The Family (12 page)

He spent his first two months of war marching, training, and feeling
sorry for himself because not a single letter reached him from the States. All the replacement recruits from Camp Upton were in the same boat: because they were constantly on the move, shuffled from unit to unit, neither their mail nor their pay caught up with them. “We began to feel we were all among the forgotten men,” Hyman lamented.

Finally, on March 10, 1918, his permanent assignment came through. The forgotten men were piled into dun-colored French rail cars—no American soldier failed to remark on the words “40
hommes
, 8
chevaux
” (40 men, 8 horses) prominently stenciled on the side—and transported to the city of Toul east of Paris. Hyman reported to Company K, 18th Infantry, First Division. The company's commanding officer, Captain Joseph Quesenberry, a boyish twenty-three-year-old honors graduate and former football player from the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces (now New Mexico State University), informed Hyman of the great honor that had befallen him: he had landed in the fabled Big Red One. The First Division prided itself on being first in every way: it was the oldest division in the U.S. Army, the first American division to arrive in France after the United States entered the war, the only American division to parade through the streets of Paris on July 4, 1917, the first to fire a shell at the German line, and the first to suffer casualties. When Hyman and the other replacement troops fell into line at Toul, Captain Quesenberry laid out their sacred mission: “The First Division has been in every war the country was in. It came out with honors every time. I expect to maintain the good name of the division in this present conflict, so we can wear the Red One [the divisional insignia] with pride.” There was another First Division first that involved the captain personally—on March 15, he had participated in an attack in which the Americans took their first German prisoners of war. After bouncing around for five months, Hyman was at last in a permanent outfit with men who had “pride in their company, regiment, and division.”

Above all, pride in their commanding officer. “He was a great officer, a soldiers' soldier,” Hyman wrote of Quesenberry. “He was the idol of our outfit.” The 250 men in Company K were ready to lay down their lives for their young captain. Hyman felt the same.

—

“There is no doubt that
it will be a shameful peace,” declared the newly empowered Lenin when faced with the dilemma of how to extract Russia from the war, “but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.” The most the Bolsheviks could hope for was to minimize the shame. This they botched as well. Peace negotiations with the Germans opened in the city of Brest-Litovsk three days before Christmas of 1917 and culminated in a dramatic stalemate in the middle of February 1918. The Russian delegation under Trotsky announced that Russia was pulling out of the war but refused to commit to any kind of peace treaty. “Neither peace nor war” was Trotsky's sly position. The Germans' response was to mount a rapid push east into Russian territory. In five days, the German army advanced 150 miles, swallowing more Russian territory than in the previous three years. With Petrograd in imminent danger, the Bolsheviks moved the government to Moscow. On February 23, the Germans made one last ultimatum for a peace treaty, and Lenin conceded: “It is a question of signing the peace terms now or signing the death sentence of the Soviet Government three weeks later.” The treaty of Brest-Litovsk was formalized on March 3 and it was indeed shameful.
Russia lost not only all of its western territories—Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, most of Belarus—but a third of its population, a third of its arable farmland, more than half of its industry, and nearly 90 percent of its coal mines. The dismembered former empire would devote what remained of its resources to a protracted civil war.

Rakov and Volozhin were now under German control. After three years near the front line and six months of lawlessness following the Bolshevik revolution, Shalom Tvi and Beyle were subjects of the Ober Ost—the German name for the territory they had taken from the Russians during the war.
The regime change came as a huge relief. The family had lost everything during the chaotic “neither peace nor war” weeks in February, when a gang of armed bandits and deserters took over Rakov and terrorized the townspeople. “For three days they rioted, looted, and plundered, with no one to stop them,” one resident wrote. Sonia, now almost eight, and her two older sisters, Doba and Etl, were hidden away in a closet while the
marauders went from house to house. Their mother crept into the garden at night to bury the family's money and silver. Then, a week into March, the Germans rolled in and the reign of terror came to an end. The girls emerged from hiding. Beyle went to the market to see if there was any food for sale. Shalom Tvi salvaged what he could of their shop and factory. The family, like all of Rakov's Jews, had high hopes from the Ober Ost. The provisional government had been powerless. The Bolsheviks had brought nothing but plunder and chaos. Maybe under the Germans life would return to normal.

