The Family (34 page)

The question concerned the fate of resistance leader Yitzhak Wittenberg. Tipped off by a traitor in the ranks of the FPO, the Gestapo had demanded that Wittenberg be turned over to them alive.
Gens, though by some accounts he secretly supported, funded, and armed the FPO, agreed to do what he could to arrange the capture. On July 15, he set up a meeting with Wittenberg, in the course of which he betrayed Wittenberg to the police (sources differ on whether the Jewish or the Lithuanian police made the arrest). However, an FPO contingent succeeded in freeing Wittenberg and hiding him in the ghetto. “
The chase after Wittenberg went on for hours,” wrote one resident. “The whole ghetto felt involved.” Hidden in an attic, disguised as a woman, Wittenberg issued the call for an immediate uprising. But the Gestapo outwitted him. An ultimatum was issued that put
Jewish Vilna in an impossible bind: either Wittenberg be turned over to the Gestapo alive or they would kill every last Jew in the ghetto.
Gens coined a slogan that was shouted in the streets: “1 or 20,000.” The ghetto erupted.
A throng of “underworld characters and Jewish police, masses of ghetto Jews” descended on FPO headquarters screaming “We want to live!” In the end, with the ghetto on the brink of a civil war of Jew versus Jew, FPO members persuaded their leader to surrender. “
Look, Jews are standing in the street,” Abba Kovner told Wittenberg. “We shall have to fight them in order to reach the enemy, and he will probably stand there and laugh. Are you prepared for this?” Wittenberg entered Gestapo headquarters with a hidden capsule of cyanide (some believe Gens slipped it to him). He committed suicide in his cell.

July 16, 1943—a day of shame that became known as Wittenberg Day—
signaled the beginning of the end. Three weeks later, on August 6, a thousand Jewish workers were pulled off their jobs at Vilna's Porobanek Airfield, herded into a railway yard, and forced onto cattle cars. Many tried to run, assuming they were bound for Ponar, and were shot down. But this roundup was something new. With their armies being pounded and pushed back in Russia, Sicily, and North Africa, the Germans were desperate for weapons, ammunition, concrete blocks for bunkers, tanks, uniforms, fur coats, machine parts. The workers seized at the airfield on August 6 were not being sent to die at Ponar but to live and work as slaves in Estonia, where the Nazis were amassing huge concentration camps—not extermination camps like Treblinka and Sobibor but war-industry work camps. If the slaves worked themselves to death, so be it—fewer to kill in the end. By Wittenberg Day, Vilna ghetto, like all of Europe's ghettos, had already been assigned an expiration date and a liquidation program. The fit prisoners would go to Estonia. The “unnecessary” would be disposed of.

Vilna, in fact, was the first place where the Nazis began to murder Jews on a methodical, industrial scale. It was also the site of their greatest success.
Of the eighty thousand Jews living in Vilna when the Germans seized the city in June 1941, only two to three thousand survived the war.
At Ponar alone, some seventy-two thousand Jews from Vilna and the surrounding region were shot and buried. “
No other Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe was so comprehensively destroyed.”

After the August 6 deportations, a second round took place on August 24. Eight days later a new Gestapo chief named Bruno Kittel took over to oversee the third cull. The fourth—and final—round began on September 23.
By then Jacob Gens was dead—shot by Kittel's orders in the courtyard of the Gestapo headquarters on the evening of September 14. The liquidation of Vilna ghetto proceeded without its king.

—

According to the last ghetto census conducted on May 29, 1942, Doba was living with her two sons and her brother-in-law at Strashuno 15. At some point in 1943, Doba “vanished”—her cousin Tsipora's word. Tsipora has no recollection of the particulars. After the May 1942 census, there is no trace of Doba; no document with her name in it; no survivor who can attest to her disappearance. Only these two facts have surfaced: on May 29, 1942, Doba and her sons were alive. In 1943, she vanished.

This is probably how it happened.

