Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  Three weeks or so passed. I became used to the rhythm of things in my new group. We always cooked at night, for the reason that Jack has explained—in the day the smoke would have brought the Germans right to our bunker. The water stank just as it did in Jack’s bunker—we were less than a mile away and situated on the same swampland.

  JACK

  For my part, after a few days, the desire to kill myself started to fade away. Instead, I made up my mind to see to it that Rochelle came back to our group. Again I had a sense that, maybe, just maybe, it still was our destiny to be together. After all, she had found her way to my bunker against all odds. Why couldn’t the separation be overcome as well?

  I went over to her new bunker to talk to her again. They had a little chimney hole in their cover, just as we did. Somehow I had learned that she would be doing the cooking that night, so I figured out that I could talk to her through that little chimney hole while she worked.

  ROCHELLE

  Jack was embarrassed to come inside the bunker and talk to me. It wasn’t me he feared so much as the other members of my group—the teenage boys—who were sure to make fun of him if they saw him face-to-face. These boys came from lower-class backgrounds, and they knew of the Schleiff family and its wealth before the war. So for them, having Rochelle Schleiff come to stay with them was a catch … a trophy. The fact that I had left Izik Sutin, who had a price set on his head by the Germans, just added to their sense of prestige and triumph. The boys were very nice to me, but they would have been perfectly prepared to rub it into Jack’s face.

  So one night, as I’m sitting and cooking our flour-and-water soup, all of a sudden I hear a soft voice coming through our little chimney hole. At first I was scared to death because I thought the Germans had discovered us. But then I recognized Jack’s voice. He started talking to me. His attitude was that he was just checking in to see how I was doing. It was clear, by the fact that he was coming at all, that he liked me and missed me and was no longer angry with me. But he was careful not to put any pressure on the situation.

  JACK

  I wanted her to see that I hadn’t lost interest. I was afraid that, without those visits, she would assume that I was still upset and depressed and wanted nothing to do with her.

  ROCHELLE

  He came by a few times like that. I began to enjoy his visits while I sat and peeled potatoes. It was just friendly, casual talk, but it began to connect me to him. Little by little, I saw that Jack was a nice human being. It was more than sex. He really cared.

  Our talks became more and more friendly and full of feeling. One time, both groups thought that our locations had been spotted by some unfriendly farmers. So we all abandoned our bunkers and ran away on foot into the woods. Jack came to find me, and we went on a separate walk together. Even while we were hiding for our lives, we kept on talking!

  It was the beginning of our real courtship. The visits back and forth by Jack continued for three or so weeks—just talking through the chimney. Once or twice, as things grew closer between us, he even came down into the bunker to sit beside me as I cooked. He wasn’t so worried anymore about being teased.

  Gittel noticed what was going on, and she liked Jack. She said to me one day, “Listen, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that you’re here in our group. You make it easier for me. You’re a nice girl, and I hear that you come from a nice family. So I’ll tell you something—you must be crazy to leave Izik and come instead to live with me and these boys. Izik is a fine young man. These boys here are proste [common] … not your caliber of people. Everybody knows that he wanted you and waited for you, and it’s obvious he’s going to be good to you. If I were you, I would go back to him. You have no future here. At least with Jack you can help each other.”

  Gittel really worked on me that night. But I was like a scared deer, still on the run. I couldn’t respond to her when she spoke these words.

  This was how it was as the New Year of 1943 approached.

  JACK

  By now, I was determined to have Rochelle back. I saw what there could be between us. Even the members of my group, for all that they liked to tease me about it, could see how stupid it was for Rochelle and me to be apart.

  So about three days before New Year’s Eve, I came up with a plan and instructed my group in how we would carry it out. I demanded their full cooperation—if they refused, I would leave with my father Julius and we would join another group. They recognized that my skill at planning and leading raids was important to their survival, so they went along with me.

  My plan was this: We still had lots of food left from our raid on the wealthy Polish estate. So we would invite Rochelle’s group to come to our bunker for a little New Year’s Eve celebration. Actually, for safety’s sake, to avoid being spotted by Polish farmers out late for the occasion, we planned to begin it well after midnight. But the spirit of the thing was the same. We had everything arranged—we planned for exactly where every member of her group would sit. Rochelle, of course, would be sitting next to me, in her old place. And at the end of the night, when it was time for them to leave, we would tell them that Rochelle wasn’t coming with them. We weren’t going to let her leave.

  Well, they all came on schedule—all the boys that is. Gittel didn’t come along for some reason. And for a while there we had a real party.

  ROCHELLE

  Believe it or not, there we were in a hole underground and we celebrated. We were young … we sang songs. It sounds so bizarre now that I couldn’t imagine it if I hadn’t been there myself. We had lived through another year.

  JACK

  After the main meal was over, I took Rochelle aside and told her in advance of our plans for keeping her with us when the party came to an end. I told her, “You’re going to stay here with me.” I meant it. But at the same time, I had already sensed, by the way my visits with her had been progressing, that staying with me was what Rochelle wanted as well. If I hadn’t believed this, I never would have gone ahead with the plan. If she had said “no” to me that night, I would have let her go.

