The Family (29 page)

Hitler and his henchmen deemed the business of genocide too vast, complex, and important to be handled by the Wehrmacht—the regular army. Instead, the SS (Schutzstaffel—“defense echelon”),
a paramilitary police force that reported directly to Hitler, was tapped to set up an elite unit called the Einsatzgruppen (“special duty groups” is the rough literal translation—“mobile death squads” captures their function). Tough Nazi loyalists were recruited to be Einsatzgruppen foot soldiers; its officers included a large proportion of lawyers, doctors, doctorates, even a few pastors. The four Einsatzgruppen (lettered
A
through
D
) were further broken down into subunits of Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos. Since the manpower of the entire Einsatzgruppen was only about 3,000 (each of the four main groups had between 600 and 1,000 men), efficiency and ingenuity were essential.

Einsatzkommando 9, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe B with about 160 men at its disposal, was assigned the task of “cleansing” Vilna, a city with 60,000 Jewish residents and an additional 20,000 Jewish refugees. It was a daunting task but Einsatzkommando 9's leader, SS-Obersturmbannführer
Dr. Alfred Filbert, a lawyer from Darmstadt, set about it energetically. Filbert put together
an auxiliary force of 150 men cherry-picked from the Lithuanian political police to assist with the work; he had lists drawn up of Vilna's Jews, with a separate category for wealthy families, intellectuals, and political activists; he ordered “snatchers” to target the leaders and able-bodied men first so as to leave the women, children, and elderly defenseless. And he had the good fortune of inheriting a ready-made mass murder site at Ponar. “The executions are to take place away from cities, villages, and traffic routes,” SS commander Heinrich Himmler specified. “
The graves are to be leveled to prevent them from becoming places of
pilgrimage. . . . Executions and places of burial are not to be made public.” Ponar was perfect on every score.

—

Ponar was supposed to be a secret but there were witnesses to what happened there that July. In the first week of the month, a couple of Wehrmacht drivers and a clerk saw a column of prisoners marching on the road and they followed them to the site. They noted that the men moving the column along with their carbines were not Nazis but Lithuanian civilians wearing armbands. The clerk reported that all the prisoners were men “
between about twenty and fifty. . . . These prisoners were really quite well-dressed and most of them were carrying hand luggage such as small suitcases.” When they reached the site, the prisoners were marched around the perimeter and into the semicircular trench that ringed one of the partially excavated pits. They were ordered to stand silently in the twenty-foot-deep trench, but not all complied. According to one of the drivers, “An elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment and said in good German, ‘What do you want from me? I'm only a poor composer.' The two civilians standing at the entrance started pummeling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit.”

Shepseleh was not one for making trouble. He took his place with the others in the trench. He waited for his pick and shovel to be issued. But no work tools were in evidence. Instead the men with the carbines ordered all of them to take off their shoes, jackets, and shirts. Jackets and shoes were to be piled on the side of the trench. Shirts were to be wrapped around their heads and faces. Anyone who was slow or reluctant got slammed with a truncheon or the butt of a rifle. The orders were loud, clear, quick but incomprehensible. Shepseleh was told to grasp the naked waist of the man in front of him. A pair of wet trembling hands grasped his waist from behind. Shepseleh and nine other men were marched like that out of the trench. The ten of them stood in a blind human chain at the lip of a pit intended for fuel tanks. The air exploded, bullets ripped into flesh, and Shepseleh fell into the pit. The witnesses differ on exactly how the firing was done. One said there were ten Lithuanian auxiliaries armed with rifles or handguns—one for each victim in the batch. Another swore the killing was done by one man with a light machine gun. When Shepseleh's body fell
into the pit, it landed on a pile of warm bodies. Some of them were still alive. A guard stationed above the pit used his pistol to finish off anyone who was moving.

“We stayed there for about one hour,” one of the witnesses said later, “and during this time some four to five groups were executed, so I myself watched the killing of about forty to fifty Jews.” The witnesses made no move to stop or protest what they saw, but their consciences were not entirely defunct. “
We all said to one another what on earth would happen if we lost the war and had to pay for all this?”

By the end of the day, Shepseleh's corpse was embedded in a layer of four hundred fresh corpses. Before calling it a night, the guards sprinkled them with a thin coating of sand and lime so the pit would be ready for the next day's slaughter. Witnesses recalled seeing the sand shift and heave for hours afterward.

Still, they all died eventually. By September, twenty thousand Jews—most of them men, like Shepseleh, in the prime of their lives—were missing from Vilna.

July 11, 1941

Dear Sonia and Chaim,

Thank God that we are all healthy and that it is quiet at your place. May God grant that it is always quiet there. Now, dear children, things have changed. Even though you write you received letters from mother and from Doba and that they are well—now only God knows what is happening to them. They are in the line of fire. May God protect them, that they should stay alive. I am very worried about them. I am sure they suffer hunger, but the most important thing is that they survive.