At seven o'clock on the morning of September 23, Ukrainian soldiers broke into their room and at gunpoint ordered Doba, Yitzchak, and the boys to vacate the building. “
Screaming obscenities, [the soldiers] demanded our so-called jewelry,” recorded one prisoner. “There was very little left, mostly watches.” Doba grabbed whatever of value remained and hid it in an inner pocket or the seam of a coat, and then she and Yitzchak and the boys joined the mass of people in the courtyard. They walked the two blocks to the main ghetto gate on Rudnicka Street, they passed the sign on the gate that warned of typhoid danger—“Entry is strictly forbidden for non-Jews”—they entered the streets of the city, the gentile city. “
As soon as we passed the gate, we were surrounded by other Ukrainians who stood ready for us with outstretched rifles,” wrote a survivor. “Instinctively we closed ranks a little more and kept walking.” The streets were eerily deserted—no jeering bystanders, just troops armed with rifles and clubs and a long dark river of prisoners.

Doba's reply had been “none” when the ghetto census-taker asked her profession. Her sole occupation had always been daughter, wife, and mother. Wife had been taken from her when Shepseleh died at Ponar two years earlier, but she had clung to mother. Doba was not a saint. Her heart was large but fragile and selfish. It must have driven her mad to share half
a room with two miserable boys for two years, to listen to them cough and bicker, to see their childhoods wither. No one emerges from a ghetto ennobled. “
It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims,” Primo Levi wrote. “On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” Doba's humanity was assaulted mercilessly by the agents of National Socialism. Maybe they succeeded in degrading her. Maybe she broke down and turned on her family. Maybe she grabbed food for herself and let them starve. Maybe she came to hate the sons she had once loved more than life. There is no way of knowing what was in her heart. But the facts speak for themselves. She was a widow without a work permit imprisoned in a ghetto, and yet she kept two boys alive.

At the outskirts of the city, streets gave way to hills and gardens. At a bend in the road, the slender twin baroque towers of the Missionaries Church of the Assumption came into view above the walls of the Rossa Monastery. Chaos descended as Doba and her family approached this place of worship. “
Germans tore into our columns,” wrote one prisoner. “We were pushed in all directions. We could not see anything but felt that something terrible was taking place.” Families were being split up—men to one side, women and children to the other. What were Shimonkeh and Velveleh—children or men? Velveleh had a month to go until he turned eleven. After two years in the ghetto he would have been stunted and emaciated, so he probably looked closer to seven or eight. A child. He went with Doba into the monastery courtyard. Shimonkeh, fifteen and tall for his age, was judged to be a man. With the crack of a rifle butt, Doba lost her firstborn son. Shimonkeh and his uncle Yitzchak disappeared into the crowd.

Soldiers with rifles and clubs forced Doba and Velveleh toward Rossa Square, an immense enclosure in the monastery complex. At the entrance “
there were two rows of Gestapo facing each other for about 200 feet.” The air reverberated with the sounds of people inflicting and enduring pain. “
I don't know how to describe the sound and the smell of death that reigned around us,” remembered one prisoner. “By this time, most of the women . . . were walking aimlessly in a daze with desolate looks on their faces as if they had already lost their minds. There were small children crying, looking for their parents.” At the far end of the square there was an opening, an exit
into a narrow corridor, and in front of this opening the naked bodies of two young men and a young woman dangled from poles—FPO partisans who had been caught trying to escape through the city sewers and killed by Kittel's orders. One witness wrote that the men were dead but the woman had enough life to croak out, “
No, they won't do this to you.” Tsipora, who was present in Rossa Square that day, remembers only two bodies, a man and a woman; she believes that they had been strangled for putting up a sign that said, “Jews go right.” It was always the same when the Germans did a “selection”—right meant life, left was death.

All around Doba, women were pinching their cheeks so they could color up and look younger. Anyone who had lipstick smeared her mouth with bright red. The crowd shoved Doba and Velveleh toward the hanging bodies at the far side of the square where the “selection” would determine their fates.

