The Family

by David Laskin

  In the spring of 1930: These details on the birth of the baby and the first Passover come from the Kfar Vitkin Web site, www.kfar-vitkin.org.il/, translated by Aza Hadas.

  “It is necessary that we have a language . . .”: Quoted in Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 82.

  Hebrew became a badge of honor: Donna Robinson Divine, Exiled in the Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 125.

  excruciating internal warfare: Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 83.

  Haganah had arranged to meet: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/irgunill.html.

  Under cover of night: Shapira, Land and Power, p. 229.

  “We are fated to live in a state of constant battle . . .”: Quoted in Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs: 1882–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 246.

  British commissions radically pared back: Sachar, A History of Israel, p. 118.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: RETURN TO RAKOV

  Sales picked up again after the brief stumble: Maidenform Collection.

  Production tripled: Evans, They Made America, p. 314.

  This is what he wrote after the visit: Rakov Yizkor book.

  Gentile shop owners now displayed signs: Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 73.

  Members of the fascist anti-Semitic ONR . . . routinely attacked: Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, pp. 70, 73.

  A big family wedding was celebrated: Interview with Tsipora Alperovich, Tel Aviv, June 2010. Tsipora remembered it as Etl’s wedding but she was mistaken.

  Vilna’s Jews accounted for a substantial percentage of the population: According to http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/vilna/vilna.htm#jewstatistics, 40 percent of the 154,532 residents were Jewish in 1897; 43.5 percent in 1916; 45 percent at the time of Sonia’s visit. But Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna Under Soviet Rule, 19 September–28 October 1939” in Poles, Jews, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal, and Polin, in Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 9, edited by Antony Polonsky, Israel Bartal, Gershon Hundert, Magdalena Opalski, and Jerzy Tomaszewski (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), p. 108, says 37 percent of 200,000 residents were Jewish prior to the Second World War.

  But another, more shadowy motive: See Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 217, for the possible homosexual connection.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW”

  A “special inquiry”: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, File Series A-File, File Number A-2958053, records relating to Sholom Kahanowicz. The documents in this file detail the special inquiry hearing, the issuance of the bail and the tourist visa, and so on.

  Now just to visit he needed: Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 23.

  The 1939 World’s Fair: Details on the fair from 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter (New York: Free Press, 1995); and Trylon and Perisphere, by Barbara Cohen, Steven Heller, and Seymour Chwast (New York: Abrams, 1989).

  the seventy neon signs: Farrell-Beck, Uplift, p. 77, and Tom Reichert, The Erotic History of Advertising (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), p. 145.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SECOND WORLD WAR

  Vilna, which had flown God knows how many flags: Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 111.

  “Vilna is congested with refugees . . .”: Quoted in Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 126.

  wounding 200 and killing 1: Yehuda Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939–1945 (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1981), p. 108.

  Meanwhile, 14,000 Jewish refugees: The statistics in this paragraph come from Bauer, American Jewry, p. 112; Shtetl Jews Under Soviet Rule, by Ben-Cion Pinchuk (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 37, which places the number of refugees at ten thousand; and Vilna, by Israel Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943), p. 471. The quote on “the spiritual elite of Polish Jewry” is from Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 37.

  “The food supply is being rapidly depleted”: Quoted in Dov Levin, “The Jews of Vilna,” p. 119.

  Vilna’s travel agents arbitrarily stopped: Cohen, Vilna, p. 473.

  a total of 137 Vilna Jews had immigrated to all countries: Bauer, American Jewry, p. 116. But this figure is far from definitive. Herman Kruk in The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2002), p. 49, describes how the Joint arranged for refugees to get out by traveling through Siberia; and Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 38, says “many” refugees found a way out to the West and Palestine—though no number is specified. Doba also indicated that many were getting out. There is no easy way to reconcile these discrepancies. My conclusion is that the American family could have done more but that Doba and Shepseleh were timid and indecisive, burdened with two young boys and unwilling to run big risks or take unorthodox paths like traveling via Siberia or Shanghai.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: UNDER THE BIG ONES

  Young Jews and the Jewish “working intelligentsia”: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 51.

  “had lost their Jewish essence . . .”: Quoted in Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”

  “Nonproductive elements” disappeared: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 34.

  “Within an hour, in one stroke . . .”: Quoted in Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 44.

  “We assembled the pieces”: Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”

  Khost was ordered to introduce special classes: Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews, p. 85.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: “THEY SNATCH WHOLE STREETS”

  Reuven Rogovin was such a Jew: Volozhin Yizkor book, “Under the Soviet Regime.”

  Next came tanks: Mendel Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941–1945: An Eyewitness Account (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing, 2010), p. 13.

