The Family (30 page)

F
or the parents, every new Nazi decree or personnel shuffle rekindled hope. The children, instinctively, knew better. At the end of July, Vilna got a new administration—district commissioner Hans Hingst and his deputy for Jewish affairs Franz Murer. Murer, a barber in his former life, had graduated from Hitler Youth to become a die-hard Nazi. Soon they were calling him Mem—the Angel of Death. The Angel wasted no time.
On August 6 he told the Judenrat that they had twenty-four hours to deliver 5 million rubles into his hands—with the usual
or else
. But Murer was a small-time chiseler compared with his boss. Hingst had big plans that required time and finesse to bring to fruition. On the last day of August, he judged that conditions were ripe for what became known as the Great Provocation. In the afternoon, two armed Lithuanians entered a building on Glezer Street in the old Jewish section; outside, the street was crowded with German soldiers queuing up for a movie. The Lithuanian intruders fired off a couple of rounds and then dashed into the street, hollering to the soldiers that there were Jews inside the apartment building shooting at them. This was Hingst's pretext for a mass
Aktion
. On Monday, September 1, “The city seethed all day,” wrote Kruk. Rumors swirled that in the ancient Jewish quarter, the residents of every building were being “driven out.” Not just the men—everyone. “
Lines of people march on both sides of
the street,” wrote Kruk, “winding behind one another—all with yellow patches. . . . Those who saw it describe dreadful scenes. The wailing reached the sky. The young were leading the old. They were dragging sick people and children. There were dozens of well-known and distinguished Vilna Jews in the groups. Those who saw it wept with them.”
In the course of two days Hingst evicted some 3,700 Jews from the congested heart of Jewish Vilna and crammed them into Lukiszki Prison. From there, they were dispatched in groups to Ponar—men on foot, women in trucks.
The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers by gender and age—864 men, 2,019 women, 817 Jewish children. By Friday, September 5,
wild new rumors congealed around a single word.
Ghetto!
The purpose of the Great Provocation became clear: the old Jewish quarter had been emptied so that Jews from other parts of the city could be confined there. Vilna's 40,000 remaining Jews had a single day to relocate. The Germans had deliberately fixed on Shabbat as the moving day so as to inflict maximum pain.

Kruk, September 5, 1941:

Better stop thinking. But how?

It is 11:30 at night. Everyone is awake. My house borders the district of the Fourth Precinct. I listen to the nocturnal silence. Maybe I'll hear something. Neighbors go from door to door and don't know what to do with themselves.

Maybe pack? Pack what?

In the street, I hear shots.

My friends, where are you? What's happening to you now? Will I ever see you again?

The hours drag on like years!

Doba, like every other Jew still alive in Vilna, had a few hours to sort and bundle up the fragments of her life. On the morning of Saturday, September 6, she dressed herself and the boys in as many layers as she could zip and button around them so there would be less to drag with them
through the streets. A column of Lithuanian police and civilian guards stormed their building, forcing open doors, shouting at the residents to be quick, beating and herding them. The halls and stairwells filled with screams and sobs and the shuffle of shoes on stone. Doba, Shimonkeh, and Velveleh staggered under their burdens—Doba knew that every shirt, every dish, every piece of silverware meant another loaf of bread so she tried to haul away as much as possible. The boys blinked and squinted when they emerged into the sunlight they had barely seen since June. The streets were “
a picture of the Middle Ages,” wrote one of the herded, “a gray black mass of people . . . harnessed to large bundles.” Lithuanian guards stood by to hustle and club them; bystanders heckled and jeered and robbed the unwary. “
A bundle was suddenly stolen from a neighbor,” wrote fourteen-year-old Yitzhak Rudashevski, who went to the ghetto that day with the rest of them. “The woman stands in despair among her bundles and does not know how to cope with them, weeps and wrings her hands. Suddenly everything around me begins to weep. Everything weeps.”

The Germans had ordered the gentile populace not to assist the Jews in any way—but a few kind souls endangered their own lives by lifting a pack onto the back of a tottering old woman or hiding the valuables of a neighbor. Doba and her sons took their places in the black parade. “
The Lithuanians drive us on, do not let us rest,” wrote Rudashevski. “I think of nothing: not what I am losing, not what I have just lost, not what is in store for me. I do not see the streets before me, the people passing by. I only feel that I am terribly weary, I feel that an insult, a hurt is burning inside me. Here is the ghetto gate. I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. I have been cut off from all that is dear and precious to me.” Doba and the boys marched without knowing where they were going; they had no idea that ahead of them the stream was being forced into three channels: one drained into the tiny crabbed precinct of the old Jewish quarter, abutting the Great Synagogue; one into the half dozen dismal blocks anchored by the Judenrat headquarters on Strashuno Street; the overflow filled Lukiszki Prison. Doba and her two boys ended up in the Strashuno Street ghetto—the Large Ghetto, as it became known. They were comparatively lucky.
Anyone who could not be crammed into the Large Ghetto spent Saturday night penned
outside on Lidski Lane; on Sunday they were all carted off to Lukiszki Prison and from there to Ponar.

