The Family (47 page)

A group of six witnesses
:
“The Destruction of Rakov Jews” report written in August 1945, in “Memory to Volozhin Region,” www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/volozhin1/Volozhin1.html#TOC.

Moshe Pogolensky gave a different account
:
“Rakov Under Nazi Occupation.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: BREAKDOWNS

“I was torn,” he recalls
:
Interview with Leonard Cohn, Stamford, Connecticut, August 5, 2011.

Two rabbis imprisoned in the stifling house
:
Volozhin Yizkor book, pp. 33–34.

Itel managed to secure a “declaration of essentiality”
:
Evans,
They Made America
, p. 314.

Itel's campaign to “safeguard the value and goodwill of Maiden Form's name”
:
www.apparelsearch.com/names/M/Maidenform/Maidenform_Brands.htm.

Gold, though restricted, was still available
:
Cohen,
As I Recall
, p. 80.

Twenty-three years old in 1942, Rose was a pretty
:
Interview with Rose Rubenstein Einziger and her daughter Laurie Bellet, Walnut Creek, California, February 27, 2010. Also unpublished diary that Rose Rubenstein kept as a young woman.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: DESPAIRING PEOPLE

another nine thousand souls had been slaughtered
:
www.deathcamps.org/occupation/vilnius%20ghetto.html.

“the blood-drenched delusion”
:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, p. 36.

Doba had no permit
:
Most sources, including www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html, note that only those who held permits were allowed to live in Ghetto 1—the Large Ghetto where Doba and the boys were recorded in the 1942 census. But Tsipora Alperovich, in interviews in Tel Aviv, June 8, 2010, and March 29, 2011, described visiting with Doba and her sons in the ghetto and insisted Doba had no permit.

He was a good man, a confirmed bachelor
:
H. Kazdan, ed.,
Teacher's Memorial Book
(in Yiddish; New York: Committee to Perpetuate Memory of Deceased Teachers, 1954), pp. 284–285. Yitskhok Senicki is mentioned on p. 233 of Kruk,
The Last Days
; the footnote to this page states that “He was killed in a camp in Estonia.”

the average “living space” in Vilna ghetto
:
www.deathcamps.org/occupation/vilnius%20ghetto.html.

She remembered that he suffered serious hearing loss
:
Tsipora Alperovich in the June 8, 2010, interview said that Shimon suffered hearing loss after contracting meningitis—but from the letters it seems that he suffered some hearing loss after contracting scarlet fever as child. It's possible that Tsipora was mistaken or confused. The extent of Shimon's deafness is unknown.

“the insanely wild conditions of life
 . . .”:
Mark Dvorzhetski quoted in Rudashevski,
The Diary
, p. 16.

“The book unites us with the future”
:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, p. 106.

“the same sad ghetto song
 . . .”:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, p. 73.

“Frozen, carrying the little stands on their backs
:
 . . .”:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, pp. 91–92.

“
Let us not go like sheep
 . . .”:
www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/vilna/during/responses_to_the_murder.asp?WT.mc_id=wiki.

to arm his Jewish ghetto police with guns
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 562.

“An American incursion has landed”
:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, pp. 93–94.

Battle of Kasserine Pass
:
H. R. Knickerbocker and Jack Thompson,
Danger Forward: The Story of the First Division in World War II
(Washington, DC: Society of the First Division, 1947), pp. 13, ff.

Seventy years later, Len
:
Interview with Leonard Cohn, Stamford, Connecticut, August 5, 2011.

“Today the terrible news reached us
 . . .”:
Rudashevski,
The Diary
, pp. 138–140.

Gens, though by some accounts he secretly supported
:
www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html.

“The chase after Wittenberg went on for hours”
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 241; www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/gens.html.

Gens coined a slogan
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. xlvi.

A throng of “underworld characters
 . . .”:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. xlvi.

“Look, Jews are standing in the street,” Abba Kovner told Wittenberg
:
www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/terrible_choice/ter002.html.

signaled the beginning of the end
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. xlvi.

Of the eighty thousand Jews living in Vilna
:
deathcamps.org.

At Ponar alone, some seventy-two thousand Jews
:
Snyder,
Bloodlands
, p. 192.

“No other Jewish community
 . . .”:
deathcamps.org.

By then Jacob Gens was dead
:
Gens remains an extremely controversial and enigmatic figure. Some believe that as the ultimate pragmatist he saved many Jews from death, doing the best he could in an impossible situation. Others write him off as a megalomaniacal collaborator—a traitor, a perpetrator of shameful deeds, and a leader who was taken in by German lies and ended up “pushing others to their deaths.” For a good discussion of Gens's contradictions, see www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/terrible_choice.ter002.html.

At seven o'clock on the morning of September 23
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 265.

“Screaming obscenities
 . . .”:
Lily M. Margules,
Memories, Memories: From Vilna to New York with a Few Stops Along the Way
(Annapolis, MD: Lighthouse Press, 1999), p. 69.

“As soon as we passed the gate
 . .
 .”:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 265.

“It is naïve, absurd, and historically false
 . . .”:
Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
(New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 40.

“Germans tore into our columns”
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 266.

