by Vic Shayne
The smiling, friendly Dr. Wichtmann was a monster wearing the mask of a human being. The depths of his heartless being could not have been painted more vividly than in this unforgivable scene. The poor boy had been turned into a suffering, helpless vegetable who could only moan hopelessly in agony yet could not die. The boy, the poor boy is now, thankfully, long gone, but I am his witness. I remember him. I cannot bear to say kaddish for him, but I do.
After seeing this tortured boy, I fully realized: there was no tomorrow—no future. There was no longer value to human life. No more innocence; no hope; no trust.
Later I told Shmulek what I saw. At the end of the day, we were taken back to the ghetto. Now the buildings were sufficiently emptied so we could find a place to sleep almost anywhere inside. That night I did not sleep. My mind would not rest. It was filled with terrible images.
Then came the fateful day that will never leave me in peace, in the summer of 1942. In the heat of June, on a Sunday in which the sun shone as brightly as ever, I once again found myself near the gate of the ghetto, waiting to see if Grabowski would come get us. I was lost in my thoughts for a short while when I happened to look up at the gate at the edge of the yard. Standing there was Oleg Soshinski, the brother of two policemen from my hometown. I was taken aback. What was he doing this far away from Maitchet? Did he come just to see me? It did not seem very likely that Oleg would travel nearly twenty miles to find me, but it was true. What did he want from me? Oleg’s brothers, Pietrik and Vladik, had a long-standing reputation for anti-Semitism and violence in Maitchet, but since the Nazi occupation, the pair had risen to supreme gang leaders.
Oleg waited for the guards to move away before he walked up to me. For a moment or two we stared at each other past the barbed wire. I waited until he spoke. I could see in his face and his eyes that something was not right. He shifted back and forth on his feet and would not focus his eyes on me for long. What could it be? More Aktions? I had no idea. Then he told me, and this warm, sunny day became the darkest day of my life. I could hardly hear; the blood was pounding in my head. I was too shocked and overwhelmed to even cry. Oleg’s words rang over and over in my mind and continue to do so to this day.
Oleg said, “Motel, you have no more family. Your mother and your sister were killed the first days, but my brother Pietrik took your father and cut him into thousands of pieces. And your sister was raped and thrown away like garbage. They butchered the whole town.”
When the killing began, Oleg told me, Pietrik took my father out with my older sister and said, “I will save you.” It was a trick; and I’m sure my father knew it, but what was he to do? Pietrik had come to seek his revenge. I could find nothing to say. I could find nothing to do.
What did he say? What did Oleg Soshinski say to me? My mouth was open. I don’t know what I felt. I looked at him as if he was speaking in a language I could hear but not understand. What did he say? I was afraid to ask him to repeat what he said, but he did anyway.
Oleg told me that my mother, father, and sisters had been rounded up by the local townspeople. They were beaten, brutalized, and terrorized. They were lured away by Oleg’s brother Pietrik, who promised that he would hide them. It was a ruse. He and his friends repeatedly raped my sister then cut my father up with their knives, one finger at a time, one facial feature after another, until he was no longer recognizable. Meanwhile, the rest of the Jews of Maitchet were herded toward the woods. As my sister Elka was forced to march alongside my mother, she did not march fast enough. This was an excuse for a Polish neighbor to smash in the back of her head with the butt of his rifle. She fell and my mother reached down to collect her brains; then, she picked up her daughter, my beautiful little sister, and trudged to the edge of the forest. There, my sisters, my father, and all the rest of the Jews in Maitchet, including the visitors who had run away from other towns, like the Bachrach family, were shoved or carried or dumped by jeering, laughing, and screaming Poles into a large pit, where they were buried, most of them still alive.
My cousin Moishe was among them. He saw everything. He too was buried, but he did not die of his wounds and waited until night fall to dig himself out of the mass grave. I was to meet up with him later and relive the emotions I felt upon learning of these murders.
When Oleg told me of the fate of my precious family, I decided that there was no place for me any longer. I had no home. I had no life. I had no family. A part of me died in June of 1942. Most of me, in fact. My heart had been ripped from my chest, my breath gone, my eyes afraid to search for God. This was the year when the most Jews were murdered in all of the war years. This was the year when I lost my life.
