The Family (28 page)

Vilna was still crowded with refugees, but otherwise life had improved so much under the Soviets that Doba quit raging about escape and shifted the lens of her anxiety to her parents. “Father is suffering,” she wrote Sonia in October. “He is alone, broken and has to live in the same house with good Gishe Sore. He sounds sad and worried. He always asks: When will I see you children? I cry and wonder when mother and father will be together again. She wrote to me that she misses father with every step she takes.” Doba let drop in the same letter that Shepseleh was finally working and bringing home four hundred litai (the Lithuanian currency) a month.

By the start of the new year, Chaim's brother and brother-in-law had found work in Volozhin as well. It didn't hurt that Kestlikh, the chief administrator who had ordered the marketplace cleared for the people's park, was himself a Jew. There was no question that Jews were rising under the new regime. Jewish school principals, Jewish mayors, Jewish officers commanding squads in the Red Army, Jews getting jobs while Poles were being packed off to Siberia.
Where would it end?
the local gentiles muttered through gritted teeth.

—

Vilna, January 20, 1941

Dear Sonia,

I have good news for you. A dear guest has arrived here—Mother!—may she stay well. I have not dared to imagine that this would happen. They kept promising to come but only now have the authorities allowed them. At long last we see each other. Mother has aged since we had last seen her. Soninka, I cannot tell you how glad I was to see her.

Mother has already been with us for two weeks, and I want her to stay a few more weeks, until after the Bar Mitzvah of Shimonkeh on February 11. But Mother does not want to stay that long because Etl is due to give birth. She suggests that she would stay if Etl and Mireleh could be persuaded to come here to Vilna and Etl could give birth here. I would be so happy finally to see them all.

Love, Doba

Beyle remained with Doba and Shepseleh and the boys for a month—long enough to celebrate Shimonkeh's bar mitzvah on February 11, 1941. “It was a fabulous visit and I enjoyed it very much,” she wrote her husband. “Doba came with Shimonkeh to meet me at the train station, and we both cried from happiness.” She couldn't stop marveling over her grandsons. Velveleh was a model child, sensitive, artistic; he played the violin, he drew beautifully, his teacher praised him as the best student in class. Shimonkeh, thin,
pale, and serious, was growing up to be a true Jewish scholar. He chanted his haftarah portion perfectly at his bar mitzvah service; he dutifully laid tefillin and prayed every day. Doba was proud to see her firstborn become a man, but she couldn't help worrying about what kind of future he would have under the godless new regime. When the talk turned to politics, they spoke in code and euphemisms. Hitler was referred to as Haman, the evil Persian councilor in the Book of Esther who plotted to kill the Jews, or “your stepfather.”
Do you think your stepfather will try to invade Palestine?
they asked when discussing the news of Rommel's German Afrika Korps massing against the British in North Africa. They hoped the boys did not understand. Doba and Beyle shed many tears over the interminable separation from Shalom Tvi. As always they talked about moving to Palestine or New York, or joining the families together in Rakov. But it was just talk and they knew it. The Big Ones weren't letting people out, and the English and the Americans weren't letting people in.
After the war, after the war
, they said again and again. God willing Haman would be defeated, his bones broken and scattered.

Beyle returned to Rakov in the middle of February. Etl had her baby two weeks later—another girl, born at home on March 1, 1941. The birth was easy, the baby was healthy, Etl was up and around in a couple of weeks. They agonized over the name and finally chose Doba Beyle, honoring sister, mother, and grandmother.

Their letters moved (slowly) around a three-noded circuit through winter and into the spring. It took weeks, sometimes months, for a letter to arrive, but that didn't deter them from pouring out their hearts to each other. They were a close, anxious, communicative family. The same letter sometimes made the complete circuit so that those in Vilna, Rakov, Kfar Vitkin, and New York could all enjoy it.

Etl chastised Sonia for failing to send any greetings to Khost in her last letter: “I wonder about it and am angry. Absolutely unpleasant to receive such a letter. Possibly you wrote without thinking. Next time think about it. Khost has said nothing, but it was very strange.”

But by the next letter, Etl had forgotten all about it. Five days before Passover, she snatched a few minutes to write to Sonia about the children and their preparations for the holiday: “Doba'leh [five weeks old] develops
well and it seems that she will be a pretty girl. She already knows how to scream. Mireleh is very happy with her sister, and watches that no one will take her. On Monday night it will be Pessach Eve. We have already baked matzot and we have good chickens. The weather is poor, cold and wet.”

