Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  JACK

  Another difference with the small groups—in them we fought and raided simply to survive. In the atrad, we not only went on missions for food, but we also, for example, placed mines under railroad lines that the Germans were using to transport their supplies to the Russian front. But the discipline of Zorin and his lower “officers”—for that is what they were, even if they did not all have formal commissions as did Zorin—was severe. They killed their own people who refused to obey. In exchange for greater security, we had placed our lives in the hands of Zorin and his officers.

  ROCHELLE

  Zorin was himself a loyal Communist, yet he managed to maintain the independence of that Jewish atrad, even though the Russian partisan groups would have preferred that Zorin be directly under their command. That was the official Soviet policy as issued by Comrade Stalin himself. Special officers were sent by the Soviets to join up with the Russian partisan groups in the Nalibocka Forest and to impose a disciplined unity on all partisan efforts. And there was Zorin with a group that was not at all organized on strict military lines. None of the Russian partisan groups allowed old people and children. Few of them allowed wives. A minority percentage of Zorin’s atrad consisted of precisely these people. But Zorin was dedicated to saving lives. Because he was a charismatic man and a sincere Communist, he kept the Russians from controlling him. He deployed the fighting forces of the atrad in numerous joint missions with the Russians. But at the same time, he prevented the atrad from falling directly under Russian command—which would have meant constant and severe losses, as the Russians would have preferred to risk Jewish lives rather than their own. The atrad would have been decimated. So Zorin was no mean politician.

  Zorin himself plainly enjoyed the power and privileges of being commander in chief of the atrad. He rode a beautiful palomino horse that had been taken during one of the raids. And, of course, though Zorin was in his late forties, he had taken a young girl as his “wife.” She was from Minsk, maybe twenty years old at most.

  You would be amazed how, even in that group of ragged Jews living in hiding, social classes and distinctions took on such life and power. There were the commanders, the fighters, the craftspeople, the washers, and the cleaners. But Zorin’s woman was the queen. If fine clothes were brought back from a raid, they went to her. So even within our camp she was dressed in the height of fashion. She had her own horse that she rode alongside of Zorin and his palomino. They were the royal couple. They would ride by and we would wave and smile. We knew that our lives depended upon them. Zorin was a good commander and he took care to save the lives of as many Jews as he could. But his way was the way things went, and his woman had great power as well. If they wanted to get rid of you, they could send you on missions from which you would never come back.

  The top echelon of officers in the camp was comprised exclusively of Zorin’s fellow Russian Jews. His chief of staff was named Pressman. This Pressman had also taken a “wife” and he had a secure position of power because Zorin liked him. But Pressman wasn’t too smart and he really didn’t have the experience to make the decisions he was called upon to handle.

  That was the reason Pressman came to rely heavily on the judgment of one of his assistants, a Jew from western Poland named Wertheim. Wertheim was in his midthirties. He and some of his family had escaped to Stolpce when the Germans first invaded in 1939. During the two years of Russian rule, his brother Manik had been dating a girlfriend of mine. Because of that, I was already very friendly with him. Wertheim took to Jack as well once he met him in the atrad.

  I would say that Jack is alive today because of Wertheim. There were times when I would learn that the top officers were planning to send Jack out on a highly dangerous mission. I would go to Wertheim and beg him … tell him that Jack was sick. Some of the times he was sick, and sometimes he wasn’t. Wertheim knew that I was often faking. But he would agree to keep Jack back in camp.

  JACK

  All this is true. But it is also true that I did go out on a number of armed missions and food raids. Rochelle could not keep me out of everything, and I would not have let her try. I wanted to live and be with her. But I also wanted to serve the atrad and to fight.

  The main military focus was on selecting areas where we could get the food and clothing that would allow the atrad to survive. Sometimes we would plan raids specially to obtain medical supplies. The usual raiding group numbered twenty to twenty-five people. The groups had been smaller—four or five people—early on. But there was a terrible incident in which one of the groups had been murdered on the way back from a raid by Russian partisans, who then stole the sleighs filled with supplies. They let the Jewish boys do the work and then took their lives.

  By the time I arrived, procedures had been worked out for encounters with Russian partisans. On first sighting them, we would immediately fan out into smaller groups, protecting whatever food or supplies we had taken, and we would show, by readying our weapons, that we were ready to fight back. That ended the problems. It wasn’t worth it to the Russians to get into a fight with us on that scale.

  ROCHELLE

  There was another factor at work as well. Don’t forget that we are talking about the summer of 1943. The Germans weren’t doing so well on any of their fronts. We had at last a flicker of hope that they might be defeated and that the Russians might be coming back. For the Russian soldiers in partisan groups, it meant that they had to start thinking about what might happen to them if the returning Russian authorities learned that they had been killing off Jewish partisan fighters. As soldiers of the Soviet Union, they would have been subject to severe punishment. They knew that, and so they disciplined themselves and behaved better—more like military comrades and less like Jew-haters.

