Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  We ran and ran. But still we heard the machine guns and at times the shooting was intense—bursts of fire in specific areas. I remember thinking that they must have caught and killed Mottel and his wife. And I was certain that they would follow Tanya and me until we dropped from exhaustion. We ran all day like that. We went deep into the woods and finally had to sit down—collapse!—and rest. Looking back, I can only guess that the German police decided that it didn’t pay for them to run so hard after two Jewish girls. It was autumn already. The cold would take care of us.

  In late September, during the day, it was still fairly warm. But after dusk it was frosty. So during the night, while we were trying to doze off—which we could only do in fits and starts—our wet clothes became frozen. And my feet, from running, were scratched and bloody. I was very sore. Tanya and I both sat like that through the night, through hours of cold and misery. Our clothes grew so stiff that, when dawn finally came and we wanted to get up and stretch, we couldn’t. It was as if we were in metal armor. At last, by making small and difficult movements, we reached a tiny clearing in the woods where the sun was shining. It took what seemed like hours, but our clothes finally began to soften up. Even so, we could barely walk at first.

  Amazingly, we weren’t hungry. Adrenaline was still working overtime within us. As we talked about what to do next, we still weren’t thinking about surviving in the long term. It was only that, now that we had achieved it, we wanted to make something of our escape—just so the Germans didn’t find us right off and shoot us. Our main goal was to get farther away from Stolpce. But after our clothes had thawed out, we decided to stay in that same hiding place for another day and night, to avoid being spotted if there was any sweeping search for us underway. When we didn’t hear any shooting during that time, we figured that they had given up on us for the time being.

  As we talked, Tanya came up with a suggestion. While we were at the sawmill, she had learned from a fellow laborer—a Belorussian who had worked there for years, and who felt sorry for the young Jews who now served as slaves around him—that there were Russian partisans hiding out in the woods. Those partisans were small bands of Russian troops who had been caught by surprise by the Nazi blitzkrieg invasion of eastern Poland. The Belorussian laborer had given Tanya the name and location of his uncle, a farmer who lived some ten miles from the sawmill. The farmer was friendly to the Russian partisans and knew how to contact them.

  According to Tanya, if we could make it to the farm, there was a possibility that we could somehow join the Russian resistance efforts against the Nazis. It seemed remote, but what other possibilities did we have? Besides, the thought of helping out the Russian partisans and then, after we had proven ourselves, being given guns with which to fight—this was as big a dream as either of us could imagine, under the circumstances.

  Unfortunately, our information about the Russian partisans was seriously lacking in details. What was missing was the knowledge that most of the Russian partisan groups treated Jewish escapees not as allies, as potential fellow fighters, but rather as enemies on a par with the Nazis themselves. Imagine that—at the very time that the Nazis were invading the Russian homeland!

  We started walking—hoping that, even though neither of us knew the countryside well, we could somehow find this farm and join up with the Russians.

  There was another chance factor that helped us, like there being a forest across the Niemen River. In the prewar years, there had been reasonably good relations between Belorussians and Jews, as opposed to Poles and Jews. That was because the Belorussians were a minority ethnic group in eastern Poland. Most of their people lived across the border, in the Soviet Union. Many Belorussians had welcomed the Soviet troops who had been occupying eastern Poland up until the Nazi invasion. The majority of the Jews in eastern Poland had welcomed the Soviet troops as well—for the obvious reason that the alternative would have been falling into the hands of the Nazis.

  Most of the Belorussians were peasant farmers scattered throughout the northeastern Polish countryside. That was the region in which my hometown of Stolpce was situated. Not all Belorussian farmers were friendly to the Jews, of course.

  But some were. As it turned out, while the assistance the friendly Belorussian farmers offered was minimal, it was enough to make a difference.

  Somehow, toward the end of the first day after leaving our hiding place in the woods, we arrived at the farm we were looking for. We didn’t go up to the house, but we saw the Belorussian—his name, I remember, was Usik—working in the field. So we decided to approach him—what else could we do under the circumstances? He knew who we were, he didn’t have to ask. We told him we were hungry, we asked if he could give us something to eat. He told us that he didn’t have any food to spare—all he could give us was a couple of eggs from his chicken. He gave each of us a little egg, and we made a hole and sipped the yolks out, just like you would drink water. We felt that at least we had something in us.

  Then we asked the farmer if he knew of any Russian partisans hiding out nearby. He told us that he had heard of some, but he didn’t know exactly where they were. He suggested that we go on several miles more to another Belorussian farmer—maybe he would have clearer information.

  It was hard for us to make our way—we were new to the woods, and so we wandered in circles and wasted all of one day. We were still barefooted. But still, in a couple of days, we got to the farm the first farmer had described.

  The second farmer gave us something to eat—our first food since the eggs two days before. We asked him if there were any Russian resistance fighters we could join. He said, “Yeah, some Russians may come by today. Stick around here, and when they come, you can ask them if they’ll take you.”

