Violins of Hope (25 page)

Motele was also shunned by his former friends. At the beginning of the school year, he went to Gershtein's former palace to reenroll in classes. Along the way, he passed a group of Ukrainian children playing in a park. As soon as they saw him, they started chanting, “Jew! Jew!” Motele did not react. He just lowered his head and kept walking.

He walked into the familiar schoolroom and noted a new portrait of Hitler on the wall. “Good morning,” he said.

“A Ukrainian doesn't say ‘good morning,' but ‘glory to Ukraine,'” responded one of the three teachers seated at a round table. None of them bothered to look up from the books they were reading.

“I've come to enroll in this class,” Motele mumbled hesitantly.

“What's your name?” one of the teachers asked. Although he was still looking down, Motele recognized him as a geography teacher who had always been mean to him.

“Mordechai Schlein.”

The mean teacher jumped up and stared at Motele with hatred. “You zhid!” he shouted. “Who let you in here? Run away quickly. Don't you know that Jews are forbidden from attending school?”

Motele left the room as fast as he could, leaping down two and three steps at a time on his way out of the schoolhouse. He did not stop running until he reached a large field far from the village, where he fell to the ground and sobbed uncontrollably.

That winter was very difficult for Motele's family. They had always lived simply, but they had at least been able to avoid poverty. Now that the Nazis had limited what Burtzik could charge for his services, they barely had enough to survive. To make matters worse, the millstone in the windmill had worn down and needed to be replaced if Burtzik was to continue to protect his family by being useful. To save what little money they earned for the new millstone, the family ate only potatoes the entire winter.

In addition to nearly starving to death, Motele's family almost froze. Since the villagers refused to lend Burtzik a horse, he was unable to get wood for the fire. It was up to Motele and Batyale to walk two miles to the forest. Digging through the deep snow with their bare hands, they would search for twigs that they could load onto their little sled. Crying because they were starving, freezing, and exhausted, they would endure taunts and insults from Ukrainian children on their way home.

In the spring of 1942, the ethnic cleansing of Volhynia resumed with brutal intensity. The Nazis began systematically liquidating the ghettos, starting with women, children, and the elderly who were unfit to work. Close to twenty thousand Volhynian Jews were killed in the first stage of these renewed massacres, which commenced in May and lasted until mid-June. The second phase resulted in the complete destruction of the ghettos in Rovno and Olyka and the murder of ten thousand Jews. It was the third stage that did the most damage. It began in August and lasted more than two months. The killing teams, often operating in several districts at the same time, murdered 150,000 Jews, effectively obliterating what was left of Volhynia's once-vibrant Jewish community. A final stage, in November and December 1942, completed the ethnic cleansing by eliminating the 3,500 skilled laborers who had remained in the ghettos. This left alive only a few thousand Jews who had managed to hide or escape to the forests, many of whom would later die of starvation or during partisan battles.

The massacre that took place in the Volhynian city of Korets on May 21, 1942—the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot—resulted in the slaughter of 90 percent of the town's Jewish population. One of the few survivors was a forty-four-year-old civil engineer by the name of Moshe Gildenman, who later related the horror of the Korets massacre in gruesome detail. “Near a pit twenty-by-twenty meters long and three meters deep stood a table with bottles of cognac and food,” he recalled. “At the table sat a German with an automatic pistol in his hand. Frightened and despairing Jews were pushed into the pit naked, six at a time. The German ordered them to lie on the ground, face down. Between one sip of cognac and the next he shot them. Among the 2,200 Jews the Germans shot that day were my wife and my thirteen-year-old daughter.”

The killings lasted for twelve hours. That evening, Gildenman and the other survivors met in the synagogue to rend their garments and say Kaddish for the dead. While others were mourning, Gildenman's thoughts turned to rage and retribution. He heard a voice cry out from inside himself: “Not with prayers will you assuage our grief for the rivers of innocent blood that was spilled—but with revenge!”

