The Family

by David Laskin

  British intransigence inflamed Jewish resistance. The first round of terrorist bombings and assassinations in Mandate Palestine were a direct result of the brutality and inhumanity that the British displayed toward Jewish refugees during the war.

  Sonia read the newspaper, read her father’s letters, exchanged news with her fellow moshavniks, and went slowly out of her mind. The words hope and God and future appeared in nearly every letter her father wrote, but after the Patria and the Salvator and the Sturma, Sonia could hope no longer. Even if by some miracle Etl and Doba and their children could be extracted from the ghettos of Rakov and Vilna, the British would never let them set foot in Palestine. The war had snapped shut a perfect trap. The Jews of Palestine despised their British governors, but they were utterly dependent on British power. Without the British military, Rommel’s Panzer divisions would sweep in from the west and they would be prisoners of the Reich just like their relatives in Europe (an Einsatzgruppe unit was stationed in Greece, ready to descend on Palestine and begin liquidating the Jewish population when the time came). With the British in control, though, they were powerless to help their brethren trapped in Europe. Sonia and Chaim could do nothing but work their land, raise their children, and wait.

  With every passing month of war, Sonia set her heart more fiercely on bringing her father to Palestine. But this too was maddeningly impossible.

  —

  The Nazi-appointed Judenrate—literally, “Jewish councils”—were not councils at all but instruments of more efficient oppression and murder. When the masters wanted to enumerate, rob, transport, or kill the slaves, the Judenrat was charged with making the numbers come out right—enough money, enough bodies. If they failed, they died first. If they succeeded, they died anyway—maybe a few hours later, a few weeks, a month, but they died nonetheless. So it was no honor and no guarantee of safety that Chaim’s brother Yishayahu was forced to serve on Volozhin’s Judenrat. The local SS probably tapped him because he had been a teacher.

  The holy city of Volozhin was cursed with an especially sadistic bunch of Nazi occupiers. Their greatest pleasure was torturing little girls to death. When one Jewish girl was caught taking a bottle of milk from a Christian woman, the Nazis made her crawl up a hill on her hands and knees gathering potatoes until she was bloody and exhausted. “The tortures lasted for hours until her powers ceased, then they killed her,” recounted one witness. The Nazis grabbed two Jewish girls and marched them to the top of Priest’s Mountain along with two dogs. “On the mountain they shot the girls and beheaded the dogs to mix Jewish with animal blood. Those who passed away naturally were considered lucky.”

  On October 28, 1941, Yishayahu and the other members of the Volozhin Judenrat were summoned by the local head of the Gestapo—a thug by the name of Moka. Moka told them to come up with a heap of boot soles—why or for what he did not specify. The Judenrat, figuring it was just another random act of Nazi madness, complied, but the madness did not end there. Moka returned to the Judenrat later that day with a couple of SS officers. This time he ordered the council members to assemble the entire population of the ghetto for “an interesting lecture” on work ethics. Again, Yishayahu and his fellow councilors spread the word through the ghetto. A survivor described what ensued: “When a large number had assembled, Moka sent most of them back to the ghetto. He imprisoned the rest in the cinema hall. From there he took groups of ten people at one time, conducted them to the neighboring sports ground and killed them.” Two hundred Volozhin residents died in this action, including Jacob Garber, the Judenrat head. After the shootings, Belarusian police were called in to despoil the bodies: “[They] stripped the clothes off the corpses, took away any rings and jewelry and pulled their gold teeth out of their mouths. Then a group of Jews was brought and ordered to bury the dead.” Yishayahu may have been among the victims—able-bodied men were targeted first and he was not yet forty. Like Beyle, like Shepseleh, like Khost, Yishayahu Kaganovich had no grave. His name appeared just once in the records of Volozhin as a member of the Judenrat, then vanished. He left a wife, a daughter, and a two-year-old son.

  “Life in the Ghetto grew harder and harder,” wrote a survivor. “One day several SS men entered the house which served as a House of Prayer. They took a Torah Scroll, spread it out on the ground, made several dozen Jews lie down on the sheets and killed them.” Perhaps this was one of the scrolls inked by the soft skilled hand of the patriarch Shimon Dov HaKohen—grandfather of Yishayahu and Chaim; Doba, Etl, and Sonia; Itel, Harry, Sam, and Hyman.

  —

  Sam’s oldest daughter, Dorothy, had always been strange—shrill, irrational, obsessive, hypersensitive, suspicious of others. Today she would probably be diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic or bipolar, but in 1941 she was written off as peculiar. Her siblings joked that Dorothy had a radio with its own unique frequency, which explained why she knew about news events and weather conditions that no one else had ever heard of. When Dorothy emerged from her bedroom on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, shouting that Japanese planes had bombed the U.S. battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor, no one in the family believed her. Where the hell was Pearl Harbor, anyway?

  But for once, Dorothy’s radio had gotten it right. In the course of the surprise attack, four U.S. naval battleships were sunk, four others were damaged, 2,402 Americans died, and 1,282 were wounded. The following day Congress declared war on Japan, and the declaration of war on Germany came three days later.

