Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (40 page)

Childless couples did not lose children, but they sometimes found them. A Jewish girl from Nowograd-Wołyńsk in Volhynia survived the mass shooting in a trench where her mother and sister were murdered. She ran from hut to hut in the forest, and finally found shelter with a young woman. There the girl was beaten so long and brutally that the neighbors complained of the noise and told her to seek shelter somewhere else. She finally met an older Ukrainian couple, Marko and Oksana Verbievka, who seemed sympathetic and who listened to her story: her life, the pit, the shootings, the flight, the beatings. They cried as they listened to her. And then Oksana said: “Be at peace, little child, forget all this; you will be a daughter to us, we have no children, everything will be yours.”

And then, after a moment: “But you won’t abandon us later, will you?” The girl stayed with Marko and Oksana for the rest of the war, and then left them.

The words of Oksana and Marko, Ukrainian peasants, convey the sadness of childlessness, the inevitability of aging, the desire to transcend death through posterity, but also the simple and present need for help on a farm. This was an age of agriculture. These eastern reaches of interwar Poland, today western Belarus or western Ukraine, were still almost entirely agrarian. The farming was without machinery, requiring intense animal and human labor. The Great Depression had hit hard and lasted long in this part of the world, separating farmers from markets, turning them back to self-sufficiency. Economics was more about labor than about exchange—about producing enough so that humans and animals could survive the winter to produce again the next summer. There was usually enough manpower to go around; thanks to the international immigration limitations of the 1920s and 1930s, there had in fact been too much. This would change under German rule.

In the invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941, which was launched from precisely these territories, the Germans had taken many of the horses, since even the army of the famed
Blitzkrieg
moved chiefly by horsepower. When Operation Barbarossa did not go as planned, and the Germans had to send millions more of their own young men to the front, they replaced the lost labor in Germany by taking men and women from eastern Europe. At first this was by recruitment, and then by impressment, and finally in murderous campaigns. As millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians were brought to Germany, the country became more Slavic in its population than it had been since the Middle Ages. This left parts of eastern Europe starved for labor, and countless families desperate for help in the pastures and fields. Hundreds of Jewish children, perhaps a few thousand, survived because peasant families needed labor. Most of them were orphans.

Noema Centnewschwer, from the Białystok region, was about ten when the Germans invaded and the mass killing of Jews began. She worked at seven homesteads in the countryside before she found one where she could stay. It was a large farm where the children were too small to work and where there was only one farmhand. “After a few days,” she remembered, “they sensed that I was Jewish, but they let me stay anyway. They weren’t kind, they brought up my Jewishness, but they didn’t let me go hungry.” Chawa Rozensztejn was from the same part of the world, from the town of Łomża. She survived the pogrom of Jews by Poles in the town in 1941 and then the clearing of the ghetto in 1942. At the age of six, she made her way alone to the surrounding villages. As a nine-year-old, she recalled that the peasants she found were “friendly enough when I worked conscientiously.”

Szyja Flejsz was a boy of about Noema’s age from Volhynia. He hid in several villages and then made for the woods with some other boys. He worked for a time as a shepherd, then followed advice to go to Woronówka, a small settlement inhabited only by Poles. During the Soviet period in 1940, the NKVD had deported two villagers. The Germans assumed control in 1941. By the time Szyja arrived in early 1943, the surrounding woods were the site of the partisan war between Soviets and Germans. By day, as he remembered, everyone tried to keep peace with the Germans, and by night with the Soviets.

Szyja was taken in by Zygmunt Kuriata. Of some forty-two huts in Woronówka, twenty-two belonged to members of the Kuriata family, which perhaps created a sense of trust. One of the two people deported from the village by the NKVD had been a member of the family, but Zygmunt seems not to have drawn any specious conclusions about Jews and communism. Zygmunt knew that Szyja was a Jewish orphan and treated him well. He wanted Szyja to learn prayers, perhaps to help him blend in, since forced recital of the Lord’s Prayer was one way Christians tested Jews; or perhaps to save his soul. Perhaps neither, or both. But Szyja thought of his murdered parents: “My father was a Jew, my mother was a Jew, and I want to be a Jew.” Kuriata received this with equanimity: “A Jew is a Jew, he does not want to pray.”

In 1943 in Volhynia, a third force entered the partisan war. Ukrainian nationalists, in these extreme conditions, were able to establish their own partisan army. In the first months of the year, many of the Ukrainians who had been serving the Germans as auxiliary policemen went to the woods and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This formation emerged as a result of the triple occupation of Volhynia and other lands inhabited by Ukrainians that had been part of Poland until 1939. The Soviet occupation had destroyed legal Ukrainian political parties and discredited the radical Ukrainian Left. Then the German occupation offered thousands of young Ukrainian men—some of whom had already been serving the NKVD as militiamen and assisting in the deportation of Poles and others—training in methods of killing Jews and others. Then the anticipated return of Soviet power, represented in late 1942 and early 1943 by the Soviet partisans, brought these policemen and others to the woods, some of them as Soviet partisans, others to the UPA.

