Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  On the way to Maitchet, with the sun soon to be rising on yet another day in another sky, I got another idea. I remembered that my grandfather had a Polish friend, a farmer we called Mr. Glatki, who lived close by. We abandoned plans to enter Maitchet and set out toward the Glatki farm.

  Shmulek and I had been walking for hours. Just around dawn, I recognized the familiar narrowing of the road in front of us. Though exhausted, with aching feet and rubbery legs, I picked up my pace. Shmulek stayed close. Here it was—the farmhouse with failing paint, the big barn, the well. We had made it to the Glatki farm. Chickens and geese were noisily running around the property. At last we came upon Mr. Glatki’s door in the early morning. Dew was dripping from the roof and the eastern wall of the house was bathed in orange light. The new day was warm but the windows were half shut. Our shirts were sticking to our skin. I couldn’t hear anyone inside, but I knew the Glatkis—Mr. and Mrs. Glatki and their daughter—were all awake.

  My fist rose up in front of my face and gently knocked on the door. Then a louder rap. A dog started to bark nearby. Inside we heard footsteps scuffing over wooden floors. I turned to look at Shmulek. We were nervous to be standing outside on the Glatki’s porch and continually looked over our shoulders. Finally, the door opened and in front of me was the Glatkis’ daughter, Marie, who greeted me warmly, though I hardly recognized her. Maybe I just never paid much attention before. The last time I had seen her she was a little girl. Children are always reinvented. Now she was a teenager with a big smile. Marie greeted us with such happiness and friendliness that I was taken aback. My face must have betrayed some desire for reassurance because she threw open her arms and called out, “Motek! I know who you are; you are Shlomo’s son.” Marie Glatki ushered us into the house like long-lost relatives whom you rarely ever get to see. Shmulek and I followed her as she led us into the great room. Without any fear in her voice—maybe she was too young, too innocent to understand the danger—she told me, “We have your cousins hiding here.”

  It was a sorrowful reunion, though we were elated to see those who had survived the worst in Maitchet. My cousins Yossel, Moishe (Chonyeh’s brother), Elleh, and Yudel were in the Glatkis’ great room, along with my two uncles, Michoil and Zimmel. Also, there was a doctor named Yakobovich, a man named Noah, and my father’s closest friend, Chatzkel Rabetz. They all looked at me with as much surprise as I had for them. Which among us was a ghost? How did they all end up here? How did they escape the massacre at Maitchet?

  We all shared an odd feeling in this reunion—happiness, sorrow, and pity. There was too much to say and nothing to say. We were all disheveled, dirty, and tired. Worry drew down our faces; eyes were bloodshot from a lack of sleep; feet were swollen and heavy; words didn’t come easily. Minds were still too numb, with no time to mourn for our shared and private losses. Even a trace of fleeting happiness at this impromptu meeting couldn’t hope to bring a smile to our faces. Yet when we entered the room, we were greeted with kisses and hugs as if we returned from the dead. We touched one another’s faces to make sure we were real.

  Everyone was eager to hear what had happened to me. I spent hours filling them in with all the details of how I ended up in Baranowicze with Shmulek, and how we made our escape. I told them I had heard what happened to my family but knew little else or even how much to believe. And then my cousin Moishe began to tell me what I never wanted to hear again. He confirmed Oleg Soshinski’s story. Moishe, along with the rest of the Jews in Maitchet, were marched to a grave at the edge of the forest. The Poles were murdering everyone, shooting them, beating them to death, driving them in convulsive fear and tears toward the forest.

  I couldn’t listen. He confirmed what happened to my family, my grandfather, our shtetl, the homes, the babies. My God, driven to a pit, the dead along with the living, the dirt thrown over them by a hundred Polish men and women, neighbors, in an orgy of madness. Moishe was among them, buried alive. But he scratched toward the surface as it grew dark. He continued to claw and claw until he reached the air, breathing once again. Moishe climbed out of the grave and stood crying and shaking among the leaves. Beneath him in the grave was his family. He paused to think about them. Then he was spotted. Two Poles, vestiges of the murder party, began chasing him. He ran through the forest until he got away.