Most things in history have the fortune of fading gracefully to a manageable conclusion. They erode, grain by grain, until they slip into the background, a slow disintegration back into the earth. Yet nothing disappears; they are never totally gone—here and there a thread, a clue, a fragment linking the present and the future to the past. But there is an exception to every rule. Our shtetls were the exception. One of the richest cultures the world has ever known is gone now. The memory of our Yiddish civilization was buried with tortured souls or left to us, the few survivors, haunting our minds for as long as we breathe. The memory of what shtetl life once was, is now forever tainted, stripped of all innocence. The goodness, the joy, the warmth does not stand alone in the heartbroken, bittersweet memory. No, these memories are not truly bittersweet. They are much worse. Tainted and distorted is the sweet, loving world of family, Torah, Shabbos, flavors, aromas, smiles, tears, faces, homes, shuls, and Yiddishkeit. These are memories we cannot divorce from the storm of terror that swept away our families and our lives. Erased without mercy were our shtetls, not even afforded the dignity of resting in peace. And now my own family was taken as well. More than eighty relatives, each with his and her own name, were murdered without cause.
I come from a place and a people that I cannot even prove ever existed. The rain would not stop falling.
Escape from Baranowicze
I awoke to near-empty streets. People in the Baranowicze ghetto were summer puddles, evaporating as the day wore on. A city of orphans, disconnected. Our past, present, and future were melting. The last cries of the Shema drifted high over the killing fields, souls returning to heaven—souls whose last words sang our eternal oath to God. In the morning when I awoke, I was greeted by the sun, indifferent in the sky, too far away to feel the pain that numbed me. How could I go on and face this day or any other to follow? How dare the sun shine.
I hated my own innate instinct to survive, to pick myself up from the floor. Yet you learn that your fate is not your own. Sometimes we have a will to swim to the surface against all odds. I was a young man with no past, no family, no love. For hundreds of miles the shtetls were erased of their Jews. I was adrift and yet I continued to paddle forward. Don’t ask me why or how. I do not know the answer. As long as the eyes are open, we are looking forward.
Shmulek and I returned to Dr. Wichtmann’s house with the sun just coming up behind our backs. We were dropped off to work, to postpone our own demise. On this day, nobody was home but the maid. Unsettled by the stillness of this morning, as well as the absence of Grabowski, the doctor, and his wife, I became uneasy. I didn’t know why, or whether this feeling of agitation portended good or bad. This particular day was different. The maid was watching us more intently than we had grown accustomed to, as if interested in our every move, or waiting for an opportunity of some sort. I thought maybe she was told to keep an eye on us.
Shmulek and I began taking out our paintbrushes and preparing for work when the maid began to stare at us. I looked at Shmulek and he looked back at me. There was something about her eyes, as if she was trying to say something to us without speaking. I brushed past her as I walked across the room to pick up a drop cloth. She didn’t move. When I returned to the paint bucket by the wall, I removed the lid and noticed she was still starting at me. I looked at her and she shifted her ey
es back and forth. Was she trying to say something with her eyes? Finally, she spoke. “Komm mit.” Come along. I slowly stood up, walked over to the window, and peeked out. Nobody was there. Then I walked to the edge of the room and peered around the corner. Still quiet. The house seemed deserted. Shmulek was holding his paintbrush over his open paint can. It was dripping thick gobs of paint silently back into the white liquid. His eyes flitted from me back to the maid. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Now the maid was beginning to fidget. She waved her hand: Come with me. Shmulek stood up as I replaced the lid of the paint can and took a step toward the maid. I jutted out my chin as if to ask her, What? She turned and began to walk but did not take her eyes off of me. Shmulek came by my side, then all three of us, nervous, suspicious, afraid, excited, and trembling, walked one behind the other as the maid led us into the bedroom, signaling in silence, not daring to speak. Then quietly, just above a whisper, and with hand signals, she began insisting that the doctor’s wife said something needed to be fixed behind the bed. Come, come—over here. Shmulek hesitated. He didn’t trust her. He said there was nothing to be fixed. What could be behind the bed? It didn’t make sense. Shmulek turned as if to walk back to our paint supplies. I began to back away from the woman. What kind of trap was this? We had been in that room a dozen times. Behind the bed was the wall, nothing else. We stood still with paint rags in our speckled hands, all three of us staring at one another for a moment. But something in her expression transcended words; her eyes pleaded with us to follow her. Into the bedroom, now. Hurry! Come along! She reached out her hand but neither of us took it.
