Violins of Hope (24 page)

 

 

T
he twelve-year-old boy was fast asleep when the six armed men discovered him. He was lying by himself near a smoldering fire in the woods of the Polish-Ukrainian region of Volhynia. His head was resting on a violin case. It was just after midnight on January 4, 1943.

“Where did this little boy come from?” asked one of the men.

“He probably got lost in the forest,” responded their leader. “He's probably also hungry. Let him sleep for now. When the soup is ready, we'll wake him up so he can tell us who he is.”

The men lit a new fire. They melted snow in the aluminum boxes that they carried on their belts. When the water started boiling, they added some wheat and frozen meat.

“Wake up, young man!” the leader yelled, shaking the boy when the soup started to cook. “You shouldn't sleep so soundly in the forest.”

The boy's eyes cracked open and quickly closed. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

The leader grabbed him by the arms and sat him upright. The boy opened his eyes again. Seeing the strange men with their weapons, he jumped up. He tried to run away, but the leader gripped his hand.

“Don't be scared, little boy,” the leader said. “We won't harm you. We're partisans. Do you know what partisans are?”

The boy knew exactly who they were. They were members of a Jewish guerrilla force. Freedom fighters who had escaped into the woods when the Germans and Ukrainians had come to liquidate their hometowns. From their hideouts in the forest, they launched paramilitary attacks and performed acts of sabotage on the Nazis and their collaborators.

“I know, I know!” the boy exclaimed, recognizing the patches of red fabric they wore on their caps. “I've been looking for you for the past three days.”

“What's your name, boy?” the detachment leader asked.

“They call me Mitka,” the boy lied. He had learned to disguise his Jewish identity around strangers, even fellow Jews. He had adopted a name that implied that he was Ukrainian. His real name was Mordechai “Motele” Schlein, but he would not share this with the partisans for several months.

He did, however, tell them the partial truth about how he had ended up in the woods. Motele was from the Volhynian village of Krasnovka and had escaped into the forest in the previous spring, right after his family had been shot. He told the partisans that his parents had been killed along with other townspeople in retaliation for the burning of a German warehouse. The truth was that his parents and little sister had been murdered simply for being Jewish. As Motele explained to the partisans, he had lived in the forest by himself for the entire summer. When winter had arrived, he had gone into a nearby village and gotten a job as a shepherd for a rich peasant. After suffering months of physical abuse from the peasant's wife, the boy had slipped back into the forest on New Year's Day in the hopes of joining the Nazi-fighting partisans.

“I like you! We'll take you with us,” declared the detachment leader, impressed with the boy's resourcefulness. “You'll be in Uncle Misha's Jewish Group.” The detachment leader just happened to be Simcha “Lionka” Gildenman, the son of the “Uncle Misha” after whom the partisan brigade was named.

“Aren't you afraid of being around Jews? Here in Volhynia, the Ukrainian children are afraid of being called ‘zhid,'” Lionka continued, invoking a Russian epithet for a person of Jewish descent.

“I'm not afraid of Jews,” the boy responded, turning his head and wiping away a tear with his sleeve. “They're just like everyone else.”

Motele was born in 1930 in Krasnovka, a small village near the border between Poland and the Soviet Union. He grew up in a sunken, straw-covered shack with his sister Batyale, who was two years younger than him. Their father Burtzik Schlein owned the shack along with a windmill and a garden. Their mother Chana took care of the family by preparing their meals, washing their clothes, and tending to the garden. In the nearby lake, she soaked flax that she would spin into linen at night. To further supplement the windmill's meager profits, she raised geese that Motele and Batyale lovingly cared for.

Although Motele's family was so poor that they could not afford shoes for him, his childhood was full of fun and affection. He spent his summers playing with his Ukrainian friends, who loved him for his bravery and sense of humor. He, in turn, enjoyed helping them take care of the cows and horses behind the village. As he rode bareback through Krasnovka on the peasants' horses, nobody gave any consideration to the fact that Motele was Jewish.

Most of all, Motele loved music. One of his favorite activities was listening to his mother sing as she worked at her spinning wheel. His favorite song was a ballad about the 1903 massacre of Jews in Kishinev, the capital of the Romanian region of Bessarabia. There was also a blind lyrist who would often visit Krasnovka to beg. While the beggar sat on the ground, singing Ukrainian folksongs and accompanying himself on the lyre, Motele would cry as the music touched his soul. Some days, Motele would walk to the other side of the village to visit the lavish palace of Meir Gershtein, a wealthy plantation owner who was the patriarch of the only other Jewish family in Krasnovka. Peering through the iron fence that surrounded the estate, Motele would spend hours listening with fascination as Meir's daughter Reizele played the piano while her teacher Solomon played the violin.

Motele wanted to make music. He carved a crude wooden flute, on which he taught himself to imitate birdcalls, to the delight of his friends. He would also try in vain to replicate the wonderful sounds he heard from the Gershtein estate—complex compositions such as a mazurka by Henryk Wieniawski. A handmade flute was the only instrument that Motele could afford, but what he really wanted to play was the violin. “When I grow up, I'm going to learn to play the violin like the plantation owner's teacher,” he pledged to Batyale. “I'm going to be a musician.”

Motele finally got his chance to learn music in the fall of 1938, when Meir Gershtein's wife—who was Motele's third cousin—invited the eight-year-old boy to live with her family. In the afternoons, after Reizele finished her schooling, she and Solomon would go into the parlor to play music. Motele would become so mesmerized by the sound of Solomon's violin that he would still be staring dreamily at the instrument several moments after they stopped playing.