  In the middle of it all, Moishe’s story and my own, I realized I was not alone in my grief; each pair of eyes gazing upon me shared my loss—each told of their own. Each of their own families met the same fate—murdered, tortured, some in Maitchet, others elsewhere. It was the same in every shtetl. A room full of orphans together, alone. Too ugly for words; too much to let in. There was no ground beneath our feet. We were all lost; drifting, surviving but no longer living.

  The Glatkis fed us all. For now we were safe, with a place to sleep and ponder our next move. In this small house in the middle of a farm in the middle of a field, we thought. We were a small group of people who could ill afford to drift. We couldn’t stay and we couldn’t leave. I was aware that the Germans were still there, that the Poles were still drunk with a murderous appetite, that they had killed everyone in Maitchet, and had stolen all the Jews’ possessions. Many had even already moved into our homes; they were sleeping in our beds, with fingers, shoes, and shirts soaked with Jewish blood.

  I didn’t want to hear any of this. My family. I kept thinking of them, over and over again. And what of Bubbie and Zayde? They were old; what happened to them? What of my mother’s parents in Morozovichi? I found it hard to believe that Zayde, in his wisdom, in his foresight . . . I closed my eyes. I couldn’t even bear to think of him. My heart was tearing apart.

  One of my cousins told me that Zayde figured out what was happening as soon as he looked out his window. Then a neighbor took him in—a Polish neighbor. Zayde was led up into the man’s attic.

  From above the street, through the slats in the wall, Zayde watched the brutal scene unfold. He watched in horror as his family—his sons and their wives and his grandchildren—were beaten, clubbed, dragged, punched, kicked, and stabbed while driven toward the forest. With his hand held gently over his heart and tears coming to his eyes, Zayde had told me so many times over the years that his family was the light of his soul. He would tap his heart, saying with his wet, half-closed eyes, Here, here is where my family resides. Zayde stood up in the attic. Zayde stood up and walked out of his hiding place. He walked through the living room of the Polish family that kept him safe and out of sight. And he walked out into the heartless street in plain view of the Polish gang and joined his family. Within an hour, Zayde, too, was gone. With his family—with my family—Zayde was buried, still alive. No more Jews in Maitchet. No more.

  Free for Now

  While Jews were being murdered all over Eastern Europe, shot in the streets, stabbed with farming instruments, burned alive, I was in hiding at the Glatki farm with a band of runaways. We ate. We were given water. We had a roof over our heads. We cleaned ourselves and treated our bruises. But there were so many of us, and we all knew that we would have to be moving along shortly. We could not stay—not all of us. Every moment we remained with the Glatkis we risked not only our lives but theirs as well. One of the first orders of business when the Germans conquered Poland was to impose the death penalty on Poles who dared to hide Jews. The Glatkis, whose humanity and dignity surpassed their fear, tempted fate by hiding us. I was to learn later that their farm and their home was a constant way station for runaway Jews. They would not turn their backs on their friends; they would not shed their humanity; they would not become ugly or contaminated with a fear that would erase their compassion. When the war was over, in years to come, I had their name listed at Yad Vashem with the Righteous Among the Nations.

  The Glatki family was put to the test. We endangered them with our every breath. Throughout the Nazi occupation, the Polish police and vigilantes willingly went door to door, farm to farm, no matter how remote, looking for Jews in hiding. Nothing was more impor
tant to them than to kill every last one of us. Many times Polish farmers and White Russians took it upon themselves to search for Jews; they took their guns and their dogs and hunted for Jews in fields of tall grass, cellars, rooftops, and silos. Every farmer was suspected of hiding Jews. There was no trust.

  Shmulek and I were with the Glatkis only two days before the inevitable happened. Three of the most ruthless killers—Stach Lango, who almost burned me alive when the Germans first took over, and his comrades Bodgrabah and Polulich (whose first names I cannot recall)—galloped on horseback onto the Glatki’s farm. Hearing the hooves and neighing of the horses, the Glatkis opened a trap door beneath the kitchen floor and the entire lot of us was ushered into a tiny space, crammed tightly together on top of one another. Mrs. Glatki, a small, plump woman with a kind, round face, thin eyebrows, and full lips, took her place in the kitchen among the pots and pans. We could see some of the room from down below as we peered up through cracks in the floorboards. Our eyes strained, along with our ears, as the men arrived at the front door. We didn’t dare move; we could hardly breathe.

