Violins of Hope (21 page)

As night descended, the Jews searched for shelter. Some spent the night in roofless houses. Most simply lay on whatever dry spots they could find on the ground outside. Still others wandered around searching for food, shouting and crying as they became separated from their family members in the dark. Starving and scared, very few of them were able to sleep.

Feivel and his family settled in a room inside an empty house that could at least protect them from the wind. They lit a fire and heated up some water. They drank the warm water with sugar cubes and used the remaining water to wash themselves. Despite the horrible conditions, they considered themselves lucky to be able to change their clothes and stretch their legs a bit. “Don't look around,” Feivel told his family. “Just try to get some sleep. I'll try to get us a little food in the morning.”

The next morning, Ukrainian peasants arrived to sell bread and milk to the deportees. Feivel exchanged some of the money and jewelry his family had smuggled from Gura Humorului for a little food. At the exorbitant prices the peasants were charging, the small amounts of gold and money Feivel's family had brought would not last long.

Suddenly, the streets were filled with even more people—thousands of Jews from the town of EdineÅ£, Bessarabia. They had been on a death march for three weeks. Having exchanged all of their clothing and belongings for food over the course of their march, they were now emaciated skeletons barely covered in filthy rags. The nightmarish figures scarcely looked human as they dragged themselves along, shivering and crying. Feivel and the other deportees surrounded the convoy, sneaking a few men away and giving precious food and clothing to the others. The Romanian soldiers kept driving the death march forward with whips and bullets, shouting, “Whoever lags behind will be shot dead!”
⁸¹

After a few restless days in Ataki, the deportees were told that they would be marched across the Dniester River. Terrifying rumors circulated about the Jews who had died during earlier crossings. Some had been pushed into the water and then machine-gunned in the back. Others had simply drowned in the river. Still others had successfully crossed the river only to be shot by cruel Romanian soldiers on the other side. The river had been filled with bodies of Jewish men, women, and children.

Before crossing the Dniester, the deportees were ordered to exchange their Romanian lei for Ukrainian rubles at overly inflated exchange rates that ensured that their money would lose 80 percent of its value. The Jews were also told to hand over all gold and jewelry or face immediate execution. Feivel and his family decided to defy these commands. They held on to what remained of the currency and the jewelry they had sewn into their clothes. They did, however, hand over the gold necklace that had been the first present that Feivel had given Tzici. They had briefly considered trying to hide the necklace, but Tzici's parents had convinced them that it was not worth the risk. Little Helen needed her parents now more than ever.

By the time the convoy reached the Dniester River, the rain that had been falling nonstop since they had reached Ataki was causing the river to overflow. The Romanian soldiers decided to postpone the river crossing until the next day. Feivel and his family lit a fire that once again allowed them to enjoy warm sugar water. They slept as a group, with the men forming a perimeter to protect the women from the marauding Romanian soldiers. They covered themselves as best as they could, but it was impossible to ward off the wind and rain. They spent yet another restless night, frozen, hungry, exhausted, and terrified.

The next morning, wooden rafts arrived to ferry the Jews across the river. The deportees crowded onto the decrepit rafts, which were barely able to support their weight. Some overturned, leaving dozens of bodies floating in the freezing river. Shouting and cursing, the Romanian soldiers continued to shove the Jews onto the rafts with their rifle butts. Before long, they started pushing deportees into the water, mockingly wondering aloud whether the Dniester River would part for the Jews like the Red Sea had for their ancestors. The first people to be thrown in the water were the rabbi from Gura Humorului and his six children. Unable to swim, they screamed and flailed in the river for a few seconds before they all disappeared into the current. Feivel watched as the soldiers stood there, clapping their hands and laughing.

The Winingers made it across the river, but a Romanian soldier stole one of their last suitcases along the way. They were herded down yet another muddy road to the town of Mogilev-Podolski, the first stop on what would become a lengthy death march deeper into Transnistria for forty thousand Jews.

