went on with his questions.
Sometime later in the night the first interrogator was replaced by a new one and the questioning continued.
The Shield: a novel Page 21