  Khost and the others were taken prisoner: There are conflicting bits of testimony concerning the fate of Khost. In the “Testimony by Uri Finkel,” http://rakowshtetl.com/UriFinkel_8.htm, Rakov survivor Uri Finkel writes the following: “Thus did our shtetl lose the active ones of our Jewish community still in the first days of the fascist occupation. Further on, in addition to the 255, the shtetl lost the active Soviet educators from the Jewish school and a few other employees, who were evacuated and then overtaken by the Germans near Minsk and were with the Minsk Jews as the first victims. Among them were the teacher Kehas Goldshteyn [Khost]. . . . Together with them were about a dozen Rakov intellectuals and a dozen young men who arrived to be mobilized into the Red Army and ended up with the rest. Of these I know Sholem Finkel (Fayves), M. Chayet (Ade . . . ), I. Kaplan (Israel Moshakhezes), Aizik Katz, and others. The ten who remained alive escaped from the Minsk ghetto. The relatives of 50 Rakov families were in the Minsk ghetto. A much larger number ran away to other shtetls, many to Krosne, not believing the provocations of the commander, that the Jews who were sent to a work-camp would not be killed. Many of these were murdered along the way, not knowing where to turn.” But another Rakov survivor named Hillel Eidelman wrote to Sonia from Rakov on July 20, 1945: “I was with your brother-in-law [Khost] in the German camp, where the murderers killed him. I would write more, but my hands are trembling as I tell you such terrible news.” Eidelman does not specify which camp it was. Khost’s fate after June 27 is unknown, but from Eidelman and Finkel it seems clear that he was captured outside Minsk and killed in a camp in the vicinity of Minsk—most likely Maladzyechna.

  the Lithuanian police were on hand to divide shoppers: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 51.

  every Jew in Vilna had to wear two badges: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 25. Dates and details about patches v
ersus armbands differ slightly from one account to the next. See Kruk, The Last Days, p. 57. What is clear is that the Nazis kept changing the rules in order to confuse the ghetto prisoners and provide themselves with excuses for roundups and murder.

  “They Snatch Whole Streets”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 52.

  “What is happening in Ponar?”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 66.

  a paramilitary police force that reported directly to Hitler: Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 4. My account of the organization of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing pits at Ponar relies heavily on Rhodes. I also consulted The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign Against the Jews: July 1941–January 1943, by Yitzhak Arad and Shmuel Krakowski (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. vi–vii.

  Dr. Alfred Filbert, a lawyer: It’s not entirely clear that Filbert was in charge of Vilna. Filbert was head of Einsatzkommando-9 at the time and this was the unit assigned to Vilna, but his name does not appear in any records attached to this period. The Web site deathcamps.org says that Horst Schweineberger and Martin Weiss were in charge of the Sonderkommando of EK-9 situated at 12 Vilenskaia Street in Vilna—but Weiss and Schweineberger seem to have come later. Balberyszski in Stronger Than Iron confirms that Weiss and Schweineberger came later and that Schweineberger directed the establishment of the ghetto in September 1941. Rhodes in Masters of Death, p. 223, notes that Filbert later had a nervous breakdown.

  an auxiliary force of 150 men cherry-picked from the Lithuanian political police: Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 54.

  “The graves are to be leveled . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 48.

  “between about twenty and fifty. . . . These prisoners were really quite well-dressed . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, pp. 54–55. I rely heavily on Rhodes’s account, p. 55, of Ponar at the time of the killings and for eyewitness accounts. I visited Ponar in 2011, but the pits had been smoothed over and trees had grown up. Old photos from the war also helped me visualize the scene. I used Rhodes’s vivid and carefully documented account as the basis for what I imagine were the circumstances of Shepseleh’s death, though the exact details will never be known. The idea that he was rounded up early in the occupation and killed at Ponar is speculative—but Tsipora Alperovich, who was in the ghetto, said during our interviews in Tel Aviv that this was his fate (though she did not see him snatched).

  “We all said to one another . . .”: Quoted in Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 57.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: “AKTION”

  “Until further notice, about 200 persons are being liquidated daily”: The Einsatzgruppen Reports, p. 52.

  The prisoners, according to one account: “Testimony by Uri Finkel.”

  rounded up fifty-five Rakov Jews: The size and composition of the group varies from account to account: In “Testimony by Uri Finkel” Finkel states there were forty-nine victims, most of them young men; The Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 36 puts the number at fifty-eight. My account is a composite of Finkel and “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.

  A Rakov Jew named Moshe Pogolensky: “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.

  One day the Germans announced: “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation,” Ibid.