“there were two rows of Gestapo
 . . .”:
Sonia Pauline Beker,
Symphony on Fire
(New Milford, NJ: Wordsmithy, 2007) pp. 58–59, quoted in www.untilourlastbreath.com.

“I don't know how to describe the sound and the smell of death
 .
 . .”:
Margules,
Memories, Memories
, p. 72.

“No, they won't do this to you”
:
Beker,
Symphony on Fire
, pp. 58–59, quoted in www.untilourlastbreath.com.

“Ukrainian guards walked among the half-sleeping people
 . .
 .”:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 662.

the gas chambers at Sobibor
:
I have found a number of conflicting accounts about the liquidation of the women and children of the Vilna ghetto. Some sources, including Vilnius Ghetto Lists of Prisoners, vol. 1, Vilnius: Jewish Museum, 1996, say that the women who were not sent to Kaiserwald (labor camp) were exterminated at Majdanek concentration camp—not Sobibor. Balberyszski in
Stronger Than Iron
also cites Majdanek. Other sources, including Howard Margol, a past president of LitvakSIG at Jewish Gen and a well-known expert on the Vilna ghetto, says the women
were all transported to Ponar and shot there. Dr. Rose Lerer Cohen wrote the following in an e-mail of October 25, 2012: “From
The Holocaust in Lithuania a Book of Remembrance
published by Rose Lerer Cohen and Saul Issroff—I found the following references—between June and November 1943 Jews from the Vilna Ghetto were transported to Kaiserwald and on 23–24 September 1943 3,500 prisoners were transported from the Vilna Ghetto—males to Estonia via Siauliai and women were transported to Kaiserwald. The weak were murdered on the spot. The remaining prisoners were transported to Stuttoff, and from there the children were transported to Auschwitz together with their mothers. Others were transported to Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Neuengamme.”

However, Zvi Bernhardt, a researcher with the reference and information services of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, wrote the following in an e-mail message dated October 31, 2012: “According to [Yitzhak] Arad's 2004 book
History of the Holocaust Soviet Union and Annexed Territories
volume 2, pg. 572–573: 1400–1700 younger women were sent to Kaiserwald, 4000–4500 were sent to Sobibor and a few hundred were shot in Ponar. Arad's 1980 book
Ghetto in Flames
is still considered the authoritative book on the Vilna Ghetto.” However, in
Ghetto in Flames
(New York: Holocaust Library, 1982), Yitzhak Arad writes the following on p. 432: “About 1,600–2,000 of the males assembled at Rossa Square were dispatched to camps in Estonia, and 1,400–1,700 women to Latvia, totaling 3,000–3,700 persons. Another 4,300–5,000 women and children were sent to the Majdanek gas chambers, and several hundred elderly and sick people were shot at Ponar.”

Many questions remain unanswered—and will never be answered—about the final months of Doba's life and about her death. My narrative choices were based on the following: the majority of the prisoners recorded in the May 29, 1942, census were still alive when the final liquidation of the ghetto was made on September 23–24, 1943—therefore it seems logical to conclude that Doba was among them; Yad Vashem's researcher has identified Arad as the authority on the Vilna ghetto and Arad says in his most recent account that “4000–5000 were sent to Sobibor”—so again, it seems logical to conclude that Doba and Velveleh were among those. I have been unable to resolve the question of whether the women and children of Vilna who were selected to die perished at Majdanek or Sobibor, about which Arad himself offers conflicting accounts.

My intention was that Doba would represent the thousands of Jewish women in Vilna whose stories have never been recorded—so I chose to narrate her final days to reflect the most common experiences.

For details about the gas chambers at Sobibor, I relied on
Sobibor
: A History of a Nazi Death Camp
, by Jules Schelvis (Oxford: Berg Press, 2007), pp. 99–113. Schelvis cites two contemporary accounts of transports arriving at Sobibor from Vilna (p. 220).

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: KLOOGA

Gestapo Chief Kittel did the counting
:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 268.

One hundred of the old and feeble
:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 662.

“People started to cry”
:
Saul Slocki testimony in the archives of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (The Ghetto Fighters' House), Israel.

the train halted at Klooga
 . . . on Wednesday, September 29:
Anton Weiss-Wendt,
Murder Without Hatred
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 301; Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, p. 286.

The next morning they gave him a cup of chestnut coffee
:
These details on life in the camp come from Weiss-Wendt,
Murder Without Hatred
, and from interviews with Tola Urbach, Adele Jochelson, and Michael Turner recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation, Institute for Visual History and Education, archived at Stanford University Library, Palo Alto, California (among other libraries). In
Stronger Than Iron
, Balberyszski noted that roll call was usually held at 6
P.M.
and initially was not so bad—only gradually did it become a torture.

Gradually the daily quotas were raised to nineteen, thirty
:
Weiss-Wendt,
Murder Without Hatred
, p. 303.

“Everywhere [the strong ones] are the first ones
 . . .”:
Kruk,
The Last Days
, p. 680.

“They would use the roll call to punish ‘offenders'
 . . .”; When Kurt Stacher:
Balberyszski,
Stronger Than Iron
, pp. 286, 301; and Weiss-Wendt,
Murder Without Hatred
, p. 304.