  As it happened, Rochelle didn’t say anything directly at first about her own feelings, one way or the other. What she did say was, “Well, my boys won’t be too happy about this. They depend on me. I have my chores to do there.” My answer was, “We weren’t too happy when you left us. So this time let them be unhappy in return.”

  It was getting late, time for the boys to go back to their bunker. They were saying their good-byes, but then they noticed that Rochelle wasn’t moving. We then pushed her into a corner of our bunker and surrounded her. They soon understood what was happening. At that point they became very angry, demanding to take Rochelle back with them. I remember that one of those boys, named Ephraim, reached for his rifle and threatened to use it if we didn’t let Rochelle go. But we were prepared for that, and while Ephraim alone was holding his weapon, all of the men in my group had their rifles trained on the boys.

  ROCHELLE

  I was a prisoner of war!

  JACK

  I told them that if there was any trouble, we would shoot them all at once. This left Ephraim frozen and the rest of them frightened. Then Rochelle spoke up. She told them she wanted to stay, so they left peacefully for their bunker.

  ROCHELLE

  What I remember is that the boys asked me, “Are you going?” And that I didn’t say anything. I just sat and watched. Not out of indifference, but out of confusion and a kind of frozen panic. Ephraim threatened with his rifle to take me back to their camp where I belonged.

  I must have said something to try to avoid any bloodshed. Anyway, thank God nobody did any shooting. And I stayed there, with Jack.

  Did I want to stay? I can say that I did, yes. But it wasn’t a great romantic moment. It was hard for me. When Jack first told me his plans that night, I thought about what Gittel had said. Then I figured, “Okay, I’ll stay here. Maybe she’s right.” It wasn’t that I was in love with him. But he really did want to hel
p and be good to me. That was as much as I could expect.

  But in the weeks that followed, things developed gradually. It wasn’t sex right away. We were talking together more and more, building a trust and a feeling for each other. Maybe the seeds of that were planted a month earlier, before I had run away to Gittel’s bunker. When Jack had come back from that raid with the bullet holes in his coat and the split binoculars, I had a strong sense of how sad I would have been if he had died. I had found a friend, and I could have lost him that night.

  It was during the winter of 1943, after the New Year’s Eve showdown, that I progressed beyond feelings of friendship and gratitude and moved toward a love for him.

  One form that took was to worry constantly that he would be killed leading one of his raids. Jack could be very reckless. It was still a kind of game to him. It diminished his anger, his fear, and his grief. He would make raids even when we still had an adequate food supply. I began to insist that he make no raids that were not absolutely necessary. And I tried to keep him away from farms that were close to the towns—and to the police. I began holding him back, in short.

  Then he saw I really had begun to care about him. And from there things evolved into a genuine love affair.

  JACK

  Even before that New Year’s Eve, I was constantly thinking … what would happen if Rochelle decided to stay with Gittel’s group? Or what if I had turned stubborn after she first ran away and had refused to try to get her back? Even now I sometimes wonder … what would have become of us?

  Of course, our lives would have been completely different. Who knows if we would have survived without each other. If we had, we would have married different people and had different children. But I don’t think that Rochelle could have survived had she stayed in Gittel’s group with the boys.

  ROCHELLE

  That’s so. I would have died somehow.

  JACK

  They were not a good bet to succeed in the partisan way of life. At the least, Rochelle would have ended up with a man she did not care to be with, just for the sake of survival and protection. And I, on the other hand, would have been very disappointed and depressed. I would have taken even greater risks than I had before, and eventually I would have gotten killed somewhere.

  ROCHELLE

  A woman couldn’t survive alone in the long run during that time. Without Jack, I would have gone back to Stolpce to be killed by the Germans, or I would have wound up with some man … probably not even a Jew. There were not many women in the woods, and ultimately you needed protection. Either you let anyone have you, or you had just one who protected you from the others. That was the truth of it. But it did change somewhat as the war went on and two large Jewish partisan atrads [fighting groups] formed in our region—those led by Simcha Zorin and by the Bielski brothers. Within those groups there was a community framework in which a woman could survive without a male companion and protector. But early on, when there were only the small groups, a girl was bound to have constant trouble on her own.

  As the years in the woods went on, a lot of people used to say to me, “We know you’re not going to be together when all this is over. This is just for wartime.” That was the case for most of the couples that formed at the time. As soon as the war was over, maybe 80 percent of the couples we knew split up right away. That was true whether or not the boy was Jewish. Survival and convenience did not translate well into peacetime. And the conditions of the war made the normal sorts of commitments impossible.

  Pregnancy was the kiss of death. No one wanted you to join their group if you were pregnant, and the chances of you and the baby both surviving delivery were virtually zero. You had to be careful. Pulling out was the main means of protection, along with forms of sex in which there was no penetration at all. Some of the couples had babies during the war, but always it was by accident. One of the girls in a nearby bunker gave birth during that winter. As soon as the baby was born she placed it on a rag outside on the snow so that it would die right away and not suffer. That girl at least had a normal delivery. What if there had been complications? Certain death for both the girl and her baby.