  Chance, fate, and ambition had divided the family of the scribe. War reunited them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WONDER GIRL

  Word seeped into the Rakov ghetto that America had entered the war, but the Germans saw to it that the news raised no hope or unrest. Nazi officers convinced the Rakov Judenrat that the United States and Britain intended to make peace with Germany and that when the fighting stopped the Nazis were going to transport the Jews to Palestine. “Many such shameful and worn-out lies guided the activity of the Judenrat,” wrote one Rakov Jew. “Rich storekeepers and factory owners, people with initiative who handled their difficulty with gelt . . . were in the Judenrat. They exacted a harsh price from the population. No one can say that the gelt did not help them. Meanwhile hundreds of children, women, old people and weak and sick men were living in great hunger and need.” Etl and her daughters were among those.

  The day after the United States declared war on Japan, the first killings by poison gas took place at the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland. The murderers mounted an elaborate charade, telling the victims that they must have a medical exam and shower—and then shoving them naked into the back of a paneled truck in batches of fifty to seventy and asphyxiating them with carbon monoxide. Murder by gas would be perfected over the next few months and a gas called Zyklon B, far more efficient than carbon monoxide, would be used to kill on an industrial scale at the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Sachsenhausen. But gas was not necessary for mass murder. Plenty, like Shepseleh, were shot over pits; murdered, like Beyle, by greedy neighbors; captured and imprisoned and executed like Khost. Disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition claimed many more. In the six months between June and December 1941, the Nazis slaughtered a million Jews in the territory they had seized from the Soviets—most of them killed by bullets and fire, the preferred weapons of the Einsatzgruppen.

  By the end of 1941, Hitler had made it clear that the elimination of Jews from Nazi-occupied territory was now his top priority. Accordingly, on January 20, 1942, SS general Reinhard Heydrich convened a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform key governmental and military personnel of how the “Final Solution” of European Jewry would be effected. Heydrich announced that the Reich’s goal was the elimination of some 11 million Jews not only from the countries at war in Europe but also from the United Kingdom and neutral nations including Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and the European sector of Turkey. Able
-bodied Jews would be worked to death; the remnant would be “dealt with appropriately.”

  The Jews of Rakov were among the first to be “dealt with” under the blueprint of the Final Solution.

  —

  They were torn from sleep at dawn on Wednesday, February 4, 1942. To Minsk, to Minsk, adult voices muttered. Mireleh was only six but she knew what Minsk meant. Minsk was where her father had gone. Minsk was the city. Shops. Crowded sidewalks. Cakes and sweets and stores crammed with delicious food. If they were going to Minsk maybe she’d get to see her daddy again. Maybe her mother would smile.

  The snow was still shadowy blue outside, but inside everything was in an uproar. Her mother was frantically pulling clothes into bundles. Dobaleh was hungry—Mireleh was hungry too but she knew better than to whine about it. To Minsk, to Minsk. They must pack only what they could carry in their arms. Mireleh was big enough to carry a bundle of her own, but Dobaleh was still a baby. What did Dobaleh know? She had spent half her life in the ghetto, her father had disappeared before she could say “Daddy,” she couldn’t even walk properly. In one month it would be Dobaleh’s first birthday—but Mireleh doubted that there would be cake.

  Fists were pounding on the walls and then the door flew open and men’s voices shouted at them to get moving. Everyone who had been stuffed into this tiny house since Yom Kippur grabbed what they could and then all of them tumbled outside into the snow.

  Even in the feeble dawn light Mireleh could see the ring of armed men in uniforms. The voices kept shouting commands that she couldn’t understand. The women screamed as the men with guns grabbed their bags and shoved them along. No need for bags where you’re going. Anyone who tried to resist or turn back got cracked on the head with a rifle butt. A few fell to the ground bleeding. Mireleh clung to her mother’s hand and they moved with the surging crowd. Cries and curses echoed over her head. They are not taking us to Minsk. They are taking us to death. One or two broke off from the mass and began to run. Fire from the machine guns dropped the bodies onto the trampled snow. The sound of pain was deafening.

  The noise subsided a little when they were all assembled in the courtyard of the three synagogues: the old shul, the new shul, and the small shtible where the Hasidim used to dance until their black clothes flapped in the air like crows’ wings. They were low and humble, these three beloved shuls. Their roofs were shingled; their wooden walls were darkened and ridged by time; inside they were bare and dim but for the jeweled light that shone from the Torah scrolls. Still, they were the glory of Rakov. But why were they at shul today? It wasn’t Shabbat and it was much too early. Mireleh pressed close to her mother and baby sister in the courtyard as the ring of men tightened. They were all being squeezed toward the entrance of the old shul, and one by one they disappeared inside. The bony ends of knees and elbows jabbed at Mireleh from every side. The breath was crushed from her body. And then it was their turn to take their place with the others in God’s house.

  —

  Nachum Greenholtz, a Rakov Jew, had been warned of what was coming that day and managed to hide inside a “field bathroom.” He wrote: “From the cracks in the wall we could see the Germans searching and checking and surrounding the town. Later we saw the flames coming from the ghetto and we instantly understood what was happening. We heard the sound of the screams.”

