The Family

by David Laskin

  The “reason” given for the first Aktion in Rakov was that the local Jews had aided a group of Russian prisoners. The Germans had taken so many prisoners from the retreating Red Army that they had to press one of the Rakov synagogues into service as a military prison. The prisoners, according to one account, were “close to death when they arrived—starving, naked, barefoot, beaten and abused.” They were so hungry that they ate the grass and flowers in the synagogue courtyard and stripped the bark off trees. Rakov Jews saw an opportunity to help while earning a bit of desperately needed money. Women cooked and baked and then smuggled the food into the synagogue compound and sold it to the prisoners. Security must have been lax, because with the help of the local Jews all the prisoners managed to escape and melt into the surrounding peasant villages. This was the pretext for the Nazi Aktion. Operatives of Einsatzgruppe B rounded up fifty-five Rakov Jews (the exact number varies in different accounts), including women, children, and the elderly, took them into the forest about twenty-five miles from town, shot them, and dumped the bodies in a shallow grave.

  A Rakov Jew named Moshe Pogolensky wrote about the aftermath:

  At first, we did not know where to find them since we were not allowed to walk in the streets. A few days passed and some of the Christians said that they saw the bodies inside a hole in the ground. As soon as the rumors spread in the shtetl, three members of Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish burial society, immediately volunteered to give them a proper burial, despite the perils involved in doing such a mitzvah. Among them, Israel Yitzhak, the smith, Hirshska, the ingle, and Yakov Cholsky, volunteered to bring them to Jewish burial. They secretly went to the killing field, removed the cover of the hole in which the bodies were thrown, quietly took all the victims they found, and put them on buggies and took them to the Jewish cemetery for burial. Sadly, the Germans found out about this, discovering the three men. They immediately took the men away and executed them and their remains were never found.

  Fear and darkness spread amongst the Jewish population in town. Each person tried to find a hiding place until the terrors would pass. Not one Jew was seen outside. Everyone closed himself in his home with his shutters shut and there was a deathly quiet surrounding the town.

  Etl sealed up the house on Kashalna Street and took charge of her family. She knew how to sew; she was experienced in buying and selling from years of working in her parents’ leather business; she was smart and resourceful and desperate. She was sure—they all were sure—that “the terrors would pass.” She just had to keep her family alive long enough to greet that day. She probably had some leather hides or garments stashed away that she could sell or barter. There might have been a bit of cash. Many Jewish women were forced to work for the German occupiers, cleaning their homes, washing and sewing their clothes, scrubbing the streets, pushing papers in their offices, and Etl may have been among them. She did whatever it took to survive. Etl was, or had been, on good terms with the gentile neighbors, and she was fortunate that the gentiles in Rakov were mostly Belarusians, not Lithuanians. The Nazis brought out the worst in everyone, but the Lithuanians were among the more eager collaborators, and their worst was worse than the Belarusians’.

  Etl and her mother and children spent the scorching summer of 1941 shuttered in their house near the Catholic church. What happened outside seeped in through the cracks like a foul odor. The Nazis set up a Judenrat—the council that mediated between the occupiers and the prisoners. Though no one wanted to serve, the Germans threatened more killings if four men did not step forward. An unwilling council was formed. Their main task was serving as bagmen for the plunder that the Germans demanded—clothing, jewelry, money, even eggs and chickens. The Jews were filthy vermin but evidently their possessions escaped the taint. One day the Germans announced that the bodies that had been retrieved by the slain members of the Chevra Kadisha could be buried in the Jewish cemetery after all: graves were dug amid the stunted pines, prayers were chanted hastily, the dead were consigned to the hands of the Almighty. Then fourteen more Jews disappeared, murdered and dumped where no one would ever find them. There were stories of “good” Germans who turned a blind eye and sadistic Germans who went out of their way to humiliate, torture, draw blood. Some of the tortures could have been concocted only by madmen. Devout old Jewish men were lined up in the marketplace and forced to yank out each other’s beards. The inmates of insane asylums were turned loose in synagogues to taunt and beat and crush the bones of observant Jews. The Judenrat of a nearby shtetl was given twenty minutes to come up with ten thousand cigarettes. There was no logic, no motive, no apparent pattern, except that more and more Jews died.

