The Family (31 page)

Another survivor named Moshe Pogolensky wrote that “the Germans caught the son-in-law of Puchinsky and threw him in the flames, where he was burned alive before the eyes of the entire community. . . . The Jewish victims stood shaking as they watched. . . . The SS men ordered everyone to dance around the pyre and sing ‘Hatikva' [“the hope”—the song became the Israeli national anthem]. This torture did not satisfy the Germans. As soon as the fire was extinguished they ordered everyone to give them their hidden money.”

After the burning and the stealing came the killing in earnest. The SS selected thirty-one sturdy-looking Jews from those assembled in the market and marched them to the Jewish cemetery—a five-minute walk past wooden houses and garden plots brimming with autumn's bounty. Inside
the cemetery walls they handed out shovels and ordered the thirty-one to dig a “huge, deep hole.” Meanwhile, those who remained in the marketplace were divided by gender into two groups. When word came that the hole was ready, 112 men were culled from the market and sent to the cemetery. The Germans and their Lithuanian accomplices were ready for them. The thirty-one diggers were ordered to lie flat and motionless on the ground: with their faces in the earth, they couldn't see what was happening, but they heard the shots and the moans and the thud of bodies falling into the bottom of the pit and then falling on top of other bodies.
When all 112 men were dead and piled in the pit, the thirty-one grave diggers were ordered to get up and take their shovels and cover the dead—their relatives, their neighbors, their friends, their enemies, their fellow Jews.

Sonia had been prophetic when she walked through this cemetery as a child and shuddered at its aura of “total destruction, poverty and the feeling of exile.”

At some point during that Yom Kippur, Beyle got sucked into the vortex of violence and disappeared forever. Accounts of what happened to her are cloudy, their provenance unknown. Years later, Sonia wrote that her mother was “murdered on Yom Kippur eve in 1941 in Rakov at the hands of her Christian neighbors,” but Sonia's children think that Beyle may have died on Yom Kippur itself. The grandchildren speculate that some Rakov gentiles, under cover of the carnival of killing, targeted Jews they believed had money or merchandise to steal. It was common knowledge that Beyle had operated a leather shop and factory for years, so the neighbors must have assumed she had a cache of money or hides. Very likely they broke into the house and demanded all of her money and shot her or clubbed her or beat her to death when she was slow or unwilling to hand it over. Beyle was sixty-six years old, thin, frail, and suffering from a weak heart. It wouldn't have taken much to kill her. Her body was never found. She has no grave. Her beloved husband in New York, her beloved daughter in Kfar Vitkin, her other beloved daughter in the Vilna ghetto had no idea she was dead. But Etl knew—very likely Etl watched and screamed with a screaming baby in her arms and a screaming toddler by her side while her mother was killed before her.

“It is very hard for me to describe the fear and the depression that
spread within the remnants of the Jewish population that survived,” wrote Pogolensky. “Most of the men at that point were annihilated and the few who survived tried to hide. Almost every home suffered a victim and each and every family was in mourning. The words, ‘today it was them, tomorrow it will be the rest of us,' were heard in every conversation. It was as if this sentence was constantly hovering over the community and the ambiance was bleaker than a most grave depression. No hope for survival or renewal spread to every home.”

At dawn the following day the survivors of the Yom Kippur massacre were ordered to leave their homes and move into a cluster of houses and
batei-medroshim
(prayer houses) around the synagogue compound: 950 Jews, most of them women and children and the elderly, crammed into nine homes and four prayer houses. This was the Rakov ghetto. Etl, holding seven-month-old Dobeleh in one arm and clutching the hand of five-year-old Mireleh with the other, took her place in the procession of prisoners. SS and Polish police lined the route and clubbed them along with batons. The walk from the Kaganovich family home to shul took ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Etl had come this way a thousand times before on Shabbat, on holidays, for bar mitzvahs and funerals. But on that day terror made the familiar strange. Etl walked with every nerve ending flayed, every instinct alert, offended, primed for action. Yet action was out of the question. She was a sensitive reed of a woman, thirty-four years old. She endured what she had to in silence so she could live for her daughters. Etl was devout so she may have prayed to God, silently, under her breath. Or maybe instead of praying she cursed God for taking her husband and her mother, for separating her from her father and sisters, for burdening her with two doomed helpless children.

—

October 26, 1941

Dear Sonia,

You write about sending letters through the Red Cross but this is in vain because where our family members are the Red Cross doesn't serve
them. We ask at the post office but they know nothing about it. They said to ask in another place. I asked them [the American relatives] to ask about it since this is New York and everything is so far and you have to drive and you need time to get to places. They promised me that they would ask about it.