Those who got in first, or had the muscle or gumption, seized the better flats and barred the doors. Doba was in no shape to hustle or grab. She and the boys may have spent the first night sleeping in a courtyard or in the gutter—many did. The black parade continued long after dark; the angry rustle of voices and the crack of rubber and wood on bone never stopped. Doba and her sons trudged up and down a thousand filthy steps, knocked on a hundred doors, shoved their way into other shoving bodies. At some point, after God knows what epic ordeal, they ended up at Strashuno 15, a few doors down from the Judenrat on the main street of the Large Ghetto. It was a building of three floors, maybe three apartments to a floor. Eventually, Doba, Shimonkeh, Velveleh, Doba's brother-in-law Yitzchak Senitski, and 437 other Jews lived in that one small building.

“What can I say,” Doba had written Sonia in happier times, “Shimonkeh is the greatest joy of my life.” In the ghetto, the dregs of that joy turned, like poison gas, into torment.

I
tel had entered her queenly phase. She was fifty-five years old in 1941, rich, polished, tireless, infallible. Her business had never been more successful, her appearance more striking, her manner more imposing. She dressed and groomed with exquisite taste. Her pearls were large and numerous. Her life was full. Her happiness apparently secure.
Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses in the world, employed 1,450 people; yearly sales of bras and girdles topped 4.5 million. The Bayonne plant produced more bras than any other manufacturing facility anywhere on the globe. Bea, a graduate of Barnard College, had married a tall manly doctor two years earlier and was working her way up in the company. It pleased Itel no end that Maiden Form would remain under family control, a female dynasty, passed from mother to daughter. In regal fashion, Itel kept strict guard over her privacy while tossing the press glamorous tidbits about her tastes and temperament. She was a voracious reader; she and William were regulars at the theater and the opera. She loved to dance—at corporate bashes, the tuxedoed young execs jockeyed to partner her. Her travels, of course, had been trimmed back because of the war, but she still made the most of every hour on the road. “She could romance a customer out of his shoes and socks,” remarked one of the company's rising young men. “In market week, she would float around the showrooms very
gracefully. . . . She made it her business to say hello to every single person who came in.” Itel herself was a little more blunt about it: “I warm up sales. Then I let the salesman take the order.”

With a kingdom so large and prosperous, it was time to move to a palace.
Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion on a private beach in a swanky enclave on Long Island's North Shore. The previous owner, a wealthy Broadway impresario, had been terrified of a house fire, so there was lots of bright shiny tile everywhere. Salvatore, the Italian gardener, kept the grounds immaculate, tended the flower beds, and rolled the clay tennis court. A Norwegian cook named Anna prepared their meals. There was a ballroom, a library, a studio where William could sculpt, servants' quarters, a boathouse. Every workday Vincent, the chauffeur, drove Itel and William into Manhattan. In the summer, William fished from his own jetty. The Rosenthals were not invited to the parties of their rich WASP neighbors, but they had plenty of society of their own. Though Itel had never been especially family minded, except with her own immediate family, she saw that every relative got at least one invitation to Bayville. The mansion on the Sound hosted many a sweet sixteen, wedding, birthday bash, boating weekend, and bridge evening.

Had she cared to, Itel could have stepped in as head of the family after Abraham's death the previous year. She was the oldest, the richest, the most worldly, the most respected of the siblings. But the role of matriarch was not in her repertoire. She once told an interviewer who asked about her background that her
father was “a wonderful man, intellectually gifted, wrapped up in his dogma. My mother was very short, a good business- woman.” So much for family heritage. Without a leader, without strong ties to the past, without Judaism to bind them together (only Sam and Ethel among the six siblings had an appetite for the faith of their father), the American family splintered. Itel and Harry grew closer, and Harry and William spent a lot of time together as well. Both were members of the Jewish Club—an uptown venue for chess, cards, cigar smoking, and high-minded lectures founded by well-heeled Eastern European Jewish men who had been excluded from the echt German Jewish Harmonie Club (Hyman joined later in the decade). Ethel and Sam, still upstairs-downstairs neighbors in the same tight little house in the Bronx, held the fort and kept
the faith. They attended their father's shul every Shabbat, their kitchens were kosher, they celebrated all the major holidays, but under their breath they both muttered about being second-class citizens. Ethel still shared the upstairs apartment with her mother and Shalom Tvi, who still slept on the foldout bed in the living room.