  Still Etl heard nothing from her father and sisters, nor they from her.

  —

  In Vilna, your fate depended on what symbol was inked on your documents. A certificate typed in German and stamped with a swastika, proof that you worked for the Nazis, was usually enough to persuade a snatcher to let you go. The horse stamp used by the Lithuanian administration had less authority. The various rubber stamps applied by private employers permitted you to work but rarely to escape if a snatcher grabbed you. People were “driven out of their minds” trying to figure out which stamp was the safest and how to get their hands on the “iron document” issued by the Nazis. But often it made no difference. Plenty of snatchers ripped up your documents no matter what stamp they bore, threw the scraps in your face, and hauled you off to Ponar. Without a stamp you starved. With a stamp—horse, swastika, whatever—you worked and you prayed for luck.

  Doba, widowed, though she would never know how or when, had no certificate of any sort. No job. No source of income. No shred of security. What she and the boys lived on is a mystery—probably they eked out the crumbs of the handouts that used to come from America.

  Doba would never let her children starve but there was nothing she could do to keep their childhood alive. Shimonkeh and Velveleh’s days of riding bikes in the country and playing chess with their father were over. Velveleh was not yet ten years old, still an innocent—but Shimonkeh was already a man. Hadn’t they all told him so over and over again six months earlier, when they celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Taharat Hakodesh synagogue (now the Germans’ medical warehouse)? But what did it mean to be a man, a Jewish man, in Vilna in the summer of 1941? Most of the men had been snatched—those who remained clung to life by the filament of work. Some boys no older than Shimonkeh lied about their age and got themselves hired in the peat bogs outside the city. They toiled half naked all day, every day, from dawn to dark, but when they returned home at night they had a few coins and sometimes vegetables or eggs they had bought in the villages. Some boys put on their father’s work clothes and hired out as painters, carpenters, electricians: they knew nothing of such trades, but they learned as they went. Shimonkeh was not a strong boy. His frame was awkward, his limbs long and scrawny; his ears belled out on either side of a narrow face; his sandy hair was barely longer than stubble; his hearing may have been permanently impaired by his childhood bout with scarlet fever. But intelligence can be a kind of strength. In the shuttered city, Shimonkeh registered whatever passed before him with the fierce, abashed regard of a thirteen-year-old prisoner. “The children did not complain,” wrote one Vilna father of that season. “They understood they had to stay inside. . . . They did not ask questions or demand an explanation. The opposite happened—they protected and guarded us, the grown-ups.”

  Shimonkeh heard his mother’s sobs. He heard the screaming in the courtyards at night. He was forbidden to go outside but the agony of the city reached him through the walls. His father had disappeared. He was the man of the family now. Did that mean he would disappear next?

  Shimonkeh was born a year before Anne Frank and a year after Yitzhak Rudashevski, a Vilna boy who kept a diary of the German occupation. If Shimonkeh wrote down what he saw and felt that summer, the pages have been lost. But the imprisoned children had a kind of mute unde
rground. On the spot they invented their own codes, accommodations, wild fantasies, and invisible, infinitesimal survival strategies. Had he been able to read Anne Frank’s diary, Shimonkeh would have understood implicitly:

  Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  VILNA GHETTO

  For the parents, every new Nazi decree or personnel shuffle rekindled hope. The children, instinctively, knew better. At the end of July, Vilna got a new administration—district commissioner Hans Hingst and his deputy for Jewish affairs Franz Murer. Murer, a barber in his former life, had graduated from Hitler Youth to become a die-hard Nazi. Soon they were calling him Mem—the Angel of Death. The Angel wasted no time. On August 6 he told the Judenrat that they had twenty-four hours to deliver 5 million rubles into his hands—with the usual or else. But Murer was a small-time chiseler compared with his boss. Hingst had big plans that required time and finesse to bring to fruition. On the last day of August, he judged that conditions were ripe for what became known as the Great Provocation. In the afternoon, two armed Lithuanians entered a building on Glezer Street in the old Jewish section; outside, the street was crowded with German soldiers queuing up for a movie. The Lithuanian intruders fired off a couple of rounds and then dashed into the street, hollering to the soldiers that there were Jews inside the apartment building shooting at them. This was Hingst’s pretext for a mass Aktion. On Monday, September 1, “The city seethed all day,” wrote Kruk. Rumors swirled that in the ancient Jewish quarter, the residents of every building were being “driven out.” Not just the men—everyone. “Lines of people march on both sides of the street,” wrote Kruk, “winding behind one another—all with yellow patches. . . . Those who saw it describe dreadful scenes. The wailing reached the sky. The young were leading the old. They were dragging sick people and children. There were dozens of well-known and distinguished Vilna Jews in the groups. Those who saw it wept with them.” In the course of two days Hingst evicted some 3,700 Jews from the congested heart of Jewish Vilna and crammed them into Lukiszki Prison. From there, they were dispatched in groups to Ponar—men on foot, women in trucks. The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers by gender and age—864 men, 2,019 women, 817 Jewish children. By Friday, September 5, wild new rumors congealed around a single word. Ghetto! The purpose of the Great Provocation became clear: the old Jewish quarter had been emptied so that Jews from other parts of the city could be confined there. Vilna’s 40,000 remaining Jews had a single day to relocate. The Germans had deliberately fixed on Shabbat as the moving day so as to inflict maximum pain.

  Kruk, September 5, 1941:

  Better stop thinking. But how?

  It is 11:30 at night. Everyone is awake. My house borders the district of the Fourth Precinct. I listen to the nocturnal silence. Maybe I’ll hear something. Neighbors go from door to door and don’t know what to do with themselves.

  Maybe pack? Pack what?

  In the street, I hear shots.

  My friends, where are you? What’s happening to you now? Will I ever see you again?

  The hours drag on like years!

  Doba, like every other Jew still alive in Vilna, had a few hours to sort and bundle up the fragments of her life. On the morning of Saturday, September 6, she dressed herself and the boys in as many layers as she could zip and button around them so there would be less to drag with them through the streets. A column of Lithuanian police and civilian guards stormed their building, forcing open doors, shouting at the residents to be quick, beating and herding them. The halls and stairwells filled with screams and sobs and the shuffle of shoes on stone. Doba, Shimonkeh, and Velveleh staggered under their burdens—Doba knew that every shirt, every dish, every piece of silverware meant another loaf of bread so she tried to haul away as much as possible. The boys blinked and squinted when they emerged into the sunlight they had barely seen since June. The streets were “a picture of the Middle Ages,” wrote one of the herded, “a gray black mass of people . . . harnessed to large bundles.” Lithuanian guards stood by to hustle and club them; bystanders heckled and jeered and robbed the unwary. “A bundle was suddenly stolen from a neighbor,” wrote fourteen-year-old Yitzhak Rudashevski, who went to the ghetto that day with the rest of them. “The woman stands in despair among her bundles and does not know how to cope with them, weeps and wrings her hands. Suddenly everything around me begins to weep. Everything weeps.”

