The Family (46 page)

the Lithuanian police were on hand to divide shoppers
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 51.

every Jew in Vilna had to wear two badges
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 25. Dates and details about patches versus armbands differ slightly from one account to the next. See Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 57. What is clear is that the Nazis kept changing the rules in order to confuse the ghetto prisoners and provide themselves with excuses for roundups and murder.

“
They Snatch Whole Streets”
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 52.

“
What is happening in Ponar?”
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 66.

a paramilitary police force that reported directly to Hitler
:
Richard Rhodes,
Masters of Death
:
The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 4. My account of the organization of the Einsatzgruppen and the killing pits at Ponar relies heavily on Rhodes. I also consulted
The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews: July 1941–January 1943
, by Yitzhak Arad and Shmuel Krakowski (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. vi–vii.

Dr. Alfred Filbert, a lawyer
:
It's not entirely clear that Filbert was in charge of Vilna. Filbert was head of Einsatzkommando-9 at the time and this was the unit assigned to Vilna, but his name does not appear in any records attached to this period. The Web site deathcamps.org says that Horst Schweineberger and Martin Weiss were in charge of the Sonderkommando of EK-9 situated at 12 Vilenskaia Street in Vilna—but Weiss and Schweineberger seem to have come later. Balberyszski in
Stronger Than Iron
confirms that Weiss and Schweineberger came later and that Schweineberger directed the establishment of the ghetto in September 1941.
Rhodes in
Masters of Death
, p. 223, notes that Filbert later had a nervous breakdown.

an auxiliary force of 150 men cherry-picked from the Lithuanian political police
:
Rhodes,
Masters of Death
, p. 54.

“The graves are to be leveled
 . . .”:
Quoted in Rhodes,
Masters of Death
, p. 48.

“between about twenty and fifty.
 
. . . These prisoners were really quite well-dressed . . .”:
Quoted in Rhodes,
Masters of Death
, pp. 54–55. I rely heavily on Rhodes's account, p. 55, of Ponar at the time of the killings and for eyewitness accounts. I visited Ponar in 2011, but the pits had been smoothed over and trees had grown up. Old photos from the war also helped me visualize the scene. I used Rhodes's vivid and carefully documented account as the basis for what I imagine were the circumstances of Shepseleh's death, though the exact details will never be known. The idea that he was rounded up early in the occupation and killed at Ponar is speculative—but Tsipora Alperovich, who was in the ghetto, said during our interviews in Tel Aviv that this was his fate (though she did not see him snatched).

“We all said to one another
 . 
. .”:
Quoted in Rhodes,
Masters of Death
, p. 57.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: “AKTION”

“
Until further notice, about 200 persons are being liquidated daily”
:
The Einsatzgruppen Reports
, p. 52.

The prisoners, according to one account
:
“Testimony by Uri Finkel.”

rounded up fifty-five Rakov Jews
:
The size and composition of the group varies from account to account: In “Testimony by Uri Finkel” Finkel states there were forty-nine victims, most of them young men; The Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 36 puts the number at fifty-eight. My account is a composite of Finkel and “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.

A Rakov Jew named Moshe Pogolensky
:
“Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html.

One day the Germans announced
:
“Rakov Under Nazi Occupation,” Ibid.

Some of the tortures could have been concocted only by madmen
:
Details from Eliach,
There Once Was a World
, pp. 580, 584.

People were “driven out of their minds”
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 44.

Some boys put on their father's work clothes
:
Ibid., p. 53.

“The children did not complain”
:
Ibid., p. 47.

“Who has inflicted this upon us?”
:
Anne Frank,
The Diary of a Young Girl
(New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 207.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: VILNA GHETTO

On August 6 he told the Judenrat
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 35.

“Lines of people march on both sides
 . . .”:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, pp. 83, 86.

In the course of two days Hingst evicted
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 58.

The Einsatzgruppen report broke down the numbers
:
Rhodes,
Masters of Death
, p. 137.

wild new rumors
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 95.

“
Better stop thinking”
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 96.

“a picture of the Middle Ages”
:
Yitskhok Rudashevski,
The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto: June 1941–April 1943
(Tel Aviv: Ghetto Fighters' House, 1973), p. 30.

“A bundle was suddenly stolen
 . . .”:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, pp. 31–32.

“The Lithuanians drive us on
 . . .”:
Ibid., p. 32.

Anyone who could not be crammed
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 83.

CHAPTER TWENTY: YOM KIPPUR, 1941

Maiden Form, now one of the largest family businesses
:
Evans,
They Made America
, pp. 314–315; Maidenform Collection.

