Sarah was seated, as she often was this time of day, at her little black sewing machine positioned near the window to catch the last of the waning light, her right hand working the silver wheel that caused the needle to stab into fabric, her left aiming the torn shirt beneath it, sure and true.
Moshe had caught a small twist of worry in her words, and he moved close to turn the wheel for her, the two of them doing the work together, well-practiced, content in their closeness. Theirs was not a family given to physical or verbal expressions of affection, but the love was deep and never doubted.
“I am praying to God every day to get you out of here,” she said.
The threat of war roiling over Europe—maybe only eighteen to twenty-four months away, most thought—made exiting Poland complicated, but Sarah clung to the hope that Colombian officials would grant the visa, that Moshe could leave before his eighteenth birthday, at which point he would be forced into mandatory military service.
“Well. There is enough to be done each day without thinking about things we cannot control,” Sarah said suddenly, pushing herself up from the chair. “The papers will come in their own good time.”
Again, the worry in her voice, Moshe thought. It was there so often these days.
The vague underpinning of tension that had been part of his parents’ being for as long as he could remember had been escalating, and he knew it wasn’t just because of the distant war and his eighteenth birthday. Many of the elders in town, in fact, seemed preoccupied, often engaging in hushed, worried conversations, the content indecipherable but the tenor so intense he could almost smell the stench of fear that rose from the words like smoke from a wood fire.
But each morning, Moshe’s parents arose before dawn, as always, fixed their faces into neutral expressions, left the small house on their well-kept cobblestone street, and walked the hard-packed path to their milling business a few yards away. There they spent the next ten or twelve hours grinding flour and the buckwheat cereal called kasha.
It was important work. And the Edelmans were relied upon. Almost as much as they were reviled.
Jews in Krasnik, the Edelmans among them, had initiated and now conducted much of the town’s commerce: the dry goods store, tailor shop, bakery, and pharmacy. But whatever small courtesies the townsfolk extended to Jewish merchants during the direct exchange of money for products were fleeting. At all other times, the Jews of Krasnik, all four thousand of them, were treated not so very differently from the vermin that arrived in waves from the nearby fields every autumn. Even from childhood, Jews and gentiles alike understood that.
Jewish boys learned while still in short pants to walk fast and purposefully through town after school to avoid being jumped and beaten. Jewish girls skirted doorways to avoid the young bullies who knotted menacingly to yank up their dresses, a practice intended to humiliate them in the rawest way an eight-year-old can contrive.
Even adult Jews walked with caution through the streets, though their precautions didn’t always accomplish much. They were often spat upon, slapped, or beaten.
“I despise this place,” Moshe said to his two-years-older brother, Yankel, that summer after a venomous outburst from a Catholic neighbor. “They will never change, these people. We must leave this behind somehow.”
There was rarely more discussion than that, among the Edelmans or any of the Krasnik Jews, about the difficulties of their existence. Anti-Semitism had flourished in the town for every one of the fourteen generations reared there since Jews had received the official right to settle in that part of Poland in 1584. Discussing a truth as old and as tenacious as this accomplished nothing.
And the fact is, the Edelman family—father Abraham, a smallish man with chestnut hair, gray eyes, and the long, full beard of Orthodox Jews; Sarah, slim and dark-haired, ten years younger, an arranged-marriage bride; and the five children born to them from 1907 to 1922, when the last, Moshe, arrived—lived a somewhat better life than many Jews. They had their own home, inherited from Sarah’s mother, and their mill, which provided a steady if modest income.
Life in Krasnik, situated in rural eastern Poland and surrounded by flatlands planted with rye, barley, and oats, moved more slowly than it did in some other towns. By the 1930s, however, the population had grown to 18,000 people, and most of what a person or a family required was available there. There were several brick municipal buildings, a hotel, clothing shops, cabinetmakers, a butcher, bakers, a synagogue, a Catholic church, an elementary school, and a Catholic high school.
Three townspeople owned cars—an army major, a doctor, and a Jewish entrepreneur who used it as a taxi to ferry people to outlying areas or to the train station. Once in a while an airplane flew overhead, a rare-enough event that nearly everyone dashed outside at the sound to look up and follow its progress across the sky.
Tuesday was market day in Krasnik, the day that farmers from miles around loaded their grain, chickens, cheese, and eggs into wagons and made the trip to town in the gray light of dawn. An especially busy day at the Edelman mill, it was the one afternoon that the Edelman children could escape their tightly regimented schedule of school, study, and religious instruction in order to help out.
Life was hard, and work was constant—not just at the mill, but at home. Water still had to be carried from a source quite distant from the house, and wood was cut at the end of every summer and stacked in the woodshed for the wood-burning stove, the only heat source during the brutal winters that inevitably shouldered autumn aside long before anyone was ready and then lingered stubbornly. The family spent long autumn evenings slicing apples from their orchard to dry in the oven and chopping cabbage to fill a fifty-gallon barrel with sauerkraut. Sarah put up huge stores of peas and beans that she raised in her garden and bought a six-month supply of potatoes and cabbage in September to cram into the stone cellar under the woodshed for the frigid months.