I read here in the papers that they count all the refugees from Poland but there is nobody from our area. From Vilna there are three [refugees]. I am always looking in the papers to see what they write about it.

Your father,
Shalom Tvi Kaganovich

Sonia and Chaim had both made aliyah by ship, sailing from Constanta to Istanbul, around the blue-gray mountains that rim the spectacular Turkish coast and across the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to Palestine. Once the war began, these storied waters became a Jewish death pit like Ponar. Jews without papers were forbidden to cross from Europe to Palestine, and many who tried died in the attempt.
The British adopted a strict policy of turning back, hunting down, and firing “at or into” ships carrying illegal immigrants, a policy they enforced with obsessive viciousness. Hundreds died on board unsanitary, unseaworthy, or sabotaged ships. Those who tried to disembark without proper documents were deported to the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, where they rotted in packed detention camps for the duration of the war.

In November 1940, the
Patria
, carrying 1,700 illegal Jewish immigrants, was blown up in Haifa harbor in a Haganah plot gone awry (the bomb that was intended to cripple the ship, and thus keep it in port, accidentally sank it). Two hundred fifty people were killed. The Sea of Marmara swallowed the 230 refugees on board the
Salvator
in December 1940. Some 770 Romanian Jews went down with the
Sturma
in the Black Sea in February 1942: the ship was in dire condition and dangerously overcrowded, but when it docked in Istanbul for two months, the Turks refused to permit entry to any of the passengers and the British would not bend to the pleas of the Jewish Agency to grant them Palestine visas.
Finally, the Turks ordered the ship to be off and it sank in the Black Sea a mile
off the Turkish coast. Seventy children died; 250 women drowned; one passenger survived. In the aftermath of the
Sturma
disaster, posters branded with the word
MURDER
and the photograph of the British high commissioner fluttered on the walls of Palestine's cities: “Sir Harold MacMichael . . . wanted for the murder by drowning of 800 refugees on board the
Sturma
.”

British intransigence inflamed Jewish resistance. The first round of terrorist bombings and assassinations in Mandate Palestine were a direct result of the brutality and inhumanity that the British displayed toward Jewish refugees during the war.

Sonia read the newspaper, read her father's letters, exchanged news with her fellow moshavniks, and went slowly out of her mind. The words
hope
and
God
and
future
appeared in nearly every letter her father wrote, but after the
Patria
and the
Salvator
and the
Sturma
, Sonia could hope no longer. Even if by some miracle Etl and Doba and their children could be extracted from the ghettos of Rakov and Vilna, the British would never let them set foot in Palestine. The war had snapped shut a perfect trap. The Jews of Palestine despised their British governors, but they were utterly dependent on British power. Without the British military, Rommel's Panzer divisions would sweep in from the west and they would be prisoners of the Reich just like their relatives in Europe (an Einsatzgruppe unit was stationed in Greece, ready to descend on Palestine and begin liquidating the Jewish population when the time came). With the British in control, though, they were powerless to help their brethren trapped in Europe. Sonia and Chaim could do nothing but work their land, raise their children, and wait.

With every passing month of war, Sonia set her heart more fiercely on bringing her father to Palestine. But this too was maddeningly impossible.

—

The Nazi-appointed Judenrate—literally, “Jewish councils”—were not councils at all but instruments of more efficient oppression and murder. When the masters wanted to enumerate, rob, transport, or kill the slaves, the Judenrat was charged with making the numbers come out right—enough money, enough bodies. If they failed, they died first. If they succeeded, they died anyway—maybe a few hours later, a few weeks, a month, but they died nonetheless. So it was no honor and no guarantee of safety that Chaim's
brother Yishayahu was forced to serve on Volozhin's Judenrat. The local SS probably tapped him because he had been a teacher.

The holy city of Volozhin was cursed with an especially sadistic bunch of Nazi occupiers. Their greatest pleasure was torturing little girls to death. When one Jewish girl was caught taking a bottle of milk from a Christian woman, the Nazis made her crawl up a hill on her hands and knees gathering potatoes until she was bloody and exhausted. “
The tortures lasted for hours until her powers ceased, then they killed her,” recounted one witness. The Nazis grabbed two Jewish girls and marched them to the top of Priest's Mountain along with two dogs. “On the mountain they shot the girls and beheaded the dogs to mix Jewish with animal blood. Those who passed away naturally were considered lucky.”