—

It rained the night of September 23 and the Jewish women and children in Rossa Square got soaked. “
Ukrainian guards walked among the half-sleeping people, robbed and beat them,” wrote Kruk. The final selection of the 8,000 ghetto survivors was completed on the September 24. An estimated 1,400 to 1,700 young women went right—to the Kaiserwold concentration camp in Latvia. Between 4,000 and 4,500 women and children went left—to
the gas chambers at Sobibor. A few hundred were deemed so weak, sick, or old that they were not worth transporting to a gas chamber and instead were taken to Ponar and shot over the brimming pits.

Kaiserwold, Sobibor, or Ponar: those were Doba's options. It seems unlikely that she and Velveleh were selected for Ponar—only a small number of the weakest were sent to the death pits. Kaiserwold, a labor camp, would have bought Doba a few more months of life, assuming she survived the rigors of slave labor. But that also seems unlikely. Tsipora's thirty- four-year-old mother was with her in Rossa Square on those two days, and when the moment of their selection came, the mother went left and Tsipora went right. “At thirty-four my mother was considered too old for work,” Tsipora says. Doba was nearly forty-one.

That leaves Sobibor.

The gas used at Sobibor was carbon monoxide piped from a large
gasoline engine into sealed chambers measuring about 270 square feet each. It took half an hour for the gas to asphyxiate Doba. There were so many women in the death chamber with her that she didn't lean or fall as her life ebbed away. She died standing up, wet with perspiration and excrement, her naked body and shorn head pressed tight into the naked bodies and heads of the women around her.

—

Four days before the liquidation of Vilna ghetto, Shalom Tvi went to Montreal, Canada. Although the Hudson and Champlain valleys were ablaze with fall color, this was not a journey made for pleasure. It was a journey of bureaucratic necessity. Shalom Tvi had now been living in the United States for four years on a tourist visa that he renewed and extended every six months. In order to upgrade the tourist visa to an immigration visa that would enable him to remain indefinitely, he had to leave the country, file an application at an American foreign consulate, and reenter the United States with new documents reflecting his altered status. Since Montreal was the site of the American foreign consulate nearest the Bronx, Shalom Tvi duly made the trip to Canada, filed the “Application for Immigration Visa (Quota)” on September 20, 1943, and presented the newly approved and stamped immigration visa, No. 436, when he crossed back into New York State at Rouses Point.

On the visa application form, he indicated that he was seventy years old, gray haired, blue eyed, five feet four inches tall, and that his “purpose in going to the United States” was “to reside, and I intend to remain permanently.” In the space for nearest living relative he wrote, “Mrs. Bella Kahanowicz, whose relationship is wife and whose address is Rakov, Poland.”

Four days later, Vilna was finished; Volozhin was already finished; Rakov had been finished nearly eight months earlier—and still Shalom Tvi believed, or hoped, that he had a wife whose address was Rakov, Poland.

“Perhaps you hear about our area,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia after his return from Montreal. “Here we know nothing. My only consolation is getting frequent letters from you.”

T
hey put the men in rows of ten and ticked them off a row at a time.
Gestapo Chief Kittel did the counting himself: “10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70—right! 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70—left!” Two trains were waiting on two separate tracks. The squads filled the empty freight cars in alternating waves—seventy men to a car. Each car was identically bare: no seats, no toilet, a single window crisscrossed with barbed wire high up in the corner. When a car was full, a guard stuck his head in and shouted that if one man went missing, all would be punished. Then the sliding door was slammed and locked and the next car was filled.

