by David Laskin
There were Bundists and Zionists in Shimonkeh’s family. At fourteen his uncle Chaim had already been enrolled in HeHalutz. His aunt Itel had been inhaling revolutionary literature. His aunt Sonia had been dreaming of making aliyah. Perhaps Shimonkeh too had the soul of a revolutionary. Maybe someone smuggled him a copy of “The First Call,” the fiery manifesto that twenty-three-year-old Zionist Abba Kovner delivered to the delegates of Vilna’s Jewish Youth Movement on the night of December 31, 1941:
Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth! Do not believe those who are deceiving you. Out of 80,000 Jews of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, only 20,000 remain. In front of your eyes our parents, our brothers and our sisters are being torn away from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were snatched away for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are those naked women who were taken away on the horror-night of the provocation? Where are those Jews of the Day of Atonement? And where are our brothers of the second ghetto? Anyone who is taken out through the gates of the ghetto, will never return. All roads of the ghetto lead to Ponary, and Ponary means death. Oh, despairing people, tear this deception away from your eyes. Your children, your husbands, your wives—are no longer alive—Ponary is not a labor camp. Everyone there is shot. . . . It is true that we are weak, lacking protection, but the only reply to a murderer is resistance. Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath.
Shimonkeh must have known that Abba Kovner and Itzhak Wittenberg were recruiting Vilna’s young Zionists and Communists into an underground resistance movement called the FPO (Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye—United Partisan Organization). He must have known that Judenrat chief Jacob Gens, a former officer in the Lithuanian army, carried a pistol and that he had gotten the Nazis to arm his Jewish ghetto police with guns, rubber sticks, and brass knuckles. The FPO was amassing arms as well. When the “actions” started again, they would be ready.
News of the war seeped through the walls. The prisoners smiled and winked at each other when they learned that the Red Army had fought the Germans to a standstill at Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942. They knew all about the Anglo-American attack on German forces in North Africa that November. “An American incursion has landed,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary on November 12. “The Germans are suffering dreadful blows. . . . When the English [and Americans] finish in Africa, it is expected that a second front will be opened in Europe and then . . . we can still manage to leave the ghetto. We become encouraged hearing that the battle is proceeding, that our spark of hope still flickers.”
If Rudashevski was aware of this at the age of fifteen, then fourteen-year-old Shimon Senitski must have been aware too. Shimonkeh knew that his mother had relatives in America. He knew that the relatives had sons. It was no great stretch for a boy with imagination to picture these sons marching into battle against the Germans.
Still, it’s unlikely that Shimonkeh imagined the truth: that in November 1942, his mother’s first cousin, Len Cohn, was among the American forces dealing “dreadful blows” to the Germans in North Africa. A spark of hope flickered across the globe unseen from cousin to cousin.
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The First Division, Len Cohn among them, landed in Oran in Algeria on November 8, 1942. The Vichy French forces defending Algeria put up little resistance, and after three or four days of fighting the Americans secured the area. Len, an adjutant on the battalion staff, bivouacked with his unit near Oran and stayed put for a couple of months. Then in February 1943, they were ordered east to stop the forces that Rommel was massing in Tunisia. What followed was the costly, bloody Battle of Kasserine Pass, fought in a gap in the rugged Atlas Mountains that rim Africa’s northwestern coast. It was the war’s first major engagement between American and German forces, and it did not go well. Americans suffered heavy casualties and significant loss of tanks and antiaircraft batteries before finally forcing Rommel’s Afrika Korps back and reoccupying the pass on February 24.
Seventy years later, Len remembered his involvement in the battle like this:
At some point I was out in a jeep with a work party. I don’t remember all the details, but we were working on a road. It was open country with the Atlas Mountains rising on one side and railroad tracks on the other. There had been snow in the mountains in January, but that day was mild. At some point I noticed a column of smoke rising half a mile away. I got out of the jeep and told the driver to turn the vehicle around and be prepared to go back to base. I walked toward the railway embankment—trying to figure out what this smoke was about—when suddenly I was shot at. I dove to the ground and took cover in a tank track a few inches deep. I got my pistol out of its holster and thought I better wait there until dark. Then I heard Germans come up from behind me—I heard them talking—they were close enough for me to know they were speaking German. I froze where I was, realizing that I had somehow gotten behind German lines. I was absolutely aware of how the Germans would have treated me if they captured me. An American officer named Cohn. I’d heard the stories of what happened to Jewish POWs taken by the Germans.
In the event, I stayed where I was and waited them out. When it got dark, I climbed up to the train tracks and followed them back to our base. When the sentry heard me, he yelled out Jimmy and I yelled back Dolittle. That was the password sign and countersign that night.
After Kasserine Pass came brutal, costly battles at El Guettar, Beja, and Mateur, but by the middle of May, Tunisia belonged to the Allies. American forces were now poised to open the “second front” in Europe that the teenage Rudashevski dreamed of.