Two years had passed since Shalom Tvi had come to the United States to visit his brother. Now the brother was dead, Shalom Tvi's country no longer existed, his family was in the hands of mass murderers, and he was a lost soul sojourning in a strange land.

Itel and William had never been frequent visitors to the Bronx, and with Abraham gone the treks to Andrews Avenue tapered off. Shalom Tvi couldn't drive and wouldn't travel on Shabbat so he rarely made it out to Bayville. Still, there was some contact between uncle and niece during these years. William had spent time with Shalom Tvi and his family during his visit to Rakov in 1937, and William's name—and wealth—were invoked frequently in the letters Doba and Shalom Tvi exchanged during the early months of the war. Much hope was pinned on the Rosenthals' money and power. They did in fact give generously and at one point consulted with an attorney about helping family members emigrate. But once the Nazis took Rakov and Vilna, what more could they do? What could anyone do? Itel and William kept abreast of the news in both English and Yiddish, so they saw the
first accounts of the atrocities and mass murders that appeared in the Yiddish dailies that summer. They were regular
New York Times
readers as well, but what little the
Times
saw fit to publish about the Nazi killings was buried, downplayed, or treated with skepticism. Itel knew that her uncle's family was in peril—they all knew—but they all kept silent about it. What was there to say? After the death of Lewis, Itel had locked the door on her inner life: anyone who dared even to knock was dismissed with silent rage. She and the rest of the family accorded Shalom Tvi the same severe respect. His situation was unbearable—why make it worse by intruding? “We never talked about the Nazis,” recalled one of Sam's sons. “We never talked about the plight of Uncle's family.” They might have imagined but they didn't discuss the anguish he was pouring out in his letters to Sonia—the sleepless nights, the numbed bewilderment, the hollow prayers, the ray of hope he refused to extinguish. Shalom Tvi lived among them like
the shadow of death. They loved him and they took care of him and they honored him and treated him with dignity, but they could not bear to look him in the eyes and ask him what was in his heart. They drove him to and from work. They took him to the shore in the summer so he could swim in the ocean. They gave him clothes and cast-off toys to send to Sonia. They read the news. But like the editors of the American papers, they couldn't or wouldn't face or believe the enormity of what was happening to his loved ones.

In Vilna, a few souls survived the hail of bullets and the cascade of corpses at Ponar and dragged themselves, bloody and wild eyed, back to the ghetto. When they told what had happened, no one believed. In New York in September of 1941, no one had even heard of Ponar.

—

At 8:50 in the morning on September 30, William's brother Moe stopped what he was doing at the Maiden Form plant in Bayonne and bent his ears to a strange sound. Instead of the soothing motorized hum of needles punching thread through satin and lace, Moe heard the ceiling groan with the scrape of chairs and the clatter of shoes—thousands of shoes pounding on the floor above and thundering down the stairwell. He immediately switched on the public-address system in his office and began bellowing at the top of his voice: “I'M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO. MY PLEA IS FOR INFORMATION. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT.” But it was already too late. The factory's 1,100 workers—nearly all of them female—were piling into the street, blocking traffic, laughing, shouting slogans, and singing for all they were worth: “Moe, Moe, a thousand times no.” “Gaiety and abandon rare in labor circles” filled the air outside the factory. The police were summoned to open a lane for traffic. But the women didn't care. They were giddy, irrepressible. The fact that it was the eve of Yom Kippur made no difference. Most of them were Polish or Italian anyway. They had had enough—enough of management from Moe Rosenthal down, enough of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union that had ceased to represent their interests. They were going out on strike, 1,100 strong, against the Rosenthals, against ILGWU president David Dubinsky, against union dues that they paid in but never saw any benefit from, against the spiraling cost of living that
chipped away at their wages, against the chintzy piecework pay scale and the long hours and piddling vacations. The strikers decided to sever ties with the ILGWU and start their own breakaway union, the Brassiere Workers Union. “[Ours] is a fight by 1,100 average Americans of Bayonne, against oppressive, out-of-town dictators,” declared Michael Vatalaro, president of the new ad hoc union.

“The strike is not authorized and is absolutely an outlaw strike, started by some Communists,” shot back ILGWU representative Israel Horowitz.