And indeed for a while it did—or something that approached normal. German officers requisitioned rooms in the finer houses in town, but they treated the home owners, Jews and gentiles alike, with respect. Germans did not steal from Beyle's garden as the Russian soldiers had. Shops reopened in the market. The peasants once again trundled into town on Monday and Friday, bought and sold, got drunk, and staggered back to their villages. Relatives of Shalom Tvi in a nearby shtetl had a German officer billeted in their house, and the daughter reported that he was a perfect gentleman who did everything he could to keep the family safe and comfortable.
When Passover came on March 28, the German authorities made sure that Rakov's Jews had kosher flour to bake matzo. Shalom Tvi was astonished when a couple of German Jewish soldiers showed up at shul for Shabbat services. Germany's Jews were far more assimilated than Russia's, and most of the German-Jewish soldiers who occupied the shtetlach were appalled by the poverty and backwardness of the
Ostjuden
—the Eastern Jews. But for a few, the life of the shtetl stirred some deep atavistic longing. “
On the earth this is the last part of the Jewish people that has created and kept alive its own songs and dances, customs and myths, languages and forms of community, and at once preserved the old heritage with a vital validity,” wrote one German Jew serving with the Ober Ost.

After nearly four years of war, Shalom Tvi and Beyle did not expect much from their new rulers. The Germans were better than chaos and banditry—but they were occupiers, not angels, and they could be just as ruthless as the Russians when they were crossed.
There were stories of German soldiers jeering at the Jewish townswomen whom they had forced to scrub a market square on hands and knees; and Germans giving Jewish laborers soup crawling with worms. “
Jews are living here in considerable
numbers: a cancerous wound of this land,” one German officer reported after taking charge of his district in the Ober Ost. Another officer declared that Jews were loathsome “because of the ineradicable filth which they spread about themselves.” A good German was better than a Russian, Shalom Tvi concluded, but a bad German was worse than anything. The German high command had had almost four years to impose
Deutsche Arbeit
—German Work—on the Ober Ost; by the time they took Rakov, they had their Germanizing policies down to a science. They restored order, but they also took all the best food, grain, and livestock and sent it off to Germany. “We ate what the [German] soldiers threw away, including potato peels from the military kitchen,” one boy wrote.

Shalom Tvi could not help noticing that Rakov's German occupiers were hungry and ragged too. These were not the grinning, singing, strapping youths who had marched off to war in the summer of 1914—but an exhausted army of the very old and very young. Shalom Tvi had seen four occupying forces come and go in quick succession in the year since his father's death. The Germans were tolerable as long as they lasted, but frankly, he was dubious that they would last long.

—

Shalom Tvi and Beyle's youngest daughter, Sonia, was eight years old when the Germans entered Rakov. She retained no memory of the foreign soldiers marching into town, the new flags and posters, the punctilious officers, her parents' cautious relief. What she did later remember from this time was being punished for setting foot in a church.

Sonia was a born adventurer, confident and curious; when her heart was set, she did what she wanted—even if it got her into trouble. One day late in the war, Sonia noticed crowds of people in their finest clothes converging on the Catholic church, just a stone's throw from their house. Sonia slipped out the gate and followed the people up the lane. When she reached the church, she saw there was a wedding. One of the teachers at the Polish Catholic seminary was marrying a seventeen-year-old girl from a wealthy gentile home, and the celebration was large, noisy, and colorful. As the guests in their finery climbed the steps and disappeared into the big double doors beneath the pointed brick arches, Sonia decided she had to follow them. It was beautiful inside the church—far more beautiful and mysterious than
Rakov's cozy wooden shul. The ceilings were so high she had to crane her neck to see to the top, and there were paintings framed in gold wherever she looked—paintings of beautiful women and a sad suffering man. “It was so quiet there,” Sonia remembered, “with not even the sound of a fly buzzing around. The walls were covered with many different pictures of Jesus, the crucifixion, the resurrection, his mother Mary, and more. This was the first time I had ever entered a church.” But not all the images were lovely. Sonia noticed a knot of guests gathered in the shadow at the back. She crept over to see what they were doing—no one paid any attention to her, she was so small and quiet. “I saw that they were all spitting onto a certain place, and when I looked closer I saw the figure of an old Jewish man with a big nose, dressed in a red cape, labeled ‘The Traitor Judas Iscariot Who Betrayed Jesus.'”