  A group of six witnesses reported: “Crying children were pierced by rifle bayonets and thrown over the crowded heads. The synagogue doors and windows were blocked with nailed planks. The murderers spilled gasoline on the walls and set the building on fire.”

  Others said that a few managed to get out of the synagogue and run for their lives, but the guards shot them down.

  Moshe Pogolensky gave a different account:

  At dawn . . . the ghetto was surrounded and the entire Jewish community, nine hundred and fifty souls, was put in the yard of the synagogue. They took ten of the healthiest people and separated them. The rest were taken group by group to the entrance of the synagogue, where they were shot and killed by automatic machine guns. The ten separated people were ordered to throw the individual bodies in the synagogue. As soon as the last of the people were thrown in the synagogue, the ten people were pushed inside without shooting them. They shot the building and set it afire and everyone was burned to death.

  “She will be a wonder girl, with her brains and the excellent way she speaks,” Beyle had written Shalom Tvi of their granddaughter Mireleh a few months earlier. “I love how she sings and dances.” The wonder girl died at the age of six with her mother and baby sister. Whether fire, bullets, or bayonet blade killed them, whether they were shot at the entrance to the synagogue or incinerated alive inside, it will never be known. Fire consumed what remained.

  “We sat there as if we were frozen and had lost touch with ourselves,” Nachum Greenholtz wrote of himself and a fellow survivor after the fire. “We did not speak the entire day. The night was very dark and very cold. We kept walking, two lonely broken-hearted Jews who tried to save their souls and left behind them everyone they knew and loved—all that were now annihilated.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BREAKDOWNS

  Sonia and Shalom Tvi were both in terrible shape that February. Neither of them knew about the conflagration in Rakov; they received no news or letters from the handful of survivors (those would come later), not a word appeared in the press. But at some unconscious, visceral level they intuited what had occurred and collapsed.

  Shalom Tvi was at shul one Thursday morning around the time of the fire when he was suddenly stricken with a “huge headache.” He stripped off the tefillin, folded his tallith, and “fled home with great pain.” The doctor called in by the Epsteins prescribed some pills and told him to apply an ice pack to the headache. A few days later Shalom Tvi took a turn for the worse and the doctor was summoned back. When a second round of pills had no effect, the doctor recommended that he be hospitalized, but there was a problem finding an empty bed. The Epsteins “immediately called the whole family,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia, “and since [William] Rosenthal is a director of a hospital, he said that he must have a room for his uncle, and through him they secured a hospital room and right away they sent an ambulance and took me on a stretcher since I was not allowed to sit up.” Shalom Tvi was exaggerating a bit—William was not a director but he did sit on the board of the Bronx Hospital (he went on to serve as its vice president after the war and he was among the founders of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University). A team of doctors was called in, X-rays were taken, and eventually Shalom Tvi was diagnosed with hardening of the arteries in the head. When he was well enough, he wrote Sonia in detail about his recovery:

  They ordered me to lie in bed for three weeks and not to sit up. They gave me medications several times a day, and two doctors came to see me every day—not doctors from the hospital but private ones for me. My family has insisted on doing everything possible to save me, and thanks to God and thanks to my family who helped me so much, after three weeks they brought me home. It cost several hundred dollars for a private room here in the hospitals and for the doctors, and they [the American relatives] paid it all. May God keep them all healthy and see that they never know illness.

  At the same time, Sonia was suffering a kind of nervous breakdown. In the decade since she made aliyah, pioneering had lost its shine. She was thirty-four years old, a farmwife and mother with two young children to raise and no female relatives to help out or kvetch to. Seven-year-old Leahleh was a sweet studious schoolgirl, but at three and a half Areleh was a handful—obstinate, rambunctious, headstrong, impossible to manage. Sonia worried he was becoming a julik—Russian for wise guy or crook. Life at Kfar Vitkin in time of war was precarious and suffocating. She and Chaim were still struggling with the farm; the cows failed to thrive, their calves were puny; the harvests were often disappointing; the work was relentless; the summers punishing. When
Chaim was away driving the truck, Sonia was left alone with the children, the cows, and the chickens. Reading had always been her great solace, but it was when she picked up the newspapers that she fell apart. There was nothing about Rakov—what shattered her were the accounts of what was happening elsewhere. Though Sonia’s letters have not survived, it’s clear from her father’s responses that at the start of February she had reached the breaking point. Shalom Tvi wrote her in frantic anxiety:

  I can tell you, my beloved daughter, that your recent letters broke me so much that I could not sleep the whole week and I am going around confused. The last letter has actually made me ill and gives me too much heartache. The tragedies reported in the newspaper I avoid reading. I don’t want to burden myself with much worry since the doctors have cautioned me to stay calm. You too need to remain calm. We cannot help them in anything. We can expect the worst and hope for the best. I believe you should see a nerve doctor—your nerves are too stretched. My situation is worse than yours. You are, thank God, in your nest, in your own house, in your bed, your husband, your children, thank God all of you are together, may all of you be healthy, and live whole and peaceful lives together. But I am an old man, alone without anybody. It is certainly good that I have such a family.