On October 28, 1941, Yishayahu and the other members of the Volozhin Judenrat were summoned by the local head of the Gestapo—a thug by the name of Moka. Moka told them to come up with a heap of boot soles—why or for what he did not specify. The Judenrat, figuring it was just another random act of Nazi madness, complied, but the madness did not end there. Moka returned to the Judenrat later that day with a couple of SS officers. This time he ordered the council members to assemble the entire population of the ghetto for “an interesting lecture” on work ethics. Again, Yishayahu and his fellow councilors spread the word through the ghetto. A survivor described what ensued: “When a large number had assembled, Moka sent most of them back to the ghetto. He imprisoned the rest in the cinema hall. From there he took groups of ten people at one time, conducted them to the neighboring sports ground and killed them.” Two hundred Volozhin residents died in this action, including Jacob Garber, the Judenrat head. After the shootings, Belarusian police were called in to despoil the bodies: “[They] stripped the clothes off the corpses, took away any rings and jewelry and pulled their gold teeth out of their mouths. Then a group of Jews was brought and ordered to bury the dead.” Yishayahu may have been among the victims—able-bodied men were targeted first and he was not yet forty. Like Beyle, like Shepseleh, like Khost, Yishayahu Kaganovich had no grave. His name appeared just once in the records of Volozhin as a member of the Judenrat, then vanished. He left a wife, a daughter, and a two-year-old son.

“
Life in the Ghetto grew harder and harder,” wrote a survivor. “One day several SS men entered the house which served as a House of Prayer. They took a Torah Scroll, spread it out on the ground, made several dozen Jews lie down on the sheets and killed them.” Perhaps this was one of the scrolls inked by the soft skilled hand of the patriarch Shimon Dov HaKohen—grandfather of Yishayahu and Chaim; Doba, Etl, and Sonia; Itel, Harry, Sam, and Hyman.

—

Sam's oldest daughter, Dorothy, had always been strange—shrill, irrational, obsessive, hypersensitive, suspicious of others. Today she would probably be diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic or bipolar, but in 1941 she was written off as peculiar. Her siblings joked that Dorothy had a radio with its own unique frequency, which explained why she knew about news events and weather conditions that no one else had ever heard of. When Dorothy emerged from her bedroom on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, shouting that Japanese planes had bombed the U.S. battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor, no one in the family believed her.
Where the hell was Pearl Harbor, anyway?

But for once, Dorothy's radio had gotten it right. In the course of the surprise attack, four U.S. naval battleships were sunk, four others were damaged, 2,402 Americans died, and 1,282 were wounded. The following day Congress declared war on Japan, and the declaration of war on Germany came three days later.

Chance, fate, and ambition had divided the family of the scribe. War reunited them.

W
ord seeped into the Rakov ghetto that America had entered the war, but the Germans saw to it that the news raised no hope or unrest.
Nazi officers convinced the Rakov Judenrat that the United States and Britain intended to make peace with Germany and that when the fighting stopped the Nazis were going to transport the Jews to Palestine. “
Many such shameful and worn-out lies guided the activity of the Judenrat,” wrote one Rakov Jew. “Rich storekeepers and factory owners, people with initiative who handled their difficulty with gelt . . . were in the Judenrat. They exacted a harsh price from the population. No one can say that the gelt did not help them. Meanwhile hundreds of children, women, old people and weak and sick men were living in great hunger and need.” Etl and her daughters were among those.

The day after the United States declared war on Japan, the first killings by poison gas took place at the Chelmno extermination camp in Poland. The murderers mounted an elaborate charade, telling the victims that they must have a medical exam and shower—and then shoving them naked into the back of a paneled truck in batches of fifty to seventy and asphyxiating them with carbon monoxide.
Murder by gas would be perfected over the next few months and a gas called Zyklon B, far more efficient than carbon
monoxide, would be used to kill on an industrial scale at the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, and Sachsenhausen. But gas was not necessary for mass murder. Plenty, like Shepseleh, were shot over pits; murdered, like Beyle, by greedy neighbors; captured and imprisoned and executed like Khost. Disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition claimed many more.
In the six months between June and December 1941, the Nazis slaughtered a million Jews in the territory they had seized from the Soviets—most of them killed by bullets and fire, the preferred weapons of the Einsatzgruppen.

By the end of 1941, Hitler had made it clear that the elimination of Jews from Nazi-occupied territory was now his top priority. Accordingly, on January 20, 1942, SS general Reinhard Heydrich convened a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform key governmental and military personnel of how the “Final Solution” of European Jewry would be effected.
Heydrich announced that the Reich's goal was the elimination of some 11 million Jews not only from the countries at war in Europe but also from the United Kingdom and neutral nations including Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and the European sector of Turkey. Able-bodied Jews would be worked to death; the remnant would be “dealt with appropriately.”

