by David Laskin
The Big Ones make plans that are impossible for our heads to grasp. God knows how this will end.
—
In the same month, the Big Ones made plans for the Baltic states. Alarmed by the Nazi conquest of most of Western Europe, the Soviet Union decided to raise its geopolitical profile by absorbing Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The pace of regime change was particularly dizzying for Vilna: since September 1939, the city had been Polish, Soviet, Lithuanian, and now, as of June 1940, Soviet once more. The Big Ones lost no time in dismantling Vilna’s institutions and economy and recasting them in the Soviet mold: large companies, banks, and factories were nationalized; capitalists were arrested and deported; “class enemies” were hounded out; and the leadership of any organization considered a threat to the Soviet Union was eliminated. Jews were tolerated as individuals, but because the Soviets aimed to erase Jewish identity and assimilate Jews into the Stalinist masses, every pillar of Jewish cultural and political life was toppled. The city’s once thriving Zionist groups, religious societies, the Bund, and the Yiddish newspapers were immediately banned. Centuries of Jewish culture, consciousness, and nationalism disappeared or went underground. Overnight, the Jerusalem of Lithuania was stripped of its aura of holiness.
For Doba and Shepseleh the Soviet takeover was a crisis, not a catastrophe. Shalom Tvi quit sending money from America for fear that the Bolsheviks would appropriate it—but under the new regime, there was less need for handouts. Since Shepseleh was out of work anyway, the economic shake-up hardly made a difference. Neither he nor Doba was especially religious or politically involved, so the shutdown of Jewish institutions didn’t affect them much. A Yiddish newspaper soon began to appear again, though it adhered to a strict Communist line. A Jewish labor leader became the city’s vice mayor. The Joint was permitted to continue distributing charity to refugees. The city’s synagogues remained open, though attendance fell off dramatically. Doba, perhaps fearing that her letters would be read by the authorities, was careful not to criticize the new regime. But in fact, the change of government had its advantages. Anyone who had been a resident in Vilna on September 1, 1939, automatically became a Soviet citizen, which meant that Doba and Shepseleh were now citizens of the same nation as Beyle, Etl, and Khost. For the first time since the war broke out, the two branches of the family could visit each other. “I miss everyone like a little girl,” Doba wrote Sonia. “Imagine my joy when I can finally see them again. Etl writes that mother has aged and weakened from yearning.”
—
It was hot and eerily tranquil that summer in Rakov. When school let out, Etl and Khost took Mireleh for walks in the woods and they bathed in the lake. At the end of June, Etl discovered that she was pregnant, though she kept it a secret for the time being. Beyle, suffering in the heat, pined over her scorched garden. Ready-made bread had disappeared from the stores, so Beyle had to send grain to the mill to be ground and baked in an oven fueled by wood that she carried herself. Though milk and meat were scarce, no one went hungry. Etl refused all of her father’s offers of money, insisting they needed nothing. “What a wonderful country,” Shalom Tvi wrote sarcastically of Sovietized Poland. “They have nothing but they need nothing.”
As summer wore on, the pace of political arrests by the NKVD (the Soviet security police) accelerated. Bundists and Trotskyites were purged. Zionist leaders were given an eight-year jail sentence. “Nonproductive elements” disappeared from the shtetlach and the cities. Had the family held on to the leather business, they might have been at risk, but NKVD agents were not interested in an old woman and a young mother supported by a schoolteacher. Most of the family’s money had evaporated when the Zloty was abolished on January 1, 1940, a fate they shared with many. As one journalist wrote, “Within an hour, in one stroke everybody became poor: he who owned a million Zloty and he whose entire property did not exceed a few Zloty.” Still, most found a way to get by with a side job, a bit of foreign currency, some dabbling in the black market, and bartering with local peasants. The Rakov family was lucky compared with their cousins in Volozhin. Chaim’s brother Yishayahu and his brother-in-law, Meir Finger, lost their imported fruit business after the Soviet takeover and both of them remained out of work for months. Yishayahu, down to his last coins, still hoped to move to Palestine. Chaim’s sister Chana fared no better. The Soviets appropriated her house in Volozhin and subdivided it: Chana and her family were left with one small room and the kitchen, and were forced to pay rent for the privilege. Grumbling about it was ill-advised—NKVD agents were only too happy to round up malcontents and ship them off to Siberia.
