I walked out and I knew that I would never see them again. I joined up with the labor group and we were led out of the ghetto to the sawmill. And within two or three hours we heard screaming like we’d never heard before. Remember, the sawmill was not an enclosed building—there was only a roof on top of an open frame to cover the equipment. Not far from the sawmill was the site on the outskirts of town the Germans had chosen for a mass grave. As we worked, we could look out and see military trucks filled with Jewish women and children passing by on the road. They were being guarded by German SS officers and Polish police. The screams were coming from these trucks.
The screams.… If there is a God upstairs, he didn’t hear those women and children.
We could see not only the trucks passing, but the local population of Stolpce gathered on both sides of the road, as if they had come to see a parade. And every time the trucks went by—especially the empty ones going back to town—these people would all clap their hands!
I was sure that they had killed my mother and sisters that day. I was in shock. Something snapped inside me. I couldn’t talk or move. I couldn’t cry. It was such a hell that I can’t find the words to describe what my state of mind was like. It is not something that most people will ever have to experience, and for that they should thank God.
The Germans didn’t take the Jewish workers back to the ghetto that night. We were herded into an empty room not far from the German army barracks. That was where we were to be kept for a week, while the Germans finished their butchery in the ghetto.
The Jews with whom I worked realized that, in my mental state, I wouldn’t be able to stand up to forced labor the next day. My mind had literally stopped working. So they took a risk—a great risk, which could have meant death for them. They hid me for a couple of days inside of a large woodpile next to our sleeping hut. Inside there, they hoped, I would somehow snap out of it. For those two days, I didn’t eat or drink. Probably I slept for twenty-four hours straight at some point. Honestly, I don’t know what happened, what I thought, how I existed. The Polish police who oversaw our workforce didn’t keep count of us closely enough to notice my absence. If a Jew was missing at the beginning of the day, they figured that it was probably because the Jew had died overnight from starvation or illness.
At last, when I felt able, I crawled out from under the woodpile and went back to work.
Meanwhile, the Germans were going through the ghetto room by room with police dogs, searching for any Jews who had tried to hide. When they were finished with the killing, they let the Polish population in to take anything they wanted from the ghetto … clothing, sheets, pillows, pots, pans. That was a way to gain support with the locals, but the Germans had first seen to it that nothing valuable was left.
We knew that after they had finished cleaning up the ghetto—making it Judenrein—they would finish us off as well.
A week went by. I was back to working at the sawmill, though my state of mind was barely adequate to make it through the day. Then one day I saw a Polish boy who had been a classmate of mine at the gymnasium. His name was Dmitri Zarutsky. He had had a small crush on me, and would occasionally ask me out to see a movie. My family would never have allowed us to date, but we did become friends—he used to come by the house for visits. He even understood Yiddish a little bit. Dmitri was standing in a barn not far from the sawmill, motioning for me to come over and talk to him. I hesitated as to whether or not to go. I could have been beaten for leaving my workstation, and besides that, I had no idea what he could want from me at that point in time.
I decided to go over and talk with him. Dmitri spoke to me quickly—he didn’t want to be seen speaking to a Jew. He said, “Listen. I just walked by the ghetto and the Germans are gathering up the last of the Jews who were found hidden away. Your whole family … your mother, your sisters, your aunts and your cousins are all sitting together in a single group. They’re being guarded by the SS and the Polish police.”
As I learned later, it was common practice in the ghetto liquidations for the rounded-up Jews to be guarded all day and then taken to the mass graves for killing at dusk. The rationale behind this was that it allowed the Germans to spend all day hunting out and gathering Jews together, and then to murder them all at the same time, rather than having to bother with lots of smaller-volume killings throughout the day.
When Dmitri was walking by the ghetto, my mother recognized him. She yelled to him to come nearer and take a message. She had to yell for him to hear, but apparently the guards didn’t care, as her death and the death of the others was certain. Dmitri was to find out where I was working and to tell me that they were all going to be killed on that day. She explained to Dmitri that they had been hiding for the past week in a hiding place that my uncles had prepared before they were taken away and killed. There was a sofa in the room assigned to them. They had cut out a piece of the wooden floor beneath the sofa, dug a hole deep into the earth underneath, then covered up the hole with the wooden floor piece. My mother and my sisters had hidden themselves with the rest of the family in that hole. For a week, I had been sure that they were already dead.
So when Dmitri let me know that my family was still alive, I just said, “Thanks for telling me.” There was nothing else I could think of to say. Hearing the news, it was for me as if they had died twice.
There was one more thing that Dmitri let me know. My mother had screamed at him to tell me that I should take nekome—revenge.
JACK
When I understood that the Germans were on their way, I left Stolpce to rejoin my parents in Mir. I knew that life would be very different than it had been under the Soviets. Enough stories about the German handling of the Jews in western Poland had reached me. I knew that I had to be with my family.