Outlaw or not, the strike shut down the Bayonne factory and spread to the Maiden Form plants at Jersey City and Perth Amboy. Five weeks passed before the two sides came together—a fiscal eternity that gouged a chasm into the company balance sheet, not to mention the household budgets of struggling workers. There had been strikes before at Maiden Form but never one so rancorous, so prolonged and difficult to settle. In the end, after the usual rounds of threats, bluffs, offers, huffy refusals, and a stormy meeting in Bayonne's Knights of Columbus hall, at which seven hundred indignant Maiden Form employees booed Dubinsky off the stage, an agreement was reached.
Clippers and operators working on the piecework scale received a guaranteed minimum increase of one dollar and fifty cents a week; those being paid by the hour got a raise of two dollars a week, with a third dollar dangled after four months “subject to negotiations and arbitration.”

Neither Itel's nor William's name appeared in any of the newspaper stories about the strike, but of course they were intimately involved in everything. Strikes always flummoxed them—as old Bundists they felt they should be immune from labor unrest, but somehow the clippers and operators didn't see it that way. The breakaway Brassiere Workers Union issued a broadside laying out the sins of management in enraged uppercase type: “NO WAGE INCREASE AT MAIDEN FORM WAS EVER WON WITHOUT THE THREAT OF A STRIKE! AND FOR FOUR YEARS A GREAT MANY OF THE WORKERS HAVE HAD NO INCREASE AT ALL.” The Rosenthals may have voted for Eugene Debs, but when it came to their own company it was business as usual.

Itel and William had long since ceased to practice Judaism, but the fact that this agonizing five-week strike had started on the eve of Yom Kippur was not lost on them. No Jew, no matter how lapsed, passes the Day of
Atonement without a twinge. Itel and William had both grown up in Orthodox households. As children they had attended services in the Rakov synagogue with their parents and many siblings. On Kol Nidre night, the eve of Yom Kippur, they had seen their fathers stand before the ark when the Torah scrolls were removed and raised before the congregation. They had listened to the cantor chant the ancient Aramaic text of the Kol Nidre that sounds like a sobbing, heartbreaking aria but is in fact a declaration of legal obligations.

And all the congregation of the children of Israel shall be forgiven, and the stranger that sojourneth among them; for all the people were in error. . 
. . O pardon the iniquities of this people, according to Thy abundant mercy, just as Thou forgave this people ever since they left Egypt.

That was how Yom Kippur began every year of Itel and William's childhoods in Rakov, and that was how it began every year since the two of them had fled Rakov for America, one after the other, in 1905. But Yom Kippur of 1941 was different. There was no prayer or chanting on the last Day of Atonement in Rakov that year. There was iniquity but no mercy. Whether there was pardon for what happened in Rakov on October 1, 1941, only God knows.

—

In a family of visionaries, rebels, pioneers, paranoids, sages, sighers, egotists, and dreamers, Etl was a pragmatist. Before the match with Khost, her health had been poor, her tongue sharp, her temper short—but marriage and motherhood sweetened her disposition and strengthened her constitution. She had never moved away from the place where she was born, but she felt no urge to leave. After Shalom Tvi went to New York, she took charge of the house, the family's money, and her ailing mother without a whisper of complaint. Even the war did not faze her. They still had their house, their bit of land. Revolution had toppled the hated tsar; the Kaiser's army had come and gone during the last war; the Poles had come and gone after the war; the Soviets had come and gone during the present war. One day this war would end and the Nazis would go too. And when that day came, Etl and her family would still be in Rakov to observe the Sabbath, to bake
matzo at Passover, to welcome the New Year joyously and atone for their sins on Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur of 1941 put an end to such hopes. That Yom Kippur, Etl and her mother and daughters did not go to shul to murmur Hebrew prayers through the drowsy hungry afternoon and gossip with the other women. Instead they were hounded from their home and herded to the Rakov marketplace.
A survivor named Uri Finkel left an account of what they were forced to endure that day:

On Yom Kippur of 1941 the fascist murderers drove the entire Jewish population of Rakov to the marketplace. They made them bring all the books, Jewish, Hebrew, religious and worldly, along with the sefer-toyres [Torah scrolls], and burned them. For an entire day the Jewish cultural treasures of the shtetl burned. The Jews had to stand over the bonfire, dance, jump and sing; those who could not do this were shot on the spot.

The fire and smoke from the burning were visible far from the shtetl. In one day no fewer than 16,000 books burned and a couple of hundred sefer-toyres, among them neviim [writings of the prophets] and megilles [scrolls with the Purim story]. . . . In the auto-da-fe of Jewish books were also burned two Jewish men and a Jewish woman, whom the fascists and the police threw into the fire.