  A few hours later, he gave us a signal that some Russian partisans were coming. There were a couple of them. They were unshaven, in filthy uniforms, but they were armed to the teeth. And there we were—two teenage Jewish girls in ragged clothing. We must have looked like animals after our days and nights in the woods. But we talked to them. We begged them to let us join them. We told them we’d do anything … cook, clean, wash, whatever was needed for the resistance effort. They felt sorry for us and agreed to take us in.

  Their group consisted of roughly forty to fifty soldiers. Some of them had been accidentally caught behind the Nazi lines. But others were simply deserters with no choice but to band together with their former comrades. The leader of the group was one Sorokin; he had earned his position by virtue of being the highest-ranking Soviet officer amongst them. But there was nothing like military discipline in the group. Its goal was sheer survival, rather than determined resistance. There were other Russian partisan groups in the area who did undertake effective action against the German military during that period. But that particular band, although well-armed, conducted raids only for the food and supplies it needed to hold out in concealment in the woods.

  The two partisans who had brought us in had some sympathy for us. The rest did not. They started in with … we should cook for them, look for dry wood for the fire, bring water from God knows where. All these things, however, we had expected to do. We wanted to contribute, to play a part in helping to fight back against the Germans.

  Tanya and I were barefooted, so they gave us some boots from dead Russian soldiers. But there were no matching pairs. I had two left boots, with no laces and no socks. Still, Tanya and I were glad to have boots in any condition, because our feet were so sore. They had accumulated tents, blankets, old army coats. None were given to us. We had nothing with which to cover ourselves. During the nights we sat so close to the fire that we almost burned our toes.

  In the group we met a Jewish girl named Sonia. She was living amongst them with a Belorussian boy from a local farm who had joined the Russian partisans. Sonia was his “girl” and was somewhat protected from abuse for that reason. When she first saw Tanya and me, we were freezing cold, dressed in our torn clothing, with nothing to keep us warm. The pa
rtisans always kept a fire going, and Sonia was cooking up for them whatever they brought back from their raids. Sonia took pity on us and gave us some clothing. She also tried to help us whenever she could and to teach us what we needed to know to survive in the midst of the partisans.

  It was October, and the cold weather was fast approaching. Misery of a whole new kind opened up for Tanya and for me.

  The demands started to increase, and labor was no longer the issue. They said, “You want better boots? You want a jacket, a blanket? Then sleep with me! Otherwise, you can sit by the fire all night.” When we refused, they would say, “You Jewish sluts! You were sleeping with the Germans! Now you come to the Russian partisans, we let you live, and you don’t want to sleep with us!” It was what you call a “no-win” situation. What are you going to answer them?

  The charge that we had slept with Nazi soldiers was particularly difficult for Tanya and me to bear. We kept quiet. We were afraid of argument, of seeming to contradict them. We also knew that no matter how much we might insist that we were telling the truth, it would have done nothing to convince the partisans. They were intent upon their lust.

  The truth went beyond the fact that we would never have slept with the Nazis. Here was the tangled insanity of the Nazi mind—even the worst of the Nazis would not have been eager to try to sleep with us. From our time in the ghetto, we knew of the rules and limits placed upon Nazi soldiers: they were permitted any and all violent atrocities against Jewish men and women alike, not to mention Jewish children, Jewish babies. But they would have been immediately shot for raping a Jewish woman. The reason was the Nazi fear of polluting the master “Aryan” race. The crime of intercourse with a Jew was called Rassenschande [race defilement].

  But the Russian partisans who now governed our lives knew nothing of Rassenschande. For them, we were women, we were Jews, and so we were fit for nothing more than filthy labor and filthy sex.

  Sonia knew what was going on. That’s why she was sleeping with her guy—she had no choice. Sonia said, “Listen, I hate to be the one to tell you this. But sooner or later, it comes down to sex or your life. A lot of the partisans are mad that you’re even here. They feel that you don’t earn your keep. They’re going to kill you.”

  But then Sonia talked to her “husband.” He was a pretty nice boy, and he said, “Okay, let them sleep in our tent for a while.” So Sonia brought us into their tent and gave us some of their blankets. We felt that we were in Heaven … that we had a protector. But then Sonia said, “Don’t feel too safe. He’s not happy protecting you two against the wishes of the others. He won’t keep you for long. He’s just being nice because I begged him to help you.”

  Shortly afterwards, Sonia came into the tent and told us that she had bad news. Her “husband” had told her that a few of the more bitter partisans had decided to get rid of us—they didn’t need us. Sonia explained the plot, “These partisans plan to start the rumor that you brought in venereal disease, that the Germans sent you specifically into the woods to infect them all. They’ll say that before you arrived in this camp, you slept with another Russian partisan group and that all of those partisans came down with disease. There will be a quick trial and they’ll kill you.” Never mind that the accusations made no sense: why would they be constantly asking to sleep with us if they really believed we had venereal disease? Those men were sure to be believed over Jewish girls who had wandered in from the forest.

  A few days later, Tanya and I were cooking a meal at the campfire. It was dawn. The partisans who were plotting against us had just returned after having been out all night. They were drunk and laughing and they came to sit by the fire. They told us that they had ambushed and killed some young Jews on the road leading from Minsk to the east. They said that they had killed the boys right off and had been raping the girls all night long. When they were finished, they shot the Jewish “sluts.”