The Jews of Rakov were among the first to be “dealt with” under the blueprint of the Final Solution.

—

They were torn from sleep at dawn on Wednesday,
February 4, 1942.
To Minsk, to Minsk
, adult voices muttered. Mireleh was only six but she knew what Minsk meant. Minsk was where her father had gone. Minsk was the city. Shops. Crowded sidewalks. Cakes and sweets and stores crammed with delicious food. If they were going to Minsk maybe she'd get to see her daddy again. Maybe her mother would smile.

The snow was still shadowy blue outside, but inside everything was in an uproar. Her mother was frantically pulling clothes into bundles. Dobaleh was hungry—Mireleh was hungry too but she knew better than to whine about it.
To Minsk, to Minsk
. They must pack only what they could carry in their arms. Mireleh was big enough to carry a bundle of her own, but Dobaleh was still a baby. What did Dobaleh know? She had spent half her
life in the ghetto, her father had disappeared before she could say “Daddy,” she couldn't even walk properly. In one month it would be Dobaleh's first birthday—but Mireleh doubted that there would be cake.

Fists were pounding on the walls and then the door flew open and men's voices shouted at them to get moving. Everyone who had been stuffed into this tiny house since Yom Kippur grabbed what they could and then all of them tumbled outside into the snow.

Even in the feeble dawn light Mireleh could see the ring of armed men in uniforms. The voices kept shouting commands that she couldn't understand. The women screamed as the men with guns grabbed their bags and shoved them along.
No need for bags where you're going
. Anyone who tried to resist or turn back got cracked on the head with a rifle butt. A few fell to the ground bleeding. Mireleh clung to her mother's hand and they moved with the surging crowd. Cries and curses echoed over her head.
They are not taking us to Minsk. They are taking us to death
. One or two broke off from the mass and began to run. Fire from the machine guns dropped the bodies onto the trampled snow. The sound of pain was deafening.

The noise subsided a little when they were
all assembled in the courtyard of the three synagogues: the old shul, the new shul, and the small
shtible
where the Hasidim used to dance until their black clothes flapped in the air like crows' wings. They were low and humble, these three beloved shuls. Their roofs were shingled; their wooden walls were darkened and ridged by time; inside they were bare and dim but for the jeweled light that shone from the Torah scrolls. Still, they were the glory of Rakov. But why were they at shul today? It wasn't Shabbat and it was much too early. Mireleh pressed close to her mother and baby sister in the courtyard as the ring of men tightened. They were all being squeezed toward the entrance of the old shul, and one by one they disappeared inside. The bony ends of knees and elbows jabbed at Mireleh from every side. The breath was crushed from her body. And then it was their turn to take their place with the others in God's house.

—

Nachum Greenholtz, a Rakov Jew, had been warned of what was coming that day and managed to hide inside a “field bathroom.” He wrote: “From the cracks in the wall we could see the Germans searching and checking
and surrounding the town. Later we saw the flames coming from the ghetto and we instantly understood what was happening. We heard the sound of the screams.”

A group of six witnesses reported: “Crying children were pierced by rifle bayonets and thrown over the crowded heads. The synagogue doors and windows were blocked with nailed planks. The murderers spilled gasoline on the walls and set the building on fire.”

Others said that a few managed to get out of the synagogue and run for their lives, but the guards shot them down.

Moshe Pogolensky gave a different account:

At dawn . 
. . the ghetto was surrounded and the entire Jewish community, nine hundred and fifty souls, was put in the yard of the synagogue. They took ten of the healthiest people and separated them. The rest were taken group by group to the entrance of the synagogue, where they were shot and killed by automatic machine guns. The ten separated people were ordered to throw the individual bodies in the synagogue. As soon as the last of the people were thrown in the synagogue, the ten people were pushed inside without shooting them. They shot the building and set it afire and everyone was burned to death.

“She will be a wonder girl, with her brains and the excellent way she speaks,” Beyle had written Shalom Tvi of their granddaughter Mireleh a few months earlier. “I love how she sings and dances.” The wonder girl died at the age of six with her mother and baby sister. Whether fire, bullets, or bayonet blade killed them, whether they were shot at the entrance to the synagogue or incinerated alive inside, it will never be known. Fire consumed what remained.

“We sat there as if we were frozen and had lost touch with ourselves,” Nachum Greenholtz wrote of himself and a fellow survivor after the fire. “We did not speak the entire day. The night was very dark and very cold. We kept walking, two lonely broken-hearted Jews who tried to save their souls and left behind them everyone they knew and loved—all that were now annihilated.”