The Volozhin relatives also kept their mouths shut when the town’s new chief Soviet administrator ordered that the central marketplace be made over into a “people’s park.” This was part of an official Soviet policy of razing the old commercial hearts of the shtetlach and moving businesses into large state-owned buildings. Workmen got busy demolishing the shops, pulling up the paving stones, planting trees and flower beds, and installing benches. One day an enormous crate arrived from the Soviet Union containing the pieces of a statue. A local Jew named Mendl Goldshmid described what happened:
We assembled the pieces, and a tall statue grew up. Stalin wearing a military dress dominated the square, extending his hand westward. But a grave problem yet arose. Close to the statue stood a huge Catholic cast iron cross. The communist secular authorities considered the presence of a cross beside the “Sun of the Nations” as an unbelievable sacrilege. They decided to demolish the cross. On a Saturday evening a unit of soldiers encircled the site. A demolition charge was set, and the cross was blown up. I was ordered to take away the broken fragments.
The Gentiles accused me of being responsible for the destruction of the holy cross. They waited for the revenge time.
Under the Soviets, everything was political. When the new school year began in September, Khost was appointed principal. With the promotion, however, came constant scrutiny by NKVD agents for “ideological fidelity.” Schools were the ideal environment for political indoctrination, and the pressure on Khost to enforce the party line was enormous. If any teacher deviated, Khost would be held accountable. Hebrew was banned and Yiddish took its place; classics of (politically acceptable) Yiddish literature could be taught, but anything that promoted religion or the religious impulse had to be rigorously excluded from the curriculum. Jewish history, any mention of the Bible, and anything that smacked of Jewish nationalism were banned. (In Volozhin, a friend of Yishayahu quit teaching in protest when Yiddish was substituted for Hebrew at the Tarbut school.) The Jewish library was emptied of objectionable books—that is, most of its contents. Khost was ordered to introduce special classes on Marxism and Leninism into the curriculum; he traded his tailored suits for coarse open-necked shirts and high boots (de rigueur under the Soviets); he had to work on Shabbat. His mother-in-law still attended shul, but it would have been politically risky for the school principal to be seen wearing a yarmulke. Khost was aware that Mireleh would grow up with little or no Jewish education, and perhaps only the vestige of a Jewish identity. But that was a price he and Etl were willing to pay. The alternative was the Nazis.
Vilna was still crowded with refugees, but otherwise life had improved so much under the Soviets that Doba quit raging about escape and shifted the lens of her anxiety to her parents. “Father is suffering,” she wrote Sonia in October. “He is alone, broken and has to live in the same house with good Gishe Sore. He sounds sad and worried. He always asks: When will I see you children? I cry and wonder when mother and father will be together again. She wrote to me that she misses father with every step she takes.” Doba let drop in the same letter that Shepseleh was finally working and bringing home four hundred litai (the Lithuanian currency) a month.
By the start of the new year, Chaim’s brother and brother-in-law had found work in Volozhin as well. It didn’t hurt that Kestlikh, the chief administrator who had ordered t
he marketplace cleared for the people’s park, was himself a Jew. There was no question that Jews were rising under the new regime. Jewish school principals, Jewish mayors, Jewish officers commanding squads in the Red Army, Jews getting jobs while Poles were being packed off to Siberia. Where would it end? the local gentiles muttered through gritted teeth.
—
Vilna, January 20, 1941
Dear Sonia,
I have good news for you. A dear guest has arrived here—Mother!—may she stay well. I have not dared to imagine that this would happen. They kept promising to come but only now have the authorities allowed them. At long last we see each other. Mother has aged since we had last seen her. Soninka, I cannot tell you how glad I was to see her.