I moved carefully toward the room and Shmulek followed me, looking over his shoulder. When we were in the doorway, our eyes scanned every corner for some kind of trap. Maybe she told Dr. Wichtmann that I disobeyed his orders about the little house where the boy was being tortured. I was trying to figure out what was in store for us in the bedroom. The maid quietly but forcefully kept shooing us inside the room toward the bed with a waving hand and a nodding head. Geh! Geh! We kept our eyes on hers as we backed up into the room toward the bed. Nothing seemed out of place. The room was spotless. The bed was dressed in a laced spread. The pillows were neatly fluffed and laid out at the headboard. The dresser was polished and all the pictures in their frames were dusted. Not a speck of dirt was on the windows or the sills. It was all so ordinary.
The maid was now standing next to the bed, beside us. She shifted her eyes. She was pointing with her eyes. We noticed that the night table drawers were open. The maid pushed her chin at the night table. Look inside. Leaning over, Shmulek and I saw that there were two pistols and extra magazines in clear view. In an instant we understood.
The maid—this servant of a Nazi officer—was risking her life by handing us an opportunity to run. I felt like a child standing in front of a candy counter when, unexpectedly, the glass between me and the candy had shattered into a million pieces of dancing light. I saw my own hand reflexively reaching out to one of the pistols. I picked up the gun and held it in my hand; it was heavy and cold; my chest was heavy; the air was heavy. I told Shmulek to grab the other gun and the magazines. We were shivering in the warmth of the bedroom, silent and staring into each other’s eyes. Already we were taking too long. We were wasting time. Time is a monster when you are in fear of being caught. Standing in the house, we were already free, and not free. I don’t remember if I said it, but Shmulek heard me: “Let’s go!” We tucked the pistols in our pants and cautiously walked out of the bedroom door. It was still early in the morning. Maybe the doctor, his wife, and Grabowski would be gone for hours, or maybe back in five minutes. We stood in the living room waiting for direction of some sort. What was the rest of the maid’s plan? The curtains shifted in the cross current of warm air. The breeze blew across our faces then out the window, calling us to follow, leading the way. The maid stood at the threshold of the Wichtmann’s bedroom, holding something in her hands. We hadn’t noticed at all until this moment. She handed us food wrapped in paper and said, “You’ll have some food for the road.”
In the hallway were two long winter jackets draped over a coat rack. In the middle of winter we wouldn’t have taken any notice. But it was summertime; two jackets oddly out of place, positioned at eye level, were looking at us. Perspiration was running down our faces, necks, and backs. I kept running my hand across my waistband, checking for the pistol. As nervous and wide-eyed as we were, the maid said nothing, but we knew the woolen coats were for us. We were still afraid to leave, still hesitating, wanting to bolt from the house, afraid to go, knowing that only death awaited us if we stayed. What were we waiting for? What did we have to lose by running out of the house? Our hesitation was the source of growing anxiety for the maid. A false security enveloped this house with its big roof shading us from the outside world of hate and murder. A rush of courage washed over this little woman whose hands were calloused and knotted with arthritic joints. She was a mother now, telling us what we had to do. In Yiddish, with stern eyes and a deliberate tone that nearly screamed at us, she ordered, “Geh gesundt!”
Yiddish? Shmulek and I were dumbfounded. We were backing away from this one little woman whose out-of-place, familiar words had stunned us. We were armed with pistols, two strong young men, backing away from the maid. We were caught off guard by her directive in Yiddish. Was the maid Jewish? Of course she was Jewish. As if the woman wasn’t standing right in front of us—as if a wall stood between us—Shmulek said to me, “Sie ret Iddish!”