As soon as the Kaddish was over, Gildenman banged the table. “Listen to me, unfortunate, death-condemned Jews!” he called out. “Know that sooner or later we are all doomed. But I shall not go like a sheep to the slaughter!” Gildenman vowed that someday he would exact his revenge.
⁸³

On September 23, 1942, with the Germans and Ukrainians surrounding the Korets ghetto for its final liquidation, Gildenman, his son, and several other men escaped to the forest. Combining Gildenman's engineering background with their thirst for revenge, the partisans staged a series of sophisticated attacks, killing Nazis and acquiring their weapons. The group's many successes included a number of cleverly engineered attacks on trains, railways, and bridges that prevented the Germans from transporting much-needed reinforcements to the Eastern Front. Taking its name from Gildenman's partisan moniker, the outfit became known as “Uncle Misha's Jewish Group.” It would be this partisan brigade that Motele would join in January 1943.

One day, Motele was approaching his family's home when he saw the Nazi-appointed mayor of the village enter the courtyard with four German soldiers. Fearful of coming face-to-face with the Nazis, Motele darted into the windmill. He climbed up to the top floor and looked out a round window at what was happening below.

While the mayor leaned against the well, nonchalantly brushing the dirt off his boots with a twig, the four soldiers entered the house. Suddenly, Motele heard his father cry out. Several gunshots were followed by the heartrending screams of Chana and Batyale.

Then there was silence. A shudder went down Motele's entire body. His hair stood up on end. He knew instantly that his parents and sister were dead. He would be next if he was not careful. He decided to run away as soon as he could get out of the windmill safely.

The mayor walked into the house and reemerged a few minutes later carrying a bloody sheet into which he had packed several stolen items. He walked back to the village, followed by the Nazi murderers.

As Motele continued to watch from his hiding place in the windmill, the neighbor Pavlo Fustamit appeared. Pavlo ran into Motele's house and stuck his head out the window.

“Maria!” he shouted. “Quick, bring a sack!”

Maria walked over with an empty bag and entered the house. After a little while, Pavlo came into the yard with a large featherbed that Motele's mother had painstakingly made. He ripped the quilt apart, dumped out all of the feathers, and took the empty cover back into the house. When he reemerged a few moments later, the quilt cover was filled with stolen items. Maria followed behind him, nearly doubled over under the weight of her heavy sack.

Convulsing with quiet sobs, Motele watched through tearful eyes as the mayor returned.

“Until the regional commander takes over the windmill, it has to be sealed,” the mayor explained to Pavlo.

As the mayor walked toward the windmill, Motele scampered down from the top floor and hid behind an old crate. His heart pounded and his head spun. He felt dizzy.

“Is there anyone here?” the mayor called out, opening the windmill's only door. “Come out, because I'm nailing the door shut.”

Motele heard the door close, followed by the hammering of nails. He breathed deeply, but did not leave his hiding place. He lay there for a long time, crying softly.

When night fell, Motele decided to make his escape. He found a rope and tied one end to a post. He pushed the other end through a small hatch on the top floor. He climbed through the hatch and slid down the rope fifty feet to the ground.

Motele's heart pounded as he approached his house. As soon as he walked through the door, he froze. In the moonlight he could see Burtzik lying in the middle of the room, covered in blood. His eyes were still open. Chana was on the bed, one bare foot draped off the side of the bed into a pool of blood. Young Batyale lay nearby, underneath a chair. Her face was flat against the floor. Her little hands were stretched out, frozen in her last moments of desperation.

“Blood . . . blood,” Motele said to himself, in shock over what he was seeing. “I no longer have anyone. They've all been murdered. I have to run away from here, as quickly as possible. They'll murder me, as well.”

Before he left, he noticed his father's little prayer book on the floor near his feet. He picked it up, pressed it to his lips, and put it in his pocket. He quickly ran out of the house.

He had no sooner reached an old pear tree that stood near the border of the yard than he saw Pavlo coming down the road. Motele quickly scampered up the tree and watched as Pavlo walked to his own house. As Motele climbed down, he suddenly remembered the Gershteins' violin, which he had secreted in the hollow of the very tree in which he was hiding so the Germans would not confiscate it.