One time, when Reizele and Solomon were playing a medley of Ukrainian folksongs, Motele started singing along unconsciously. Reizele exchanged a glance with Solomon and whispered, “Pianissimo.” As they played softly, Motele's voice resonated throughout the parlor. When they finished, Reizele ran over to Motele and kissed him on the cheek. “What a dear child you are!” she exclaimed. “What a great ear you have for music! Solomon, you must begin teaching him the violin.”

And so Motele's dream became a reality. Solomon started to give him violin lessons on an instrument that Reizele's little brother Shunye had lost interest in playing. Motele quickly proved be a good student. He was intelligent and remarkably talented, he picked things up quickly, and he was always eager to learn. Solomon spent every free moment helping his young prodigy develop his talent, even after Motele decided to move back into his parents' house in the spring of 1939.

Motele's carefree childhood ended on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As the German army occupied the western part of the country, thousands of Poles, mainly Jews, fled eastward. Several Jewish families escaped to Krasnovka, including one that stayed with Motele's family and told them horrific stories of German atrocities.

In accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had secretly divvied up Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland on September 17. The Soviet occupation brought about many changes in Krasnovka, most notably the nationalization of the Gershtein estate. After the Gershteins were forced to move to a neighboring village, their palace was turned into Krasnovka's first school, which Motele attended. Solomon was retained as one of the teachers. He continued to give Motele violin lessons after lunch.

A period of relative stability ended on June 22, 1941, when Germany violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by invading Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. Once again, people started escaping eastward.

“Everyone is fleeing,” Motele's mother Chana told his father. “Maybe we should go with them.”

“Let's wait awhile,” Burtzik responded. But he became less confident in his answer with each passing day. Others were abandoning their houses, but how could he and Chana leave the windmill that his great-grandfather had built? And how would they bring Motele and his little sister Batyale?

By July 1, it was too late. The Germans had occupied Krasnovka. They stormed the town with the roar of engines and the heavy footfalls of boots. They arrested the village chairman and hanged him. They ordered that his body be left swinging from the gallows for three days as an example for the rest of the village. The villagers secreted themselves in their shacks, but the Germans simply went door-to-door, demanding food.

A truck with twelve German soldiers pulled up in Motele's yard. Weapons drawn, they entered the house and sat down at the table. Chana served them eggs, fresh bread, and butter, which they ate without speaking a single word. They just stared at Chana from beneath the steel helmets that they had not even bothered to take off. As Motele and Batyale watched from the cracked door to the adjacent room, the eldest of the Germans suddenly stood up and went into the yard. A few moments later, Motele and Batyale heard several gunshots. The commander came back in and threw to the floor three bloody geese that were still convulsing and flapping their wings.

“These geese must be ready to eat in one hour,” he ordered Chana.

Chana just stood there, pale-faced and frozen with horror.

The German grabbed her arm and stared angrily into her frightened eyes. “One hour,” he commanded. “Do you understand?”

After the Germans stepped outside, Chana started crying. Wiping away her tears with the side of her head scarf, she started plucking the geese.

Batyale entered the room and hugged her mother from behind. “Don't cry, Mama,” she pleaded. “We still have lots of geese.”

“I'm not crying because of the geese,” Chana answered. “I'm crying over our own fates. God knows if we'll survive these murderers.”

Meanwhile, the German commander had ordered Burtzik to wash the dirt and mud off his truck. Burtzik filled a bucket with water and fashioned a brush from straw. When the commander saw Burtzik scrubbing the truck, he became irate.

“You dirty Jew,” he shouted, frothing at the mouth. “Why are you ruining the paint on my truck?”

He slapped Burtzik in the face. Then, noticing clean white sheets hanging on a clothesline, he grabbed the laundry, balled it up, and threw it at Burtzik.

“Clean with this, you damned Jew,” he spat.

Motele had come running out of the house when the German had started screaming. He watched angrily as his father bit his lip in pain and resumed washing the truck.

Immediately upon occupying Volhynia, the Germans initiated a plan to completely wipe out its Jewish community. They received ample assistance from local police and towns-people whose anti-Semitism and xenophobia made them willing participants in the genocide. “The element that settled our cities, whether it is Jews or Poles who were brought here from outside the Ukraine, must disappear completely from our cities,” declared the editor of the newspaper
Volhyn
on September 1, 1941. “The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved, and it will be solved in the framework of a general reorganization of the ‘New Europe.'”
⁸²

In the first wave of mass murders, fifteen thousand Jews were killed by the German death squads with the assistance of the Ukrainian police. By October 1941, subsequent waves of killings would result in the deaths of an additional thirty thousand Jews. The slaughters slowed when the Germans realized that they could exploit Jewish laborers rather than kill them. By this time, the vast majority of the surviving Jews of Volhynia had been relocated to cramped ghettos and labor camps, where starvation and disease claimed even more lives.

Although they were the only Jews left in Krasnovka, Motele's family avoided being banished to a ghetto because Burtzik's work at the windmill had rendered him indispensable to the town. Burtzik was, however, subjected to the Nuremberg Laws. The Nazis confiscated his grain and put severe restrictions on how much he could earn by milling the villagers' grain. He was also required to wear the yellow Star of David, which immediately ostracized him from his fellow villagers.

One of these villagers was Burtzik's closest neighbor Pavlo Fustamit, whose family had lived next to Burtzik's for three generations. Burtzik and Pavlo grew up together, herded cattle together, and served in the military together. As adults, they collected wood together and helped each other buy cattle. They were like brothers. Their wives also became close friends, visiting each other almost hourly to borrow something, seek advice, or just chat. The women would garden together, spin flax together, and help each other with various other chores. When Pavlo's house was burned down by lightning, he and his wife Maria moved in with Burtzik and Chana until Pavlo could build a new home. But after the Nazi occupation, Pavlo and Maria avoided Burtzik and his family. They stopped visiting. They would turn their heads away if they saw them on the street.