The Family (33 page)

Sam and Gladys no longer saw Shalom Tvi every day, because they had moved out of the Andrews Avenue duplex into a place of their own a few blocks away, on the corner of Andrews and West 179th Street. They weren't greenhorns anymore—why should they all live crammed together in one small house? Harry and Hyman had apartments in Manhattan, and Itel had her own private palace on Long Island Sound. It was time for Sam and Gladys to spread out a little. Even with wartime shortages and austerity, they could afford it.

Sam remained loyal to his father's shul and he davened there with
Shalom Tvi every Friday night and Saturday morning. Sam had no memories of his cousins in Palestine—Chaim had been a toddler and Sonia not even born when he left Rakov—but Shalom Tvi showed him pictures: two sunburned pioneers in shorts and sundress, a cinder-block farmhouse, a citrus grove, two adorable sabra children. As for Doba and Etl and their husbands and children, Shalom Tvi didn't bring them up and Sam didn't ask.

—

Shalom Tvi was in the habit of strolling over to his sister Leah Golda's house every Shabbat, so inevitably he saw a good deal of Rose, the younger daughter of Leah Golda and the late Shmuel Rubenstein.
Twenty-three years old in 1942, Rose was a pretty, articulate, thoroughly Americanized girl who lived at home with her mother and kept a diary during the war. Rose recounted gathering around the radio every night to listen to “Hitler's raucous, roaring voice, Roosevelt's paternalistic, calming voice, and Churchill's literary, pedantic tones.” She wrote about installing blackout shades in the windows of their Bronx home, about cars driving at night with no headlights through eerily dark city streets in which “a cigarette light showed for miles.” The air-raid siren was tested every Thursday at 11
A.M
. In the summer, her family went to Swan Lake in the Catskills, and occasionally Itel and William sent their chauffeured car around to take Rose to the Saturday night shows at the President Hotel (a Borscht Belt fixture). “We were the poor relations. Itel and William never wanted to see my brother Louis—he reminded them of their lost son, Lewis.”

At the start of the war, Rose had been working for A. Cohen & Sons (six days a week, 9
A.M.
to 6
P.M.
for fourteen dollars a week—a two-dollar premium over the normal wage because she was family), but when her uncle Abraham died she decided to quit and take a job with a rich enterprising refugee. She was eager to strike out on her own. After her sister, Betty, got married and her brother Sol was drafted, Rose was left alone with her mother. She didn't like to complain, but it was hard to be stuck in the Bronx caring for an ailing widow while New York was “teeming with servicemen of every allied nation.”

Rose's diary has a photo of her uncle Shalom Tvi taken at Betty's wedding, in 1942. He sits with his hands clasped, wearing a
kippah
and tie, handsome, dignified; his mouth curves up slightly in a dim smile, a smile
of obligation. Rose wrote under the photo, “Shalom Tvi came here for a visit and couldn't go back because of the war.” Nothing else.

But there was something else. Seventy years later, when pressed to speak about the war years, Rose came out with a memory that she had long kept to herself: “Shalom Tvi walked over to our house every Saturday. One Saturday when he came, my mother was bedridden and I was alone with him. He got very amorous and grabbed me on his lap and felt me all over. I had to fight him off.” Rose couldn't recall exactly when this happened but she was sure it was after Shalom Tvi's family had been killed by the Nazis. It had never happened before and, since Rose told her family, her brothers made sure it never happened again. As soon as she disclosed the incident, Rose regretted it. “He was a nice man but he had this terribly devastating event in his life. I shouldn't have said anything.”