Motele grabbed the violin from its hiding place and pressed it to his heart. It was his last reminder of better times. He ran into the dense forest with only one thought in his mind: “Run away, the farther the better. Escape from these evil people.”

As Motele would later tell Lionka and the other partisans who would discover him in the woods, he spent the summer after his flight in the forest. Walking eastward, toward Belarus, he lived off wild berries and mushrooms. Whenever he came across a town or village, he would hide in the bushes until it got dark and steal potatoes from a garden on his way out of town. When he needed to sleep, he would build himself a bed out of moss or grass and use his violin case as a pillow. He was initially scared of living in the forest, but he quickly became more confident as he developed his survival skills.

When the autumn brought cold winds and rain, scavenging food became much more difficult. Berries were no longer in season, mushrooms were increasingly hard to find under inches of fallen leaves, and potatoes had already been harvested from their gardens. With only a thin linen shirt, one pair of pants, and no shoes, Motele was also freezing. The weather was even affecting his violin case, which was starting to swell from the moisture. Motele had not played the violin in months, because he was afraid that someone would hear him. He would, however, occasionally open the case and run his hand gently over the strings. Just this small amount of physical contact with his instrument was enough to bring him comfort.

When the cold rain became too much to bear, Motele hid his violin under a fallen tree and walked into a village. He knocked on the first door he came to and was welcomed by an elderly farm woman who found him a job working as a shepherd for the richest farmer in the village. Motele went back into the forest and reclaimed his violin, which he hid under a pile of straw in the woodshed. In return for caring for two oxen, four cows, and ten sheep, Motele was given a jacket, a pair of pants, and a pair of boots.

The rich farmer Karpo was a quiet and kind man who treated Motele well. His wife Christia, on the other hand, was a hateful woman who lorded over Motele and her servant girl Dasha with verbal and physical abuse. Even worse was her son Pyetro, an anti-Semitic policeman from nearby Dombrovitze.

“This is our new shepherd?” Pyetro asked upon seeing Motele. “For some reason, he has very curly hair like a zhid. Come closer to me, boy.”

Although his heart was pounding, Motele approached Pyetro with every ounce of courage he could muster. “Glory to Ukraine!” he cheerfully greeted the policeman, using the salutation he had learned from the Nazi schoolteachers in Krasnovka.

Pyetro stared into Motele's shiny black eyes. “The ‘Our Father,'” he said, referring to the Christian prayer. “Do you know it?”

Motele had grown up with Christian Ukrainian children. He had learned their customs and their prayers. He recited the prayer in one breath.

“Even though you're a Christian,” Pyetro conceded, “you do have the hair of a non-Christian.”

That settled the matter until New Year's Eve, when Christia discovered among Motele's belongings the little prayer book that had once belonged to his father.

“You're a zhid!” she said, confronting Motele when he entered the house that night.

“Everybody says that I look like a zhid,” Motele responded matter-of-factly. “Even your son Pyetro said that I have the hair of a non-Christian.”

“Then what's this?” Christia demanded, triumphantly holding up the prayer book.

“Where did you find Seryozha's little book?” Motele exclaimed, quickly inventing a Jewish friend. “He gave it to me to play with for a day and I lost it. We almost got into a fight over it.” He calmly grabbed the book and slid it into his pocket.

“I told you that you are picking on this poor child for no reason,” Karpo scolded his wife. “He's a true Christian soul, and you want to turn him into a Jew.”

“Tomorrow our Pyetro will come,” Christia responded, not willing to concede defeat. “He'll interrogate the boy as necessary and will establish whether he is a zhid or a Christian.”

On New Year's Day, when the family departed for church, they left Motele behind to guard the house. The interrogation would come after the church service. Motele had planned to simply disappear while they were gone, but was overcome with a thirst for revenge. He thought of the Nazi teacher who had humiliated him in Krasnovka and of the beatings he received from Christia. He thought of his old neighbors Pavlo and Maria Fustamit, who had shunned his father and then looted his house. He thought of his murdered family. It was not fair that the self-proclaimed Christians would celebrate their New Year while he would be forced back into the forest. Someone had to pay.