One family that was allowed to stay in Mogilev-Podolski was that of a young violinist named Harry Löbel. Harry started playing the violin at the age of five and was already performing with the local symphony orchestra in Czernowitz when he was nine. By the time the Löbels reached Transnistria, they had lost all of their possessions except for the small violin that young Harry carried on his back. Knowing that his family would die of starvation and exhaustion if they were forced to march farther into Transnistria, Harry's father convinced the commandant of the Mogilev-Podolski transit camp to allow the family to stay there.

Harry's violin playing saved him and his family from starvation during their three-year detainment in Mogilev-Podolski. When the commandant, who was an amateur pianist, heard that Harry played the violin, he summoned the boy to perform. The commandant was moved to tears by Harry's playing. He decided that the boy and his family deserved special treatment. He ordered that they be given extra food and that Harry be allowed to take lessons from a teacher from another camp. The commandant followed Harry's progress, summoning the boy to play for him once a month.

In March 1944, Harry was again rescued by the violin. A member of a Romanian delegation charged with caring for war orphans visited Mogilev-Podolski. She heard Harry play and was so captivated by his talent that she issued him a special permit to leave Transnistria, even though she knew his parents were alive. Harry traveled to Bucharest and was then sent to Palestine, where his parents joined him one year later. Harry's child-sized violin also survived the Holocaust. It was later sold to purchase a new instrument that was more suitable for a professional adult.

After the Holocaust, Harry Löbel changed his name from German to Hebrew, choosing the Hebrew form of Abraham for his given name and Melamed, a word for a yeshiva teacher, as his surname. Avraham Melamed joined the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as a member of the first violin section, and was with the ensemble when they traveled to Auschwitz in 1988. En route to the death camp, Melamed was so overcome with emotion that he was unable to say a word. So he let his violin speak for him. He took it out of its case and played the “Kaddish” movement from Maurice Ravel's
Two Hebrew Melodies
. As he played, tears came to his eyes, as well as to those of his fellow orchestra members. During the same tour, the ensemble performed a historic concert in Berlin, ending with “Hatikvah.” It was one of the most emotional performances of Melamed's distinguished career.

Unlike the Löbels, the Wininger family did not stop in Mogilev-Podolski. Instead, they were forced to continue walking seven miles eastward to an abandoned military school in Scazinetz. The thousands of Jews who greeted them looked like walking corpses. Their feet were bare, their clothes were in tatters, and their bodies were covered with flea bites. Feivel spotted an old friend from Czernowitz. He, too, was emaciated, filthy, and flea-ridden.

The soldiers shoved the convoy into a large garrison that was already crowded with thousands of people. The looks of despair on people's faces and the stench of human waste were overwhelming, as was the earsplitting din of cries and screams. Some of the deportees had gone insane during their journey from Romania. Feivel watched in horror as a mother cradled an empty blanket, singing, laughing, and crying as if her dead baby were still there.

For the first time, Feivel started to fully process the gravity of his situation. In Gura Humorului, on the train, and in Ataki, he had been too shocked to truly grasp what was happening. At the Dniester River, he had been too focused on mere survival to give any thought to the future. Now that he was finally at a standstill, reality started to sink in. He pressed his fingernails into the palms of his hands and quietly braced himself for the challenges ahead.

A group of Romanian soldiers entered the hall and ordered some of the younger deportees to remove the gray corpses that littered the barracks floor. When the soldiers returned early the next morning, more bodies of men, women, and children lay lifelessly on the cold floor. Another crew of young men was conscripted to dig a large trench near the camp fence, load the bodies into a cart, and dump the corpses into the mass grave.

The Jews were once again jostled, cursed at, and struck with rifle butts as they were ordered to line up in rows. Miserable and confused, with tattered and foul-smelling clothes, they formed their lines and renewed their death march.

The soft mud continued to make walking very difficult. Several deportees got their shoes stuck in the mud. They had no choice but to leave their shoes in the slime to avoid being beaten or shot for slowing down. This only prolonged their deaths, as they were now even more exposed to the harsh elements of the nonstop rain and snow. Before too long, the soldiers started to push the soaked and exhausted Jews along. With increasing frequency, Feivel heard shots ring out as the soldiers opened fire on the deportees who were moving too slowly. The bodies of those who were killed were simply left on the roadside.