  We sat by the fire and waited. They taunted us, “Are you cold? You want a blanket, come in my tent!” We were certain that they would rape and kill us. But somehow, that morning, the partisans only threatened us. Maybe they had had enough for one night.

  But things grew much, much worse in the days that followed.…

  The Russian partisans began to say to us, “Why did you come to us? We hate you as much as the Germans do!” I thought, “Is this the reason I escaped from the sawmill? If this is survival, then I don’t care much for survival, either.” Remember, when Tanya and I had first escaped, our idea had been to run so that we would be shot in the back. We had wanted to be killed so that we wouldn’t be taken alive to our graves. So now we saw what we had survived for—to be tormented and treated like dirt. But then again, I didn’t think we would survive much longer in that partisan camp. The only thing that stopped them from killing us outright was that they were afraid of witnesses—such as Sonia’s “husband”—later testifying against them to the Soviet military authorities. Anti-Semitism was forbidden as a matter of official Soviet policy. Yes, Stalin was a rabid anti-Semite, but laws and men don’t always match.

  During late 1942—this I know from the history books—Hitler himself had issued an order calling for increased antipartisan efforts in the newly conquered European nations that made up his Reich. The partisan activity was disrupting his war efforts, and to make matters worse, there were Jews who had escaped liquidation and were now fighting back. So there were efforts underway to put a stop to all that—newly formed Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing units]. The units were assisted by local collaborators—persons of the same national or ethnic background as the partisan fighters themselves, who were recruited by the Nazis and then sent to join the partisan groups and betray them.

  Here is a craziness: it was an antipartisan effort by the Germans that “liberated” Tanya and myself from our particular hell of rape and abuse. But the “liberation” turned out to be brief.

  A couple joined the group—a Russian soldier and his wife. They brought with them a rifle and some ammunition, and so they were treated with honor and given a tent. The partisans ordered us, the Jewish “sluts,” to act as maids for the newcomer’s wife. Whatever she needed, we were to provide—make her food, wash her clothes. She was the “queen” in the camp. We tried to please her as best as we could.

  Then, about a week later, the couple told the commander of our group, Sorokin, that they knew a farm where retreating Russian soldiers had buried a lot of ammunition, and that they also knew the farmer who lived there. The commander liked the sound of that. He sent one of his partisans with the couple to bring back the ammunition. Well, the couple was spying for the Nazis. They killed the partisan who went along with them, and then they reported to the Nazis the location of our camp.

  Tanya and I never really slept during the night, because we were tending the fire. At dawn, we started to hear a machine gun. The first shots we heard were the Germans killing the guard we had posted about one-half mile from the camp. Before I knew it, the bullets were coming from all sides, like a snowstorm. I heard screams, German voices calling, “Halt!”

  Tanya and I started running almost immediately. We had been cooking up barley stew, and there was a ladle hanging from a tree branch just above us. A bullet hit the ladle and it shattered into pieces. That brought us to our feet. I thought to myself, “It was hell on earth here anyway.” Somehow—once again—Tanya and I fled for our lives. I remember, just as we started, seeing our friend Sonia trying to wrap a bandage over the head of a Russian partisan who had just been hit. His head looked half-open and blood was pouring out.

  Once we had gotten clear of the camp, we never thought about going back. We ran as long as we were able, until we could hear no more shots. At some point in our running I caught sight of Sonia again. She and her “husband” were also attempting to make their escape—in a different direction—from the camp. I had no time to stop and think about whether or not she would make it. In truth, I still expected that none of us, not Sonia, not Tanya, not myself, had long
to live.

  That day, after hours of running and hiding, Tanya and I crossed the Luze River and entered into the large wilderness region called the Nalibocka Forest. The wilderness was a natural haven for partisan activity. It was at that time that we met up with another Russian partisan group that called itself by the name of their army training—the parachutzistn [parachutists].

  There was a wooden house along the bank of the Luze River that belonged to a Belorussian farmer who made a side-living ferrying people. That’s where we first met the parachutzistn.

  We had come up to the farmer hoping to get some food, and it was only then that we saw the parachutzistn, who were sitting there drinking vodka like crazy. The farmer warned us in a whisper, “Listen, they’re very mean and very drunk. If you can get away from them, run. I don’t know if they’ll let you come out of this meeting alive.” There were about a dozen parachutzistn—they were in dirty uniforms, and their eyes took in Tanya and me as if we were cattle or worse.

  We tried to explain to the parachutzistn how we had run away from the German ambush. We didn’t know that the parachutzistn were the worst of all. It was a group that took special effort and pleasure in hunting down Jewish partisans. They had killed a group of fourteen boys from Jack’s town of Mir—that I learned only later.

  The parachutzistn were carrying a number of bottles of vodka and kept filling glasses for themselves and for us. They also offered us some food, but there were no polite preliminaries. They had no intention of letting us just walk away from them. They told us straight off, “Drink vodka and eat so that it will be easier for you to die. If you get drunk, you won’t feel the bullets.” Who could eat or drink? Who could swallow? I thought to myself, “I’m not going to get drunk. If I die, I want to know what I’m doing.”