Mother has already been with us for two weeks, and I want her to stay a few more weeks, until after the Bar Mitzvah of Shimonkeh on February 11. But Mother does not want to stay that long because Etl is due to give birth. She suggests that she would stay if Etl and Mireleh could be persuaded to come here to Vilna and Etl could give birth here. I would be so happy finally to see them all.
Love, Doba
Beyle remained with Doba and Shepseleh and the boys for a month—long enough to celebrate Shimonkeh’s bar mitzvah on February 11, 1941. “It was a fabulous visit and I enjoyed it very much,” she wrote her husband. “Doba came with Shimonkeh to meet me at the train station, and we both cried from happiness.” She couldn’t stop marveling over her grandsons. Velveleh was a model child, sensitive, artistic; he played the violin, he drew beautifully, his teacher praised him as the best student in class. Shimonkeh, thin, pale, and serious, was growing up to be a true Jewish scholar. He chanted his haftarah portion perfectly at his bar mitzvah service; he dutifully laid tefillin and prayed every day. Doba was proud to see her firstborn become a man, but she couldn’t help worrying about what kind of future he would have under the godless new regime. When the talk turned to politics, they spoke in code and euphemisms. Hitler was referred to as Haman, the evil Persian councilor in the Book of Esther who plotted to kill the Jews, or “your stepfather.” Do you think your stepfather will try to invade Palestine? they asked when discussing the news of Rommel’s German Afrika Korps massing against the British in North Africa. They hoped the boys did not understand. Doba and Beyle shed many tears over the interminable separation from Shalom Tvi. As always they talked about moving to Palestine or New York, or joining the families together in Rakov. But it was just talk and they knew it. The Big Ones weren’t letting people out, and the English and the Americans weren’t letting people in. After the war, after the war, they said again and again. God willing Haman would be defeated, his bones broken and scattered.
Beyle returned to Rakov in the middle of February. Etl had her baby two weeks later—another girl, born at home on March 1, 1941. The birth was easy, the baby was healthy, Etl was up and around in a couple of weeks. They agonized over the name and finally chose Doba Beyle, honoring sister, mother, and grandmother.
Their letters moved (slowly) around a three-noded circuit through winter and into the spring. It took weeks, sometimes months, for a letter to arrive, but that didn’t deter them from pouring out their hearts to each other. They were a close, anxious, communicative family. The same letter sometimes made the complete circuit so that those in Vilna, Rakov, Kfar Vitkin, and New York could all enjoy it.
Etl chastised Sonia for failing to send any greetings to Khost in her last letter: “I wonder about it and am angry. Absolutely unpleasant to receive such a letter. Possibly you wrote without thinking. Next time think about it. Khost has said nothing, but it was very strange.”
But by the next letter, Etl had forgotten all about it. Five days before Passover, she snatched a few minutes to write to Sonia about the children and their preparations for the holiday: “Doba’leh [five weeks old] develops well and it seems that she will be a pretty girl. She already knows how to scream. Mireleh is very happy with her sister, and watches that no one will take her. On Monday night it will be Pessach Eve. We have already baked matzot and we have good chickens. The weather is poor, cold and wet.”
Beyle added her own brief message at the end. She was suffering from a heart condition and was unable to get the fresh fruit that her doctor had prescribed. Her spirits were low; the weather depressed her; she could barely summon the strength to write even a few lines: “Sonikah, be careful about your health. I did not have enough wisdom to guard my health, and now I am sorry. I sit at home and can do nothing and the situation is difficult. When father was with me, he watched over me but those were different times. That is how it is. Everything is from God and from providence. I am asking God to make the weather warmer and then I will feel better. I want to unite with father and come to you, as we had planned. Yours, Mother.”
That letter was dated April 7, 1941.
On May 30, 1941, Doba sent Sonia a postcard from Vilna:
I want to go home for a few days and bring mother.
Have you heard from father? Mercy on him.
So alone in his old age. May there be peace and then
we could see each other.
And then the circuit was broken.