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But by then, the killing had resumed in Vilna. “It has begun again,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary on Monday, April 5. “Today the terrible news reached us: 85 railroad cars of Jews, around 5,000 persons, were not taken to Kovno [a city near Vilna] as promised but transported by train to Ponar where they were shot to death. . . . The ghetto was deeply shaken, as though struck by thunder. The atmosphere of slaughter has gripped the people.” The following day, Rudashevski closed his diary entry with the words: “We may be fated for the worst.” It was the final entry.
Vilna ghetto lacked the stomach and unity for the kind of uprising that raged in the Warsaw ghetto that April and May. The calls for armed resistance issued by Yitzhak Wittenberg, the charismatic leader of the FPO, fell largely on deaf ears. Jacob Gens, now de facto governor of the ghetto since the Judenrat had been dismissed, ruled with ruthless pragmatism. To fight, warned Gens, was suicidal—better to temporize, compromise, cooperate, play along, run out the clock. “Work for life” was his watchword. Gens vowed to keep as many people alive as possible, as long as they obeyed him. Wittenberg countered that life was not worth living as the slaves of murderers. Between them, Gens and Wittenberg divided the soul of Vilna ghetto, though Gens took the lion’s share. A showdown was inevitable.
On the night of July 9–10, the First Division, Len Cohn among them, took part in a massive Allied air and sea attack on the Sicilian coast near the town of Gela. Much was disastrously bungled in the initial assault and German resistance was ferocious. Still, the Allies had breached the perimeter of Nazi Europe. The news reached Vilna ghetto immediately, but there were no winks or smiles of celebration. “Many of us would have drunk a toast yesterday,” Herman Kruk wrote in his diary on July 10, “if there weren’t recently such an air of death in the ghetto. A question mark hangs over the ghetto. The air grows thicker.”
The question concerned the fate of resistance leader Yitzhak Wittenberg. Tipped off by a traitor in the ranks of the FPO, the Gestapo had demanded that Wittenberg be turned over to them alive. Gens, though by some accounts he secretly supported, funded, and armed the FPO, agreed to do what he could to arrange the capture. On July 15, he set up a meeting with Wittenberg, in the course of which he betrayed Wittenberg to the police (sources differ on whether the Jewish or the Lithuanian police ma
de the arrest). However, an FPO contingent succeeded in freeing Wittenberg and hiding him in the ghetto. “The chase after Wittenberg went on for hours,” wrote one resident. “The whole ghetto felt involved.” Hidden in an attic, disguised as a woman, Wittenberg issued the call for an immediate uprising. But the Gestapo outwitted him. An ultimatum was issued that put Jewish Vilna in an impossible bind: either Wittenberg be turned over to the Gestapo alive or they would kill every last Jew in the ghetto. Gens coined a slogan that was shouted in the streets: “1 or 20,000.” The ghetto erupted. A throng of “underworld characters and Jewish police, masses of ghetto Jews” descended on FPO headquarters screaming “We want to live!” In the end, with the ghetto on the brink of a civil war of Jew versus Jew, FPO members persuaded their leader to surrender. “Look, Jews are standing in the street,” Abba Kovner told Wittenberg. “We shall have to fight them in order to reach the enemy, and he will probably stand there and laugh. Are you prepared for this?” Wittenberg entered Gestapo headquarters with a hidden capsule of cyanide (some believe Gens slipped it to him). He committed suicide in his cell.
July 16, 1943—a day of shame that became known as Wittenberg Day—signaled the beginning of the end. Three weeks later, on August 6, a thousand Jewish workers were pulled off their jobs at Vilna’s Porobanek Airfield, herded into a railway yard, and forced onto cattle cars. Many tried to run, assuming they were bound for Ponar, and were shot down. But this roundup was something new. With their armies being pounded and pushed back in Russia, Sicily, and North Africa, the Germans were desperate for weapons, ammunition, concrete blocks for bunkers, tanks, uniforms, fur coats, machine parts. The workers seized at the airfield on August 6 were not being sent to die at Ponar but to live and work as slaves in Estonia, where the Nazis were amassing huge concentration camps—not extermination camps like Treblinka and Sobibor but war-industry work camps. If the slaves worked themselves to death, so be it—fewer to kill in the end. By Wittenberg Day, Vilna ghetto, like all of Europe’s ghettos, had already been assigned an expiration date and a liquidation program. The fit prisoners would go to Estonia. The “unnecessary” would be disposed of.
Vilna, in fact, was the first place where the Nazis began to murder Jews on a methodical, industrial scale. It was also the site of their greatest success. Of the eighty thousand Jews living in Vilna when the Germans seized the city in June 1941, only two to three thousand survived the war. At Ponar alone, some seventy-two thousand Jews from Vilna and the surrounding region were shot and buried. “No other Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe was so comprehensively destroyed.”
After the August 6 deportations, a second round took place on August 24. Eight days later a new Gestapo chief named Bruno Kittel took over to oversee the third cull. The fourth—and final—round began on September 23. By then Jacob Gens was dead—shot by Kittel’s orders in the courtyard of the Gestapo headquarters on the evening of September 14. The liquidation of Vilna ghetto proceeded without its king.
