Clara's War (5 page)

The Russians had taken every car, every cart and every horse. Zolkiew was in chaos. Every day, more and more Russians left. They packed up everything they could take with them: sewing machines, scrap metal, lumber, bathtubs, grain, desks. It seemed the entire contents of our town were being passed in front of our window. Comrade Dupak showed up again with a muzzled German shepherd. He had come for his things. The Nazis were close to Lvov and he would be leaving. He told us he had enjoyed living next to us and hoped we would meet again after the war. He said
dasv'danya
earnestly and shook my father's hand.

Not long after he left, the streets were filled with panic and weeping. At first we thought the Nazis had arrived. But then we learned that before leaving, the NKVD had emptied the local jail. The political prisoners were shot and then attack dogs were let loose on them. The dogs were tearing the faces off the prisoners. I couldn't believe that Comrade Dupak had done such a thing. He was such a nondescript man with his thinning hair and pleasant smile. As soon as Mama heard the horrible news, she began to fear the worst for her father. She had been trying to find Wanda Vashilevski for days, only to learn that she had fled with the others.

There was no way to know now if Dzadzio had been released or if he was alive. We couldn't bear to think what could be happening to him. And there was no longer any way to get in touch with Josek and Giza, who had remained in Lvov the entire
year. There was nothing for Mama to do but wait. She had confidence that her brother would try his best to find out what had happened to their father.

 

Two weeks later Josek came home with Giza, a new wife, Rela, and several of her relatives, including her brother Dudio. The grief in their faces told us what had happened to Grandpa, and also what our own fate would be.

Josek told us that Lvov had been in chaos as well. The army and the commissars had been throwing civilians off the trains and shooting them if they didn't move fast enough. Every car, truck and wagon had been appropriated for the Russian flight east. A day later the Nazis had arrived. One of the first things the SS did was to go through the streets recruiting Jews for work in the prisons. Josek had gone, hoping to find Dzadzio.

He told us that the smell of death on entering the prison had been overwhelming. There had been bodies in the corridors, in the cells, in the courtyard. Just as in Zolkiew, the last act of the NKVD before leaving had been to murder and disfigure all the political prisoners so that the approaching Nazis wouldn't be able to identify them. They were protecting their own necks, but they let the real criminals, the murderers, the rapists, the thieves, all go.

We knew what was coming next. After the NKVD had shot the prisoners, they let the dogs loose. The beards of the Orthodox had been shaved when they were first imprisoned, so we couldn't even bury another Jew in my dzadzio's place. Josek and the others carried the bodies outside to the courtyard where families wandered among the corpses trying to find their loved ones. There were over 3,000 corpses. Many were children. Some were pregnant women with the bellies and breasts cut open. There were nuns and priests. Josek and the other Jews dug mass
graves in the Ukrainian cemetery. They threw the bodies in and covered them with lime before they filled in the graves. But the burials were going too slowly for the Nazis. They ordered Josek and the others to simply cover the bodies with lime as they lay in the cellar and to brick up the doors and windows. Perhaps Dzadzio's remains were in a mass grave. Perhaps they were in the cellar of Brigitka prison. We would never know.

Only a few days later, the Ukrainian Nationalists with the encouragement of the Nazis murdered 4,000 Jews in Lvov. The Ukrainian Nationalists thought that all of Galicia belonged to them. They felt that the Poles and the Jews were invaders of their homeland. Stalin had starved millions of Ukrainians to death and so the Nationalists celebrated the Russian retreat and welcomed the Nazis as their saviours and allies. Josek, Rela and the others were lucky to get out with their lives and to reach Zolkiew safely.

Our grief was beyond any words. It brought with it the gathering sense that our lives were out of our hands. It felt like a storm pulling together, the sky growing increasingly dark. It didn't seem like anything in this world would make sense any more. Later we found out that all the old-time officers like Dzadzio who had been taken east and put in a concentration camp had been released and reunited with their families. The Soviets had decided they were too old and sick to give them any trouble. If Mama hadn't moved heaven and earth and spent so much money trying to save her father, he might now be safely in Kazakhstan with his wife and family.