Beyle added her own brief message at the end. She was suffering from a heart condition and was unable to get the fresh fruit that her doctor had prescribed. Her spirits were low; the weather depressed her; she could barely summon the strength to write even a few lines: “Sonikah, be careful about your health. I did not have enough wisdom to guard my health, and now I am sorry. I sit at home and can do nothing and the situation is difficult. When father was with me, he watched over me but those were different times. That is how it is. Everything is from God and from providence. I am asking God to make the weather warmer and then I will feel better. I want to unite with father and come to you, as we had planned. Yours, Mother.”

That letter was dated April 7, 1941.

On May 30, 1941, Doba sent Sonia a postcard from Vilna:

I want to go home for a few days and bring mother.
Have you heard from father? Mercy on him.
So alone in his old age. May there be peace and then
we could see each other.

And then the circuit was broken.

The Nazis entered Vilna on June 24, Volozhin on June 25, and Rakov on June 26. There were no more letters from Europe after that.

T
he summer solstice fell on Shabbat in 1941, which meant that in Volozhin devout Jews had to wait until nearly ten o'clock at night before they could kindle a spark or flip a switch.
Reuven Rogovin was such a Jew, and on Saturday, June 21, 1941, he duly sat through the long silent gloaming before turning on his radio. It was worth the wait. Louis Aragon, the celebrated French Communist writer, was visiting Moscow and a concert in his honor was broadcast from the Soviet capital that night. The reception in Volozhin was spotty, but good enough for Reuven to enjoy the music as brightness slowly drained from the sky. After the concert, the announcer read the news as usual—nothing of note. Reuven went to bed. The next morning, he didn't bother with the radio—nothing ever happened on Sunday. But bad news came the old-fashioned way, spread from mouth to mouth: Fayve Yosef Simernicki, a local socialist activist, had died of old age. Reuven joined the small procession to the old Jewish cemetery on a knobby hillside behind the yeshiva-turned-restaurant. It was on the way to the funeral that a friend shared with Reuven another piece of bad news, more startling than the death of an old man. “Molotov [the Soviet minister of foreign affairs] spoke on the radio,” the friend confided nervously. “The Germans attacked Russia. Their planes bombed Minsk, Kiev, Harkov, and other Soviet towns.”

When the funeral was over, Reuven hurried to the people's park in the former Volozhin marketplace. A great crowd had gathered.

I saw many of the Volozhin Jews crowded together. They argued in loud voices. They formed two camps: one was pro-Soviet and the other pro-German. Workers and artisans were sure that the Soviets would overcome the Germans swiftly. Merchants and dealers, to the contrary, were convinced that the Germans would win. They refused to listen to any of the refugees' tales about the German atrocities and their blood-curdling deeds against Jews. They considered the accounts of horrors as Soviet propaganda. Many Volozhin inhabitants witnessed the German 1918 invasion. They assumed that the 1941 Germans would not be in any great measure different from those in 1918. During the occupation of the First World War they [the Germans] did not hurt any Jews. So they said, “It is not reasonable that this cultivated and organized nation could change during one generation. Why would they hurt us now? The people working for the Bolsheviks, and in love with them, they should be afraid now, but not the common Jews.”

Similar conversations were taking place in Rakov and Vilna and every shtetl, town, and city in Russian-occupied Poland. Nobody, not even Stalin, had had an inkling that Hitler was planning to break his pact with the Soviet Union and launch one of the most massive invasions in history. No Polish or Lithuanian Jews went to bed on the night of Saturday, June 21, thinking that they had observed their last Shabbat in freedom. Etl sang Mireleh a song, bid her mother good night, gave baby Dobaleh a late feeding in the hope that she would sleep longer. Then she got in bed beside her husband. At 3:30
A.M.
on Sunday, while they slept, 3 million Nazi soldiers and two thousand Luftwaffe bombers sprang at them out of the west.

When the crisis came, the Soviet authorities proved to be useless. Scrambling to save their own necks, they left the local population utterly on their own in “bewilderment and panic.” In Volozhin there was a hasty conscription of able-bodied men under the age of fifty. A thousand reported for duty, but the Soviets could only process fifty men—and those were dispersed when a Luftwaffe squadron passed overhead while they mustered.
“The authorities were busy trying to evacuate the important persons to safe places deep inside Russia,” wrote Reuven Rogovin. “The Soviets did not tell us what to do, whether we should stay in our town with the German enemy approaching rapidly or whether we should escape to Russia. Each person had to decide for himself.”