  Someone, maybe Mr. Glatki, maybe their daughter, invited the men in. We heard boots trouncing on the wooden floors. Dirt between the floorboards drifted down on our heads. Now a sudden barrage of curses in Polish could be heard. Foul street language making forceful demands. Mrs. Glatki was the brunt of their anger as they towered over her. In their hands, I could see, were rifles. They opened cabinets too small to fit even a child. They looked under furniture and behind chairs and drapes. Stach Lango screamed at Mrs. Glatki: “You are hiding Jews! Where are the Jews?”

  Bodgrabah and Polulich stormed through the other rooms. We could hear furniture being thrown against the walls, glass breaking, things being overturned. But of course they found nothing. The house grew quiet. We could see nothing. The boots clunked away. Stach stood in the front doorway with one eye toward the Glatkis as his men went out into the barn, poked rakes into haystacks, and climbed up onto the loft in their search. When they came back and reported to Stach that nobody was there, he flew into a rage. He grabbed Mrs. Glatki by the arm and screamed at her, “Where are the Jews?” Mrs. Glatki refused to turn us in, and we watched her face turn red. That’s when Stach lifted up his rifle. We braced ourselves. With both hands tightly around the barrel of the weapon, using it like a spade, he jammed the butt of the weapon down onto Mrs. Glatki’s shin. The poor woman screamed in pain and fell to the floor crying and moaning. She was on the floor, inches over our heads. Stach Lango had broken her leg, and the three men left the house with Mrs. Glatki unable to stand. Yet minutes passed and we didn’t dare move, though we wanted to reach out for the poor woman writhing on the floor above us. Tears rolled down her face as she held her bleeding leg.

  Through the floorboards, we told Mrs. Glatki that if the men came back we could all just wait for them and jump them. They would be no match for all of us. But Mrs. Glatki, through her tears and agony, insisted that there would be no such fighting in her house. We were at a loss. Still beneath the kitchen floor, once again we heard the galloping of horses. It was only two to five minutes later that the three men returned and burst through the front door. Stach Lango came back over to Mrs. Glatki and again demanded that she tell him where she was hiding Jews. He screamed with veins pulsing at his neck and spit flying from his mouth. He waved his rifle at her as she tried to pull herself up to a chair while clutching her leg. She didn’t answer him; she wouldn’t look at him. Without warning, Stach again brought the butt of his rifle down on Mrs. Glatki’s leg—the same leg. Then he rode away, satisfied with his brutality. I do not remember whether Mrs. Glatki passed out from the pain, but we waited a long time down below. We waited to be sure that Stach Lango and the others would not return. Finally, we emerged from the trap door into the open air of the kitchen. Dr. Yakobovich began attending to Mrs. Glatki’s swollen, red, bleeding leg. He used whatever he could to treat her, bandaged her, and set her broken bone in makeshift splints as the rest of us watched and tried to help. Now we all knew we were dead if we stayed. We would be dead and so would the entire Glatki family. So, we waited for darkness, then fled. Everybody took off in different directions. Shmulek and I stayed together.

  We ran quickly through the fields and into the blanket of trees where we could hide and gather our thoughts. All day and night we ran, far enough into the forest but close enough to periodically emerge and try to figure out where we were. There was nothing keeping us from running as far away as we could go. We ran and ran, still carrying with us our pistols and our winter coats. We put the coats on in the summer heat—one less item to carry. I knew this land, but I didn’t know where I was going. I ran without purpose, without anywhere in mind. We were homeless again, always looking over our shoulders, trying to cover longer distances at night. But the truth is that we didn’t know where to go. We didn’t know where it would be safest; we didn’t know how far east the Germans had invaded and set up their outposts. The forest became our home.

  Partisans

  There were others in the forests. We, on the run, wandering without a plan, were not alone. Little did we know that there were thousands in hiding—remnants of the shtetls, bands of Poles, communists, Russians. Resistance fighters mixed with farm boys and Jews. But don’t think for a second that we all got along. There was just as much anti-Semitism in the partisan units as in Europe—it was just as lawless, maybe worse. You could be killed for looking at someone the wrong way. Jews were constantly being murdered in the thick of the forest. If you had a gun, you had value (though that was also another reason to kill you).

