Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  But not everyone retained a sense of family. Most did, but there were terrible exceptions: Jack and I had personal knowledge of one of those. It involved a mother and a daughter who ran away from the Mir ghetto at the same time that Jack did. What happened to them shows how family bonds could break down terribly under the weight of hardship. The daughter was maybe seventeen, and her mother was somewhere in her forties—an age that seemed very old to the Jewish youth who were hiding out in the forest. Well, the daughter found a young group who was willing to accept her but not her mother. I should mention that this daughter also had a boyfriend who was a son of a bitch, as bad a character as she was. I say she was bad because what she told her mother at that point was that she, the daughter, had a chance to survive and that the mother was only a burden to her. One of the members of her group had a small bottle of poison, and as a solution to the difficult situation the daughter convinced the mother to drink the poison! The mother didn’t want to, but her daughter basically forced it upon her as the only way out. It went from worse to worse—the poison didn’t take right away, it wasn’t strong enough. The mother suffered for a whole day before she went—gasping, suffocating, thrashing. They watched and waited a whole day for her to die.

  Any attempt to hold onto traditional family bonds was difficult, given the conditions that were faced by the early small groups. Everyone was desperate, fearful of being found out, trapped, tortured, killed. There were cases we heard of, in a few of the bunkers, where mothers had escaped with young children—toddlers and a bit older—who would make noise or cry too persistently. The others would demand that something drastic be done, and when the mothers refused to suffocate their own offspring, the others would grab and kill the child!

  Julius acted as a father both to Jack and to me and took care of us in his own ways. Because of his age, his most frequently assigned job in the partisan groups was to keep the fire fueled and going at night. Sometimes he would take a few raw potatoes from the food supply and stick them under the hot ashes to bake. He wasn’t supposed to do that … it was like stealing. But he would do it so that he could wake Jack and me—his kinderlach [children]—in the middle of night and give us a little extra food. Julius was always very sweet and protective to me because he had seen how unhappy his zunele [affectionate term for son] was during the time I ran away.

  That was how we lived in the first months together. But Jack and I did not have much time to get used to any sort of rhythm of life in the bunker. Because in March 1943, our location—as well as that of the other two Jewish bunkers in the Miranke region—was discovered by the Germans. Who knows how? Maybe one of the farmers in the vicinity saw the smoke from our cooking fire.

  JACK

  There had been pressure on the Germans to do something about the Jewish partisan activity. I won’t say it was their first priority, but it mattered to them because they wanted to win the trust of the local Polish population and establish confidence in the stability of their rule.

  Don’t forget, we were basically living off the local Polish farmers. If we didn’t raid their houses, we would go into their fields and dig up their beets, potatoes, or whatever else they were planting. Also, many of the farm families—as well as other members of the local Polish population—had husbands or sons who were now serving in the Polish police. None of those families wanted living Jewish witnesses who might someday testify as to how they had cooperated with the Germans. Even though the progress of the war at that time seemed to be favoring the Germans, the Russians might return and rule Poland again someday—as happened, in fact, in 1944. If the Soviet regime was reinstalled, those who had collaborated with the Germans could expect to pay dearly.

  So all of those families were on the lookout for Jewish partisans. And even farmers who had no strong feelings about Jews one way or the other were intimidated by the Germans. They were afraid that if they helped us—or even if they seemed merely to be withholding information as to our whereabouts—they would be burned out and killed by the Germans and their Polish henchmen. So we were in danger of being spotted and informed upon from all sides. If we heard the sound of sawing nearby us in the woods, we were terrified, for it meant that a Pole stocking up on firewood might have seen us.

  ROCHELLE

  One day there was an ambush. We heard shooting all around us. One of the nearby bunkers was completely caught unaware—the Germans dropped a grenade down their entry hole and they were all killed at once. Exactly our own worst nightmare. Thank God we were spared that. But they advanced toward the two remaining bunkers—ours and Gittel’s—lobbing hand grenades and firing steadily with their machine guns.

  All of us in our bunker ran. There was nothing else we could do, taken by surprise like that. We took nothing with us but our weapons and the clothes on our back. We ran deeper into the wilderness, into the Nalibocka Forest, which despite its name contained large stretches of pure swampland. Into that swampland they did not follow us. We were afraid to go back to our hole or to any other dry portion of the Miranke woods. There might be other German sweeps. So in the swamp we stayed.

  It was still winter, but from March through May we slept outside. It was freezing! Our beds—trees and branches to lift us off the snow and the muck—were all we had to keep us off the swampy ground. Food was a terrible problem. When the German and Polish police drove us out of the Miranke woods, they made sure to kill off any animals or livestock—horses, cows, rabbits—in the region that we might be able to steal and live on. A kind of scorched-earth policy. But they didn’t reckon with our desperation and our hunger. At night we used to go out and find the dead carcasses in the woods or on the outskirts of the swamp. In most cases they had been lying there for days, maybe even a week or more. And we would cut slabs of rotting flesh off those carcasses and stuff our pockets with them. Then we would go back to our camp in the swamp and chew on this meat, getting ourselves to swallow as much as we could.