Chaim's brother Yishayahu debated this question heatedly with his good friend Benjamin Shishka. Benjamin said he was going to evacuate with the Russians; Yishayahu tried to talk him out of it. Yishayahu was convinced he had nothing to fear from the Nazis: he was a Zionist, not a Bolshevik—let the Germans send him to Palestine if they didn't want him. Benjamin fled east with the Soviets. Yishayahu went home to his wife and children and waited.

Rakov, twenty-five miles east of Volozhin, had one more day to wait. The Soviets organized a hasty evacuation of the schoolteachers along with a handful of intellectuals and a dozen young men who had been conscripted into the Red Army. After bidding farewell to Etl, Beyle, and the children, Khost left with this group. They were headed to Minsk—east, away from the Germans.

—

Doba had been sixteen years old in the last months of the Great War when the Germans marched into Rakov. She remembered it perfectly. They were all afraid when the Germans entered the town, but it quickly became apparent that they had nothing to fear. The Germans stole nothing, burned nothing, insulted no one. They sang while they marched.

The German soldiers who entered Vilna on June 24, 1941, neither marched nor sang.

There had been bombing raids on the city on Sunday and again on Monday—but by dusk the droning of aircraft receded. As night fell, Lithuanians took to the streets and Jews shut themselves in their apartments. Doba and Shepseleh's front windows gave on Pivno Street, a major thoroughfare, and they stood looking out from behind the curtains at their Lithuanian neighbors milling around below. In the street, the sound of distant engines rose in a whining crescendo—the motorcycles of the German vanguard. The soldiers rode two to a bike—one driving, the other
training a machine gun at the windows of the buildings.
Next came tanks decorated like parade floats, with huge red banners stamped with black swastikas at the center, and then the artillery and finally an endless stream of trucks crammed with soldiers. The bystanders cheered and waved white cloths and shouted “
Valia
,
valia!
” (Long live). The Lithuanians joyously welcomed their Nazi “liberators.”

Pivno Street was silent and deserted when Doba, Shepseleh, and the boys awoke on Tuesday, June 24. The shopwindows were shuttered; even the arch under the Ostra Brama was empty. Everyone who had the will and the means to escape was heading east with the retreating Red Army. Everyone who remained in Vilna was now a subject—or prisoner—of the Third Reich.

—

“I don't know and cannot imagine what has happened with them,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia frantically. “Have they stayed where they were or have they escaped to Russia? Only one thing is clear to me, that wherever they are it is not good. May God allow that they be healthy and alive. For mother it would be better to remain in Rakov, also for Etl with the children and Doba with the children it would be better to remain, because whatever happens, they would be in their own beds, and they would not be starving. But for Shepseleh and Khost it would be better in Russia.”

Even half a world away, they knew each other's thoughts and anticipated each other's decisions. Doba and her children stayed put and slept in their own beds. Etl and her daughters did the same. Khost fled for the Soviet Union. Or tried to. In the event, the party of Rakov teachers and intellectuals was too slow, and the Germans caught up to them outside Minsk.
Khost and the others were taken prisoner and marched into Minsk with the entering Wehrmacht. He was the first of the family to disappear.

—

The Nazis had had two years of experience in the gutting of Jewish communities, and by the summer of 1941 they had gotten it down to a science. First they removed the leaders. A couple of random public killings instilled fear and enforced submission. Next the able-bodied men were targeted. The cowed survivors fell quickly into line.

But there was always room for improvement. Vilna, with its combustible mix of cultured Jews, anti-Semitic Lithuanians, and stateless Poles, became a kind of laboratory for Nazi terror and mass murder.

Shepseleh's job, whatever it had been under the Soviets, ended the day the Germans took control. Overnight, he joined the huge ranks of the Jewish unemployed: Jews who were fired from Vilna's hospitals, universities, and public offices; Jews whose businesses were shut down or appropriated or “Aryanized”; Jews who were replaced by Lithuanians. Shepseleh stayed inside with the boys—already Jewish men were being attacked or grabbed off the streets. On June 28, a dead body was found near their home on Pivno Street. Doba left the apartment only when they needed food. Jews were now forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, to converse with a gentile or set foot in a gentile home, or to appear on the city's major thoroughfares. Doba took her place in line outside the food shop, but the Lithuanian neighbors shoved her to the back. Gentile women who a week ago had smiled at her and stopped to ask after her sons now turned their backs. The Nazis had quickly set up a Lithuanian police force to do their dirty work, and Lithuanians signed on enthusiastically. The next time Doba went out for food,
the Lithuanian police were on hand to divide shoppers into two lines—one for Aryans, one for Jews. Doba spent the morning of July 4 sewing: starting that day
every Jew in Vilna had to wear two badges—one on the chest, one on the back—of yellow circles set in a square of white cloth, with the letter
J
stitched like a barbed hook at the center. Four days later the orders changed and they had to replace the patches with yellow armbands. So Doba had to sew four of those.