  Life in the woods was at once organized and disorganized. Cells, gangs, and bands of soldiers cut off from their command centers staked out territory and bonded according to a strange chemistry of fear, ideology, nationality, common hate for the enemy, and animal instinct. Partially armed, unarmed, disarmed; wounded, young, old, lost; women, boys, grandfathers; lost remnants weaving in and out of cruel branches, tripping on wires of gray vines, scratched in the face by sharp twigs, searching for berries and mushrooms, hidden from the sun, mottled with leafy shadows, drinking from puddles, praying for rain.

  In this invisible forest world, there were partisans with caches of weapons who were exceptionally organized. The Bielski brothers—big, strong Jewish millers from Nowogrudek—were leading more than a thousand Jews deep into the foliage. Ruling in military style with confidence and determination, the Bielski boys set up a thriving village just out of view from the “outside” world, like a ghostly fairytale.

  The Bielskis raided German outposts, raised livestock, galloped on horseback, set up a communal hierarchy, and ran their unit like a military operation. Tuvia Bielski was the leader and his younger brothers were his enforcers. For the duration of the war, the Bielski clan evaded the Germans, struggled with Soviet militia, and avoided the Poles. To the Russian military camps, Bielski and his community claimed they were loyal Soviet citizens. This way they could avoid persecution and retain control over what little weaponry and supplies they had managed to scrape up. Whenever you identified yourself, you first wanted to know who was asking the questions. If we met a Russian, we said we were Russian. To the Poles, we were Poles. And to the Jews, we were Jews. After the war, I was reunited with more than a couple of friends who had survived with the Bielski unit.

  Then there were those who had formed smaller bands here and there—groups of ten or twenty. One division of partisans—Jews from a Russian unit—in the dead of winter trudged through knee-high snow into Maitchet in search of the murderers Stach Lango, Polulich, and Bodgrabah. Lango, however, had fled deeper into Poland, but partisans found the latter two at home, gagged them, then dragged them to a fence where they tied them to a post and shot each one in the head. The temperature was well below twenty degrees and the slumping bodies quickly froze as the partisans returned to the thick forest, their footprints disappearing in the white snow. For more than a week, the Poles of Maitchet looked upon t
hese lifeless shadows as a reminder that justice would be done. Afraid to remove the bodies, the Poles watched as the corpses turned into icy monuments, haunting everyone who set eyes upon them.

  Thousands of partisan groups, set deep in the forests and frozen swamps, were living out of huts—underground bunkers carved out of the earth that we called by the Russian word, zemlyankas. People slept there in the early morning hours or hid from the cold during the day, raiding nearby farms under the stars. There were many types of zemlyankas. Some were so big that they housed livestock or were used as community rooms. Some held small stoves. Others were mess halls. All were camouflaged on the outside. Without the zemlyankas, there was no way for a partisan to survive the winter.

  I think most of those who called themselves partisans were not so different from Shmulek and me, who were on the run with no plan in mind, trying not to starve, and drinking the dew from leaves before the sun came up. History may now refer to us as partisans, but we were just people on the run, fighting for our lives—aimlessly, hopelessly, then once again hopeful, that we would find someone or something of sense. Anything. The more organized partisans were content to call the forest their home until the war would end. They stayed in one place for as long as they could but never tried to flee Eastern Europe. It was just too dangerous to leave the forest. They had no choice but to depend on one another as a community, continue to fight and hope for the best.

  Shmulek and I kept moving. We were tired and hungry. We were thirsty and alone. We were never far from home, a home that was no longer there. We had been running along in the forest for days and nights. Then we were found. It was nighttime and overcast. We heard the crackling of leaves and twigs and our hearts started to race. We stopped in our tracks and drew our pistols. Figures cautiously emerged out of the darkness, hardly distinguishable from the gray-green pattern of branches and dense, leafy undergrowth. Somehow we had run into a group of tattered survivors from Maitchet, in the middle of nowhere.