Itel and William bought an eighteen-room mansion
:
Details from Maidenform Collection and interviews with Sallie Cohen Goldwyn, various dates, and Marvin Sleisenger, Kentfield, California, November 10–11, 2010.

father was “a wonderful man
 . . .”:
New York Post
, September 6, 1964, on file at Maidenform Collection.

first accounts of the atrocities
:
David S. Wyman,
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 20. The subject of how much was known about the Holocaust in the United States and when is highly complex and controversial. Yehuda Bauer in
American Jewry and the Holocaust
, p. 187, says that “There can be no doubt that anyone who read the papers, listened to the radio, or read the daily reports by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) had access to all the information about Europe's Jews that was needed to establish the fact that mass murder was occurring.” Bauer notes that Yiddish papers in the United States published “accounts of the mass murders in Vilna as early as March, 1942.” “Until June, 1942, all this information was admittedly scattered. Nobody imagined a campaign of mass annihilation, and the information was always presented in a form which allowed for doubts as to its veracity.” According to Bauer, the Bund sent the first “authoritative and exact report of a general plan to annihilate Polish and, by implication, European Jewry.”

See also Henry L. Feingold,
Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Feingold says in part that the American Jewish community failed to speak out against the Holocaust because the community was disunited, bent on assimilating, had no effective leaders, had shed its communal religious traditions, and thus had no general public forum they could use to oppose the slaughter.

At 8:50 in the morning on September 3
:
Details on the Maidenform strike come
from newspaper clippings from September and October 1941, in the Maidenform file of the Bayonne, New Jersey, public library; journal name has been omitted from the clippings, but the articles are apparently from the
Jersey Journal
and
Bayonne Times
. Additional articles, many undated or with the journal name omitted, are from the Maidenform Collection.

Clippers and operators working on the piecework scale
:
Clipping from Bayonne library, no title or journal name, November 4, 1941.

A survivor named Uri Finkel
:
“Testimony by Uri Finkel.”

When all 112 men were dead
:
I have relied on the account of the killings recounted in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation” in www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/rakov/rkv_pages/rakov_stories_occupation.html, but there are several different accounts of this massacre. A survivor named Nachum Greenholtz is quoted as follows in “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation”: “I was among the people who were taken from the market in Rakov to the road of Buzmanu, where a hundred and twelve Jews were annihilated. A few others as well as I were able to escape. The Germans shot at us but I ran quickly to the forest. I spent the night there and in the morning I returned home.” Greenholtz's relative Adi Grynholc, who has done extensive research into Rakov history, insists that Nachum's accounts of Rakov during the war are the most reliable.

At some point during that Yom Kippur
:
My account of Beyle's death and Etl's existence in the Rakov ghetto is based on conversations with my Israeli relatives, and their information in turn came from conversations with their mother, Sonia. Unfortunately, Sonia did not tell her children how she came to know about the killing of Beyle or that Etl and her daughters survived the first rounds of shootings. It's likely that one of the Rakov survivors told her—possibly Hillel Eidelman, who wrote letters after the war about the dire situation in Rakov.

The British adopted a strict policy
:
Arthur Koestler
, Promise and Fulfilment—Palestine, 1917–1949
(New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 59.

Finally, the Turks ordered the ship
:
Kramer,
A History of Palestine
, p. 300; Koestler,
Promise and Fulfilment
, p. 63.

“The tortures lasted for hours
 . . .”:
Volozhin Yizkor book, p. 534.

“Life in the Ghetto grew harder
 . . .” :
Eliezer Leoni, ed.,
Wolozin: The Book of the City and of the Etz Hayyim Yeshiva
(Tel Aviv: Wolozin Landsleit Association of Israel and the USA, 1970), p. 32.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: WONDER GIRL

Nazi officers convinced the Rakov Judenrat
:
“Testimony by Uri Finkel.”

“Many such shameful and worn-out lies
:
 . . .”:
Rakov Yizkor book.

Murder by gas would be perfected
:
Timothy Snyder, review of “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” by Witold Pilecki,
New York Times Book Review
, June 24, 2012, notes that Zyklon B was used at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.

In the six months between June and December 1941
:
Timothy Snyder,
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 189.

By the end of 1941
:
Snyder,
Bloodlands
, p. 186.

Heydrich announced that the Reich's goal
:
“The Wannsee Conference and ‘The Final Solution,'” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Web site, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005477.

February 4, 1942
:
This date is from
The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust
, edited by Guy Miron (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); other accounts, including “Rakov Under Nazi Occupation,” put the date at February 2, 1942.

all assembled in the courtyard
:
Accounts of the liquidation of the Rakov ghetto and the torching of the synagogue have serious discrepancies and I agonized over which account to choose in narrating this event. The essential difference concerns whether the ghetto prisoners were shot outside the synagogue and the corpses then thrown into the synagogue and torched, or whether the prisoners were herded into the synagogue and then incinerated alive. Ultimately, I chose the latter because more sources give this account. I also followed the advice of Adi Grynholc, who has researched this episode thoroughly. It's possible, as my friend Ivan Doig speculated, that both accounts have some truth: it could have been that the Nazis began shooting the prisoners in batches and at some point decided that it was taking too long—there were 950 men, women, and children to kill—and so they herded the remainder into the synagogue and set the place on fire.