In one of those freight cars, packed in the stifling dark with sixty-nine other men, stood Shimonkeh. His uncle Yitzchak may have stood next to him. There had been no selection for the males of the Vilna ghetto.
One hundred of the old and feeble were weeded out and shot—but the rest were crammed indiscriminately onto the trains. Smooth-faced teenagers, arthritic middle-aged shopkeepers, once-famous musicians, laborers with callused hands, teachers, librarians, electricians, attorneys, pharmacists, chemists, hospital directors, yeshiva students—the Germans needed the bodies. Had there been a selection, Shimonkeh might have been sent left like his mother and brother. He was a tall lank scarecrow with spindly arms and narrow shoulders; knobs of bone rippled from the base of his skull
down his back; he could barely hear. But the Germans didn't care. Shimon was swept onto the train with the rest. He had ceased to be Shimonkeh when his mother and brother disappeared in Rossa Square. Now he was Shimon Senitski—an emaciated fifteen-year-old boy standing in the dark and wondering when the train would move and where it would go.

It was night by the time the engine shuddered to life. The air already reeked of excrement. Ten minutes outside the city, a wild cry tore through the car: they had taken the track to the right—they were going to Ponar. “
People started to cry,” said Saul Slocki, who was on the train that night. “Some started to say good-bye to each other. Others prayed.” Then, after a few agonizing minutes, the train ground to a halt, idled, and reversed until it was back on the main track. Bound to Estonia—not Ponar. This was the Nazis' idea of a joke. “Why not?” wrote Slocki. “If they couldn't have the pleasure of murdering us, this little joke was something for them to enjoy.”

Shimon was on that train for three days. In some cars the men got bread, water, and sausage—in some cars they got nothing. When he needed to relieve himself, he had to squat over the pail in front of the others. The men put the pail next to the door to minimize the stench, but when a guard came to inspect them he kicked it over and a slick of urine-soaked shit spread through the car. “On the train, no one spoke,” said one survivor. “I cannot describe the horror. We were not human anymore. It was like we were made of death.” Some men died on the train; by the end of the third day all of them thought they would be dead before the journey ended.

Shimon was still alive when
the train halted at Klooga, in northern Estonia, on Wednesday, September 29, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, 5704. “Klooga aedlinn” the sign said—the garden town of Klooga. Shimon got out of the train and sank his feet into the sandy soil; there was a tang of salt in the air—a few miles away the Baltic laved a beautiful white sand beach where Estonians came on holiday. Through the scrub pines he could see the gate and a signpost with the words “O.T. Betriebe Klooga.” Next to the gate, block letters snarled the same message in German, Russian, and Estonian—“Stop! You will be shot without warning.” The guards shoved Shimon into a line of prisoners and marched him through the gate. “Inside the gate they lined us up,” recalled a survivor who went by the name Michael Turner after the war. “I heard someone being killed. Through loudspeakers a voice
said ‘If you are hiding gold you will be killed.' There was a big box to put in jewelry, watches and money.” After that the guards stripped Shimon naked, shaved a swath through his hair from forehead to nape, and gave him a prisoner's striped jacket, shirt, pair of trousers, pair of wooden clogs. The jacket bore a Star of David with the number 641 sewn onto it. He had ceased to be Shimonkeh when they took his mother. He ceased to be Shimon when they took his clothes and half his hair. He was prisoner #641, a slave belonging to Albert Speer. They put him in a huge light-flooded barracks with rows of bunks and little stoves at either end.
The next morning they gave him a cup of chestnut coffee, lined him up in the camp yard with the others, made him stand rigidly still while they called the numbers of every prisoner. Anyone who moved got clubbed over the head by an SS guard. Roll call took an hour, then he went to work.

His first job was to string barbed wire around the perimeter of the camp so no one could escape (some escaped anyway and were tortured and killed when caught). Then he got assigned to Klooga's specialty: the production of underwater signal mines made of reinforced concrete and hundred-pound concrete blocks used for bunkers. Shimon, who probably barely weighed a hundred pounds himself, had to make fifteen of these concrete blocks a day, every day. That was at the start.
Gradually the daily quotas were raised to nineteen, thirty, and thirty-five, until they stabilized at forty. The skin flayed off his arms; his limbs ached and swelled. Exhaustion haunted his every step. “I was in six different camps in Estonia,” says Ben Anolik, a survivor. “Klooga was the worst.” “Nights I did not sleep,” says Michael Turner. “I am a man. I am supposed to be the strong one. You got used to being hungry, dirty. We were alive.”