  JACK

  And they had good reason to behave like military comrades, because we were making a contribution by repeatedly blowing up the rail lines and the main highways with our mines and dynamite. That was weakening the German advance into the home country of the Russian partisans. The mines were not only blowing up trains and trucks with supplies—they also cost the Germans hundreds of casualties when their troop carriers were the target. Our good friend Simon Kagan, who had escaped from the Mir ghetto at the same time I did, had joined up with a Russian partisan unit. Simon was especially good at planting dynamite in the track beds and detonating—from his hiding place a short distance away—at just the right moment. He demolished plenty of trains. It took great skill and nerve.

  Zorin and his commanders realized, just as the Russian partisans did, that the war was showing signs of turning against the Nazis at that point. They wanted it clearly understood that they had been helping the Russian effort against the Germans. It would not have been enough for them to say only that they had been saving Jewish lives.

  ROCHELLE

  During that first summer in the atrad, Jack developed a terrible infection that covered nearly his entire body. As best we could tell, it was partly due to the filth in which we all lived, and partly from malnutrition—nearly two consecutive years of eating very badly by that point.

  There were boils from his feet to his neck and face, and especially on his legs and in his pubic area. They looked like big bumps, red and raw, and if you so much as touched them, yellow pus as thick as honey would run out of them. His body was a bundle of bones and pus.

  JACK

  I checked with our doctor in the atrad but she told me there was nothing she could do. She had no medications for a case like that. She thought it might disappear on its own. But I didn’t see how it could disappear—it was all over me! The doctor also happened to mention that, if the infection should spread to my bloodstream, that would be the end of me.

  ROCHELLE

  Things were so bad that Jack could no longer physically bear to wear shoes. Instead he wrapped his feet in rags. The rags stuck to his boils, and so when he would take them off, the scabs would tear off and the pain and infection would become even worse. It
was terrible with those rags, but the problem existed with any clothes Jack would try to wear. They stuck to him like glue. I thought that maybe exposing his body to the air might help to dry up the boils. But when we tried keeping him naked, all kinds of worms and bugs would start to feed on him.

  It went on for three months and more. Jack was so sick—and so depressed. He was sick of himself! He told me at one point to go away, to stop bothering with him and trying to heal him. He said that he knew he was just making my life miserable, making the lives of others in the atrad miserable. He felt he couldn’t take it anymore … he wanted to kill himself. So I took on the task of watching over him and not only trying to reduce the infection but also making sure that he did not end his own life.

  There were others in the camp who were sick during that time, but none that were in such prolonged bad shape as Jack. I went to the chief of staff—not Wertheim but Pressman himself—and asked if Jack could be given better food. By that time Jack couldn’t even walk. I kept him in the underground portion of one of the shelters, covered only with a thin blanket to reduce the sticking. I would give him part of my own meat and vegetable portions to try to build up his strength. But his depression grew worse and worse. I think that was the lowest Jack ever felt.

  Nearly everyone felt sorry for him. But then there were others who were mean and vicious—including even so-called friends of Jack’s. They would say to me, “Why are you futzing around with this guy? You’re not married. He’s not your responsibility. Why not just leave him?”

  What a question. Not that it would have been difficult to accomplish. All I would have had to do was to take my one extra pair of pants and move two bodies further away in the shelter.

  But I would never have left him. By that time I loved him so deeply. I was just praying every night that he would survive!

  JACK

  I was thinking about suicide a lot of the time. My preference was to go out on a dangerous mission and get killed in action while killing some Germans in the process. But I couldn’t even move around the camp very well, so a long march was out of the question. I would have to do it myself. There were two or three occasions when I felt 99 percent ready.

  What stopped me from killing myself wasn’t Rochelle—I thought she would have been better off without me. But I was worried about my father Julius—I couldn’t expect Rochelle to stick with him after I was gone, and he might have suffered terribly without her to care for him. Even so, the thought of suicide did not leave my mind.

  As for Rochelle, she was such a good and kind soul! She not only cared for me during that time, but another man in the atrad as well. He and his wife—their last name was Farfel, I remember. Well, he had a bad case of boils himself. Not as bad as mine, but terrible enough. And the boils needed to be squeezed out—they had black things in their centers—and cleaned. There was no fancy way to do this—no gloves, no antiseptic equipment. Someone had to do it by hand, with rags. That was how Rochelle worked with me as well.

  ROCHELLE

  Farfel’s wife—she was a common-law wife, you would say, like I was to Jack—she couldn’t bring herself to clean him. He was in great pain, so I went to him and helped him. I remember he was lying on his stomach … kind of an ugly guy. And I was squeezing, so that he could begin to heal. The man’s father was alive and a member of the atrad as well. He worked in the kitchen like Julius did. He would watch what I was doing. Once he said to me, “Why couldn’t my son have a wife like this?”

