by Ann Huber
About this time, Moishe and Pesche became concerned that the old Wynnefield neighborhood where they rented an apartment was irrevocably changing, as many of the Jewish families they knew began moving out. They stayed put until one day the upstairs tenant threw out her greasy wash-water over the railing right onto Pesche’s fresh laundry. They decided it was time for them to carve out their piece of the American dream elsewhere.
They bought a pretty brick duplex, their first house, on small tree-lined Westwood Lane near the “Main Line,” in Overbrook Hills, just across the City Line Avenue border of Philadelphia proper. It was close enough to walk along Haverford Avenue to a synagogue in Overbook Park. The house had everything they wanted: three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a finished paneled basement where Moishe could pay his bills at his “new” desk, a covered front porch, and a garage. The garage, which was never used for that purpose, served as a storage and workshop area. Closing was scheduled for May of 1968, which made the summer an opportune time for me to spend with them. Herm wrote, “Just to show you how much my folks are counting on you to come, we’re including you in our reckonings of who to put in which rooms.” But Overbrook Hills was such a long, long way from where they started.
Poland, which was caught in a tug of war between Prussia (Germany) and Russia for more than 200 years by the start of World War II, had had a large Jewish population since the 14th century; its King Kzimicrz II protected the Jewish community from persecution and the population flourished. In the late 18th century, four million Jews from the former Polish/Lithuanian state came under Russian rule. Czarina Catherine the Second banished Jewish merchants out of the cities into small villages called “shtetls” in the countryside, known as the Pale of Settlement. By the 19th century, several insurrections led to fewer restrictions but shtetl life continued. Mordy was one such shtetl, little more than a stop on the train line between Warsaw and the East.
Each shtetl had at its core a small, dirt-poor Jewish community, surrounded by Polish-owned farms. Robbed of their livelihood, Jews generally turned to trades such as tailoring, shoe repair and commerce, trading goods and services with other locals, and living peacefully most of the time. These hard-working, honorable, and religious people had become resigned to the terrifying pogroms, which were as common as inevitable.
According to Pesche, “Where we lived, violence was perpetrated by soldiers, renegades or outsiders, not by our neighbors. The children all played together and the Polish community left us alone until the war brought the Germans and Russians. When Germans and Russians moved in, they ruined it.”
Pesche was born in Sarnaki, Poland in either 1910 or 1911. Sarnaki was a shtetl about 100 miles east of Warsaw, not far from Mizrich (Międzyrzec), a larger community. She was a cheerful, bright, outgoing woman, with dark brown hair and blue eyes that she passed on to her children. She loved to sing and dance, but had a serious side, too. Her father made his living buying and selling hay and corn. He was also a moneylender, lending to “poor” people. As the youngest of seven siblings whose mother died when she was only two years old, she was raised by her oldest, much older, sister, Leah. “I did not like living with my beautiful sister because my cousins were grown. I had no one to go to school with.”
Embarrassed about her lack of education, Pesche often lamented not going past the 3rd grade. It is a shame she felt bad about herself because she was street smart and clever, qualities that later saved her and her family’s lives.
After a few years with Leah, Pesche returned to live with her father until the age of seventeen when, like many other young women, she went to work in one of Warsaw’s abundant dry-goods factories. During the 1920s and 1930s a majority of the Jewish population in Warsaw was employed in the manufacture of clothing. Pesche joined the ranks of sweater-knitters, young women who were the backbone of the factories.
A soft smile lightened her face when she told me, “I was going out with young men. We went together to the Zionist meetings. We all planned to move to Israel as soon as possible. One such young man was a shoemaker, Mottel, I think his name was, who wanted to marry me. He followed me like a shadow, but I couldn’t stand him. A shoemaker? Where do I come to a shoemaker? No!”
I was surprised by the independence she enjoyed. She was happy in Warsaw. Her only obligation was to send money home from her job, until after a few years, she had to return home to care for her aging father.
Pesche was in her eighties by the time she told me her story. By then, she could only remember two brothers: one whose name she could no longer remember who died young serving in the Polish army, and Binyumin who was much older than she. Binyumin lived with his wife and children in the little shtetl of Mordy. Pesche also had four sisters, two of whom still lived in Mordy then. There was such a large age difference between the siblings that Binyumin was a father figure in her stories. Shabbat and other holidays were spent at his table where he presided over the family.