  The Germans had ordered the gentile populace not to assist the Jews in any way—but a few kind souls endangered their own lives by lifting a pack onto the back of a tottering old woman or hiding the valuables of a neighbor. Doba and her sons took their places in the black parade. “The Lithuanians drive us on, do not let us rest,” wrote Rudashevski. “I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. I have been cut off from all that is dear and precious to me.” Doba and the boys marched without knowing where they were going; they had no idea that ahead of them the stream was being forced into three channels: one drained into the tiny crabbed precinct of the old Jewish quarter, abutting the Great Synagogue; one into the half dozen dismal blocks anchored by the Judenrat headquarters on Strashuno Street; the overflow filled Lukiszki Prison. Doba and her two boys ended up in the Strashuno Street ghetto—the Large Ghetto, as it became known. They were comparatively lucky. Anyone who could not be crammed into the Large Ghetto spent Saturday night penned outside on Lidski Lane; on Sunday they were all carted off to Lukiszki Prison and from there to Ponar.

  Those who got in first, or had the muscle or gumption, seized the better flats and barred the doors. Doba was in no shape to hustle or grab. She and the boys may have spent the first night sleeping in a courtyard or in the gutter—many did. The black parade continued long after dark; the angry rustle of voices and the crack of rubber and wood on bone never stopped. Doba and her sons trudged up and down a thousand filthy steps, knocked on a hundred doors, shoved their way into other shoving bodies. At some point, after God knows what epic ordeal, they ended up at Strashuno 15, a few doors down from the Judenrat on the main street of the Large Ghetto. It was a building of three floors, maybe three apartments to a floor. Eventually, Doba, Shimonkeh, Velveleh, Doba’s brother-in-law Yitzchak Senitski, and 437 other Jews lived in that one small building.

  “What can I say,” Doba had written Sonia in happier times, “Shimonkeh is the greatest joy of my life.” In the ghetto, the dregs of that joy turned, like poison gas, into torment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  YOM KIPPUR, 1941

  Itel had entered her queenly phase. She was fifty-five years old in 1941, rich, polished, tireless, infallible. Her business had never been more successful, her appearance more striking, her manner more imposing. She dressed and groomed with exquisite taste. Her pearls were large and numerous. Her life was full. Her happiness apparently secure. Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses in the world, employed 1,450 people; yearly sales of bras and girdles topped 4.5 million. The Bayonne plant produced more bras than any other manufacturing facility anywhere on the globe. Bea, a graduate of Barnard College, had married a tall manly doctor two years earlier and was working her way up in the company. It pleased Itel no end that Maiden Form would remain under family control, a female dynasty, passed from mother to daughter. In regal fashion, Itel kept strict guard over her privacy while tossing the press glam
orous tidbits about her tastes and temperament. She was a voracious reader; she and William were regulars at the theater and the opera. She loved to dance—at corporate bashes, the tuxedoed young execs jockeyed to partner her. Her travels, of course, had been trimmed back because of the war, but she still made the most of every hour on the road. “She could romance a customer out of his shoes and socks,” remarked one of the company’s rising young men. “In market week, she would float around the showrooms very gracefully. . . . She made it her business to say hello to every single person who came in.” Itel herself was a little more blunt about it: “I warm up sales. Then I let the salesman take the order.”

  With a kingdom so large and prosperous, it was time to move to a palace. Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion on a private beach in a swanky enclave on Long Island’s North Shore. The previous owner, a wealthy Broadway impresario, had been terrified of a house fire, so there was lots of bright shiny tile everywhere. Salvatore, the Italian gardener, kept the grounds immaculate, tended the flower beds, and rolled the clay tennis court. A Norwegian cook named Anna prepared their meals. There was a ballroom, a library, a studio where William could sculpt, servants’ quarters, a boathouse. Every workday Vincent, the chauffeur, drove Itel and William into Manhattan. In the summer, William fished from his own jetty. The Rosenthals were not invited to the parties of their rich WASP neighbors, but they had plenty of society of their own. Though Itel had never been especially family minded, except with her own immediate family, she saw that every relative got at least one invitation to Bayville. The mansion on the Sound hosted many a sweet sixteen, wedding, birthday bash, boating weekend, and bridge evening.