Early into the first day, Feivel could see that Tzici was losing her strength. She kept changing the arm with which she was carrying Helen. She needed Feivel's brother-in-law to push her from behind to keep moving forward. Feivel could not help her because he was too busy propping up his mother, who would have collapsed into the mud without his assistance. Feivel opened his last remaining suitcase and gave more of his rapidly dwindling possessions to a soldier in exchange for allowing his ailing mother and baby Helen to ride in one of the two horse-drawn carriages that followed the procession. On the second day, Feivel exchanged more of his belongings for a ride for his mother, but received a whip to the face for asking if Helen could also sit in the wagon. Instead, Feivel created a sling for Helen by cutting a slit across the back of Tzici's jacket and adding a rope to support the baby's weight. Helen had continued to grow thinner and weaker. Hungry and freezing, she had even lost the strength to cry.

Feivel watched as others were forced to abandon their parents, spouses, and children who were too weak to walk any further. One morning, Feivel overheard a daughter arguing with her elderly mother over the impossible decision of whether to remain in the barn and die with her or leave her behind when the death march continued. The sadistic soldiers ended the debate by shooting both of them. Another mother abandoned her young daughter on the side of the road when she was no longer able to carry her. A few hours later, the remorseful mother simply stopped walking. She offered no resistance when a soldier beat and shot her for not keeping up with the rest of the convoy.

At night, the Jews were locked in barns. Feivel would look around and see how their numbers had dwindled during the day. When he woke the next morning, Feivel would count the numbers of deportees who had died overnight. This included his uncle, who died during the first night of the death march from Scazinetz. The soldiers would add to the numbers by shooting the children and sick people who were too weak to continue walking.

After three days of a brutal death march through the rain and snow, the convoy arrived at an abandoned train station in Obukhov. By this time, only half of the Jews who had left Scazinetz remained. The soldiers warned them to not leave the train station. They turned around their wagons and drove off, leaving the deportees with neither food nor any other supplies. Although the Jews had been strictly forbidden from traveling to the nearby village, many went there to beg, to exchange their belongings for food, or to find jobs. More often than not, the Ukrainians welcomed them by throwing rocks or siccing dogs on them.

Feivel's mother had grown very sick. She had suffered from heart problems before the deportation, and had contracted pneumonia during the death march. A doctor from Gura Humorului visited her in the train station and told her that she would not last much longer. She died in her sleep that night.

Feivel decided to take his remaining family members to Shargorod, a larger city where there was already an established Jewish ghetto. Because the large Jewish community had been able to organize itself, Shargorod promised better prospects for food and employment. Shargorod was also in the district of Mogilev, a region that saw less German involvement and Romanian cruelty than other parts of Transnistria.

Since they could have been sentenced to death for trying to relocate themselves, Feivel's family hired a carriage driver to take them overnight to avoid detection. The trip cost the Winingers a gold earring—their last valuable item.

The Shargorod Ghetto was packed with seven thousand deportees who were squeezed into 337 schools, community buildings, homes, cellars, and attics. Feivel was able to rent a single room from a Ukrainian peasant that became home to his family and another family—seventeen people in all. Feivel found a job cutting down trees, for which he was paid a quarter of a loaf of stale and moldy bread daily. This was not nearly enough to feed his family. Feivel gave the bread he earned to his father, Tzici, and Helen. He sustained himself by eating snow and leftovers that he foraged from the garbage.

If they were to have any chance of procuring enough food and firewood to stay alive in the freezing ghetto, Feivel and his family knew they would have to risk their lives by engaging in illegal activities. Tzici earned food from their Ukrainian landlord by disguising herself in his wife's clothes and traveling by train throughout Transnistria selling his sausages. Had she been caught smuggling food or simply roaming around without a permit, she would have been tortured and killed as a warning to other Jews. Feivel stole wood from his job to keep his family warm and to heat drinking water during the deadly Romanian winter. He, too, would have been shot on the spot had he been discovered.