  I thanked him for saying this. But I was not trying to make the other woman look bad. It was easier for me to help him than to watch him lie there in pain.

  JACK

  At last, we discovered the method to cure me. It was a case of trial and error. We tried every substance available to us in the woods. Finally, it proved to be very simple. Tar.

  ROCHELLE

  We would peel the bark from birch trees and then char it and cook it. That produced a thick black sap that we could apply to the open boils. I can’t explain why, but the sap seemed to kill off the infection.

  JACK

  The birch tar was so thick that, after the infections started to clear up, it was a real problem to wash the tar off. And even after the tar came off, I had red circular spots on my legs for years. I still have some on my left leg … like old war wounds that have never really healed.

  Looking back, I can see that this awful experience was, at the same time, a good test of our relationship. Another girl in Rochelle’s place would have gone away. But she stuck with me and that proved that our love was very strong. I vowed to myself that if we survived I would protect and take care of her for all of our lives.

  VIII

  Nazi Assault on the Nalibocka Forest

  ROCHELLE

  In August 1943 there was an enormous invasion of the Nalibocka Forest. It was a major operation … tanks … airplanes … soldiers and shooting all over. The entire atrad was on the run. But we had no idea where to go.

  We learned later that two German army divisions had been involved, meaning close to 20,000 German troops. There was also support from the Polish police. The entire Nalibocka Forest was surrounded.

  The Germans had made up their minds that the partisan activity had to come to an end. It hurt them to have their trains and trucks blown up. And it hurt them politically as well, because the local Poles—whose farms were raided so often—knew very well that the Nalibocka Forest wasn’t under German control. This made those Poles wonder how long the Germans would hold on to the rest of Poland.

  The goal in the big August attack was to encircle all of the partisan groups in the forest and to kill them off once and for all. The Germans had finally figured out, from all the spying on our movements over time by the Polish farmers, where the major atrad groups were encamped.

  JACK

  It was difficult for an atrad with a population like ours—so many old people, so many women with children—to move quickly and in a unified manner.

  One thing worked in our favor—and in favor of all the other atrads as well. When the Germans invaded the Nalibocka Forest, they must have been very afraid of being ambushed by one or more of the partisan units. And they should have been afraid—because that happened to them early on in their push. For that reason, the Germans didn’t spread out as they invaded the forest. They kept to narrow column lines. That meant that we could see them—and hear them—coming from a distance and, if nothing else, know in which direction to run away.

  As the Germans gained momentum, all of the commanders of the various atrads realized that retreat was their only real option—retreat to the centermost swamps of the Nalibocka wilderness. There was no way that a pitched battle could work in the partisans’ favor—not against trained German divisions. And there was no possibility of unified resistance by all the atrads—the organization between the various camps wasn’t that good.

  So we ran. We left behind everything we had in the camps except for our weapons and some handfuls of food that we stuffed in our pockets.

  ROCHELLE

  We began by running away in the same direction. But in the swamplands there was very tall, coarse grass. And when we passed over it, there was an obvious beaten-down path that could not have been missed by the Germans.

  I remember that, as the line of retreat spread out, there were five of us in a group—me, Jack, Julius, and another couple. And it hit me! All of a sudden I turned to the rest of them and—as if someone was instructing me in what to say—I told them, “This is no good! The Germans will track us down just by following this beaten path of grass. They are sure to go after the largest number of people that they can catch. They’re not going to break off their advance to go after small handfuls of Jews. So let’s leave this path and head off on our own.”

  They all agreed with me. So we went off to the right, straight into a thick and heavy part of the swamp. Very quickly the water came up to our chins. We stood in it and remained as still as we could. We had to hold onto each
other, in a kind of human chain, to keep ourselves from slipping or sinking.

  Soon we could hear machine guns, then loud voices shouting out in German. We were no more than two hundred feet away from their main line of advance. We couldn’t make a noise or a movement … we couldn’t allow the weeds to move. For a day and a night we were standing like that, because we could hear the noises and the shooting. We could see on one another’s faces the leeches that were sucking on our chins. Below the waterline, they were sucking on our hands, legs, and feet as well. During the night we took turns waking one another up so that we wouldn’t fall asleep and drown.

  By the next morning, there was no more noise. We figured that the Germans had pushed far enough ahead for us to come out from the swamp water and stand on drier land. Our feet looked like elephant feet. Our clothing stank from mud and rot. We couldn’t stand ourselves.

  We took our clothing off to air it out and let it dry. We were naked and had nothing left to eat and only the swamp water to drink. For days we went on like that. Our big source of food was a dead horse that we scavenged—eating raw slices after scraping off the maggots. I remember watching Julius take one of these rotten raw slices and put it in his pocket to save for later.