They lived a frugal existence, but whatever the sacrifices required, Abraham and Sarah arranged for each of their children to receive at least a basic education. Until 1925, public education wasn’t compulsory in Poland, and was, therefore, all but inaccessible in remote areas. Illiteracy proliferated. The eldest two of the five children, Frieda and Zalmen, were into their teens before the mandatory-education law passed, so Abraham and Sarah engaged a private tutor for them and enrolled Zalmen in chader (religious school). Daughter Hennia, along with Yankel and Moshe, attended public school every day, and the two boys headed off to chader late every afternoon, removing the square, navy-blue hat with a Polish eagle emblem required at school and replacing it with the round, black yarmulke.
Sarah kept a kosher home, and their children accepted that they would devote many hours each week to abiding by and celebrating the ancient traditions. Shortcuts were never permitted in Abraham’s home.
On Friday evenings when they returned from temple, the Sabbath dinner of gefilte fish, soup, potatoes, vegetables, and honeyed carrots lasted well over an hour, with much praying and singing. Every Sabbath day, from ten until noon, the family attended prayers at Krasnik’s main synagogue, an impressive old building, lovingly tended. After service, Abraham, stern and exacting, quizzed the Edelman sons about the Torah and the Talmud.
The family approached the high holy days with great solemnity and uncompromising adherence to tradition. Before Passover, every drawer, cupboard, chair, and table in their five-room house was scrubbed, every corner behind each piece of furniture cleaned. All the everyday dishes were washed, packed, and taken to the attic, replaced with the Passover dishes. Each family member had a beautifully crafted seder wineglass, and the seder supper lasted at least four hours, as the family sang Passover songs and recited the Haggadah, the story of Passover, from cover to cover.
Moshe followed the religious traditions as expected, but by the time he had reached his early teens he had come to realize that the praying and singing did
n’t ignite in him the deep feeling that it did in many others. He was Jewish by heritage, and that was important to him, even if he wasn’t as devout as some. And he was interested in having a safe way to spend time with others who shared his heritage, so he joined the Zionist Youth Organization when he turned fourteen, as his brothers before him had. Every Friday evening, he and his friends listened to lectures about Palestine and danced the hora under the watchful gaze of the portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism.
It was among these people that Moshe learned some of the details of the increasingly disturbing developments across Europe and across the oceans that had been stirring such anxiety in his parents and the rest of Krasnik’s Jews.
Since the ascension in neighboring Germany of Adolf Hitler—as chancellor in 1933, and as head of state (Führer) the next year—the situation there had grown ever more alarming. Jewish property was confiscated, Jewish government workers were being dismissed in massive numbers, government decrees were pressing Jews further into the margins, and Jewish religious artifacts were being burned in public celebrations. Reports circulated that the Nazi rules-enforcers—the Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers, the smaller elite Schutzstaffel (SS), and the greatly feared Gestapo—were beating, imprisoning, or killing Jews. More than fifty thousand Jews had fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, understanding earlier than most that the man’s anti-Semitic rantings were more than rhetoric. Among German Jews who remained, suicide was increasingly regarded as the only option.
Jews across Europe and across the globe were monitoring these reports with alarm, even as much of the rest of the non-Jewish world was ignoring them. There was a strong belief among most countries that interference in another nation’s internal affairs was unacceptable. Just as important, a notion prevailed that Jews themselves had contributed much to the contempt and ill feeling leveled against them. They held entirely too many important positions in government, commerce, and other professions—not just in Germany but in other countries—than they should have, given their numbers and their abilities, it was said. They were clannish and had odd customs. Whatever recalibrating was going on in Germany was no doubt for the good, it was believed.
As the 1930s advanced, more and more Jews frantically angled to leave Germany and the countries sure to be overrun when Hitler triggered the war that everyone knew was coming. But the borders were blocked to Jews. No one wanted them. Immigration rules even in America and Canada became ever more strict.
Even before the Nazis came into power, all of the Edelman children and most of their friends had hoped to leave Poland someday, believing, as they had heard, that in some places Jews received better treatment. Many dreamed of reaching Palestine and helping to create the land of tolerance and promise spoken about by the Zionists. Establishing life there would require the backbreaking work of draining mosquito-infested swamps, clearing rocks from hillsides, and constructing something from nothing. Moshe had few of the necessary skills, but he often imagined himself arriving there, creating a life, and arranging for others in his family to join him.
“To live like free men in a free land—this is what I want,” he said to his friends as they left the youth meetings, their souls pulsing with the belief that a different way of living might be possible in this land about which they had heard so much.
“The British control Palestine, which makes it impossible. They will not allow us in,” David reminded him.
“Now they will not,” Moshe agreed. “But some time they must.”
Zalmen, the eldest Edelman son, had made his escape from Poland years earlier at age seventeen. Crossing through Germany, Holland, and France, mostly on foot, sometimes jumping trains, he had reached Belgium late in 1929. Once there, without proper papers, securing employment proved extremely difficult. But he was clever. He schooled himself in the ways of avoiding detection and remained in Belgium for seven years. In 1936, however, he was arrested as an illegal alien and returned to Poland, where he was ordered to report to the military draft board and inducted into the army.