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According to the last ghetto census conducted on May 29, 1942, Doba was living with her two sons and her brother-in-law at Strashuno 15. At some point in 1943, Doba “vanished”—her cousin Tsipora’s word. Tsipora has no recollection of the particulars. After the May 1942 census, there is no trace of Doba; no document with her name in it; no survivor who can attest to her disappearance. Only these two facts have surfaced: on May 29, 1942, Doba and her sons were alive. In 1943, she vanished.
This is probably how it happened.
At seven o’clock on the morning of September 23, Ukrainian soldiers broke into their room and at gunpoint ordered Doba, Yitzchak, and the boys to vacate the building. “Screaming obscenities, [the soldiers] demanded our so-called jewelry,” recorded one prisoner. “There was very little left, mostly watches.” Doba grabbed whatever of value remained and hid it in an inner pocket or the seam of a coat, and then she and Yitzchak and the boys joined the mass of people in the courtyard. They walked the two blocks to the main ghetto gate on Rudnicka Street, they passed the sign on the gate that warned of typhoid danger—“Entry is strictly forbidden for non-Jews”—they entered the streets of the city, the gentile city. “As soon as we passed the gate, we were surrounded by other Ukrainians who stood ready for us with outstretched rifles,” wrote a survivor. “Instinctively we closed ranks a little more and kept walking.” The streets were eerily deserted—no jeering bystanders, just troops armed with rifles and clubs and a long dark river of prisoners.
Doba’s reply had been “none” when the ghetto census-taker asked her profession. Her sole occupation had always been daughter, wife, and mother. Wife had been taken from her when Shepseleh died at Ponar two years earlier, but she had clung to mother. Doba was not a saint. Her heart was large but fragile and selfish. It must have driven her mad to share half a room with two miserable boys for two years, to listen to them cough and bicker, to see their childhoods wither. No one emerges from a ghetto ennobled. “It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims,” Primo Levi wrote. “On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” Doba’s humanity was assaulted mercilessly by the agents of National Socialism. Maybe they succeeded in degrading her. Maybe she broke down and turned on her family. Maybe she grabbed food for herself and let them starve. Maybe she came to hate the sons she had once loved more than life. There is no way of knowing what was in her heart. But the facts speak for themselves. She was a widow without a work permit imprisoned in a ghetto, and yet she kept two boys alive.
At the outskirts of the city, streets gave way to hills and gardens. At a bend in the road, the slender twin baroque towers of the Missionaries Church of the Assumption came into view above the walls of the Rossa Monastery. Chaos descended as Doba and her family approached this place of worship. “Germans tore into our columns,” wrote one prisoner. “We were pushed in all directions. We could not see anything but felt that something terrible was taking place.” Families were being split up—men to one side, women and children to the other. What were Shimonkeh and Velveleh—children or men? Velveleh had a month to go until he turned eleven. After two years in the ghetto he would have been stunted and emaciated, so he probably looked closer to seven or eight. A child. He went with Doba into the monastery courtyard. Shimonkeh, fifteen and tall for his age, was judged to be a man. With the crack of a rifle butt, Doba lost her firstborn son. Shimonkeh and his uncle Yitzchak disappeared into the crowd.
Soldiers with rifles and clubs forced Doba and Velveleh toward Rossa Square, an immense enclosure in the monastery complex. At the entrance “there were two rows of Gestapo facing each other for about 200 feet.” The air reverberated with the sounds of people inflicting and enduring pain. “I don’t know how to describe the sound and the smell of death that reigned around us,” remembered one prisoner. “By this time, most of the women . . . were walking aimlessly in a daze with desolate looks on their faces as if they had already lost their minds. There were small children crying, looking for their parents.” At the far end of the square there was an opening, an exit into a narrow corridor, and in front of this opening the naked bodies of two young men and a young woman dangled from poles—FPO partisans who had been caught trying to escape through the city sewers and killed by Kittel’s orders. One witness wrote that the men were dead but the woman had enough life to croak out, “No, they won’t do this to you.” Tsipora, who was present in Rossa Square that day, remembers only two bodies, a man and a woman; she believes that they had been strangled for putting up a sign that said, “Jews go right.” It was always the same when the Germans did a “selection”—right meant life, left was death.
All around Doba, women were pinching their cheeks so they could color up and look younger. Anyone who had lipstick smeared her mouth with bright red. The crowd shoved Doba and Velveleh toward the hanging bodies at the far side of the square where the “selection” would determ
ine their fates.
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It rained the night of September 23 and the Jewish women and children in Rossa Square got soaked. “Ukrainian guards walked among the half-sleeping people, robbed and beat them,” wrote Kruk. The final selection of the 8,000 ghetto survivors was completed on the September 24. An estimated 1,400 to 1,700 young women went right—to the Kaiserwold concentration camp in Latvia. Between 4,000 and 4,500 women and children went left—to the gas chambers at Sobibor. A few hundred were deemed so weak, sick, or old that they were not worth transporting to a gas chamber and instead were taken to Ponar and shot over the brimming pits.