From July 1941 to November 1942

I
was beginning to count the dead.

Wilek. Dzadzio. The sons of Mr Malinovski, who lived directly across the street from Mr Melman and a few doors down from us, had shared the same fate as Dzadzio. I knew this was just the beginning. The Nazis would be in Zolkiew any day, any hour.

We didn't leave the house any more, except for Papa, who continued to go to the factory. The peasants were trying to bring in as much grain as possible before the Nazis came. Papa knew every zloty might save our lives and so he worked the press around the clock. Nobody had to forbid us to go out in the streets. Even Mania stayed indoors on these glorious summer
days, staring out of the window. I couldn't concentrate on my books. Nobody was in the mood for talking. Mama cooked. We made our beds. It was all we could manage. We knew we were facing some inevitable catastrophe, yet we couldn't do anything but wait. The moments were painfully endless. It felt like in a dream when you were are trying to escape some unseen horror, but as you start to run the ground swallows your legs and all your screams are silent. We were all restless. At night, I could sense Mania up next to me and hear Mama and Papa tossing and turning across the room.

Early in the morning of 5 July 1941, we were woken from our pathetic sleep by motorcycles roaring down our street. They were soon followed by trucks and then by soldiers marching past our window as if we were marshals in a parade. It was the Wehrmacht again. Papa went out and reported that, like in 1939, they were roaming around town, snapping pictures of the castle and churches like tourists. They were handing out candy to the children and cigarettes to the men, assuring the anxious townspeople that we had nothing to worry about. But still we didn't venture out of our door. Two days later, Papa rushed over from the factory to tell us that the Gestapo and the SS were arriving. He had heard that our Grand Rabbi, revered over all of Eastern Europe for his piety and knowledge, was planning to wait for them with the members of the Kahala, the Zolkiew Jewish Council, at the entrance of the town only a kilometre away from our house. They were prepared to beg and bargain for our lives. We waited for the results of this meeting, but were not optimistic. We didn't have to wait long before we heard shooting. The sound of the machine-gun fire was no louder than champagne corks. Even the ensuing wailing and crying was faint. But they were as loud as they needed to be to inform us that our nightmare had arrived.

We heard that the Grand Rabbi had hardly got a word out before the SS officer shot him. The accompanying members of the Kahala were arrested, including the father of Giza Landau. The SS officer then drove to the synagogue and ordered his men to strip it of every bit of gold and silver and anything that was valuable. A crowd of Jews gathered in the streets and watched in horror as the crowns on the Torah handles, the Torah covers embroidered with golden thread, the candelabras and the inlay on the pillars were packed into trucks. The many Hassid and Orthodox tore their clothing in mourning at the desecration. They knew they should have been hiding, but they couldn't help themselves. When there was nothing left to steal, the SS ran through the sanctuary pouring petrol on the benches, railings, prayer books, Torahs, the tallith, anything that would burn. The walls inside and out were also drenched with petrol. When the fire was lit with dozens of torches and the SS machine-gunned the huge windows to feed the flames with more oxygen, the Sobieski Schul erupted. It was a spectacle as the flames raced up the walls and shot out of the windows. Once everything made of wood and paper had burned, the flames on the walls died out. The paint had been seared off, but the building stood. The SS officer became furious and ordered his men to throw the lamenting Jews on the embers to feed the fire, as if the heat of burning Jewish flesh would be enough to turn brick to ash. A Wehrmacht officer driving by in his Mercedes reacted in stunned horror. He ordered his men to pull the Jews from the flames. The SS officer was outranked, so a few Jews were saved for who knows how long. As soon as the Wehrmacht left, the SS tried to burn the synagogue down a second time, but the walls still held firm.

In another time, the fact that the
schul
was still standing would have been termed a miracle. But it couldn't have felt more different for me. Since the beginning of the war in 1939, I had
been secretly expecting a miracle. I dared tell no one. Not my parents. Not Mania. Not even one of my friends. I was so deeply and devotedly religious that I had been expecting something truly biblical. The killing of the Grand Rabbi and the burning of our synagogue had destroyed any hope I had that God would save us. I felt that the very Being I worshipped had abandoned us. It was now just the four of us–Mama, Papa, Mania and me–against the Third Reich.

