by Barry Rubin
Part of the Germans’ goal was to demoralize the Jews;the rest was to isolate them and to convince Poles and Byelorussians to despise them. To help Jews in any way—even to give a potato to one—was punishable by death, not only the death of the individual but that of his entire family. Such a sentence, however, was generally limited to those who hid Jews or, later, helped partisans. In contrast, those who turned in Jews might be given a horse or cow; extra food, vodka, or tobacco, and perhaps a rare but prized bar of soap.
What most Dolhinov Jews experienced during the first eight months of the German occupation was grinding work, constant threats to their individual lives, and growing hunger. While a small number of those with special skills—the pharmacist, doctors, dentist, flax dealers, and a couple of the best tailors and shoemakers received passes and some privileges, the main two jobs were road repair and labor in the fields of peasants. Esfira Dimenshtein’s uncle and father were set to shoeing horses, a vital part of the German military transport system as well as for peasants’ needs. Her mother worked in the fields and the best day during this time was when a peasant gave her nine potatoes to take back to her family. Otherwise, whatever could bring in any money or traded was sold to buy food.
Esfira and other girls had the job of cleaning houses and doing laundry for the Germans. The soldiers threw them food scraps like dogs, some of which they ate and the rest brought the rest back to their families. Once, a German soldier hit her, dissatisfied by her missing places while cleaning under his bed. But the real problem was rape. At least one among their number was raped and murdered.
For Dolhinov’s Jews, death was a daily companion but did not seem an inevitable host. Rather than walk in the road, it was better to travel through the backyards’ of houses. Windows in each room were inspected for usefulness as potential escape routes. By staying in your home, avoiding contact with e Germans, and obeying their ordinances, one might hope to survive. Otherwise, as Gendel Kaplan of Dolhinov recalled, “There was only one punishment for breaking any rule—execution.”
One day, an SS man passing through town lost his leather whip. The officer demanded it be found. Frantically, the Judenrat offered a big reward and bade people immediately bring to the mayor’s office every conceivable whip, strap, or lash. But when the one he wanted could not be found, five—or eight, depending on the witness—were chosen more or less at random, were forced to dig a pit. The Jews were forcibly gathered to watch their execution.
Yet if individual Germans wanted to behave decently they were able to do so, at least when others weren’t looking. Esther Dokszycky recalls a tall dark German who behaved very cruelly and a red-haired one who told her, “I promised my mother I won’t kill anyone,” and gave her a piece of bread telling her to hide it “or they’ll kill me.” He shook his head sadly, “But I don’t know what they’ll do to you.”
At the same time, though, the Germans also knew how to keep the Jews off-balance in order to maintain control and wear down their victims. For instance, my cousin, Victor Rubin, then fourteen years old, had the job of going to the forest to cut firewood. One day in the winter of 1941, he hitched up the family horse to their cart and with his younger brother, Arieh, and another boy.
Intercepted on the way back, the police stole their horse, took their wood, beat them up, and threw them in jail overnight. The Judenrat heard about it and got them released, probably saving their lives. Victor’s face was covered with blood and he still carries a scar from that day. A council member took them to Dr. Kotler who fixed up the injured boys. The next day, when a German officer saw Victor’s condition, he acted shocked. “Who did this to you?” he asked, as if offering to be his protector. Victor merely mumbled something about an accident.
Meanwhile, with blood still on Victor’s face, the final decisions of the Final Solution were being made. At the January 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference of high-ranking German officials, a death sentence was passed on the remaining Jews in eastern Poland, whose number was there estimated to be 846,000 people. A map sent January 31 to the SS commander, marked with coffins with the number of Jews already murdered in each place. In Belarus, it said, only 230,000 had so far been killed. Much work remained to be done. None of this was known in Dolhinov, but people were starting to get the idea.
Everyone was looking for a way out but usually not finding one. Bushke Katzovitz’s mother, Hana, for example, begged a Christian friend and offered to pay if she took in her daughter, who had already proven on her train ride home that she could pass as a Pole. The woman said “No.” It was too risky.
Do I blame her? Not really. The houses are tiny, every individual is registered, and it would be hard to conceal someone very long in the outbuildings behind the homes. But the countryside, in isolated farms and villages, was the real place where refuge had to be found. Several dozen peasants in the surrounding villages did save people’s lives, always at considerable risk to themselves.
Yet there was one notable exception in Dolhinov itself which revealed how courageous such an act could be and what terrible consequences it entailed. The wealthy Navoichik family hid Dr. Rabinovich, a refugee from Glebokie, his wife and two children. A neighbor informed on them. In the summer of 1942, German soldiers raided the house. They killed the Rabinovich family along with Mrs. Navoichik and two of her children who were home at the time. The soldiers then burned the house to the ground. Only Mr. Navoichik and one of his daughters who just happened to be outside of town at that moment survived. They fled to the partisans and along with many of the Jewish refugees, were evacuated to the USSR later that year.
The real problem—and opportunity—would have been to hide Jews for a few hours during the two big German killing sprees, which lasted, respectively, one and three days. Very few people to my knowledge did that simple service, though some at least didn’t turn in Jews they found hiding in their outbuildings.
My complaint is not that so much that no townspeople hid Jews but rather that, when the time came, so many townspeople went out of their way to turn them in so they were murdered on the spot, and then stole all their property.
The first eight months of German occupation were horrible enough but it was just a beginning. Dolhinov Jews started to hear in late 1941 about massacres in one town after another. Just before dawn, one night in October, there was a knock on the Segalchick family’s door. It was Aunt Rachel and her daughter Lyuba. They said that yesterday, on Yom Kippur, all the Jews of Plashensitz were taken into the forest and murdered. In the third week of October 1941, during Simhat Torah, in Dolhinov arrived news that 54 Jews were killed in Kurenitz, just 20 miles away.
Among the survivors arriving after the Plashensitz massacre was a Jew from Minsk named Leib Mindel who moved in with the Segalchik family. By that time Mindel, an energetic man with strong leadership qualities, had survived three German massacres. He became Segalchik’s close friend. Mindel and Segalchik talked about the certainty that death would soon come to Dolhinov. To prepare, they dug two hideouts: one a hole in the barn of neighbor Yosef Kremer, four by four yards, reinforced with sturdy wood posts, and heavily camouflaged. The second was inside the family cowshed, concealed by a false wall.
The only reason why the Dolhinov Jews were still alive was because the German military and the civilian ministeries responsible for the army’s supply still needed Jewish labor. The Nazi leadership, however, demanded their ideology be fulfilled. A March 26, 1942, meeting of eleven German ministries sealed the book. Himmler declared: “The Eastern Territories will be freed of all Jews. I alone am responsible to the Fuhrer and do not want any discussion.”lxxxii And that was that.
On March 3, the Germans murdered the Chabad rabbi and 22 other men. It is not clear precisely why, whether an act of random sadism or a deliberate attempt to destroy the community’s leadership before the main massacre. But even if people thought their only hope of survival was to escape to the forest, they could not last more than a couple of days during winter
&n
bsp; “Every day brought another terrible tale of destruction in the towns around us,” Segalchik recalled. On Wednesday, March 12, survivors told of the wiping out of all the Jews left in Ilya, shot outside the town. There was no doubt that the time was drawing close when it would be their turn. About twenty young men were determined to try and they sent Mindel and Segalchik to talk with a friendly Christian village who they thought would help.
The two men made a mistake, however, and in this situation first mistakes were usually the last as well. On March 15, they walked out of town carrying axes, saws, and a letter from the mayor saying they were going to cut wood. But a half-mile out of town, a motley posse caught up with them: the police chief and a German officer on a sled, other police on horses and bicycles.
The pursuers yelled in Polish, "Stop and put your hands up!" There was no hope of outrunning them so Sigalchik and Mindel complied. Immediately, the police began beating them. One hit Mindel on the head with a rifle, knocking him to the ground unconscious amidst a pool of blood. Segalchik was badly beaten but only on the back and shoulders, as if they did not want him to relapse into the comfort of unconsciousness. One policeman hit him so hard that his rifle broke.
Dragging the two men, the police tied them to the back of the sled and turned the horses back to the town. The prisoners had to run behind. Then they lashed the horses so the two men fell and were dragged along. Back in town, they took them to a well and the police poured buckets of water drenching them and making them shake feverishly in the cold. The next stop was the police station where two German communications’ officers, who maintained the telephone lines, were waiting. They delighted in beating up Jews for minor infractions like walking on the sidewalk or not taking off their hats in their presence. German regular army officers often delighted in persecuting Jews for fun rather than due to orders.
The German officers and the police chief beat Sigalchik and Mindel continuously asking about their contacts with partisans. The more they claimed to know nothing, the more they were beaten. Mindel, covered with blood, lost consciousness again while Sigalchik prayed for a swift death. As he lay on the floor, apparently dead to the world, Sigalchik heard the phone conversation between an officer, reporting the capture of two Jewish partisans, and the SS post in Dokshitz. Sigalchik could have no doubt what the other end was saying: Tomorrow we’ll arrive to interrogate, then execute them.
The sun had set, the last they expected to see, when they were thrown into a cell, three yards’ square with two big windows blocked only by bars, not glass. The night was cold and in the storm and their drenched clothes the two prisoners shivered. Thinking there was no chance of escape. The police didn’t even bother to stand guard but merely locked the cell door.
No rest came to the two men. Silent midnight came. Suddenly, they heard steps outside. Sigalchik looked out the window and saw the seeming mirage of his oldest sister, Peshia Riva Katz. She crept up to the window asking, through her sobs, if they were still alive and if there was anything she could do to help. Sigalchik replied, "You have no time to cry now, you must do everything possible to get us out of here. Run home and bring an axe. It would be better if your husband Yerochmiel came to help us."
She ran to the house and after half an hour, Katz arrived with an axe hidden in his jacket. He tried unsuccessfully to break the bars, then pushed the axe inside to let them try. Suddenly, they realized that the bars were attached to the wall only by heavy nails. Pre-war Dolhinov had no need to imprison any criminals more dangerous than those who’d consumed too much vodka. In fifteen minutes, they twisted the nails free and removed enough bars to squeeze out. Then they ran to their hideout in the Kremer barn. There, Sigalchik tied a wet towel around Mindel’s head and, exhausted, they fell asleep on a haystack.
What happened was this: SS men had arrived to continue the interrogation the next day and find their two prisoners had escaped can easily be imagined. They screamed for the Judenrat’s leader and warned that if the men weren’t returned fast the whole community would be wiped out. The Jewish police looked frantically but only Sigalchik’s family knew where they were. Nobody talked.
Saturday passed with the town’s Jews in a panic. The Gestapo men left that evening, emptyhanded. But not for long.
It is before dawn of Monday, March 28, 1942. In Vileika the regional headquarters of the SS is busy. Who is in the trucks and vehicles heading out for a day of murder in Dolhinov isn’t precisely clear. It is probably an SS unit perhaps accompanied by part of the German Einsatzgruppe B and certainly by a Lithuanian or Latvian police company.
The four Einsatzgruppe exist solely to murder Jews. In charge of Belarus is the700-man B branch. Its commander is named Erich Naumann, a minor bureaucrat before the war. Far from being a collection of thugs and criminals, the unit had been assembled as a group of dedicated Nazi cadre. Many had been failures in civilian life but were distinct successes as cold-blooded killers. They included a bank clerk, opera singer, lawyer, Lutheran minister, and a dentist. Those who wanted to be relieved of this duty were easily able to obtain transfers.lxxxiii
Backing up this German contingent were Lithuanian and Latvian volunteers of the security police units. Was it the 2nd, 3rd, or 12th Lithuanian Police Auxiliary Battalion; 15th Police Regiment or 255th Security Police detachment? Probably the best guess is the Latvian 18th Police Battalion. All had massacred Jews and Red Army prisoners and were stationed in the area. Jewish survivors would later always speak of Latvians or at least of soldiers who didn’t speak German. But the Jews in Dolhinov were too busy at the time to examine their credentials more thoroughly.
By dawn, their trucks were roaring through Kurzenitz. Jews there heard them and knew that death was on its way. One can forgive their sigh of relief on realizing the trucks were rolling toward victims in other towns.
Perhaps the escape of the Sigalchik and Mindel made the SS deviate from its timetable. But the SS’s follow-up report after the massacre admitted it wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. They had come to kill all the Jews but caught “only part” because they unexpectedly found that their prey “had created real bunkers for hiding in during pogroms.” One of these was three stories deep. But since the Germans found it in the end, we have no details from those who made and hid in it. It seems, if one could take pride in this, that of all the Jewish towns in Belarus, Dolhinov presented the toughest challenge for them. In the end, they only wiped out about half the community.
While they had no idea what day would be the fateful one, by this point the Dolhinov Jews knew what was coming. Too many rumors, too many refugees had reached them for illusions to survive. They knew the Germans would come before dawn, surround the town, and spring their trap in the morning. “Where could we find a shelter?” everyone asked. Shimon Gitlitz remembered that his house had a small basement closed up for years. He secretly dug it out and that gave his sister’s family the same idea.
Someone in the family awoke to the sound of stamping boots, barked commands, the wails of children, and sobs of women. The rest were hurriedly roused and the parents rushed their five children into their basement, joined by the Shaingarts, their neighbors from across the street. Shimon moved a heavy water container over the entry door to hide it from view. But that meant he was also unable to enter himself. He ran to hide himself outdoors the whole day, and the cold weather badly froze his feet.
But the family had still another problem. David, the baby, was crying despondently and his mother feared the noise would give the family away. So she ran to a Christian neighbor, handed over her fur coat and promised if the woman would conceal her she’d bring a gold watch afterward. The woman refused, her attempts to find shelter failed, and the Germans killed her and the baby. Later, the Christian woman showed up at the Kazovitz’s house claiming she had helped and demanding the watch. A single misjudgment about a person’s character cost your life.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family hid undisturbed. When night fell and the Germans le
ft, Yankel Furman, stepfather of the Kazovitz family, returned, knocked on the door and let them out. They crawled from the basement to realize with a shock how few of their friends remained alive.
Through the luck of the draw, Chana Brunstein might have had the easiest time that day. She was inside cooking when a German soldier entered. He should have forced her out to line up with the other Jews but instead—Humane? Hungry? Lazy?—he merely asked her for some eggs and left. Esfira Dimenshtein and her family were saved because a friendly Polish policeman—Maslovsky or Maletzko--had warned them that the Germans were coming the next day. They made a big hole in their grandmother’s barn and stayed there until the morning of the second day.
Avraham Friedman took a dozen relatives and neighbors to the house of his friends, the policemen Maslovsky and Takovich, who said they’d hide him but it was too dangerous to conceal such a large group. So they ran to one of the barns behind a Christian’s house, went inside, and locked the door. Friedman stayed in the policemen’s house. When he finally emerged after two days, he found bodies strewn in the streets but his brother and sister, his aunt and her children had survived. The barn’s owner discovered them but didn’t turn them in.
Gendel Kaplan’s relatives found the police less friendly. While most of the family had dug a hiding place, his 82-year-old grandmother, Rhoda, could take no more. Along with her son, who perhaps thought his status as a craftsman might protect her, she stayed seated in the parlor. When the police entered, the uncle handed them his document and said as a relative his mother was also protected. They returned the document, nodded seriously, then shot her dead right in front of him.
But most Dolhinov Jews who survived did so only by hiding. Typical was the Friedman family, whose shelter was dug in the two-yard-wide space between their big stove and the wall. The resulting space was only 1 yard by 2 yards, and the family members had to sit crushed together for a full day, hot, uncomfortable but still alive.
My cousins, the Rubin family, were one of the few which had a hiding place prepared long before the First Action. Rasia Rubin’s brother, Benjamin, had worked for the Soviets during their time in Dolhinov. Once the Germans arrived, the family hid him in a hole they dug. Knowing Dolhinov was too hot for him, Benjamin fled to Kurenitz, where he was finally captured and killed. But when the First Action came, the hole served the family well.
The least likely survivor in Dolhinov that day was Shmuel Kugel of Pleshchenitsy. Kugel had only escaped the massacre in his own town because he was outside with a work party. All day he had sat alone in the cold rain. That night, he went home to find his wife gone and the locks changed. One of his neighbors had wasted no time in grabbing the house. With only the clothes on his back he’d taken a sack for a hat, a branch for a walking stick and spent four days pacing through forests or fields, sleeping in haystacks, and being fed by peasants, “as they wept over my fate and their own.”
Arriving in Dolhinov, he was taken in by relatives who were mourning one of their own, executed because of the SS man’s lost whip. Now Kugel was in the middle of another massacre. Some of those living in the same building as him were so exhausted they didn’t even try to hide. “You can’t save yourself anyway,” they said, “you’re just torturing yourself.” Nevertheless, Kugel and nine others hid in the attic. The Germans came in and looked around several times but never found them.
One woman, driven mad by fear, ran from her shelter and was caught by the Germans. They promised that if she showed them her family’s hideout they would let the Jews there go free. Out of her mind, she did so. The Germans promptly murdered her entire family, then killed her, too.
Christian townspeople, of course, had no need to hide. Some turned their neighbors’ distress into material gain, looting their possessions, even clothes. Others locked themselves in, trembling at their own fate. When asked many years later what went through his mind when they saw Jewish neighbors being dragged away, a Polish resident of another town replied, “We were thinking that we might be next.”
That’s what the Beyelorussian hospital maintenance man Leonid Andreyovitch thought on that day as he fearfully peered out the window. What he saw was remarkable: a parade of Jews, being marched down his street under the guns of German soldiers, Lithuanian or Latvian security police, and Polish or Byelorussian local police
Boris Kozinitz, who had relatives in Dolginov and escaped there a week later, told what it was like to be in that situation, as he had been when the same units wiped out the Jews in his town just 48 hours before.lxxxiv
Germans and their collaborators grabbed Jews off the street, broke into houses and pulled people out until they assembled large groups which were then marched down the road, surrounded by several ranks of policemen. As they walked toward the market square, the prisoners could see non-Jewish townspeople watching indifferently.
When they arrived by the square, where many of them had worked all their lives in the small adjoining shops, they were ordered to sit and wait. Some fell prostrate onto the ground and wept. Many prayed. Most hoped it was just some re-registration, minor humiliation, or even the execution of a small number who would be selected out of the group.
A few ran for it, and were shot down, one of them falling within reach of Kozinitz. Two men made a break for it and got pretty far. A submachine gun opened up on them, they fell down. But, when the shooting stopped, one got up and took off again. Police fire brought him down, too. None of those who ran for it escaped in either town.
What can one say in such circumstances? Kozinitz’s friend, Gdalia Levin, had chronic tuberculosis and so was used to facing death. He whispered in Kozinitz’s ear, "Take a good look at the trees and the houses, you shall not see them again. These will stay after we are gone, nothing changed, but we will not. The world will keep on existing but many Jews will not be in it."
One man, however, had some small role in determining his fate. A German officer pulled out a man named Lipkind, a member of the Judenrat. The officer said, "You, as a community elder must see all your community being killed and we will kill you last."
In response, Lipkind charged a Polish policeman named Komolka, hit him in the face and then went back to his place among the others. The officer asked Komolka if he wanted Lipkind punished. The policeman replied, "No, there's no need, he'll be shot soon anyway."
But how did Kozinitz and some of those in Dolhinov survive this fatal assembly? As he tells the story:
“I was approached by Sonder-Führer Hartman and was called aside. He called also my father, my stepmother Gutte and her daughter Haya. My brother, Haim, approached Sonder-Führer Ungerman presented his pass and added that he was employed by the Germans. As an answer he received a slap in the face. He began to run toward the Jewish cemetery and I clearly saw that he succeeded in reaching it. However, [local witnesses] told me later that my brother was killed by [the Polish policeman] Witwizky from Gleboki, who ran after him with a submachine gun.”
Esther Dokshitsky was among those marched to the main square of Dolhinov. More and more Jews arrived. One said that the Germans would send them to a concentration camp; another insisted they would all be killed. A mother holding a baby was screaming. One of the Germans grabbed the baby, said, “We’re not going to waste a bullet on this one,” and smashed its head onto an electrical pole, then dropped the dead child on the ground.
The German commander began reading the names of men, the doctor, dentist, pharmacist, and others. Esther’s father and uncle were flax merchants and on the list. Since his own two daughters and wife were safely in hiding, the uncle grabbed his sister and her two children claiming them as his. A policeman escorted them to a house and warned them to stay inside. Someone said, “Even if we survive, what will we eat?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to eat,” answered Esther’s father. “Why are we better than the other ones?”
After those who the Germans wanted to keep alive were removed, the soldiers and police opened up with rifles
and machineguns and mowed down hundreds of people. They fell in place, a few living for a few seconds more. Others were forced into two hay warehouses on which gasoline was poured from jerrycans and then set alight. Having been used so long to store hay the buildings were infinitely flammable.
Anyone trying to escape was machinegunned. The screams of those burned were terrible, the cries of those who tried to escape were cut short by the bullets. At 6 PM it was quitting time, and the murders stopped. Any Jew caught after that was left completely alone, as if the Germans were indifferent to their continued existence.
How did the Germans, Poles, Latvians, and Lithuanians who did this deed feel about it? It didn’t bother them at all. Probably, they enjoyed it. They did what they set out to do and knew what they did. After all, it was only one of many towns where they conducted their performance. Certainly, none were reluctant; no pangs of conscience plagued them. Do we need to know any more than that?
Is there some universal lesson here about whether they were mistreated as children, denied sufficient maternal affection, tasted poverty? For all practical reasons, this is rubbish. After all, there will always be such people and they will commit such deeds if afforded the opportunity, given justification, and assured of immunity. There will always be such childhoods and societies, always be such regimes and ideologies.
Philosophers, psychiatrists, and social workers have defined the world that creates such individuals. The point is to stop them.
They left, went back to the base and no doubt had a fine drinking party, recounting amusing incidents of that day.
Night fell in Dolhinov. And at dark, or in some cases only the next morning, survivors came out to see what and who remained. The Dimenshteins heard a cousin named Vichne Hodas, shouting, “Come out! They've killed everybody!" She’d survived in the home of a Christian neighbor but her parents were killed. Her father, who was very pious, decided he was ready to be a martyr if fate so willed and refused to hide.
Those who emerged found homes wrecked by looters, both uniformed and neighbors. It was like emerging from a bomb shelter after nuclear war. Esfira Dimenshtein saw people shredded by bullets, lying in pools of blood. She recognized friends, schoolmates, relatives. Gendel Kaplan recalled, “When we came out of our hideout we could not breathe. We were frozen with horror.” The smell of dead bodies everywhere and, incongruously, feathers drifted threw the air languidly, torn from pillows cut up by looters in hope that treasures were inside. Blood smeared the cottage walls.
Esther Telis heard some of her non-Jewish neighbors discussing the event. “The Germans are not very smart,” said one. “They should have killed the Jews in winter when it’s too cold for them to run to the woods and survive. Instead, they waited until the spring and now it’s too warm.”
Surrounded by enemies, having seen so many horrors, it was hard not to be demoralized and give up entirely. “We the survivors,” reflected Avraham Friedman, “became lost shadows living in the memories of the dear ones we lost. We walked around with no purpose. How could we ever overcome this torture and agony? “
A Jew from another town, Eliezer Shod from Krivitzi wrote of the same period, “
”We carried on feeling the deepest humiliation and not an ounce of self-respect. Every moment of the day passed through darkness and depression, and nights were filled with terror and nightmares. In the depths of disillusion, sometimes we felt that we were the living dead. We walked both in and outside the realm of the living.”
It was easy to succumb to this fatalism and passivity. To continue struggling for escape and survival took an almost superhuman effort.
And, of course, the Germans of the garrison and their police force were still there. They demanded that all the remaining Jews register and promised no more would be killed. The surviviors were made to collect the bodies as they grieved for lost ones and sobbed, not only for those who were dead but also for themselves. Their trials were by no means over. Only now they could have no doubt as to the verdict and sentence.
Haya Katzovitz’s account cannot be surpassed in the telling:
“We collected the bodies from the streets and the backyards, their homes and their hiding places, and buried them in a common brotherly grave. The survivors became shadow-like creatures. The fear from what we recognized were imminent atrocities against us, kept us awake at nights. People worked hard for the Germans hoping that they would be saved and the Germans promised the Judenrat that no more actions would occur. We all knew that we could not trust that promise; still the will to survive was very strong. There was only one case of suicide by a person who returned home after the massacre and found out that his entire family was killed.”
Sigalchik along with Mindel, the most unlikely survivors of all, sat in the hideout in his neighbor’s barn, knowing that every breath they drew might be the last, hearing the barking of German orders, the screams of those seized, and the shots that cut them short.
They emerged from their hideout to see “from afar the flames from burning barns. We could also smell burning fuel mixed with the smell of burning human flesh and clothing everywhere….There was a ghastly quiet on all the streets of the town, and we trudged amidst this deathly cold silence.”
Their breath before them in white clouds, deep white snow crunching beneath their feet, they walked to the forest. All night long, since it was unsafe to light a fire, they had to pace to keep from freeing, “like caged foxes,” according to Sigalchik’s telling comparison. Many times, after all, he had seen such foxes at the fur farm when he brought them food. They had no hope of escape but could only wait for their execution. And yet soon that very experience at the fox farm would save Sigalchik’s life and that of practically every other survivor of Dolhinov.
Meanwhile, the night goes on endlessly. What thoughts come to a man who has left behind his mother and siblings, his friends, whose state of life or death he knows not. For Sigalchik, more than any other Jew in Dolhinov there is also a sense of guilt, “Would they have not done it if my friend and I had sacrificed ourselves?”
Looking at other towns' experiences, it doesn't seem like it would have made a difference. This is what Sigalchik concludes rationally--“We knew it was only an illusion that the massacre could have been prevented”--but in his heart can he accept that not-guilty verdict entirely? Is this a factor in his restless need thereafter for revenge, to purge himself of a sense that somehow those murdered souls lost at least some days of life due to him? His paradox is another reminder of why it was so difficult for individual Jews to flee, saving themselves yet placing others in jeopardy.
No sleep, no rest, no comfort.
The day brings little warmth and they stay concealed. The next night they arrived at a little farmhouse on the forest edge and see candlelight in the window. They knock on the door and are met kindly. The farmer asks them to sit down, pulls down the heavy drapes so no one would see them. And then he tells his own tale. That very day he’d gone into town and saw the surviving Jews walking around, disturbed by no one. The two men want to stay in the forest but it’s clear that Mindel, still bleeding from his head wounds, won’t live much longer if they do.
Segalchik insists they return to town for a few days. Once Mindel heals and the weather improves, they will try again. They sneak back to find his mother, alive and whole, greeting them at the door of the family house. They hide in the barn but still hear the talk of the streets through Segalchik’s relatives bringing food and news. "If it weren't for Segalchik and Mindel trying to join the partisans there would have been no disaster," people complain. The more sensible have a different version: their deeds merely made the massacre come sooner.
No sooner had the Jews buried their dead—of course, there were no casualties whatsoever on the other side or among non-Jewish townspeople--that the Germans, in early April, unleashed their new plague. All Jews must leave their homes and move into a small area along Borisov Street which would be their ghetto, into whose houses b
etween 1500 and 2000 people must crowd into every corner. They’re allowed to take only what might be fit into a wheelbarrow. The Judenrat makes housing arrangements. Ina Freedman’s family moved into a house with six others. A dozen people or more would have to share a single room in the little cottages. Jail cells would have been more spacious.
But before they left their homes forever, Jews had one more task to perform. Like Haya Katzovitz’s mother, Hana, they burned belongings they couldn’t take so these don’t fall into their rapacious neighbors’ hands. It’s an admission of knowing they won’t return. Smoke rose from fireplaces of the Jewish houses. And then they walked to the ghetto area, a parade of Jews carrying the last of their possessions, but none of their hopes.
The Katzovitz family, the Riar family, and a refugee from the Polish city of Lodj lived in one room of a house; the family of Schreibman—Hana Katzovitz’s brother, the family of Shimon Gitlitz, and his sister-in-law, the recently widowed Rachel Katz and her baby, dwelt in the other room. The kitchen, however, was not left lonely as two single people moved in there. The Friedman family, which like everyone else had their own small cottage, now lived in a dwelling of the same dimensions with six others.
Next, the prisoners are made to build a barbed wire barrier inside a wooden fence to make this area their prison. Jewish police patrol inside; a detachment of 10 local German-recruited police outside. Immediately, the Jews looked for weak points or, as Avraham Friedman and Sigalchik did, created and camouflaged escape routes as they worked on the fence. One they found was a little shed behind a house, with a long-forgotten door opening onto the street outside. It’s marked down as a good escape route. But when the time came, perhaps it was not so forgotten after all—those who tried to use it were killed without exception. They also begin digging out holes and hiding places.
Observing Jewish law as best they could, they baked matzoh for Passover and said their prayers, more fervently than ever. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no harm, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff—they comfort me.”
But of course death was their companion for every waking hour. Arieh Rubin continues his woodcutting. Accompanied by guards, the detail walked about three miles outside of town, chopped down the trees, and dragged the wood back. It’s backbreaking labor but also a privileged task. Not only did it allow him to get out of town into the fresh air and open fields, but there’s a chance for encountering peasants who might gift a potato or two for his family.
On the morning of April 27, 1942, a strange feeling came over Arieh he’d never felt before. Some premonition made him feel that no matter what happened—even if the Germans came to shoot him in his bed—he must not go to work that day. His mother pleaded with him, fearful of what might happen if he didn’t get up and report for work. Perhaps he’d be shot. Each decision, usually so trivial, had become weighted down with gravestones. But Arieh was far more fearful, albeit inexplicably so, of what would happen if he did.
The seven other men went out to the woods as usual. Everything seemed normal. When they were half-way back, the soldiers suddenly stopped and shot them all down. One of the men, Hersch Sperber, fell with a bullet in his head. A German soldier kicked him to make sure he was dead. But he wasn’t. After all were gone—to the next world or back to their barracks, respectively--and darkness came over the land, Sperber awoke and found himself alive. He staggered to his feet, ran into the woods, and snuck back into town, reaching the hospital. Dr. Kotler cut out the bullet and saved him.
The next day, the Germans again surrounded the town in the Second Action. Sperber survived hiding in a hole. He eventually came to the land of Israel where he died only in 2007, almost six decades later, having fathered three children who would not otherwise have been born.
But the other six men were still dead. And so would Arieh have been, except for that strange, powerful feeling that he cannot explain to this day.
Only then were rumors starting to spread of Red Army soldiers in the nearby woods and the vision of their return. Not just bandits or ragged escaped prisoners, but a real army of liberation. The Germans themselves proved it by posting threats to kill anyone who helped the partisans. They circulated articles about alleged German victories over these guerrillas. Such efforts had the exact opposite effect: proving an effective force existed. At last, there a tiniest glimmer of hope for Dolhinov’s Jews.
And yet it was too late for most, almost all, of them.
Early morning, April 28 1942, there’s something of wrongness in the air, a tension among the police the gradual arrival of more soldiers until the ghetto is surrounded. It is the Second Action. The previous month’s events are repeated. screams, chases, sounds of shots. Hiding places discovered, grenades thrown into them or Jews brought out and shot down. This time, the Germans and their allies are determined to do the job thoroughly. They stay at it for two full days and part of a third. By the end, there are survivors again but not many, except for the expert workers, given a short stay of execution by the Germans themselves.
Among the Dolhinov Jews, only one nuclear family survived, my cousins, and that was due to Shlomo Rosin. How many unsung heroes there were whose deeds deserve being sung.
Rosin had built a hiding place first for his brother-in-law who the Germans had sentenced to death, then for the family’s use in the First Action. When it was left behind with their home as they moved to the ghetto, he made a new hiding place. They began by expanding the windowless potato cellar. But they decided that wouldn’t suffice and so they closed it up and started over again.
This time they built in a less obvious hiding place for a hiding place: just inside the front door. A trapdoor was cut from a piece of flooring which blended in with the rest. A handle was fit onto its bottom so it could easily be opened, closed, and fit into place.
And so when the Germans came again, he told thirteen relatives, including my six-year-old cousin Leon, not to worry about him but to get into the shelter quickly. He then arranged a large pile of potatoes over the trap door--thus making impossible his own escape through it. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll manage.” Those were his last words to them.
Rosin ran to the synagogue to hide. But unlike his cleverly constructed hiding place, that was all too obvious. The German searchers found him there with little difficulty. Leaping out a window in a vain effort to escape, Rosin was shot and killed. His family survived only because he sacrificed his life for them.
Blessedly not knowing this at the time, the Rosins and Rubins huddled in the hole. They heard soldiers enter searching for them as footsteps went right over their heads. The first thing the soldiers checked was the storage room, their original hiding place. If they hadn’t changed plans everyone would have died. But the Germans never guessed that to reach that storage cellar they’d stepped right over the real hideout.
Hour after hour the families sat for three days, daring to talk only in whispers. Since they were close to the river, water constantly seeped in and they sat in puddles. There was no food or drink. Through small air holes Shlomo had cut, they could, however, see a bit outside. The sound of shooting was heard. So were their Polish neighbors telling the Germans that the families must be hiding somewhere in the house. Townspeople were pointing out the shelters of other Jews, ensuring their doom and the informants becoming heir to all their property. One of the families wiped out in this way was in the very next house, the Grosbeins, distant relatives of mine on my grandmother’s side.
That first night, Shlomo’s sister, Bilke, lost confidence in their sanctuary’s safety and decided to join another group elsewhere. Shlomo’s daughter, Rachel, decided to join her. After a while in that hiding place, Rachel missed her family and returned. A few hours later, the other place was discovered and all there, including Bilke, were killed.
Frustrated in not being able to find the Rosin-Rubin hideout, the Germans returned to the house and focused attention on the outbuildings stretch
ing behind it. They set the woodshed afire, certain this was where their quarry hid and believing the flames would finish them off.
Smoke drifted into the breathing holes. At first the fugitives thought the house was burning down around them. Uncle Shlomki stood up, hunching under the low ceiling, and said he was going to leave. But Gavriel Rubin stopped him, calmly asserting: “It is better to be burned alive than caught by the Germans.” Shlomki sat down again. They awaited better times.
The Katzovitz family also had a new hiding place. Since the Schreibams already lived in the area that became the ghetto, they remained in their home and could use the safe haven they’d built during the First Action. It was cleverly placed below a balcony and each of the nine people entering had to jump down to get inside.
But this was a place with only enough room for the women and children. The men took the biggest risk, ready if necessary to sacrifice themselves. They began by hiding in woodpiles but if they had a chance they agreed to get out the hidden gate door leading outside the ghetto which they’d noted earlier for use in just such a situation.
Down into the hideout jumped Feiga Shriebam; her sister Gita Gitlitz, the Katzovitz’s sister-in-law, and her two sons; Mrs. Katzovitz and her daughters. The hidden women, too, heard their neighbors guiding the Germans to other hiding places; the screams and futile pleas of captured Jews; followed by gunshots, grenade explosions, and deadly silence. Frozen with fear, they did not even dare to whisper. There were more screams and more gunshots, and more and more.
At one point, Mrs. Katzovitz whispered to her children: “If we are to be caught we should not cry my daughters, we should not beg them for our lives since it does not help anyway, we should not expect mercy from them. We should die with our self respect and dignity knowing who we are.”
Then she stopped cold. There were the noises downstairs of police entering the house. The hidden ones strained ears to follow their progress. The footsteps moved away toward the other side of the house. Then came the sound of furniture being moved. Neighbors and police were looting everything. They didn’t call the Germans lest the soldiers interrupt their enrichment and order them to return to the proper work of murder, at least before profit. Ultimately, cupidity, not love, saved their lives.
The next morning the Germans visited each house and discovered some of the hiding places they had missed, rechecking homes not fully inspected by the less-dedicated police. But the neighbors weren’t satisfied. Some Jews obviously still lived. Townspeople, accompanied by Germans, came into the house and one was overheard to say, “It looks suspicious.” They began knocking on the walls and one of them said, “Get an ax.”
Just then, when all seemed lost, they began arguing among themselves. A soldier snarled, “What are you doing here, brigade number four?”
The reply came: “This is our territory. We are brigade five. Get out of here!”
As the first group left, a bugle blast sounded, calling all the Germans to assemble. All the soldiers left. The women had survived the second day.
Yet they knew it was only a matter of time before the Germans returned and caught them. Leaving was imperative. They climbed out of their hiding place and headed for the gate door but found it locked. Though they didn’t know it until much later, that lock saved their lives. The door had been discovered and their husbands, sons, and fathers who’d gone through it the previous day had been shot down: the Katzovitz’s stepfather, Yakov Foreman; and little Aron and Nachman and Shimon Gitlitz; and Feiga’s husband Chiam, and son Chilik Shreibman. And so had been the Katzovitz’s grandmother Feige Gitlitzther and their aunt Haya, Sarah and her son Gadalya Eidelman. “There was,” as one survivor noted drily, “no time to mourn.”
Meanwhile, Chana Brunstein, who had such good fortune during the First Action, decided not to try her luck too far this time. She joined a group of eight, including her brother, who decided to break out of the ghetto.
They made a run for it in the morning of the first day, before the Germans got too organized. Police guards fired at them but only one was lightly wounded. Panting for air, they raced several blocks away from the ghetto and broke into an abandoned house—it belonged to Yerachmiel Shapiro, who many of them had visited in better days—on May 3 Street and hid in the basement. The Germans weren’t looking for Jews outside the ghetto and the fugitives could catch their breath there.
But after a few hours, they reluctantly but inevitably had to go on. They checked to make sure no one was watching—the townspeople were as dangerous to them as the SS—and ran once again.
And here is an image that I cannot get out of my mind, a small thing that took a heartbeat of time. But Chana Brunstein noticed and remembered it for more than a half-century despite it having come in her life’s most terrifying moment. As they ran across Boimalach boulevard, they spotted an eight-year-old girl all alone who they knew to be from the Sandler family. They did not stop or divert their path. No one can blame them and no one can doubt that she did not live more than a few hours after that. This frozen image of a little girl, lost, confused, bereft, dazed, is a fitting image for the horror of those days.
The group’s next stop was the attic of a house that belonged to the uncle of one of them. And finally when night came, they ran out of town altogether, to the granary of a farmer in the nearby village of Palant. The man had been a regular customer in the Katzovitz store and they knew they could trust him. They were right, which is why this story is being told and not gone forever, as are those of three thousand other children of Dolhinov.
He hid them in the potato storeroom under his home—oh, staff of life, indeed was that vegetable for them. And as an extra kindness during the daytime he took them upstairs to sleep by the oven. They would stay there until the massacre was over.
Like other menfolk, Esfira Dimenshein’s father put sand on the floor to hide the entrance of the hole where his wife, son, and daughter was hidden. They spent two days inside and when they could breathe no more came out. Fortunately for them, they lasted long enough. Their father was dead and so were all their other relatives including their grandparents, relatives, and friends.
And then it was over, in every sense of the word. But I have not told one word of what is most important. It is easy to dwell on the stories of survival, because those people live and have stories to tell. It is comforting to hear the stories of survival, because they imply that if one had been there an individual survival could have been secured through smartness and luck. Yet for every one such name, there are a dozen who did not live.
Here is one small incident that took one minute and yet reveals the inescapable paradoxes and inevitable choices of Dolhinov Jews. Sigalchik’s sister had saved him from jail but could not save herself in the second massacre. Pulled out of a hiding place by the soldiers, she begged them to let her live, saying she had young children.
They asked, “If you really have young children, where are they?” She knew that to answer that mocking question was unthinkable, and futile even so. She remained silent. She died. At least, in that last moment she knew they were still safe and might live. Such were the sole consolations available.
Esfira Dimenshtein had the experience closest to that of most Dolhinov Jews that day:
“They led us to a sandlot near the cemetery saying that we are going to work. There were Germans and [local] policemen. They made us stand in two rows and started shooting. I wasn't killed because I faint[ed]. I woke up…it was dark and it was very hard to breathe. I looked around and didn't see anyone, just dead bodies. There was a dead man lying on me. And I started creeping to the forest.”
She hid for two days under haystacks, thinking that this dome of dried animal fodder would be her deathbed. On the evening of the second day, she decided to make for the forest. There she met some other escapees who told her that her brother and mother had been saved by the same Polish policeman whod rescued them in the First Action and now helped them to hide.
Sixte
en-year-old Esther Dokszycky was hiding with her mother, Rivke, and sister, Roshkle, along with her aunt and her own two daughters, while her father and uncle hid behind a woodpile. The women heard the Polish family next door talking about where the Dokszycky’s might be and then went off to bring the Germans. Rivke, said, “They’ll find us.” They decided to split up in the hope that at least a few would survive.
Rivke took off her wedding ring—the only thing of any value they had left--and put it on her daughter’s finger. Had she a premonition of who would live and who would die in the next few minutes?
Then they raced out. Rivke and Roshke turned left and were shot; the aunt, her two daughters, and Esther turned right and made it to a neighbor’s house where they hid in the attic. They heard people saying, “They have to be somewhere around here.” And then the top of a ladder appeared, followed by German soldiers who dragged them out.
Esther’s aunt cried out, “My husband is a specialist and you’re not supposed to kill us!” Her effort worked.
“So why did you hide?” replied a soldier. “I’ll take you to the SS commander.”
When the officer had examined their papers and found out she was telling the truth, he asked her the same question as did his subordinate.
“I didn’t want to be killed,” she replied in fluent German.
The officer looked down at his clipboard. Yes, he said, your father and uncle are flax merchants and you are listed as having two daughters. But who, pointing at Esther, is this one?
“This is also the daughter of a specialist,” she explained.
For a moment they stood there, the black-uniformed SS officer and his armed men face-to-face with a small Jewish woman and three young girls. Finally he decided, “Take them to the other specialists,” ordered the officer.
“And what,” the soldier asked of Esther, “should I do with this one?
“Let the little shit live,” he answered. “I will kill her next time.” The man led them off. A few moments later, as they were passing a house, some other soldiers brought out their cousin, a little boy of ten years old. He was an orphan, his father having been killed and his mother being the one who had committed suicide after the first action.
Quickly, the aunt said that he was also one of her children.
“Oh no, you don’t,” said one of the soldiers. “You watch!” And they shot him down before their eyes.
Finally they arrived at one of the three houses given over to the surviving Jews. There Esther found her father, who had blood all over his face. He had been caught, too. “They gave me a good beating because they said I wasn’t supposed to hide,” he explained.
“Father,” she said to him, “I think that mother and Roshkle are dead.” He already knew. “At least you’re alive,” he said, and they broke down in tears.
For 24 hours they stayed in that house, without food. They left only to bury the dead. In one wagon, Esther saw another aunt with her husband and four children; and in a second wagon was the bullet-riddled body of her six-foot-tall cousin, a college student, so big he needed a whole wagon for himself.
As I watch her describe that scene on the video screen at Yad ve-Shem, the Jerusalem museum of the Shoah, I think her story of the Second Action is over. But it isn’t
At the very end, as the interviewer is winding things up and getting ready to turn off the camera, she adds one more thing. It is the most horrible of all the horrible things in her memory, so incongruous with the luxurious Florida home in the background of the scene. Yet having told the rest of the story, she finds herself able to unburden the last terrible secret. She speaks.
There she is, back in the run-down house with the other experts, all shaken by their experiences of the day. A teen-aged boy has just come in the door, perhaps the last living Jew in the streets of town. He sees Esther and comes up to her, hesitating, but unable to restrain himself. The boy has something he must get off his chest.
“I was forced to bury the dead,” he tells her. “Among them was your sister, Roshke. She was still barely alive and her eyes were open. But I couldn’t bury her alive, so I asked one of the Polish police to shoot her. He refused.
“And then I asked one of the SS men. `Sure,’ he said.” He lifts up his machinegun and lets off a burst into her body. And then the boy picks her up, as gently as he can, and throws her into the mass grave, as respectfully as he can.
“I knew it was your sister,” he explained to Esther, “because I recognized her beautiful blue eyes.” And then he walks away.
Except for about 150 to 300 “experts” and their families, all those Jews who the Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Poles caught were put to death immediately, mostly shot down where they stood; some torn apart by grenades in their hiding places.
On the morning the massacre began, young Arieh Rubin was a stone’s throw outside Dolhinov, seeking food for his family. He saw Yehuda Ginsberg of the Judenrat telling people that the Germans were calling for an assembly. And he also saw the unsual number of German soldiers. Wisely, Arieh ran in the opposite direction, into the woods. Wandering there, he met up with a group of other young Jews who’d escaped and were seeking the partisans. But he could not leave his family like that and did not join them.
Instead, he walked about a mile and a half to the house of a peasant who he’d often visited with his father who’d bought and sold in the countryside. Arieh hid and hesitated. Then around midnight he knocked on the door. The man came, and asked—a wise person did not open a door lightly in those times—“Who is it?”
“It’s Arieh, the son of Gabriel.”
The peasant was startled. It was the last thing he expected. Guests were sitting around the table in his parlor drinking and talking, friends but not necessarily men who could be counted on to keep a secret. No one could see him talk to a Jew. Merely to open the door could mean the death of not only of himself but of his whole family.
Who can see into the soul of a man? He made his decision, opened the door a crack, and said, “Go out by the place where the garbage is thrown and I will help you.” Later, when all slept within, the man brought him a loaf of bread and jug of milk, promising to return the next day. Arieh slept on the ground. The same thing happened again when the earth had rotated once on its axis, the second day of the massacre.
Then, the peasant sent his wife to see what was happening in the town. She was too scared to enter but reported that the German soldiers had left. When Arieh heard that news he himself returned. On the outskirts he saw a Polish policeman too busy stealing clothes from homes in the ghetto to notice him.
Hard it was to enter that town of the slain. Everywhere, he saw the fallen where they lay like, as another survivor put it, strewn leaves fallen in autumn. Arieh entered a house and saw a dead woman lying on the bed, another on the floor. He rushed home, what courage that took, not due to fear of the Germans but fear of what he might—was almost certain—to find there. He tried the front door. But it would not open. He went around to the back door, but that, too, was stuck.
And then in that moment of despair, the end of the world, he saw his mother and his father and his little brother, who had come out of their place of hiding and were now hiding in the backyard. They embraced, took what they could in a few moments, and fled. Telling me of that in the living room of his apartment in Ramat Gan, two-thirds of a century and a million worlds away, Arieh broke down and wept.
There was one being more with them on leaving than there had been when they’d gone into the shelter three days earlier. For when the Rubins and Rosins came out they saw the shattered hiding place of their next-door neighbors, the Grosbeins. Once again, the two sides of my family came together. The townspeople had led the Germans to the Grosbein’s hiding place and when the Jews there didn’t come out, they threw a hand-grenade in. They didn’t bother to go inside themselves. Nobody, the Germans concluded, could have lived through that explosion, and there were more people to kill before
their working day ended.
But there was one survivor, six-year-old Haim Grosbein. He had been sitting in a corner and the blast, which tore off the legs of a cousin sitting next to him, had left him unhurt physically. And so they took him into their family.
Are these terrible events hard to talk about for those who experienced them? Almost seventy years later, I heard the story again from Victor Rubin, Arieh’s brother, at his dinner table in his home in Israel. Also at the table was his 40-something-year-old daughter. By that time, Haim Grosbein had grown up and old, was a pensioner with many grandchildren of his own. Victor’s daughter turned to her father and said with a calm equanimity I found astonishing, “Oh, I knew you were close to Haim Grosbein’s family but I never knew why before.”
There were about 50 people left alive who came out of their shelters that night. The police were too drunk, confident, or sated with loot to care. The survivors broke down the ghetto fence and escaped toward the forest to the east. Someone started shooting but it was very dark and nobody was hit. They didn’t stop until they found the partisans.
At that moment, Chana Brunstein and her seven companions were still in the farmer’s potato room and they asked him, too, to go into Dolhinov. He knew their families and came to report that not one of them had survived.
She and her brother, also, had to see for themselves. Like the peasant woman, she put a wide scarf over her hair and let it droop over her face as a disguise. Some townspeople saw her as a ghost, “Eta Z'idovka!" they said in Polish, “She’s a Jew!” Going to the hospital, they found the seemingly indestructible Dr. Kotler and his wife who had survived in hiding and were packing medical supplies to take. He hid everything of use they couldn’t carry with the hospital’s Byelorussian maintenance man, Leonid Andreyovitch. “I’m going to the forest,” he told them. “Come with me.” And they did, and joined the Partisans.
Not all the Dolhinov Jews went into the forest that day, however, and the tale of Jewish Dolhinov had not quite come to an end. About 150, like Esther and her father, were still kept alive by the Germans, the craftsmen and their families who had special skills particularly useful for the German war effort. There were only enough Jews left from a community that once lived in 400 houses, and then 40 in the ghetto, to fill just three. If anyone might be preserved by the Nazis, if any shred of pragmatism remained among them, then that tiny group would be kept working hard at their unpaid, productive labor. But there wasn’t and they wouldn’t
Among the last Jews in Dolhinov was my distant cousin on my father’s side, Mendel Chafetz, and the neighbors he had saved as his supposed family, my great aunt Haya Doba Rubin and her children, Haim, 12, and Jacob, 10. We know what happened from the official SS report.
“On May 10 we conducted a Jewish action in Volozhin. The Jews there were not as well prepared as in Dolginov.” But by now, with hardly any Jews left to murder, the SS had a new task on its hands: fighting the Red Army partisans. A detachment attacked a German air force communications’ outpost near Dolhinov. And so they had to be still in that area. The SS unit failed to catch the partisans in an operation conducted on the night of May 20-21. But since they were in Dolhinov again, they decided to make good use of their presence to take care of unfinished business:
“On the next day we conducted our third action in Dolhinov. With it the Jewish question in Dolhinov was decided once and for all.”lxxxv
Mrs. Katzovitz and a number of the older women had remained behind to witness the last days of Jewish Dolhinov. They watched Christian townspeople scrutinizing the ghetto, lighting bonfires at night to reveal any Jews trying to escape. One night they heard a loud noise and rumors spread that it was a bone-grinding machine which would turn into dust those few Jews who were soon to be killed there.
Realizing that the end, and their end, was at hand on May 10, Mrs. Katzovitz, her youngest daughter Sara, along with Gita Gitlitz and her sons Israel and Yehezkel finally made their escape. They urged another woman to go with them but she refused, saying: “Where am I to go? Who is to say how old I should be when I die? People could die in their forties, they don’t have to wait for their sixties.” Despite everything that happened, she and her husband still thought that their son being the sole qualified mechanic in the area would protect them.
As she headed toward the woods, the next to last thing Gita heard was the father telling the arriving German soldiers about his son’s great skill. The last thing she heard was gunshots.
It was very dark. Gita and her sons, Israel and Yehezkel ran one way; Mrs. Katzovitz and Sara the other. The latter were soon in the Jewish cemetery where they met Zlata Dokshitzi and her daughter Haya. Together they hid in the fields for weeks, eating raw barley, moving ahead of the peasant mowers. One night, they were hiding behind bushes in the forest when they saw shadows moving, not Germans but other Jews from Dolhinov, including Gita and her two sons.
What had happened to her when she went left rather than right, or was it right rather than left? Gita and her sons had hidden in the fields, too. Starving, they were finally ready to give up and so desperate that they started back to Dolhinov to face their fate. Fortunately, on their way they ran into Gita’s nephew who persuaded them to choose life, to return to the forest and not give up.
Finally, the whole group met up with the Red Army partisans and lived in the woods for the remaining two and a half years of war. When the Nazis and their allies were finally destroyed, they immigrated to Israel in 1948. Israel Gitlitz joined the army of the country that bore his name and was killed in the War of Independence in 1949. Only 18 years old, he knew what he was fighting for, and what he was fighting against.
And what of the others who were the last Jews of Dolhinov before May 21? If these people were not broken by this point, it was a miracle. Having lost his wife and other daughter, Esther’s father had no desire to live but he wanted to save his remaining daughter. “Go to Cybulski,” he told Esther’s older cousin, Peretz. He was a very poor Polish peasant who her father had befriended, letting the man grow crops on some land that he had leased for flax but didn’t need.
Peretz snuck out of town and asked Cybulski to come see his father, who the Germans let meet peasants as part of his work for them. Cybulski took some flax with him as an excuse.
“Look,” said Esther’s father to Cybulski when they met at last, “I don’t have too much left but whatever I have is yours. I want you to take my daughter and my nephew.”
Cybulski was a very brave man and agreed. That very night, he returned to the ghetto. Esther said good-bye to her father and he promised to come to her when he could. He claimed that if he ran away his three brothers would be killed. But both of them knew this was only an excuse of a man who’d already made up his mind.
Then he turned to Cybulski and said, “Mr. Cybulski, I want you to be a father to my daughter.”
“You should come yourself and do that,” said Cybulski, himself almost in tears.
“I’ll try but, just in case, we live in uncertain times.”
And so they left her father and Dolhinov to go back to Cybulski’s village. The next day, a third Jew arrived, a man in his mid-40s whose wife and two daughters were dead but who had made a different choice from Esther’s father. Cybulski took him in also.
The farmer made a hole in the dirt floor of his cow’s corral; added a wooden door with breathing holes; spread straw, and then—well there was the cow as a decoy. But he said to his wife, “I’m not going to put Esther in there. We will have to do something for her to stay in the house.”
The rest of the summer of 1942, she spent in the attic, amidst the hay. And when the weather became cold, she hid in the space between the big oven and the wall. The two men stayed in the barn. If all seemed safe enough, at night all three sat with the family. On warm nights Esther would go out, like a ghost, amidst the high grain in the field.
Each day, Cybulski carried flax into Dolhinov and Esther’s father would give him some money
and clothing. Then came May 21. The shouting and the shooting was heard well outside town. Cybulski couldn’t face going. He knew what he would find. His wife went instead and returned to report that everyone was dead.
“That night,” Esther later recalled, “I was in the attic and I wanted to commit suicide.” She felt as if, “The three of us are the only Jews alive.” But she had no idea to commit suicide. Finally, Cybulski came to her and said, “I love you like my own daughter We will try to hide you and we will see what happens. And if they find you we will all be dead any way.”
They hid there for 18 months, until November 1943. Then, one day an escaped Russian prisoner of war came to the house and begged for something to eat. Cybulski wasn’t home but his wife and daughter were and they gave him some bread and milk. But they didn’t let him know about the three Jews they were hiding. And he left
.He was captured and interrogated by the Germans and told them about who had helped him. The police commander from Dolhinov came to Cybulski’s house and Esther recognized his voice from the attic. She was fully prepared to die. But suddenly, all was quiet. After some hours, Cybulski came upstairs and told her that he had been away when the police came but they had taken his wife and daughter to jail, and they might be shot.
Esther told the other two Jews that they would have to leave so as not to put the family into any more danger and persuaded them to do so.
Cybulski explained how to find partisans. First, he said, you go to the big river, the Vilaya and cross it.
But none of us know how to swim, they answered.
There is one place you can cross the river on foot, explained Cybulski. You will see a big oak tree. Cross there.
Off they went. But they came to a crossroad and Cybulski had forgotten to tell them about that. Once again, Esther had to choose between turning left or right, a matter of life and death. Suddenly, she knew what to do. On the right she could see auto tracks and the droppings of horses and cows. To the left, there was nothing. Where others don’t go, that is the way to the partisans.
Two miles down the path they came to the big tree. And there sat a shepherd boy. He was scared by the sudden appearance of three extremely strange strangers. He got up to run away.
Don’t run, little boy, said Esther in her most soothing voice. I want to talk with you.
“You’re a spy!” he said accusingly.
No, she said, I’m not a spy. I’m Jewish and I’m running away from the Germans. Tell me where the partisans are.
“I’m not telling you anything. You’re a German spy.”
So Esther gave him the greatest treasure she had: a small piece of soap. His eyes widened and his mouth soon opened, too. “Go two miles to the village of Lesnicki,” he told her, “and you’ll find partisans.”
And there indeed were the partisans. They took the trio to their commander.
“You want me to believe,” he said, “that you hid 18 months in a peasant’s house only a quarter-mile from Dolhinov and you’re still alive? It’s ridiculous.”
“Look at us,” they told him. And he looked at the three ragged, exhausted Jews, a little girl, a teenage boy, and a haggard man. “We didn’t look human,” Rachel later said, and they certainly hadn’t been treated as such for a long time. They did indeed look like people who had hidden 18 months in a hole under the cloven hooves of a cow and in an attic filled with hay.
Then he smiled, “Such nice partisans you’ve brought here,” he laughingly told the sentry who’d escorted them, “Such fighters!” Turning to the fugitives, he added, “You can work in the kitchen.”
He turned to leave and walked away. At that moment, she heard a voice behind here say, “You’re Rivka’s daughter?” It was Avram Freedman of Dolhinov, who she’d known since childhood, who was now aide to the commander of the People’s Avenger’s partisan brigade.
And they were home again. Though they were hardly safe or in a real home for a very long time to come.