Hennia went at age twenty to a kvutzah, a Zionist pioneer camp, to learn agriculture, because most of the few entry permits issued were given to Zionists with farming experience. Two years later, she returned to Krasnik with the certificate and the hope of receiving her permit. Denied that, she married and settled in her hometown.
With each passing year and month, the conditions for Jews steadily worsened everywhere in the region, even in remote Krasnik. A Jewish-owned dry goods store, successful for years, went fallow soon after a non-Jewish Pole opened a similar store nearby and sokols, members of an anti-Semitic organization, positioned themselves threateningly in front of the Jewish-run shop.
Abraham was attacked one evening while returning home from synagogue, his coat sliced with long gashes, half his beard slashed off with a pocketknife, his face bloodied. When he reported the incident to the police and identified the two young attackers, whom he recognized, the authorities accused Abraham of fabrication, a charge frightening enough to send him nervously on his way and to vow that he would never again complain.
Even the Edelman mill began to suffer, as farmers—to avoid hostilities directed at anyone who “supported” Jews—traveled many additional miles to mills owned by non-Jews. Abraham’s answer to this turn of events was to start a small business selling yarmulkes, prayer books, and other religious items from his living room. The income from either one of the businesses was insufficient to support the couple and their two sons, Moshe and Yankel, still living at home, but the combination of both, along with the money that each of the boys contributed, made it possible to scrape by.
By Moshe’s unsettled summer, any hope that the family had nurtured of leaving Poland as a group had disintegrated completely. They needed good connections and a great deal of money to bribe officials, and they had neither. But Moshe would get out, they believed. The documents from South America now held the promise of an entire family.
Then, on Friday, September 1, 1939, the dream dissolved. Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began.
As the German army advanced, the roads became clogged with refugees, a swollen, sluggish target for the German air force, which dropped bombs on them and sprayed them with machine-gun fire. The relentless attacks from the sky had the desired effect: Many people, particularly young Jews and anti-Nazi gentiles who had given thought to joining the fleeing refugees, reconsidered.
Five days later, on the afternoon of Moshe’s seventeenth birthday, the Germans bombed Krasnik.
“Run! Get out into the orchard!” Sarah screamed as the first bombs fell. It was never clear why she believed this would be safer than staying in the house, but no one questioned her orders, or her authority.
The family huddled under the apple and plum trees, watching in dazed silence as bombs struck the far end of town again and again, engulfing much of it in flames. The acrid stench of burning buildings blew toward them.
“I knew the war would come to us,” Sarah said softly. “I just did not believe it would happen for many more months.”
As dusk settled onto the burning landscape, Sarah stood. “Come . . . . We will go to the house. We are safe for now. The airplanes will not drop bombs on us in the dark.”
Inside, she put food on the table while the rest of the family sat numbly.
Two days later, German tanks that had ground their way across hundreds of miles of Poland fired three artillery shells into Krasnik, demolishing several houses and killing three people. German soldiers, lean men with mean faces, swarmed in, ordering the townsfolk to stay off the streets.
“Now we are seeing the guts of the beast,” Sarah said to Abraham, who was praying, the only thing he could think of to protect his family.
The Einsatzgruppen (special killing unit) immediately sought out the town’s rebbe, its Jewish sage, Yaakov Ben Zucher Dov, and several prominen
t Jewish leaders, ordering them to desecrate the synagogue and Torah scrolls and to burn the prayer books. When the rebbe refused he was shot, dragged through the streets by his ankles, and discarded like carrion in the square for all the Jews to see.
The soldiers demanded a huge amount of gold and silver to permit the rebbe to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, an act of enormous importance to the Jews, they knew, and most came forward with anything of value—wedding rings, engagement rings, watches. Sobbing quietly, Sarah handed over the necklace given to her by her in-laws on her wedding day. It had been in Abraham’s family for generations.
The gentiles of the town quickly made it clear to the occupying troops that they would cause them no trouble, which allowed the Nazis to focus all their attention on the Jews. They turned the synagogue into a horse stable; commandeered many homes of Jews; and issued a directive: All young Jewish men and women were to report to the town square at six each morning to receive labor assignments for the day.
Sometimes the young men were ordered to scrub manure from the floors of their former synagogue, always with small brushes that required them to move along on their knees like insects while their overseers ridiculed them, their heritage, and their religion. Often they chopped wood, hour after hour, to keep the occupiers warm, the cold months just a stiff wind away. The females did the Germans’ laundry or cleaned the houses that they had appropriated.
All Jews were ordered to wear six-pointed yellow stars whenever they were outside their homes, and if they neglected to do so they were beaten or shot. A curfew was enacted: Jews had to be off the streets from seven p.m. to six a.m.
Jews began worshipping secretly in houses and apartments, posting lookouts to alert them to any surprise visits by the Nazis. It was risky, gathering this way, but for a time they could huddle together in a prearranged location, taking furtive comfort in their faith and rituals, the cord that bound them together, when nothing else in their lives was as it had been.
Trusting Calvin Page 2