I asked her, “Du ret Iddish?” (Do you speak Yiddish?), but now her courage lapsed into a state of near panic. Again she was a simple woman, a jittery maid pushing us out of her life. Time was running out. It was all too uncomfortable. She was looking around, full of a well-founded apprehension that someone may return home and discover what she had done, what we were about to do. With her hands—her tiny, bony hands—she came after us, driving us toward the door with every ounce of her being. I grabbed the doorknob and turned it while staring into her eyes. Shmulek pushed the door open without checking to see if anyone was outside. Then the woman screamed in a whisper, “Geh! Geh!” Shmulek and I went through the front door without looking back. Despite our hurry, we did not run. We walked right down Wichtmann’s front path, through his garden—the garden of an unfortunate, well-to-do Baranowicze Jewish merchant whose intelligence and business sense could not save him from a common destiny. Shmulek and I walked through the white picket fence, carefully closing the gate behind us. The fence, the house, the garden, the grounds—all disappeared behind us as we headed down the street with winter coats slung over our shoulders. Like Lot, we dared not turn to look back over our shoulders. In no more than five minutes, Shmulek and I passed a couple of Polish policemen. We all ignored one another. We kept walking, our feet wanting to move faster than we would let them. We didn’t run; we didn’t talk; we just kept moving. Moving ahead. Away.
I was no stranger to these roads. I had driven our horse and wagon over them on so many occasions with my father. Baranowicze was my second neighborhood, familiar and a part of me. I knew the roads that left the city and with each step we were making good our escape. Far enough away from any living soul now except for a cow or two standing in an open field, our first words were spoken. I told Shmulek to follow me; we were not going to get lost—I knew where we were going. Right down the middle of the road, in broad daylight under a clear sky, we headed off in the direction of Mush, on the outskirts of town. We were two Poles casually hiking down the road.
As we walked, I told Shmulek if anyone comes to bother us, we shoot them. Don’t hesitate. Feeling for his gun at his waistband, he agreed. Mine was sage advice from one who never fired a gun in his life. I didn’t know what it was to shoot anything, even a tin can. But from this point forward, we had nothing else in our lives to lose.
When we got far enough away from Baranowicze, we began walking mainly on the shoulder of the road, ready to dive into the weeds should s
omeone happen by. They wouldn’t take us by surprise, though—you could hear someone coming a mile away. Tires make a lot of noise on gravel, and vehicles stir up a cloud of dust. We kept vigilant. Our ears were sensitive to every sound: rustling leaves, gnats, mosquitoes, sudden gusts of wind, our own feet. Our feet were so loud, ceaselessly crunching and shuffling. There was no way to muffle our own shoes.
We walked along at the same pace as when we left Wichtmann’s house—slow but steady. All around us were wild fields watching us with suspicion. In the not-too-far distance was a stand of trees, and behind these stood the forest. We decided we would run toward the forest if we were chased. But not a soul was around, and we walked until at last the sun went down. Once it became dark, we couldn’t see far in front of us. The night was filling the world with ink. Still, we worried that someone—a Polish farmer or a hunter—could come up on us without notice, so Shmulek and I trudged deep into the high grasses of the fields and hid. Clouds had gathered in the sky; the city was far behind us. No light. We sat there together: faceless, formless, homeless orphans.
We didn’t know what to do next. Where would we go? We knew that Poland was under Nazi control. German soldiers were in every town. The Poles were proud and anxious to find Jews and turn them over to the Germans. They lived for the praise that was specially set aside for productive collaborators.
In the far distance, in the stillness, when the breeze stood still, we could hear gunfire or bombing, reminding us that we were alone in the world—a hostile, cold, murderous world. How could we survive? Then I thought of going home. I said, “Let’s go to Maitchet.” Anywhere but nowhere. Somewhere familiar. Maitchet was still alive in my head. Maitchet was my family, my home. I knew that my family was gone, but to me Maitchet was what I knew best. With minds too restless to sleep, we walked through the night with the idea of finding one of my cousins, Chonyeh, who I knew was at one point hiding with a Polish friend just outside of town.