Sonia fled from the church and ran home. She couldn't help blurting out what she had done and seen to her parents. Her father was furious. “He said that it was forbidden to Jews to set foot in a church. I had to swear a
neider
[vow] of 40 days of silence.”

Forty days of silence—
when the child felt like howling at the top of her lungs. But this was the vow that Jews in Europe had always imposed on one another: when you wanted to scream, keep your head down and your mouth shut; don't look; don't fight back; hide.

Sonia could not understand what she had done wrong. “It was simply that it was very interesting to me to see inside,” she said. Wasn't it punishment enough to discover that in their church the Christian neighbors secretly spat upon the dirty Jew? She wondered if they spat on the gates of her own house while their backs were turned. She couldn't fathom this hidden hatred. It didn't seem right that their churches had domes and steeples and stained glass and pictures framed in gold while everything Jewish was so shabby and sad. Even the Christian cemetery was a gardenful of flowers, while the Jewish cemetery where her grandfather was buried struck Sonia as a place of “total destruction, poverty, and the feeling of exile—that's what I felt.” Sonia was once walking through the Christian cemetery when her eyes fell on an inscription in Russian—
I'm already home, you'll come to visit soon.
She wondered what it could possibly mean. The Christians had a home right here on earth—why did they need another? In Rakov's
Jewish cemetery, the cemetery of exile, trees grew but not a single flower bloomed. When her father went there to pray for her grandfather's soul, he stood outside the rusted fence like a beggar. Why couldn't a Jew have sweetness and beauty too?

—

At the end of March 1918, around the same time that Rakov was absorbed into the Ober Ost, the Germans launched a massive push aimed at decisively ending the stalemate along the Western Front. The Americans had still barely gotten their noses bloodied in the war: now that the spring offensive had put the Germans within striking distance of Paris, the time was at hand for the Americans to show what they were worth. The First Division was chosen to mount the counterattack, and on April 6, 1918, Sonia's first cousin Hyman boarded one of the hated “40
hommes
, 8
chevaux
” train cars and headed up to the front line in Picardy. On the train ride across northern France, Hyman saw smooth round hills just greening up in the first flush of spring and blackened stumps of villages that had been shelled to oblivion. He saw women and children, sometimes waving, sometimes staring stonily; he saw men, but only old men or young ones who were bandaged or missing limbs. He saw church steeples and hedge-rows and delicate jade green fronds that by summer would explode in drifts of red and pink poppies. He detrained in a sector that looked a lot like the countryside around Rakov, only hillier. He scrambled to find places to sleep. He listened to the rumors of imminent attacks. He pined for letters—“I have not heard a word from anyone since I left the States,” he wrote his parents, “days have turned into weeks and weeks into months and even the months are turning and turning and still not a word from any one of you.” He pined for Anna. He became a crack marksman with a Springfield bolt-action rifle.

On the night of April 24, Company K took up its position about a mile from the village of Cantigny. Hyman, scoping out the terrain, understood at a glance what they were up against: the Germans had chosen an elevated position on the top of a chalk rise that commanded the countryside to the west. When it came time to fight, Company K would be slogging uphill without any cover into the teeth of German machine guns.

But first they had to survive the ceaseless barrage of German artillery.
As soon as the regiment dug in near Cantigny, huge volumes of high explosive shells and canisters of poison gas rained down on them from some ninety German battery positions. German airplanes whined overhead, spitting down rounds of machine-gun fire. “
The shelling did not come in bursts,” wrote one soldier, “but was continuous and apparently was meant to break down the morale of the new occupants of the sector.” Food carts were blown up or held back by the intense shelling, and the men counted themselves lucky to get one cold meal a day.
For a week they lived on “a slice of meat, a spoonful of sour mashed potatoes, a canteen of water, a canteen cup of coffee, a half-loaf of bread, a beautiful country and sometimes a sunny sky.”