Even before a representative came to our house to ask for a contribution, the news that the SS were asking for a ransom for the lives of the Kahala members had spread. When Mama told me how many kilograms of gold and silver they wanted, I couldn't believe there was that much money in the entire world. Mama donated our silver
chanukeah,
her wedding band, silver trays and candlesticks. The ransom was carted in wheelbarrows to the SS headquarters. They took over the town hall, which was in Sobieski's castle. Their offices looked out on the fountain of Madonna and the two big churches. But the piety of those buildings had no effect on the SS. The men were released and informed they were to run the Judenrat, which was responsible for all Jewish affairs. But their most important responsibility was making sure that all the SS orders were carried out to the letter.

The Nazis postered the town with the racial laws printed in the Gothic script that had become a weapon of hate. But we had already known them by heart well before the Nazis arrived. We weren't allowed to go to school or the park. We had a curfew. We weren't allowed to walk on the pavement, but had to walk in the street. My father, like every Jewish business owner in town, had his business confiscated by the Nazis. We had to wear the white armband with the blue Jewish star above the right elbow. Any offence was punishable by death. The day the order for the armbands came down, none of us could leave the house until
my mother had embroidered them. It took Mama over two hours to do one armband. I was furious as I watched my proud mother compelled to fabricate the emblems of our humiliation, as well those of Giza, Josek and poor Uchka, who couldn't sew a stitch. How would she explain them to Zygush and Zosia?

My dear friend, Helena Freymann, was killed one day as she walked out of her door and down the street. A Pole, someone whom she smiled at whenever she saw him and who had known her family for years, pointed her out to a soldier who was not even SS. He simply took out his pistol and shot her as if he were lighting a cigarette. She had forgotten her armband. This happened right down the block from our house one day after the edict came down. In this way we learned that the Pole or Ukrainian who might turn us in would not be a stranger. They would know us. Their children would be our classmates, their fathers would know our fathers, and their grandfathers would have known our grandfathers. I suppose, in the end, it made no difference if you were betrayed by a friend or an enemy. It really only meant that your heart might break a little more in the moment before you felt the bullet.

It was almost impossible to keep up with all the orders and edicts that came from the Nazi command headquarters. All the men were ordered to report to the town plaza for an examination by a doctor. Able-bodied men were designated A; those capable of light work were designated B; those who were sick, old, weak or crippled were designated C. Mama told Papa that many of our friends were paying off the Ukrainian doctors to get the C designation. She suggested my father do the same. His response was, ‘For the Nazis, believe me, I don't want to be a cripple.' He didn't know then that this would save all our lives.

 

We had become a race of recluses, depressed by the news from the Nazi papers and radio stations as much as by what we were facing in our beloved little town. During the summer of 1941, the Nazis had taken Kiev, Karkhov, Minsk and all of the Crimea, with little opposition from the Soviets. From our living-room window, hidden behind the curtains, I watched young Jewish boys my age and younger as they struggled down the street, pushing carts and wheelbarrows filled with crushed stones. Papa came home and told us that they had been smashed into tiny pieces from the grave markers in the Jewish cemetery to pave the roads for German tanks. Some of the gravestones were over 300 years old. They even took the very first gravestone, which had been given to the Jews by Sobieski. It was the most sacred responsibility of the Jewish faith to find hallowed ground in which to bury our dead. It came before building schools or a
mikvah
or even a synagogue. Dozens of our family members were buried there. Mama couldn't stop crying.

We knew there would be no more letters from Rosa and Babcia, but at least we knew what had happened to them. Uchka knew there would be no letter from her husband. The children asked about their father all the time. ‘When is he coming home? Why isn't there a letter?' Zygush was old enough to pester Uchka. What was sadder was when he stopped.