  And no one got sick from the food—the mushrooms were not poisonous, and the germs and bacteria in the dead carcasses were not strong enough.

  JACK

  We must have been fated to live.

  ROCHELLE

  For the first few days of our hiding in the swamp, before we constructed pallets from trees and branches, we were often standing in water. There were leeches that would attach themselves in clusters to our legs, which were already swollen from the water.

  During that time I developed a terrible pain in one of my legs … from the moisture and the cold. Maybe a nerve became inflamed. To move at all I had to hop on one leg. When, in May, we heard nothing more of German patrols, we left the deeper swamp area and returned to the more solid ground of the woods. But we were still outside, and cold, and miserable. Who would have thought that I would ever have missed the bunker?

  JACK

  What made our situation even more difficult was that we had no way of knowing what was happening with the war in a wider context. We had little idea of what was happening with the German offensive in Russia, for example. Later, when news reached us through some Polish farmers of the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad [in late 1942], we felt a little hope that maybe, maybe.…

  But during that winter of 1943, as we hid in our swamp, we could only suppose that the Germans were marching in triumph toward Moscow and that the Nazis would be ruling Poland and Russia without any effective opposition. It was difficult to see any long-term possibilities other than death at German hands. Even if we made it back to dry land, how long could we expect to live by stealing food from mainly hostile farms?

  On the other hand, there were terrible things that we did not know that would have made us feel even worse. We did not know at the time about the concentration camps. It was a secret that the Germans kept carefully hidden from the Jews, so as to keep as much hope in the minds of the remaining ghetto Jews as they could, and thereby reduce the likelihood of desperate resistance. What we thought at that time was that all the Jews were being killed the way
our families had been killed … town by town, through shootings at mass graves. We also had no idea how many Jews had survived. For all we knew, the groups in the Nalibocka Forest were the only survivors. Not many parts of Poland had a wilderness equal in size to this—it could have been that we were uniquely fortunate. But we were Jews who were still alive, and that was something. It was enough, at least, to push us from one day to the next.

  In May 1943, after a springtime with no major German activity in the area, we decided to risk leaving the swamp for a higher woodland site. At that point we had only nine in our group. We kept far away from our old bunker site. That time, instead of digging underground, we built little huts out of branches that were meant to be very temporary. Our plan was that we would change our location constantly, and in that way reduce the risk of being informed upon and ambushed. This was strictly a warm-weather tactic. For the coming winter, we figured that we would have to construct a new bunker due to the cold. Looking back, I can see that the plan was not a very good one. The part of the Miranke woods that we were in then was a relatively confined one—we could have been easily surrounded. As we were stealing food from the local farmers regularly, the danger of being spotted was especially high. Even if we had built a bunker, I doubt we could have survived the winter.

  In our wanderings, we found a few other small Jewish groups, and that was a bit of an encouragement to us. But from those groups we also heard terrible news about the ongoing liquidations of the Polish ghettos.

  ROCHELLE

  Things didn’t always go smoothly for us with the other Jewish groups. People were desperate, and that made some of them behave badly.

  For example, Jack had been carrying with him all that time in the woods a small diamond necklace that had belonged to his mother. It had great emotional importance to him. And we also saw it as a means of buying food or ammunition if things reached a point of absolute emergency. During the spring we decided that it was too risky to be constantly carrying the necklace. So we put it in a little box and buried it under a tree, making a little mark on the tree that Jack and Julius and I alone would recognize.

  But a Jew from another group, an older man named Moshe, spotted us while we were burying the box. Later he went back and dug the necklace up and kept it for himself. We found out, but when we confronted Moshe, he refused to give it back. He told us that he was an uncle to some young nephews whom he had to help support—and so he needed the necklace more than we did. That was his defense. Moshe hid it in a different place so that we could not grab it from him. Moshe wasn’t afraid because he knew what kind of a person Jack was—Jack wouldn’t kill him in cold blood for a necklace. So the necklace was gone, and we never got it back.

  JACK

  As the summer went on, it became obvious that we would have to come up with a better plan for survival through the winter and after. We were small in number, without a safe home base, without options in terms of any kind of military action aside from desperate food raids in the middle of the night.

  Our problems were not only with the German troops and the Polish police. The Russian partisans who shared the woodlands with us could not bring themselves to let us alone. In the very large Russian partisan groups, the officers in command did try to maintain the official Soviet policy of nondiscrimination toward Jews. But there were always individual Russians who would hate the Jews who had managed to survive in the woods. If our boys from the bunker went out for food at night, and they ran into a small band of Russian partisans, those partisans would take their food and kill them. While that was happening, the Russians would also complain that the Jewish partisans only stole food and never fought with the Germans. We were in tiny groups—and not military groups, but ones that included men and women, older and younger people, even sons and daughters taking care of their parents, as I was taking care of Julius. We were barely surviving, and the Germans, Poles, and Russians alike were our enemies. Where were our allies? Many of my friends were killed not by the Germans or by the Poles but by our supposed allies the Russian partisans. They killed fourteen boys from my hometown of Mir in a single day.