Shimon's life varied only with the seasons, the temperament of the camp guards, and the disposition of the “strong ones”—the tough enterprising slaves who controlled the flow of food. “
Everywhere [the strong ones] are the first ones, everywhere they get the best deal, and everywhere people owe them change,” wrote Kruk, who continued his diary at Klooga. In winter Shimon froze and shivered through the night in his bunk; in summer he burned. Roll call became a daily torment—“sadistic exercises of brutality and cruelty,” wrote one inmate. “
They would use the roll call to punish ‘offenders' by strapping them to a specially designed bench and
beating them to a pulp while we all stood and watched in horror. At times they would have us sit for an hour or two with our hands up for no apparent reason in spite of the freezing weather.” When Kurt Stacher, “a man the size of a fat bear with a large bloodhound at his side,” was camp commander, Shimon cowered. Stacher's particular pleasure was to turn his dog loose and look on while it savaged prisoners.
Michael Turner watched SS guards whip his father to death: “The concrete blocks were dried in little warehouses. One day they did not dry because my father was on duty and he had fallen asleep before the blocks dried. The chief of the Gestapo whipped him and he died of the lashes.”

There was a women's camp adjoining, even more crowded than the men's camp. Same work; same food. “
The hunger was unbelievable,” recalls a survivor named Tola Urbach. The midday meal was a bowl of soup (“dirty dishwater soup with a few grains of barley swimming in it”) eaten from an empty sardine can; dinner was bread and margarine—though the margarine was so foul smelling that many could not choke it down. To squeeze out a few more calories prisoners picked potato peels out of the garbage and salvaged the grounds from fake coffee.
The food ration was “neither enough to live on nor to die on,” wrote Kruk. “Hunger knows no restraints. A hungry person is ready for anything except for stifling the worm inside you, which gnaws and gnaws. . . . Everyone followed his animal instinct, forgetting that he arrived here in the image of man—the crown of creation, the most beautiful of all creatures!” Tola Urbach: “My sister's friend went insane. In Vilna she had been a talented pianist. She became totally lost. One day they took her out and gave her an injection that killed her.” Life became briefly more tolerable when a humane Dutch
Lagerführer
(commandant) was in charge. “He was exceptional,” said one of the women. “He did not act like an SS man.” One day during the summer of 1944 he took the women to the beach. “It was a long march to get there,” says Tola. “It was the only time we were out of the camp.” The Dutch
Lagerführer
was soon transferred—too kind for Klooga.

Shimon turned sixteen on February 5, 1944. Three years earlier he had stood beneath the golden hands—the hands of the Kohanim—that adorned the ark of the Torah at Temple Taharat Hakodesh and chanted his Bible portion in Hebrew. A bar mitzvah boy. His mother and grandmother wept
with pride. Did Shimon remember it was his birthday? Did he still believe in God?
Occasionally the slaves sang Hebrew songs—songs “filled with nostalgia, hope, and desire for life.” Did Shimon join in?
Some of the men smuggled prayer shawls and tefillin into camp, God knows how or at what cost, and observed the prescribed prayer rituals every morning and every evening.
A few written traces of Shimon's imprisonment at Klooga survive, but the documents shed no light on the state of his soul. On a card labeled: Häftl. Nr [prisoner number.]: a clerk typed in 641, SENIZKI, Schimon. Another card indicates that he was born in Vilna in 1928, that his occupation was Arbeiter (worker), and that he was working in a Sonderkommando—“special unit.” In extermination camps like Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando was the task force that collected the corpses from the gas chambers and transported them to the crematoria—the worst job of all. But there were no gas chambers or crematoria at Klooga—the Sonderkommando that Shimon worked in may have had something to do with the clinic. A card indicates that at some point he was assigned to a construction crew that built signal boxes for the railroad. His name and number appear on a list headed “Transport”: possibly a group sent to work off-site. Six numbers and names appear under the Transport heading: 211 Rudnizki, 217 Gordon, 679 Chodonk, 4439 Kaplan, 6255 Bellizkes, 641 Senizki. Then there's a line, a different heading—illegible—and another column of names.