  Some of the tortures could have been concocted only by madmen: Details from Eliach, There Once Was a World, pp. 580, 584.

  People were “driven out of their minds”: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 44.

  Some boys put on their father’s work clothes: Ibid., p. 53.

  “The children did not complain”: Ibid., p. 47.

  “Who has inflicted this upon us?”: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 207.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: VILNA GHETTO

  On August 6 he told the Judenrat: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 35.

  “Lines of people march on both sides . . .”: Kruk, The Last Days, pp. 83, 86.

  In the course of two days Hingst evicted: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 58.

  The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers: Rhodes, Masters of Death, p. 137.

  wild new rumors: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 95.

  “Better stop thinking”: Kruk, The Last Days, p. 96.

  “a picture of the Middle Ages”: Yitskhok Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto: June 1941–April 1943 (Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973), p. 30.

  “A bundle was suddenly stolen . . .”: Rudashevski, The Diary, pp. 31–32.

  “The Lithuanians drive us on . . .”: Ibid., p. 32.

  Anyone who could not be crammed: Balberyszski, Stronger Than Iron, p. 83.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: YOM KIPPUR, 1941

  Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses: Evans, They Made America, pp. 314–315; Maidenform Collection.

  Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion: Details from Maidenform Collection and interviews with Sallie Cohen Goldwyn, various dates, and Marvin Sleisenger, Kentfield, California, November 10–11, 2010.

  father was “a wonderful man . . .”: New York Post, September 6, 1964, on file at Maidenform Collection.

  first accounts of the atrocities: David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 20. The subject of how much was known about the Holocaust in the United States and when is highly complex and controversial. Yehuda Bauer in American Jewry and the Holocaust, p. 187, says that “There can be no doubt that anyone who read the papers, listened to the radio, or read the daily reports by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) had access to all the information about Europe’s Jews that was needed to establish the fact that mass murder was occurring.” Bauer notes that Yiddish papers in the United States published “accounts of the mass murders in Vilna as early as March, 1942.” “Until June, 1942, all this information was admittedly scattered. Nobody imagined a campaign of mass annihilation, and the information was always presented in a form which allowed for doubts as to its veracity.” According to Bauer, the Bund sent the first “authoritative and exact report of a general plan to annihilate Polish and, by implication, European Jewry.”

  See also Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Feingold says in part that the American Jewish community failed to speak out against the Holocaust because the community was disunited, bent on assimilating, had no effective leaders, had shed its communal religious traditions, and thus had no general public forum they could use to oppose the slaughter.

  At 8:50 in the morning on September 3: Details on the Maidenform strike come from newspaper clippings from September and October 1941, in the Maidenform file of the Bayonne, New Jersey, public library; journal name has been omitted from the clippings, but the articles are apparently from the Jersey Journal and Bayonne Times. Additional articles, many undated or with the journal name omitted, are from the Maidenform Collection.

  Clippers and operators working on the piecework scale: Clipping from Bayonne library, no title or journal name, November 4, 1941.

  A survivor named Uri Finkel: “Testimony by Uri Finkel.”

  When all 112 men were dead: I have relied on the account of the killings recounted in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html, but there are several different accounts of this massacre. A survivor named Nachum Greenholtz is quoted as follows in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation”: “I was among the people who were taken from the market in Rakov to the road of Buzmanu, where a hundred and twelve Jews were annihilated. A few others as well as I were able to escape. The Germans shot at us
but I ran quickly to the forest. I spent the night there and in the morning I returned home.” Greenholtz’s relative Adi Grynholc, who has done extensive research into Rakov history, insists that Nachum’s accounts of Rakov during the war are the most reliable.

  At some point during that Yom Kippur: My account of Beyle’s death and Etl’s existence in the Rakov ghetto is based on conversations with my Israeli relatives, and their information in turn came from conversations with their mother, Sonia. Unfortunately, Sonia did not tell her children how she came to know about the killing of Beyle or that Etl and her daughters survived the first rounds of shootings. It’s likely that one of the Rakov survivors told her—possibly Hillel Eidelman, who wrote letters after the war about the dire situation in Rakov.

  The British adopted a strict policy: Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment—Palestine, 1917–1949 (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 59.

  Finally, the Turks ordered the ship: Kramer, A History of Palestine, p. 300; Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, p. 63.

  “The tortures lasted for hours . . .”: Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 534.

  “Life in the Ghetto grew harder . . .” : Eliezer Leoni, ed., Wolozin: The Book of the City and of the Etz Hayyim Yeshiva (Tel Aviv: Wolozin Landsleit Association of Israel and the USA, 1970), p. 32.