The commanders of the UPA, Ukrainian nationalists, meant to resist the Soviets and establish a Ukrainian state, but their immediate task in early 1943 was the ethnic cleansing of Poles. In a number of cases, this meant the death of Jews who had taken shelter with Polish families; in at least one case, a Jew who had a good hiding place rescued a Pole from Ukrainians. In 1943, Poles and Jews in small settlements such as Woronówka were amidst a three-sided German-Soviet-Ukrainian partisan war, and in an impossible position. In June, the Germans set fire to Woronówka as punishment for its supposed support of the Soviet partisans. One member of the Kuriata family was burned alive. The inhabitants who remained eked out a miserable existence among the ruins, the forest, and neighboring villages. They were repeatedly attacked by the Ukrainian partisans of the UPA, who burned down the last building in the village in November. Each time the UPA attacked, Szyja fled to the woods with his Polish family. In summer 1944, when regular Soviet forces arrived, the NKVD completed the task of ethnic cleansing that its Ukrainian nationalist enemy had begun. People of Polish and Jewish origin were registered and deported west, beyond the restored Molotov-Ribbentrop border, to a Poland that was itself being shifted to the west. The last time the Soviets had been in control, in 1939, they had deported people to the Gulag according to class criteria; this time they deported people by ethnic criteria to the country where they were thought to belong.

All of the surviving residents of Woronówka went west, and the locality, battered by the first Soviet occupation, then by the German occupation, then by Ukrainian partisans, and finally by the return of Soviet power, ceased to exist. Zygmunt Kuriata and his wife registered Szyja as a member of their family, and the three of them were transferred to distant Silesia, to lands that Poland was allowed to take from Germany after the war. Many surviving Polish Jews were resettled to Silesia after they were expelled from the lands of eastern Poland that were claimed again by the Soviet Union in 1945. So it was there, after the war, at the age of sixteen, that Szyja again met Jews. He decided to leave his Polish family and return to Jewish life. Zygmunt was clearly restraining emotions: “If you want to go, we won’t hold you back; if you want to stay, we won’t make you leave.” Zygmunt and his wife cried when Szyja left them.

Labor could be more or less exploitative, but labor itself was no sign of hostility or alienation. This was a time and place where children worked; the labor of children would have been taken for granted, in much of the countryside anyway, in the general understanding of what a family was. Some Jewish children could thus justify their existence by what they did, and some of them, although by no means all, were loved in return. In the end, then, the working farm was a sort of institution, both economic and moral, in which Jewish children could find a place.

Like the bond between mothers and children, or fathers and children, or nannies and children, a farmstead provided a relationship where some Jewish children could fit. Like marriage, the prospect of marriage, or sexual desire, labor could generate an image of the present or the future where someone was missing, where someone was needed, where someone could be added. That someone, sometimes, could be a Jew.

All of these situations, although extreme, were not the ultimate form of self-sacrifice. In other cases of rescue there was truly no institution at all, not even a purely private one such as a farm, home, family, or love affair. What happened when there were no states, no diplomats, no armies, no churches—and no human need for a relationship, and no way for the Jew in search of shelter to provide anything useful? What happened when there was no discernible human motivation at all, no connection between the personal act of rescue and the world in which it took place, and no vision as to how the Jew might supplement the future of others? Who rescued then? Almost no one.

It seems simple: to see a person who is marked for extinction. And yet no human encounter is simple. Every meeting has a setting, partly designed by those who meet, partly designed by others, partly a matter of chance. No historical event, even the Holocaust, is of such a scale as to transcend the inherently specific character of each human interaction. No quantity of meaning, no matter how sincerely ascribed, can void the subjective quality of each meeting. The reasons why people helped or did not help often had to do with something about the first encounter with the Jew who needed their help. Since this was true, Jews sometimes survived when they were able to think, if only for a moment, beyond their own particular suffering and see the encounter from the perspective of the other.

Joseł Lewin was from near Bielsk Podlaski, on the western edge of marshy Polesia. His family had been killed, and he was wandering alone, undecided about what to do, whether he should try to survive, and how. He finally decided to take shelter in the barn of a peasant he knew, in a settlement called Janowo. When the peasant found Joseł in the barn, the peasant was surprised and frightened, as almost everyone was in these circumstances. It is always a shock to find an unexpected person on one’s property, and Poles in the countryside knew that Jews were no longer supposed to exist. However they felt about that matter personally, Poles knew that they were in violation of the German order, and likely the norms of local society, the moment a Jew set foot on their land.

Seeing the peasant’s reaction, Joseł stopped him from speaking and asked him for a small favor: not to do anything for thirty minutes, simply to wait for that half an hour, and then come back to the barn. Then Joseł would have something to tell him. When the peasant returned, this is what he heard from Joseł: “I don’t want to live any longer; I’ll commit suicide and you bury me.” The peasant responded: “The earth is frozen two meters down; it will be hard to dig.” It was November 1943. What were these two men, who had known each other for years, actually saying to each other at that moment? “The earth is frozen two meters down; it will be hard to dig.” Perhaps, just perhaps, what the peasant meant was something like this: “I will not dig your grave; perhaps you too should wait a while and think it over.” If Joseł had not given the peasant time to calm down, perhaps the peasant would have reacted differently. If the peasant had not remarked upon the hard weather, Joseł might have killed himself. The peasant gave Joseł food and shelter for the next eight months. Joseł lived.