Some of the prisoners died of disease. Some starved to death. Some were killed when they were found with a second shirt. Some dropped dead of heart attacks. Some were beaten to death.
One hundred were shot after three prisoners succeeded in escaping. If a prisoner became too infirm to walk, he “had to depart for the next world,” in the words of the sadistic alcoholic infirmary chief, Wilhelm Genth.
In June 1944, Klooga had 2,122 prisoners, the largest number of any camp in Estonia.

It appears that Shimon was still among these prisoners. He must have had someone to look out for him. There were more women than men at Klooga, and the sexes, though segregated, found ways to mingle. Maybe a friend of Doba's took pity on the boy. Someone did. Without an ally, a frail, cerebral, gently brought-up sixteen-year-old did not stand a chance. Shimon survived. He became a skeleton but he survived.

—

Klooga was sealed off from the world by barbed wire, dogs, and SS guards. But news of the world filtered in. Tola Urbach recalls that there was a barracks in the women's camp full of “misfits and homosexuals” pulled out of the German army. One of these men had a radio and he passed on news of the war to the Jewish prisoners. “We knew the Russian armies were advancing,” says Tola. “We raced around the camp rejoicing at news of Russian victories. We knew the advance of the Russian army was our only hope of salvation.”

Word of the Allied landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944, reached the prisoners. Shimon's cousin Sidney Cohen, Sam's oldest son, was a paratrooper serving with the 82nd Airborne Division, but he was invalided out on D-day due to a case of dysentery; his unit parachuted onto the Normandy beaches without him.

In July, the Red Army took Minsk and Vilna.

The prisoners at Klooga heard the news and waited for their turn. “
Everything is being liberated, even Warsaw (!!!), everything except us,” wrote Kruk at the end of July. “We are so upset, our nerves choke us. . . . We count not just the days, but the hours and minutes: any minute we may get out of hell.”

—

Itel was also doing her bit to help the Allies win the war in the summer of 1944. Maiden Form had already filled the largest order for bras and garter belts ever placed by the U.S. government. Now the War Department tapped the company to pitch in on another front—this one involving not breasts but birds—pigeons, to be precise. Despite advances in technology, homing pigeons remained in widespread use for battlefield communication during the Second World War. Pigeons had a number of obvious advantages. They could fly at speeds of a mile a minute over short distances with a range approaching a thousand miles. They could navigate terrain impenetrable to earthbound messengers. In tiny capsules attached to their legs, pigeons could carry not only messages but also maps, microfilm, mini cameras, and blood samples. Unlike wireless signals, they did not reveal their sender's position when intercepted. The U.S. military even set up a Pigeon Service to groom avian couriers and their human handlers. Hundreds of troops
went into action on D-day with pigeons tucked under their coats, but this was clearly awkward for infantry and impossible for paratroopers. The U.S. Army Signal Corps drafted Maiden Form to come up with a better way of transporting homing pigeons safely and securely behind enemy lines. “You people ought to know about designing something to hold a live, curved object,” the army rep told Itel. In July 1944, William and his designers submitted final drawings for the pigeon vest—a cloth pouch that got wrapped around a pigeon's body and wings and then attached to a paratrooper by a long buckled strap. In braspeak, the pigeon vest had “just enough shirring to accommodate the wings”; the material was porous mesh that enabled the bird to breathe; and the “cup” was adjustable since pigeons, like breasts, are not all the same size. On an outside flap, each vest had a label with the words: IMPORTANT DO NOT RETAIN PIGEON IN VEST IN EXCESS OF SIX HOURS.