Pesche met Moishe in Mordy, where he was born and where he and his mother operated a dry goods store on the square. “My father had died by then,” Moishe told me. Like Pesche, Moishe had much older brothers whose children were Moishe’s age or older. One brother and sister remained in Mordy.
Moishe approached Pesche at the Mordy train stop when she was returning from one of her trips to visit her family who had remained in Sarnaki. “I recognized her from the feed shop,” he told us. “Pesche would come into the store with her sister-in-law.”
“Moishe threw away all his friends and he went around with me,” Pesche lovingly recalled sixty years later. They courted for four years before they decided to marry. Knowing Pesche’s family’s fine reputation, Moishe treated her very well. “My father had been a rabbi and collected interest on loans.” They went to her brother Binyumin who substituted for her late father, for approval.
Moishe and Pesche were married in the mid 1930s, the exact date lost to us as is any wedding photograph. Lenny was born in 1938, and named after Pesche’s late father, Label.
Moishe and Pesche in Poland, shortly after their wedding.
“When war broke out in Europe in 1939,” Pesche told me, “we were living in Mizrich. Moishe was working as a furrier.” Mizrich had an organized Jewish population and was a community larger than any of the numerous shtetls. It flourished because it had developed a unique industry of producing and distributing its world famous hog-hair brushes which allowed its population financial independence. It also had a second lucrative industry in fur. Like Galati, since before the turn of the century, Mizrich had been a hotbed of Zionism to which young people were drawn from the shtetl.
A gentle and unassuming man who preferred play to work, Moishe was an unlikely soldier. However, when the Polish military came to Mizrich to round up men for their force, he had no choice but to go, leaving his wife and baby behind.
Wars came and went but this war was different. As Pesche described it, “This was not about conquering territory but about killing people.” Alone with her infant son, Pesche made her way back to Mordy to find her brother and sisters. With all able-bodied men conscripted, the women and children left behind were forced to fend for themselves.
After its quick defeat, the Polish army was disbanded and many men did make their way back slowly to the shtetls. News of loved ones was hard to get and unreliable. Word of mouth was the only form of communication. There was no reliable transportation. The German trains were dangerous because they were being used to transport Jews to concentration camps.
In Mordy, as in many other shtetls, there was little food, no news about husbands, fathers, or sons; a dark cloud of fear cast a long shadow over everyone. Pesche lived with her sisters and their children for a few months until rumors began circulating that the Germans, headed toward Mordy were killing all Jewish babies as they marched east. Pesche still believed this to be true when she told the story 50 years later, and was very graphic in her descriptions; “They took the children by their legs and swung them like chickens and smashed
their heads against a wall.” Horrified, she quickly realized that, unlike her sisters who had ties and homes in the village, she had nothing to lose by fleeing. “I was not going to sit and wait for death,” she explained. And so she left her siblings, despite their protestations.
Miraculously, Moishe, who had suffered a gunshot wound to his knee, did make his way back, walking for weeks, stopping at hospitals occasionally for food. As a wounded soldier he was entitled to food. Ironically, other soldiers who were uninjured were not so lucky.
Frightened and cut off from family, Pesche had nothing to rely on but her sharp wits. She went to one of her late father’s debtors who was still making weekly payments on a debt. In exchange for forgiveness of one’s month’s payment, he agreed to ferry her across the Bug River, which formed the new border between Poland and Russia.
Driven by an extreme sense of resolve and buoyed by occasional messages passed on from person to person that Moishe was on his way back, she could not and would not leave the area. “I hoped that soon Moishe would return and everything would be over.”
Pesche planned to follow her sister Leah who had already crossed the border into Russia and to leave Lenny with her so she could be free to return to Poland to wait for Moishe. She would go back to retrieve him. To get ready for the crossing, she packed a sack filled with a large supply of farfel (dried dough) and some bedding in a large tub. It turned out that the tub was larger than the boat so their things had to be unpacked straight into the boat, including the tub she needed to bathe the baby. As the oars scraped the bottom of the river with each stroke, she and the oarsman thought they would be discovered by Russian sentries and mistaken for spies. However, the trip was uneventful except for one Russian they bribed once on land who then followed them to Leah’s house to make sure they were telling the truth.
The next day, she and Lenny joined an army of refugees. