My family was prosperous—both my mother and my father were educated professionals. They had wealthy friends who were deported at once to Siberia. And the longer the Russians stayed, the worse it became for persons who had lived a “bourgeois” life under the former Polish rule. Within the first few months, most of the “bourgeois” persons were deported to Siberia.
But, thank God, we had some luck early on. My mother was the only dentist in Mir, and the Russians needed a dentist there not only for the local population, but also to work on their own teeth. As for my father, he found work as a bookkeeper for one of the Russian agencies. Because he was working for them, he was able to obtain special food rations, which was a great benefit given the wartime shortages. We also had some privileges for obtaining consumer goods, but supplies were so chaotic that it did us little good. You might be able to obtain razors, but not blades, or vice versa. Meanwhile, my mother was able to bring home chickens, peas, cheese, butter, and bread because that was how she was paid by the peasant farmers who came to her for dental work. It was a barter system, no one had any money.
But even though we could eat, we had to be cautious because if you seemed to be living too well, you attracted the suspicion of the Soviet authorities. Very early on, my parents were forced to move from their nice house to a shabbier location because their house was allocated to a Soviet official. My mother practiced dentistry out of this house. Party members would be coming in and out for appointments, which meant that we had to careful to hide not only our food but also any nice thing we had. Because if a Soviet official saw, for example, a crystal dish that you owned, and if the official so much as said, “Isn’t that nice,” then you had to give it to them as a present at once—to save your life!
Because of the official Soviet policy of nondiscrimination toward Jews, it was no longer necessary for me to attend the Jewish gymnasium in Baranowicze. The Stolpce gymnasium was now a Soviet school. They called it a djeschiletka—it had ten grades, was open to all students, and the curriculum was very different. The Russian teachers who had arrived stressed the Soviet constitution, Communist philosophy, Russian geography and history. But I was happy to go to school in Stolpce because I was closer now to my family. The studies were less rigorous than they had been under the Poles. And if you knew how to handle yourself, how to say the right thing at the right time, and how otherwise to keep your mouth shut, it wasn’t difficult to get along with the Soviets.
They organized chess tournaments in town, and I won one of those and received a chess set with pieces that looked like ivory, though I doubt it was ivory. I was also on the editorial staff of the school newspaper. But one of the best things I did was to take training to become a first-aid instructor. Even with their treaty with Germany, the Russians somehow suspected that there might be future warfare with the Nazis, and so they were keen on everyone learning first aid. So I took a class, and then I was suddenly teaching the younger children in our school first aid. Imagine! I barely knew a thing. But when you graduated from the course, you received a specially designed Russian medal. Once, after I became an instructor, I was invited to go to a convention on first aid in Baranowicze. I had a really good time there and met a Russian girl, a party member. She was very well built and four or five years older than I was. Oh, this Russian girl, she was really friendly!
One of the things the Russian girl advised me to do was to join the Communist party. This I did not want. And even if I had filled out an application, they would probably not have accepted me. My parents were bourgeois. But if the Russians had remained long enough, I would have been forced to join somehow in order to survive.
Do you know who was in my first-aid class? Rochelle’s younger sister Sofka. And as for Rochelle herself, I once gave her first-aid treatment! The Soviets emphasized physical fitness as part of the school curriculum, so all of the students had to run long races—something like the marathons in America. At the finish line, I gave first aid to those who needed it. I had no medications, not even salt tablets. What I had was cold water. And I gave some to Rochelle.
I was interested in her. I would have dated her if I could. I saw her—from a distance—fairly often, because a girlfriend of hers, Ashke Prass, lived in the same Stolpce boarding house as I did. At that time, when I was dating, I would often take out two or three girls at the same time. We would go and indulge ourselves at the pastry shops, talk and laugh over coffee. There was a friendly atmosphere among us, without jealousy. So once I mentioned to one of the girls I dated—who knew Rochelle—that I would like to ask out Rochelle some time. But that girl said, “No, you can’t do that. Rochelle is not a girl who goes out on dates with boys yet.”
Still, I had my eye on her. I used to go to the post office in Stolpce often. Few of the houses in Stolpce had telephones, and so you went to the post office to make your calls. I had a girlfriend in another town with whom I liked to stay in touch. On my way to the post office I would see Rochelle standing in her yard and I would say hello to her. But she never invited me to come and visit with her. It would have been nice to have a chance to meet her parents—I never so much as saw them.
ROCHELLE
There was no question of inviting Jack for a visit. You need to understand that my life was very different from Jack’s at that time. I was under strict parental supervision, like most of my girlfriends who had grown up in Stolpce. Maybe if I had gone away to school in a strange town where no one in the community knew me, I would have loosened up like Jack and his friends. But in Stolpce, there was no way that I could feel free to go out with boys.
I remember once, on a cold day, being told by my parents to be sure to wear a scarf to school. I always used to get sore throats, and my parents were very concerned. On the way to school I undid my scarf, so that it was just hanging down over my coat. When I came home that day, wouldn’t you know, the first thing my parents asked me was why I didn’t keep my scarf wrapped around my neck. I asked them, “How did you know?” Someone in town had seen me and told them. If I sneezed in one part of town, they would say “Gesundheit!” in the other.
Still, I can remember my friends telling me, “You should go out with that Izik [Jack’s Yiddish name] Sutin. He always has a lot of money, and he doesn’t mind taking out a couple of girls at once.”
JACK
There was a school dance that was attended by all of the Stolpce students, including Rochelle. So I saw her and asked her to dance. You might call it a magic moment.
ROCHELLE
I was wearing a new pair of navy blue suede shoes. Jack started dancing with me and all I can remember is that he kept stepping on my toes. He was scraping my new shoes to the bare leather! I couldn’t wait to be rid of him. He was an unbelievable klutz. After that dance, for the rest of the evening, if I saw him approaching, I hid myself within my group of friends.
JACK
That was the closest we came to having a date during the two years of Soviet rule.
ROCHELLE
In the new Russian school in Stolpce, I felt like an outcast. They called me a “kulak’s daughter.” I had to be very quiet, and I had to be better at my studies than anyone else in the class to do at all well with my Russian teachers. This was not so hard for me, because my mother Cila had been raised and educated in Russia and not only spoke Russian to us children but also read us stories in that language. One thing I must say—while I was in trouble for being from the wealthy class, I no longer had to worry about being threatened or beaten because I was a Jew. Unofficially, amongst my fellow Polish students, a dirty Jew was still a dirty Jew. But if any of them called you a “dirty Jew” or raised the issue in any way, they would be sent to the principal and severely punished. All of a sudden, they all shut up.
In the Russian school, there were not only the principal and the teachers, but also politruks [political advisors]. They were supposed to indoctrinate all of the students into the Soviet ideology and to mobilize us into comsomoles [young Communist pioneer groups]. Of course
, I didn’t bother to try to join one of these groups, because I knew that they would never take me. The politruks were the eyes and ears of the school. Every activity came under their scrutiny. If there was a school assembly of any kind, large photographs were displayed of the dozen or so members of the Soviet politburo: Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the rest. All of the students would have to rise and chant, “Long live Tovarish [Beloved Leader] Stalin” and so on for the whole list of names. During the entire chant we had to be clapping our hands with joy.
Once I was standing in assembly with my sister Sofka and a couple of other friends. We were reciting the chant for the second or third name, and suddenly it all struck me as funny. I started laughing hysterically! I couldn’t stop myself.
My sister and my friends started pulling at me, even pinching me. They were saying, “What are you doing? You’re going to bring down not only yourself, but your entire family!” But it did no good.
As soon as the assembly was over, the politruks led me to the principal’s office. They questioned me at length. What was so funny? Didn’t I like Comrade Stalin? Didn’t I like the other Soviet leaders? I made up a story that I had been thinking of something funny that had happened to me that day—and that when that memory had come suddenly to my mind, I burst out laughing. It had nothing to do with the names of the great Soviet leaders! They kept at me with questions for hours. But somehow, my story saved me from serious punishment.
That evening, when my parents found out what had happened, they were furious with me. My father was in enough trouble already. He didn’t need his daughter drawing suspicion on him through her crazy behavior.
JACK
During the final stage of the Soviet occupation, maybe three months before the German invasion of eastern Poland in June 1941, my family heard some frightening news.
One of my mother’s patients was a Soviet prosecutor who had trouble with his teeth. He came to the house often. Once he came a little bit drunk. He said to my mother, “I like you. So I want you to know that during our last few planning meetings, we have decided that, as a matter of Soviet policy, we are going to bring in our own Russian doctors and dentists to Mir.” That would probably have meant that not only my mother, but also my father, as a fellow bourgeois, and myself, as their son, would have been sent straight off to Siberia.
In retrospect, that might have been a good thing. We might all have survived—most of the Jews sent to Siberia before the Germans came did survive. My mother might have lived a full life.
ROCHELLE
My father was in such despair over the Russians that he actually believed that things would be better if the Germans invaded eastern Poland and drove the Communists out. He didn’t understand who the Nazis were, what they believed. When Lazar thought of Germany, he thought of World War I, when his father was still alive and was able to do business with the kaiser’s army. “With the Communists you can’t do anything,” my father would say to us in private. “But if the Germans come, I’ll get back to producing turpentine and tar. They’ll need it to build roads. With money I’ll be able to bribe them and avoid any problems.” As I have said, my father had no idea what was coming. His illness and depression during the Soviet occupation made him blinder than ever.
III
Onset of the Nazi Horror
ROCHELLE
In June 1941, the Germans invaded eastern Poland—and were clearly on their way to Russia. The Russians may have had their suspicions about the long-term durability of their alliance with Hitler, but they were definitely caught by surprise by the Nazi blitzkrieg. There was little effective resistance by the Soviet army. We were close to the Russian border, and within two or three days of the invasion, we watched a stream of Soviet troop trucks retreating to their homeland.
When we heard that the Germans were on the way, we wanted to flee to the east, to Russia. Even my father agreed that this would have been wise, if only it was possible. Many Jews would have fled to Russia if they could. But only a few succeeded in doing so. Everything conspired against it.
Officially, the Soviet borders were not open to Jews or any other refugees from Poland. The Russians were suspicious of the Polish population—they suspected that there might be subversives or spies amongst the refugees. So during the first days of the German attack, only Soviet officials and Soviet troops were allowed through the checkpoints. It was only in the final days of the German onslaught, when the border was no longer maintained by the Russians because the entire region was in bloody chaos, that some Polish civilians, including some Jews, managed to slip through. Most of them pretended to be Russians. Meanwhile, in Poland, thousands of Soviet troops were left behind, so rapid was the German advance, and so sloppy and hasty was the Russian retreat. The Germans pushed some two hundred miles into Russia, all the way to Minsk, very early on. Their strategy was a pincer movement to encircle the tens of thousands of Soviet troops who were stranded in Poland without supplies and without any immediate prospect of help. Several thousand Russian soldiers were taken as prisoners of war. And many of them were shot almost immediately by the Germans, who were not interested in maintaining POW camps during their push into Russia. In the camps that were set up, many of the Russian soldiers were starved to death. We later found out that hundreds of Russian soldiers were hiding on Polish farms, burying their uniforms and offering labor to the Polish farmers in exchange for their lives.
There were also many groups of Russian soldiers who were hiding in the woods and forming into armed bands to obtain food. Many of them later evolved into partisan groups, but at that point in time they were taking no serious military action against the Germans. Their goal was simply to stay alive. These men were armed and trained soldiers, unlike the Jews, who were unarmed, untrained, and had old and young family members to consider.
Even if we had decided to leave Stolpce and take to the road, there was no guarantee that we would make it alive to the Russian border, much less into Russia itself. Don’t imagine that there were family automobiles in Stolpce! My father, a wealthy man, had constructed not a garage, but a large barn in our backyard to house the horses to pull the wagons we used. Many Jews did take to the roads, sometimes with horses, or horse-drawn wagons, but more often on foot. The trains had stopped running. The roads were filled with would-be Jewish refugees, as well as Poles and Soviet troops. If you took the back roads, which were difficult for any kind of travel, you had a slim chance. But the German Luftwaffe kept the main roads east under constant surveillance—and the machine gun strafings of those main roads by the Luftwaffe fighter planes spared no one. They fired on soldiers, they fired on children. The dead were piled along the roads, and bombed-out troop trucks blocked the way for those who came after.
When my family realized that the Germans would soon be in Stolpce, we packed our most important clothing, as well as the jars of gold coins covered with fat. And then we went as fast as we could to one of my father’s factories in a little town nearby called Kruglice. We stayed in the home of the Jewish factory supervisor until we could find out what was happening in Stolpce. Our major fear at that point was the bombing by the Luftwaffe, which, we had learned, had levelled many of the small Polish towns to the west. Remember, nearly all the homes were little and made of wood. They could not withstand explosions, and fires could spread quickly. So we did not wish to risk sitting in our house during the saturation bombings of Stolpce.
Even so, once the Germans had occupied Stolpce, we had no idea if our house was still standing or not. The only way to find out was to go and look. My father was too ill to undertake such a trip, which was fourteen kilometers each way and would have to be done on foot and in stealth. My mother needed to take care of my younger sisters. So it was decided that I would go to Stolpce and see if there was anything to return to. I waited until the Germans had been there for a week. On my way, I kept to the woods as much as I could. When I did follow the road, I saw dead Russian soldiers. It was the first time that I had seen dead bodies. The fli
es were crawling into their eyes and mouths.
When I got to the edge of Stolpce, and hid near the Niemen River, I could see that many of the buildings had gone up in smoke. It looked like a completely different town. But fortunately, I knew my way well enough to follow the streets, even when the structures around them were rubble. I came to our house and found it still standing. It was already filled up with desperate Jews who had taken shelter there, because their own homes were gone. In our barn in the backyard, there was a large storage area that contained barrels of flour, sugar, peas, and the like. I opened up the barrels and distributed the food to them. Everyone was very hungry. I slept in the house that night, and I told them, “Hey, my family is coming back, so leave room for us.”
The Germans saw me while I was in town, but I wasn’t as conspicuous with all the people around me as I would have been if I was spotted alone on the road. Also, at that point, the German presence was still primarily that of an advancing army. It was chaos, a no-man’s-land. They didn’t yet look at you as a Jew or a non-Jew. The Nazi SS personnel would arrive shortly—and that’s when the organized actions against the Jews would begin. But this I did not yet understand.
The next day, I made the journey back to my parents. They cried when they saw me. They thought I had been killed because I had been gone three days—a little longer than we had planned. I told them the situation and we decided to go back to our own home. The Jews who were already there were very friendly to us, as we were to them. There were no arguments about property rights. Everyone understood, from previous stories told to us by Jewish refugees, that we were in a desperate situation—that we would be moved out of the house and into a ghetto soon enough. When we returned, we took one of the rooms in the house for our own family. And then we waited.
Jack and Rochelle Page 4