The Nazis entered Vilna on June 24, Volozhin on June 25, and Rakov on June 26. There were no more letters from Europe after that.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“THEY SNATCH WHOLE STREETS”
The summer solstice fell on Shabbat in 1941, which meant that in Volozhin devout Jews had to wait until nearly ten o’clock at night before they could kindle a spark or flip a switch. Reuven Rogovin was such a Jew, and on Saturday, June 21, 1941, he duly sat through the long silent gloaming before turning on his radio. It was worth the wait. Louis Aragon, the celebrated French Communist writer, was visiting Moscow and a concert in his honor was broadcast from the Soviet capital that night. The reception in Volozhin was spotty, but good enough for Reuven to enjoy the music as brightness slowly drained from the sky. After the concert, the announcer read the news as usual—nothing of note. Reuven went to bed. The next morning, he didn’t bother with the radio—nothing ever happened on Sunday. But bad news came the old-fashioned way, spread from mouth to mouth: Fayve Yosef Simernicki, a local socialist activist, had died of old age. Reuven joined the small procession to the old Jewish cemetery on a knobby hillside behind the yeshiva-turned-restaurant. It was on the way to the funeral that a friend shared with Reuven another piece of bad news, more startling than the death of an old man. “Molotov [the Soviet minister of foreign affairs] spoke on the radio,” the friend confided nervously. “The Germans attacked Russia. Their planes bombed Minsk, Kiev, Harkov, and other Soviet towns.”
When the funeral was over, Reuven hurried to the people’s park in the former Volozhin marketplace. A great crowd had gathered.
I saw many of the Volozhin Jews crowded together. They argued in loud voices. They formed two camps: one was pro-Soviet and the other pro-German. Workers and artisans were sure that the Soviets would overcome the Germans swiftly. Merchants and dealers, to the contrary, were convinced that the Germans would win. They refused to listen to any of the refugees’ tales about the German atrocities and their blood-curdling deeds against Jews. They considered the accounts of horrors as Soviet propaganda. Many Volozhin inhabitants witnessed the German 1918 invasion. They assumed that the 1941 Germans would not be in any great measure different from those in 1918. During the occupation of the First World War they [the Germans] did not hurt any Jews. So they said, “It is not reasonable that this cultivated and organized nation could change during one generation. Why would they hurt us now? The people working for the Bolsheviks, and in love with them, they should be afraid now, but not the common Jews.”
Similar conversations were taking place in Rakov and Vilna and every shtetl, town, and city in Russian-occupied Poland. Nobody, not even Stalin, had had an inkling that Hitler was planning to break his pact with the Soviet Union and launch one of the most massive
invasions in history. No Polish or Lithuanian Jews went to bed on the night of Saturday, June 21, thinking that they had observed their last Shabbat in freedom. Etl sang Mireleh a song, bid her mother good night, gave baby Dobaleh a late feeding in the hope that she would sleep longer. Then she got in bed beside her husband. At 3:30 A.M. on Sunday, while they slept, 3 million Nazi soldiers and two thousand Luftwaffe bombers sprang at them out of the west.
When the crisis came, the Soviet authorities proved to be useless. Scrambling to save their own necks, they left the local population utterly on their own in “bewilderment and panic.” In Volozhin there was a hasty conscription of able-bodied men under the age of fifty. A thousand reported for duty, but the Soviets could only process fifty men—and those were dispersed when a Luftwaffe squadron passed overhead while they mustered. “The authorities were busy trying to evacuate the important persons to safe places deep inside Russia,” wrote Reuven Rogovin. “The Soviets did not tell us what to do, whether we should stay in our town with the German enemy approaching rapidly or whether we should escape to Russia. Each person had to decide for himself.”
Chaim’s brother Yishayahu debated this question heatedly with his good friend Benjamin Shishka. Benjamin said he was going to evacuate with the Russians; Yishayahu tried to talk him out of it. Yishayahu was convinced he had nothing to fear from the Nazis: he was a Zionist, not a Bolshevik—let the Germans send him to Palestine if they didn’t want him. Benjamin fled east with the Soviets. Yishayahu went home to his wife and children and waited.