Or by that time, maybe only three.

—

Herman Kruk was a Warsaw-born journalist, library director, and bibliophile, who kept a meticulous diary of his experience in the war. Soon after the Nazis took Warsaw, Kruk escaped and made his way to Vilna, where he continued to write faithfully in the diary. Actually, what Kruk composed was less a diary than a modernist collage, a kind of verbal newsreel of official orders, newspaper headlines, rumors, overheard dialogue, eyewitness accounts of arrests, evacuations, random violence, orchestrated violence, vital statistics, laments, surrealist street theater, and intimate cries of
grief and fear. Kruk went prospecting in the mud of occupied Vilna and whatever he hauled out he wrote down. The diary survived and remains one of the most vividly textured accounts of daily life under Nazi occupation.

On July 3, 1941, Kruk wrote:

They Snatch Whole Streets

In the past two days, the snatching assumed a mass character. It is dangerous to leave your home.

P
EOPLE ARE DRIVEN OUT OF THEIR APARTMENTS

Most recent events: they come at night, drive the whole family out of the apartment, take the men away, and the rest remain with their belongings in the open courtyards. The apartment is sealed. And there isn't anybody to protest to.

—

At some point, very likely early in July, Shepseleh was snatched. The exact circumstances will never be known but the range of possibilities was narrow. The Nazis were ingenious but repetitive: the same scenario with only minor variations was executed thousands of times in those weeks. It could have happened in the courtyard of the Pivno Street apartment building in the middle of the night or in broad daylight on a city street. Shepseleh might have been hurrying down an alley with some precious object that he intended to trade for food or simply standing by the window when he was spotted and reported. The vise of a hand closed on his arm, the snout of a gun tapped at the small of his back, a shoulder shoved his shoulder, and they had him. Already there was a Yiddish word for them:
hapunes
—snatchers.

Shepseleh was forty-four years old that summer, thin, refined, healthy but not robust. What he wanted most in the world was to support his family. As the
hapunes
led him away they told him that they were taking him to work. “To work, to work,” they kept shouting, never saying where or at what.
Work was good
—or better than nothing; work was life for Doba and the boys. Shepseleh was put in a sealed courtyard or a holding pen at
Lukiszki Prison with an ample platoon of “co-workers”—fifty or sixty men in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, many, like him, wearing suits and ties, some carrying small suitcases or little leather kits for their razor, toothbrush, and comb. So they could stay tidy while they worked. They were marched out of Vilna to the south into the fields that pressed up close to the city. It was infernally hot and dry in Lithuania that summer, and in no time the men's shirts and the armpits of their jackets were wet through with sweat. Shepseleh was accustomed to spending summer afternoons sitting in the shade outside a dacha playing chess with Shimonkeh and Velveleh. It had been years, decades, since he had walked so far under the blazing sun. Finally the fields gave way to woods of pine, oak, and maple. The sun was broken by needles and leaves into flecks of gold. Birds trilled liquidly. Some of the men asked for water but the guards hurried them along. Shepseleh could make out the occasional peaked cottage roof between the tree trunks: they were in dacha country. Paneriai the Lithuanians called this forested summer colony—Ponery in Polish, Ponar in Yiddish. Shepseleh's family had never vacationed here but he had heard of it.
Halutzim
used to come to picnic amid the wildflowers. Ponar meant rest, quiet, trees echoing with birdsong. Why on earth were they being taken to work
here
?

—

From the diary of Herman Kruk:

W
HAT IS HAPPENING IN
P
ONAR?

On the tenth of this month [July], a rumor came to the Judenrat that people were shot in Ponar. The Judenrat didn't want to hear anything and considered it an unfounded rumor.

—

Ponar was a gift that the Soviets had unwittingly left behind for the Germans. In the last months of their occupation, the Soviets had started work on a massive fuel-storage facility adjacent to the existing rail line at Ponar. The plan was to excavate a series of pits in which to sink fuel tanks, but the Germans arrived before the project was completed. Nonetheless, one pit measuring sixty feet across and twenty feet deep was in place, a second
sixty-foot pit had been partially dug out, and five satellite pits had been started. One of the pits had a twenty-foot-deep trench going halfway around its perimeter. The Nazis understood at once that these immense empty cavities in the earth could be used for something other than fuel storage. The business of mass slaughter was just ramping up in the summer of 1941. Later it would become routine, but in the early days the planners and designers were still making it up as they went along. Ponar was an inspired bit of improvisation.