Just as Papa was getting ready to leave the house on the appointed day and hour for those men whose name began with ‘S', a soldier came to the house ordering him to come to the town hall. We were terrified. I don't think I took a breath until he came home. He had been told that he would carry on running the oil-press, at no salary of course. It wasn't an offer but an order. As soon as he had told us, Papa ran across the street to the factory, where the workers shook his hand. They told him they were lost without him and couldn't run the damn machines.
They were terrified that the SS would think they were incompetent and shoot them, so they had all signed a petition. Papa said the most important thing was that the Nazi army needed oil; the police needed oil; the SS needed oil. He hoped that his job would buy us enough time to find a way out.

Just like Papa, Mr Melman and Mr Patrontasch had also been spared by their work at the factory. The men got together and started a business in contraband oil. Papa and Mr Melman kept the factory open several nights a week while Mr Patrontasch would liaise with the black market. Word spread quickly among the peasants. The farmers who had been bringing their family grain to the press for generations now came at night. They paid with a sack of potatoes, eggs, cheese, onions, anything that could be sold on the black market. The Russians had moved part of the factory from across the street to a building six doors down on our side. Papa would go out the back door and cut through the backyards to get to work.

 

Uchka's armband hadn't been worn enough to get one speck of dirt on it when she showed up at our front door weeping. She was crying so hard that we knew something must have happened to Hersch. She told us a peasant from a small village who brought his grain to my father's press had heard that Hersch Leib had been killed just a few days after marching out of Zolkiew. His unit had been headed to Tarnopol when they were bombed by German fighter planes. If not for this peasant, we never would have known anything of his fate. In their engagement photo, Uchka and Hersch shared the same dreamy expression, the same half smile on their lips, the same dark eyes looking off together. Their wedding was only a few years ago. I could see Hersch in Zygush's face as he was struggling to make sense of this new world in which he would have no father.

I was beginning to understand that when we grieve, we not only grieve for the loss of a loved one but also for the part of us that is lost with them. The Hassids say that we perform the mourner's
Kaddish
for the prescribed eleven months because the souls of the departed linger, still hungry for those they have left behind; with words unspoken and deeds undone; with the spark of their transgressions still burning. It is only with
Kaddish
over that period of time that they will understand that our love and devotion is enough to free their souls to ascend to Heaven.

We were all in a state of shock. Hersch Leib was the third member of our family to die and we knew there would be more. Uchka was heartbroken, but brave. Without a husband and with two small children to support, Uchka needed to earn a living. She borrowed some money from my father to start a used-clothing business. She would sell Jewish clothes to non-Jews.

As the summer wore on, we started to emerge from our state of numbness. Uchka had such a good reputation that women were now coming from other towns to buy from her. Mania and I were together more than we had ever been in our lives, but we rarely went out of our front door. Like Papa, we travelled from one backyard to another, passing through fences where we had pulled out the nails so we could move the slats. We'd either go to my friend Genya's house or down to the orphanage three backyards away where we'd play with the children. I read anything I could get my hands on.

As desperate as we were, I knew we were privileged: we were together, we had enough to eat, we lived in a rich town. The elders in the Judenrat had come to an arrangement with the commandant of the SS in Lvov. Almost every Saturday, month after month, the commandant drove to Zolkiew to collect his tribute. Jewels. Gold. Coins. Ingots. Family silver. Watches.
Fabric. Furs. Lumber. Clothing. Stamps. Art. Rare books. Somehow we scraped enough to buy us another month. Others weren't as fortunate. Town after town around us was being decimated; the inhabitants either slaughtered or moved to ghettos in Lublin or Lvov. We knew that our safety was a matter of whim. We were in the eye of the storm.

In the autumn, Mama decided we needed to learn and she organized a school. There were five or six girls: Mania, me, and my friends Giza, Genya, Klara and Lipka. We met in a different house every day for our safety. We studied Hebrew with Gershon Taffet, mathematics with a famous university professor from Warsaw who had fled to Zolkiew. We even had Latin. I don't think any of us studied harder in our lives then we did in those months.