  One day, in the woods, we ran into a young Russian Jew who gave us some news. He told us about a large Jewish partisan atrad that consisted of roughly 80 percent Jews from Minsk [a large western Russian city not far from the Polish border] and 20 percent Jews who had escaped from various Polish town ghettos. They were located deep in the Nalibocka Forest. There were no farmers or little towns in that vicinity—no one to observe your movements.

  The Nalibocka Forest was a massive exception to the open farmland that was most common in eastern Poland. Its dense wilderness allowed for a more large-scale partisan organization such as the atrad. In fact, we learned that there were not only two Jewish atrads operating in this wilderness, but also a dozen or so Russian partisan atrads. Approximately 15,000 to 20,000 partisans all told. One of the Jewish atrads was led by the Bielski brothers—Jewish brothers from eastern Poland. But the atrad we were told about by the young Russian Jew was led by Simcha Zorin, a robust middle-aged man with a large reddish mustache. There were some 300 Jews in that atrad—a distinct and real Jewish fighting force. That was exciting news, both for what it meant in terms of our own possible survival, and for what it meant about the survival of at least a small remnant of the Jews in the region.

  Zorin had been a Jewish officer in the Soviet army, and so he had actually received formal military training in organization and tactics. He had organized the decision making of the atrad to include a chief of staff and other military-type leaders. Those persons had considerable power. When they told you to go out on a food raid, you went, no matter how you felt about it. It was a very regimented form of life as compared to the small group structures we were used to. But on the other hand, there would be a chance to go on missions that could have a real impact—missions that would involve enough men so that you would have a real chance in battle if you ran into a force of Germans or Poles. A larger group would also mean that we could reduce the risk of being killed one by one by the Russians.

  The young man we met was a member of Zorin’s atrad. He invited eight or so of us to come along with him and see what it was like. If we wanted to join, we could. If not, we could remain on our own. We walked for miles and miles into the most dense part of the Nalibocka Forest until we reached the camp of Zorin’s atrad. It took us two full days. It seemed to us that the Germans and Poles would never venture that far. They could be trapped and ambushed too easily.

  Of course, if we were to live so far from the farms in our own little group, the logistics of carrying out food raids would have become impossible. But, as the young man who guided us there explained, with a large-scale atrad, you could carry out a variety of raids in larger numbers. Different men could take turns, rather than the same ones risking their lives every night—and you could still maintain a safe and stable camp. There was another difference that the young man explained to us. In the winter, the atrad members did not have to live completely underground. They built shelters that were dug halfway into the earth, and then were completed with branches and even boards. Each of these shelters housed twenty-five to thirty people.

  ROCHELLE

  It was a major change—you lived less like an animal and more like a human.

  JACK

  We decided to join. It helped that there were some six or seven survivors from the Stolpce ghetto living in that atrad—some people we knew from before the war. And it felt safer to be with a large group. Personally, I felt relieved not to be so much in charge as I had been in the smaller groups. Now that Rochelle and I were together, I had something to live for. We were never optimistic, but we couldn’t help but begin to hope that we could have a life together after the war. The atrad made that hope seem more real.

  The population of the atrad was very mixed—young and old people, even some children. It was like a big family. And with 300 some people, you had a range of skills that was incredible, considering th
at we were living in the midst of the wilderness. There was a woman doctor from Russia. Though she rarely had the medical supplies she needed, her being there to give diagnoses and suggestions felt reassuring. There were tailors who could mend clothing, shoemakers who could keep boots intact. If a cow was brought in from a food raid, there were butchers who could make sausages from it. There was a big camp kitchen area in which someone was always in charge, overseeing a group that had to cook for 300 every day. My father Julius worked here. The younger men were the fighters and the raiders for the atrad, but men and women and children of all ages had chores and responsibilities. Everyone took a hand in the survival of the group as a whole.

  There was a strict day-and-night security routine. We kept constant guard by way of six outposts located in different directions within a mile or two from the camp. We had passwords that everyone coming and going had to know. The guards at the outposts would shout, “Halt!” and would shoot if the password wasn’t given. It was essential to keep out police spies. I and the other men were assigned guard duty every two days or so—in four-to-six hour shifts, sometimes in the morning, sometimes afternoon, sometimes at night. When we relieved one another, we had to say the password.

  ROCHELLE

  In the woods, I don’t know of any cases in which Jews betrayed each other. No Jew would walk back alone into a German-held town and inform on partisan locations. Not after all the butchering. There were no illusions left about making deals with the Germans. When Jack and Julius and I first arrived at the atrad, the introduction from our guide was enough to establish that we were Jews and could be trusted. The problems with spies came in the mixed-population partisan groups—with Poles and Russians and Jews together. In those cases, again, it was not a Jew doing the informing. But the rumors constantly circulated that the Germans had sent Jews into the woods to join up with Russian partisan groups and then inform on their location or even poison their food. There was also the rumor—one that Tanya and I had lived with during our time with the Russian partisans—that Jewish girls with venereal disease had been sent by the Germans to sleep with the Russians. That was the poison that spread amongst the Russian partisans, even when their leaders were trying to keep to a less anti-Semitic policy.