In Mir, as elsewhere, there was a Judenrat established. There were roughly 2,000 Jews still living in the town when the Germans arrived; remember that the yeshiva had been disbanded two years previously. So out of this population, there were six or seven persons chosen for the Judenrat. They were older men, elders of the community. One of the first instructions given to the Judenrat by the Germans was to assemble a list of all the young Jewish people from ages sixteen to thirty or so. All of those young people—I was one of them, of course—were to report to work to fix up the roads, clean the homes of the German officers, take care of the stables the officers had seized. If any German—or any of the Polish police—disapproved of the behavior of any one of us, we could be severely beaten. Or shot immediately. And then the rest of the work group would be told to dig a grave and bury their dead comrade.
One of the next steps was to require the Judenrat to register all Jews over the age of fifty. That was so they could be rounded up and killed more efficiently, as the Germans considered that age group useless for work purposes.
After two weeks or so of hard labor, we were told that we would be moving into a special ghetto area that would be the home for all the Jews of Mir. The Polish population occupying those few blocks were moved out and then transferred into the better Jewish homes left vacant. They took over all the furnishings and clothing that we were required to leave behind. It was a happy occasion for those Poles.
My mother Sarah was the only dentist in Mir, and the Germans needed a dentist, so they allowed her to continue her practice. They gave her a room in a house in the Mir ghetto reserved for professionals and skilled laborers—one doctor, one pharmacist, some shoemakers and tailors—who would do work for the Germans. That was the section into which we were originally placed. My father was placed in that house as a dental technician—he and my mother were working together again.
My main job was to repair the main highways for the benefit of the German military. I was part of a large Jewish work crew. Sometimes, as we worked, some German troop trucks would pass by and the soldiers in them would start shooting. Sometimes they would shoot in the air, just to scare us. Sometimes they would kill a few of us, just for the thrill of it. It went
on for quite a while. Every day there were casualties—if not in our road work crew, then elsewhere in the ghetto. It was casual killing—no investigations, no special orders required. They were killing babies, old people, anyone who was reported for any sort of transgression of the German regulations, however minor.
The ghetto was very congested. There were usually six or so Jewish families packed into each of the small houses. In each room, five or six people slept. Your bed space was your only private space. There were no showers, no toilets, just outhouses. We kept hearing rumors about Jews being rounded up in the neighboring towns and killed. The only ones who were spared were professionals or skilled laborers whom the Germans regarded as useful—a small percentage of the Jewish population. The Germans had promised my mother that they would keep her alive because they needed dentists. So it didn’t seem to us that she was in real danger. But as the days went on and it became clear, from all the rumors we heard, that the mass killings would come to Mir, my father—who as a technician was not valued as highly as my mother—and I realized that we needed to find hiding places. This was in the autumn of 1941.
We found a place for my father in the attic of a Christian family in Mir. The family members were all dental patients of my mother, and their son was a friend of mine from school. They promised that they would keep my father’s presence a secret and provide him with enough food to live.
As for me, it was decided that I would run away to a farmhouse some six kilometers outside of Mir. The farmhouse was owned by the Kurluta family, all of whom had also been patients of my mother. When the troubles started with first the Russians and then the Germans, my parents had given them some of our belongings for safekeeping, and they had been honest in acknowledging this throughout all the horrors. By contrast, there were many Polish houses that took Jewish possessions on in that way and then later denied any such dealings, even if the Jewish owner somehow survived and came to their door. The Kurluta farm was in a wooded area, but to make doubly sure that I did not stand out they dressed me as a farmhand and I worked in the fields.
Both of these families were very good to us, but obviously there was danger in the entire situation. Could we be certain they would not betray us? The answer is that we had no choice but to trust people.
In early November, after I had been on the farm for a few days, I found out that the Germans and the Polish police—including police sent for from a neighboring town to assist in the killing—had surrounded the Mir ghetto. Then they had marched all of the Jews they could find—group after group—out of town and forced them to dig their own mass grave at gunpoint. The killings went on for two days. The first casualties were the chief Mir rabbi and the most orthodox Jews. After that, it was group by group, random murder. And while this went on, they searched through the ghetto for hiding places. Most of the Polish population of Mir assisted them—if they knew of any Jews in concealment, or trying to pass as Poles, they pointed them out. Only the useful Jews were spared—roughly 800 in number.
While the news of the killings had reached me at the farm, I was still in complete ignorance as to the fate of my parents. This tore at me. After a few days, when things had quieted down a bit, the farmer who was hiding me went into Mir and made some discreet inquiries. When he came back, he told me that my mother Sarah had been killed.… I found out later that the Germans had planned to keep her alive, but the Polish police came into her room, robbed her, and killed her with great pleasure.
I loved my mother very much. She had been murdered by senseless butchers, and there was no immediate way for me to fight back, to avenge her. It was an agony—the worst agony of my life.
Thank God, I also learned from the farmer that my father had survived in his attic hiding place. The fact that my father was still alive and might need my help convinced me to leave the farm and go back to Mir. In addition, the wave of killings had made it plain that the farmer and his family were in mortal danger so long as I continued to stay on with them. He was a good man, but he could not bring himself to protect me at the possible cost of his own life and those of his wife and children.