T
he killing had stopped. The old, sick, and disabled, the strong, healthy, and male—and plenty of others besides—were already dead. The small ghetto had been disposed of at Ponar the previous October (1941) and
another nine thousand souls had been slaughtered in the Gelbschein
Aktion
of November 3, 1941. A few minor roundups continued into December and then, at the start of 1942, the killing in Vilna stopped. Vilna ghetto was now classified a “working ghetto,” a euphemism for labor prison barracks—and why would the Germans kill off their workers when the wages were so low and the incentives to work so powerful? Yellow permits (“
the blood-drenched delusion,” one ghetto prisoner called them) were handed out to the fortunate, the well connected, the determined and resourceful: permit holders left the ghetto every day at dawn and returned at dark, sometimes with a bit of food they had scrounged.
Doba had no permit. “They had nothing, nothing,” said Tsipora Alperovich, a cousin (on Beyle's side) who lived in the ghetto with her mother. “Doba was very poor. Sometimes my mother gave her some soup. Doba had to battle every day for her life.” Tsipora was one of the lucky ones: though she was only fourteen, she had a job at a factory making German military uniforms. She and her mother survived on beans and horse meat.

Doba and the boys would have starved were it not for Shepseleh's older
brother Yitzchak Senitski. Before the war, Yitzchak, a prominent educator, had run Vilna's Dinezon School and directed sports programs and field trips for the city's Jewish youth. After Shepseleh disappeared, Yitzchak took Doba and her sons under his wing.
He was a good man, a confirmed bachelor in his late forties, brave, kindhearted, respected in the community—the ideal uncle. According to the May 1942 census of 15,507 ghetto prisoners, Doba, her two sons, and Yitzchak lived together at Strashuno 15—an address they shared with 437 other people. Tsipora, who lived in a different building in the ghetto, recalled that the four of them divided a small room with another family:
the average “living space” in Vilna ghetto was about eighteen square feet per person. Yitzchak kept the family going on what he earned as a teacher in the ghetto school.

Yes, there were schools in the ghetto. After the initial days of tumult and murder, schools were opened. Yitzchak played an active role as organizer and chair of the Teachers' Association. Shimonkeh was fourteen in 1942; Velveleh was ten. Going to school was the most wonderful thing that had happened since they were shut in the ghetto the previous September.

“The opening of the ghetto school was fantastic for us,” recalls Tsipora. “We sat on the floor to write. We had a club. We sang. We put on plays. The Song of the Partisans became our anthem—
As the hour that we longed for is so near, Our steps beat out the message—‘We are here!'
For us school was just life.” Tsipora and Shimonkeh, who were the exact same age, sat on the floor in the same classroom. They sang the same songs, wandered through the same crowded courtyards, looked at the sky over the same thirty-foot-high wooden walls. Seventy years later, Tsipora would remember Shimonkeh as a tall skinny boy, nice-looking, quiet. She remembered him playing with a yoyo.
She remembered that he suffered serious hearing loss.

No memories survive of Velveleh. In the last photos taken before the Nazi occupation he was lengthening out, shedding his baby fat, and losing the angelic roundness of his face. The bombing at the start of the war made him nervous. He was musical. No one in the family ever breathed a word of complaint about him. Tsipora can bring back nothing about him, and what she recalls of Shimonkeh—the yoyo, the deafness, the long bony physique—reveals nothing of his inner life. The mind and spirit of a
fatherless youth on the cusp of adolescence can only be surmised from fragments left by other prisoners.