  So there was a great deal of cynicism and a great deal of pain. Most couples were only using each other, without feeling.

  But Jack and I helped each other as much as we could. It took a while for us to get to know each other—two strangers put together into a hole. But we lived through so many terrible and dangerous moments together. We felt like two soldiers on the front lines. It was a crazy setting for any kind of love. But you grow closer each time you live through moments of hell like those. You have that in common with the other person and with no one else. And you had no idea of what would happen tomorrow.

  We didn’t expect to survive. But we hoped we would and we thought how nice it would be. Once we started to fall in love, we blended so well, it was as if we were one person. We were very afraid that one of us would die. It would have been terrible, like the death of a spouse, not just someone you slept with through the war. To this day, even though we were not formally married until after the war, we celebrate our wedding anniversaries starting from 31 December 1942.

  VII

  From the Bunker to the Atrad

  JACK

  It was a joy for me to see, as the weeks went on, that Rochelle began to seem more relaxed and happy. Before, when we had sung songs during the night, she would only sit and listen. But then she herself began to sing Polish songs, Russian songs, and also Yiddish songs like “Oifun Pripichok” and “Papirosun.”

  She got me to be more careful on the raids. As we fell more and more in love, I thought more and more about living.

  ROCHELLE

  It was in every sense a real love affair. But then you may wonder how a love affair is conducted when the two of you are living like wild animals in a hole in the ground with ten other people.

  A normal mind—a mind that has always lived in a safe and comfortable civilized state—can never understand what it was like. I don’t know myself how to explain. It was very cramped and crowded in the bunker. If you moved to the left or to the right, everyone else had to move from the left to the right. There was no privacy, no intimacy … none. What was happening around us I cannot say. It was pitch dark at night. You could hear people moving. But there was no verbal expression. It was like a silent movie. For us, those conditions meant that in the bunker itself we hugged each other, we petted, we kissed … and no more. It wasn’t like having a normal sexual relationship and making love when you wanted to.

  Once, I remember, we paid a return visit to the Kurluta family, to whom Jack had introduced me as his wife some two months before. I had been so shocked by his statement then. But this time, we did behave like newlyweds, and the family fed us and treated us beautifully. And on the way there, in the woods, we had stopped and made love.

  But private moments like that were few and far between.

  There was an activity, I remember, that took up a lot of our time that winter, in common with the other members of the group. It was removing the parasites from our bodies. On sunny days, we used to take turns slipping out of the bunker hole, taking off our clothes, and squeezing off the lice, which we were all full of. One of those, a breed that dug into our skin and fattened on our blood, we called mandavoshkes. They would get into your pubic hair, under your armpits, around your eyes. Only when you sat naked in the outdoor light could you see fully what was happening to your body. One day, I recall, I woke up and sensed that my eyelids were heavy. I put my fingers up to feel and there were little black bumps all along my eyelashes. I went outside, taking with me a straight pin and a tiny mirror that we all shared. I poked these out one by one, but had a hard time holding my hand steady because I was so revulsed by the fact that what I was poking at was my own filthy body. My fingers, my hands … everything was itching.

  Once I tried hard to get rid of them from my clothing. My basic daily outfit was Jack’s pajama top, a pair of men’s pants, and s
ome boots. There was no brassiere or underwear. The basic way to rid your clothes of lice was to hold them close to the fire until the little creatures overheated and jumped off. But one time I was determined to go further than that. I took the shirt and the pants and boiled up a pail full of melted snow and threw these clothes in the boiling water. Then I hung the clothes up outside on a nearby tree branch. They were quickly frozen stiff, like icicles. So then I took them back into the bunker, thinking that they would be free of vermin at least for a little while. But when they defrosted near the fire, I could see the trains of tiny white lice still crawling over the fabric! It was impossible, but it was happening before my eyes.

  All of us, that winter, took turns killing the lice, the worms, and God knows whatever else we found on ourselves. Those who had somehow paired up would help each other out with backsides and hard-to-reach spots.

  I helped not only Jack but Julius as well—I treated him as if he were my own father. I would wash him, scrape the lice from him. Julius was a very calm and patient man. He had the ability to be almost oblivious to the physical conditions in which he was forced to live. That was remarkable enough, given what those conditions were, and especially so for a man who was already in his late fifties. I remember that he often wore a hat with a little visor, and that the lice were parading around on that visor like cars on a highway. Big ones! I would watch him for a while and then ask, “Doesn’t it bother you?” He would shrug and say, “Beist mir nit” [“They don’t bite me”]. That would exasperate me, so I would grab his hat off his head and shake it, to show him how many lice would fly off from even one shake. Finally, seeing this, he would take a piece of wood and scrape the rest of the lice off this hat. That was the way he was. He didn’t clean himself—he didn’t feel the itching the way the rest of us did. One of the reasons I was willing to clean him was that I figured that, if I didn’t, the lice would jump from him onto us after we had already cleaned ourselves.