At that point, most of the Jews still living in Mir were either skilled laborers, or those who tended the horses and gardens of the German officers, or those who were still needed for road repair. There were also a certain number of Jews, such as my father and myself, who had managed to hide themselves outside the ghetto. The attitude of the Germans toward those few Jews who had concealed themselves was surprisingly casual. The Germans knew that we had no place to go—the Polish population would not hide us. So we went back to the ghetto, to rejoin our fellow Jews, and they let us do so without hindrance for the time being, for the sake of the labor we could provide. There would be another wave of killings when it suited them.
But because of our reduced numbers, they moved us in May 1942 out of the original ghetto, which was then deemed too large for our needs. As it happened, there was a old structure, the Mirski Castle—in Polish, the Mir zamek—on the outskirts of Mir. It had been built in the eighteenth century, and was in total disrepair—no heat, crumbling inner walls, filth and rubble everywhere. A Polish landowner who had been living in it had been killed by the Russians shortly after their arrival in 1939, and the castle had remained empty ever since. It was into that zamek that the Germans decided to herd the remaining Jews of Mir. The zamek had an eery atmosphere—there were old dungeons in the basement with rusted iron bars. Its thick outer stone wall had a single gate, as well as a number of small windowlike openings that were high above the ground. The Germans ringed the top of the walls with barbed wire. What few bathroom facilities there were in the zamek were totally inadequate for the 800 some Jews crammed within it.
It was during that summer in the zamek that roughly forty of us younger persons—many of whom had gotten to know one another in the Hashomer Hatzair [the labor-oriented Zionist youth organization]—began to attempt to organize some sort of resistance. We ranged in age from roughly sixteen to thirty. The majority were men, but there were some women as well. In any ordinary sense, our situation was completely hopeless. We had no weapons except for rocks, bottles, and a few knives. We were completely outnumbered and surrounded by a trained German military force supported loyally by the local population. But then again, we had no expectation that we would live beyond the next few weeks or months. Why not resist when the alternative was death at a time and a place chosen by the Nazis? Desperation was what drove us, along with the desire for revenge. Our families had been butchered and piled into nameless graves. The thought of taking at least a few German lives in return was a powerful incentive.
And so our early planning consisted in thinking out strategies by which the zamek—which was, after all, an old fortress—could be defended for a time. A very brief time.
But then an opportunity arose for us that seemed altogether unbelievable and impossible. We learned that there was a Jew in Mir who had managed to infiltrate the ranks of the German military police. This Jew was willing, at the risk of his own life, to pass information and, later, armaments to the Jews of the Mir ghetto, in the hope of saving at least a few of our lives.
The name of this Jew was Oswald Rufeisen. Rufeisen had grown up in the countryside in western Poland, not far from Germany itself. In fact, Rufeisen’s father had served in the Austro-German army during World War I and had been decorated for bravery. Some of Rufeisen’s early school classes had been conducted in German, so he was fluent in both Polish and German, although—and this was unusual for a Polish Jew—he couldn’t speak Yiddish. All the same, he had participated in Zionist youth movements and felt close to the Jewish people.
After the Germans invaded western Poland, Rufeisen fled east and ultimately wound up in the vicinity of Mir, where he posed as a citizen of dual Polish and German ancestry. Through a series of accidents and chance opportunities, Rufeisen was asked to become an officer in the German police and serve as a translator, because of his fluency in German and Polish. That was a jo
b that he could not turn down without attracting undue suspicion. It sickened him to be working for the Germans, but Rufeisen was determined to find an opportunity to save Jewish lives in the process.
Early in 1942, Rufeisen took the risk of making personal contact with one of the Jewish residents of Mir. This particular Jew was Dov Resnik, a young man who, like Rufeisen, had lived in Vilna before the war. In fact, Resnik and Rufeisen had met briefly on a couple of occasions through their participation in different Zionist youth groups.
One day Resnik was marched into the Mir police station to do some repair work. Rufeisen recognized him, just as Resnik recognized Rufeisen. They spoke briefly, in secret, on that day, and managed to arrange for a second meeting in a remote part of town that evening. It was extremely dangerous for both of them. For an officer of the German police to be seen talking on a casual basis with a Jew would attract immediate suspicion to them both. There was the possibility of informers from either the Polish or Jewish sides who would be anxious to obtain favor from the German authorities. Still, Rufeisen promised Resnik that he would help the Jews of Mir as much as he could. No concrete plans were made, but they would work out a means—through a limited number of Jewish intermediaries—by which they could maintain contact. Resnik promised Rufeisen that he would only tell two other young men in the Mir ghetto the truth as to Rufeisen’s Jewish identity—that was necessary to gain their trust in Rufeisen as an ally. For the rest, Rufeisen would be described as a sympathetic German officer. That was how I first heard of him, although later in the summer I would learn the full truth. I never spoke at any length with Rufeisen during this time, though we would exchange curt hellos in the street, with myself playing the part of the respectful Jew and Rufeisen that of the firm Nazi officer.
Jack and Rochelle Page 6