This much is clear. At fourteen, Shimonkeh was old enough to bristle at the sight of the leather-jacketed Jewish police that the Nazis appointed to cow and club and rob their own kind. He was old enough to burn with desire, to fall in love, to ache for beauty and dream of violent, heroic revenge. He was old enough to take part in the culture of his city and to feel proud that, as one writer put it, “
the insanely wild conditions of life did not break the Jewish creative spirit.” A few doors down the street was the ghetto library—always thronged. Librarian Herman Kruk (the escaped Warsaw journalist and diarist) threw a party for the community when the one thousandth book circulated. “
The book unites us with the future, the book unites us with the world,” wrote Yitzhak Rudashevski, the teenage ghetto diarist, on the day of the celebration. Bundists protested “No theater in a graveyard!” when a ghetto theater was organized early in 1942, but soon the variety shows, musicals, and satirical sketches were playing to full houses. Shimonkeh had learned to play chess from his father—maybe he played in one of the ghetto chess competitions; maybe he won. A nearby courtyard (everything was nearby) served as a cramped sports stadium. A youth group collected ghetto folklore—“dozens of sayings, ghetto curses and ghetto blessings are created before our eyes . . . the ghetto folklore is . . . cultivated in blood,” wrote Yitzhak Rudashevski in his diary. His youth club organized a committee to record the history of Courtyard Shavler 4: they interviewed residents, analyzed the responses, and concluded that “everywhere [there was]
the same sad ghetto song: property, certificates, hide-outs, the abandonment of things, the abandonment of relatives.” Shimonkeh was old enough to feel the agony of abandonment; old enough to mourn the death of a beloved teacher, to see the poetry in snow drifting against ruined walls, to breathe the melancholy of autumn nights when workers hurried through the streets with their shoulders hunched and the child vendors stood over trays of moldy potatoes and a couple of cigarettes scrounged from God knows where. “
Frozen, carrying the little stands on their backs, they push toward the tiny corner that is lit up,” wrote Rudashevski of the child vendors. “They stand thus until they hear the whistle and then they disappear with their trays into the black little ghetto streets.”
Maybe Shimonkeh stood by a tray in the cold to sell whatever his mother had left.

There were Bundists and Zionists in Shimonkeh's family. At fourteen his uncle Chaim had already been enrolled in HeHalutz. His aunt Itel had been inhaling revolutionary literature. His aunt Sonia had been dreaming of making aliyah. Perhaps Shimonkeh too had the soul of a revolutionary. Maybe someone smuggled him a copy of “The First Call,” the fiery manifesto that twenty-three-year-old Zionist Abba Kovner delivered to the delegates of Vilna's Jewish Youth Movement on the night of December 31, 1941:

Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth! Do not believe those who are deceiving you. Out of 80,000 Jews of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, only 20,000 remain. In front of your eyes our parents, our brothers and our sisters are being torn away from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were snatched away for labor by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are those naked women who were taken away on the horror-night of the provocation? Where are those Jews of the Day of Atonement? And where are our brothers of the second ghetto? Anyone who is taken out through the gates of the ghetto, will never return. All roads of the ghetto lead to Ponary, and Ponary means death. Oh, despairing people, tear this deception away from your eyes. Your children, your husbands, your wives—are no longer alive—Ponary is not a labor camp. Everyone there is shot. . . . It is true that we are weak, lacking protection, but the only reply to a murderer is resistance. Brothers, it is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of killers. Resist, resist, to our last breath.

Shimonkeh must have known that Abba Kovner and Itzhak Wittenberg were recruiting Vilna's young Zionists and Communists into an underground resistance movement called the FPO (Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye—United Partisan Organization). He must have known that Judenrat chief Jacob Gens, a former officer in the Lithuanian army, carried a pistol and that he had gotten the Nazis
to arm his Jewish ghetto police
with guns, rubber sticks, and brass knuckles. The FPO was amassing arms as well. When the “actions” started again, they would be ready.

News of the war seeped through the walls. The prisoners smiled and winked at each other when they learned that the Red Army had fought the Germans to a standstill at Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942. They knew all about the Anglo-American attack on German forces in North Africa that November. “
An American incursion has landed,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary on November 12. “The Germans are suffering dreadful blows. . . . When the English [and Americans] finish in Africa, it is expected that a second front will be opened in Europe and then . . . we can still manage to leave the ghetto. We become encouraged hearing that the battle is proceeding, that our spark of hope still flickers.”

If Rudashevski was aware of this at the age of fifteen, then fourteen-year-old Shimon Senitski must have been aware too. Shimonkeh knew that his mother had relatives in America. He knew that the relatives had sons. It was no great stretch for a boy with imagination to picture these sons marching into battle against the Germans.

Still, it's unlikely that Shimonkeh imagined the truth: that in November 1942, his mother's first cousin, Len Cohn, was among the American forces dealing “dreadful blows” to the Germans in North Africa. A spark of hope flickered across the globe unseen from cousin to cousin.