Live in goodness.

Your father,
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich

A man who fled east with the group of Rakov schoolteachers said that Khost was imprisoned in a German camp near Minsk. It might have been Stalag
342, the notorious prison in Maladzyechna where some thirty thousand Soviet citizens and soldiers died in the course of the war. According to his comrade, Khost escaped but was recaptured and killed by the Nazis. Date unknown.

—

July 27, 1941

Dear Children,

The atrocities described in the newspapers grip me with fear. There are nights in which I cannot fall asleep—I am troubled by such difficult thoughts. But I quickly change them to happier thoughts. I imagine the good and happy times when you came to visit us with Leahleh. Ah! How sweet and happy that time had been. And so I expel my thoughts and brace myself with hope for the good.

Your father who blesses and kisses you,
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich

—

July 28, 1941

Operational Situation Report USSR No. 36
Einsatzgruppe B:
Location: Minsk

1. Police Activity

Until further notice, about 200 persons are being liquidated daily in Minsk. . . . Actions were further carried out in Rakov, about 40 km from Minsk, and in the forest region north of the Minsk-Borissov- Krupka line. 58 Jews, Communist officials, and agents as well as soldiers in plain clothes suspected of having contact with partisan groups, were liquidated. In addition, 12 Jewesses who were proven to be agents for the KP during the Polish campaign were shot.

—

Etl was alone with her aged, ailing mother, a four-month-old baby, and a bright, curly haired, fatherless five-year-old when the first
Aktion
—roundup and slaughter—was carried out in Rakov.

In the initial weeks, the occupiers were careful to give reasons for why they killed. There were laws and they were simply enforcing them. If your patch was too small or the
J
was off center, if you set foot on the sidewalk, if you refused to hand over instantly whatever they demanded, you had broken the law and the penalty was death. If a German died, ten Jews must pay with their lives—or better yet a hundred. It was always the victims' fault—even the war itself was laid at the feet of the Jews. The Germans were not murderers; they had their reasons as to why the death penalty was necessary for every infraction of their law.

The “reason” given for the first
Aktion
in Rakov was that the local Jews had aided a group of Russian prisoners. The Germans had taken so many prisoners from the retreating Red Army that they had to press one of the Rakov synagogues into service as a military prison.
The prisoners, according to one account, were “close to death when they arrived—starving, naked, barefoot, beaten and abused.” They were so hungry that they ate the grass and flowers in the synagogue courtyard and stripped the bark off trees. Rakov Jews saw an opportunity to help while earning a bit of desperately needed money. Women cooked and baked and then smuggled the food into the synagogue compound and sold it to the prisoners. Security must have been lax, because with the help of the local Jews all the prisoners managed to escape and melt into the surrounding peasant villages. This was the pretext for the Nazi
Aktion
. Operatives of Einsatzgruppe B
rounded up fifty-five Rakov Jews (the exact number varies in different accounts), including women, children, and the elderly, took them into the forest about twenty-five miles from town, shot them, and dumped the bodies in a shallow grave.

A Rakov Jew named Moshe Pogolensky wrote about the aftermath:

At first, we did not know where to find them since we were not allowed to walk in the streets. A few days passed and some of the Christians said that they saw the bodies inside a hole in the ground. As soon as the rumors spread in the shtetl, three members of Chevra Kadisha,
the Jewish burial society, immediately volunteered to give them a proper burial, despite the perils involved in doing such a mitzvah. Among them, Israel Yitzhak, the smith, Hirshska, the ingle, and Yakov Cholsky, volunteered to bring them to Jewish burial. They secretly went to the killing field, removed the cover of the hole in which the bodies were thrown, quietly took all the victims they found, and put them on buggies and took them to the Jewish cemetery for burial. Sadly, the Germans found out about this, discovering the three men. They immediately took the men away and executed them and their remains were never found.

Fear and darkness spread amongst the Jewish population in town. Each person tried to find a hiding place until the terrors would pass. Not one Jew was seen outside. Everyone closed himself in his home with his shutters shut and there was a deathly quiet surrounding the town.

Etl sealed up the house on Kashalna Street and took charge of her family. She knew how to sew; she was experienced in buying and selling from years of working in her parents' leather business; she was smart and resourceful and desperate. She was sure—they all were sure—that “the terrors would pass.” She just had to keep her family alive long enough to greet that day. She probably had some leather hides or garments stashed away that she could sell or barter. There might have been a bit of cash. Many Jewish women were forced to work for the German occupiers, cleaning their homes, washing and sewing their clothes, scrubbing the streets, pushing papers in their offices, and Etl may have been among them. She did whatever it took to survive. Etl was, or had been, on good terms with the gentile neighbors, and she was fortunate that the gentiles in Rakov were mostly Belarusians, not Lithuanians. The Nazis brought out the worst in everyone, but the Lithuanians were among the more eager collaborators, and their worst was worse than the Belarusians'.