—

The First Division, Len Cohn among them, landed in Oran in Algeria on November 8, 1942. The Vichy French forces defending Algeria put up little resistance, and after three or four days of fighting the Americans secured the area. Len, an adjutant on the battalion staff, bivouacked with his unit near Oran and stayed put for a couple of months. Then in February 1943, they were ordered east to stop the forces that Rommel was massing in Tunisia. What followed was the costly, bloody
Battle of Kasserine Pass, fought in a gap in the rugged Atlas Mountains that rim Africa's northwestern coast. It was the war's first major engagement between American and German forces, and it did not go well. Americans suffered heavy casualties and significant loss of tanks and antiaircraft batteries before finally forcing Rommel's Afrika Korps back and reoccupying the pass on February 24.

Seventy years later, Len remembered his involvement in the battle like this:

At some point I was out in a jeep with a work party. I don't remember all the details, but we were working on a road. It was open country with the Atlas Mountains rising on one side and railroad tracks on the other. There had been snow in the mountains in January, but that day was mild. At some point I noticed a column of smoke rising half a mile away. I got out of the jeep and told the driver to turn the vehicle around and be prepared to go back to base. I walked toward the railway embankment—trying to figure out what this smoke was about—when suddenly I was shot at. I dove to the ground and took cover in a tank track a few inches deep. I got my pistol out of its holster and thought I better wait there until dark. Then I heard Germans come up from behind me—I heard them talking—they were close enough for me to know they were speaking German. I froze where I was, realizing that I had somehow gotten behind German lines. I was absolutely aware of how the Germans would have treated me if they captured me. An American officer named Cohn. I'd heard the stories of what happened to Jewish POWs taken by the Germans.

In the event, I stayed where I was and waited them out. When it got dark, I climbed up to the train tracks and followed them back to our base. When the sentry heard me, he yelled out Jimmy and I yelled back Dolittle. That was the password sign and countersign that night.

After Kasserine Pass came brutal, costly battles at El Guettar, Beja, and Mateur, but by the middle of May, Tunisia belonged to the Allies. American forces were now poised to open the “second front” in Europe that the teenage Rudashevski dreamed of.

—

But by then, the killing had resumed in Vilna. “It has begun again,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary on Monday, April 5. “
Today the terrible news reached us: 85 railroad cars of Jews, around 5,000 persons, were not taken to Kovno [a city near Vilna] as promised but transported by train to Ponar where they were shot to death. . . . The ghetto was deeply shaken, as though
struck by thunder. The atmosphere of slaughter has gripped the people.” The following day, Rudashevski closed his diary entry with the words: “We may be fated for the worst.” It was the final entry.

Vilna ghetto lacked the stomach and unity for the kind of uprising that raged in the Warsaw ghetto that April and May. The calls for armed resistance issued by Yitzhak Wittenberg, the charismatic leader of the FPO, fell largely on deaf ears. Jacob Gens, now de facto governor of the ghetto since the Judenrat had been dismissed, ruled with ruthless pragmatism. To fight, warned Gens, was suicidal—better to temporize, compromise, cooperate, play along, run out the clock. “Work for life” was his watchword. Gens vowed to keep as many people alive as possible, as long as they obeyed him. Wittenberg countered that life was not worth living as the slaves of murderers. Between them, Gens and Wittenberg divided the soul of Vilna ghetto, though Gens took the lion's share. A showdown was inevitable.

On the night of July 9–10, the First Division, Len Cohn among them, took part in a massive Allied air and sea attack on the Sicilian coast near the town of Gela. Much was disastrously bungled in the initial assault and German resistance was ferocious. Still, the Allies had breached the perimeter of Nazi Europe. The news reached Vilna ghetto immediately, but there were no winks or smiles of celebration. “Many of us would have drunk a toast yesterday,” Herman Kruk wrote in his diary on July 10, “if there weren't recently such an air of death in the ghetto. A question mark hangs over the ghetto. The air grows thicker.”