Etl and her mother and children spent the scorching summer of 1941 shuttered in their house near the Catholic church. What happened outside seeped in through the cracks like a foul odor. The Nazis set up a Judenrat—the council that mediated between the occupiers and the prisoners. Though no one wanted to serve, the Germans threatened more killings if four men
did not step forward. An unwilling council was formed. Their main task was serving as bagmen for the plunder that the Germans demanded—clothing, jewelry, money, even eggs and chickens. The Jews were filthy vermin but evidently their possessions escaped the taint.
One day the Germans announced that the bodies that had been retrieved by the slain members of the Chevra Kadisha could be buried in the Jewish cemetery after all: graves were dug amid the stunted pines, prayers were chanted hastily, the dead were consigned to the hands of the Almighty. Then fourteen more Jews disappeared, murdered and dumped where no one would ever find them. There were stories of “good” Germans who turned a blind eye and sadistic Germans who went out of their way to humiliate, torture, draw blood.
Some of the tortures could have been concocted only by madmen. Devout old Jewish men were lined up in the marketplace and forced to yank out each other's beards. The inmates of insane asylums were turned loose in synagogues to taunt and beat and crush the bones of observant Jews. The Judenrat of a nearby shtetl was given twenty minutes to come up with ten thousand cigarettes. There was no logic, no motive, no apparent pattern, except that more and more Jews died.

Still Etl heard nothing from her father and sisters, nor they from her.

—

In Vilna, your fate depended on what symbol was inked on your documents. A certificate typed in German and stamped with a swastika, proof that you worked for the Nazis, was usually enough to persuade a snatcher to let you go. The horse stamp used by the Lithuanian administration had less authority. The various rubber stamps applied by private employers permitted you to work but rarely to escape if a snatcher grabbed you.
People were “driven out of their minds” trying to figure out which stamp was the safest and how to get their hands on the “iron document” issued by the Nazis. But often it made no difference. Plenty of snatchers ripped up your documents no matter what stamp they bore, threw the scraps in your face, and hauled you off to Ponar. Without a stamp you starved. With a stamp—horse, swastika, whatever—you worked and you prayed for luck.

Doba, widowed, though she would never know how or when, had no certificate of any sort. No job. No source of income. No shred of security.
What she and the boys lived on is a mystery—probably they eked out the crumbs of the handouts that used to come from America.

Doba would never let her children starve but there was nothing she could do to keep their childhood alive. Shimonkeh and Velveleh's days of riding bikes in the country and playing chess with their father were over. Velveleh was not yet ten years old, still an innocent—but Shimonkeh was already a man. Hadn't they all told him so over and over again six months earlier, when they celebrated his bar mitzvah at the Taharat Hakodesh synagogue (now the Germans' medical warehouse)? But what did it mean to be a man, a Jewish man, in Vilna in the summer of 1941? Most of the men had been snatched—those who remained clung to life by the filament of work. Some boys no older than Shimonkeh lied about their age and got themselves hired in the peat bogs outside the city. They toiled half naked all day, every day, from dawn to dark, but when they returned home at night they had a few coins and sometimes vegetables or eggs they had bought in the villages.
Some boys put on their father's work clothes and hired out as painters, carpenters, electricians: they knew nothing of such trades, but they learned as they went. Shimonkeh was not a strong boy. His frame was awkward, his limbs long and scrawny; his ears belled out on either side of a narrow face; his sandy hair was barely longer than stubble; his hearing may have been permanently impaired by his childhood bout with scarlet fever. But intelligence can be a kind of strength. In the shuttered city, Shimonkeh registered whatever passed before him with the fierce, abashed regard of a thirteen-year-old prisoner. “
The children did not complain,” wrote one Vilna father of that season. “They understood they had to stay inside. . . . They did not ask questions or demand an explanation. The opposite happened—they protected and guarded us, the grown-ups.”

Shimonkeh heard his mother's sobs. He heard the screaming in the courtyards at night. He was forbidden to go outside but the agony of the city reached him through the walls. His father had disappeared. He was the man of the family now. Did that mean he would disappear next?

Shimonkeh was born a year before Anne Frank and a year after Yitzhak Rudashevski, a Vilna boy who kept a diary of the German occupation. If Shimonkeh wrote down what he saw and felt that summer, the pages have
been lost. But the imprisoned children had a kind of mute underground. On the spot they invented their own codes, accommodations, wild fantasies, and invisible, infinitesimal survival strategies. Had he been able to read Anne Frank's diary, Shimonkeh would have understood implicitly:

Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.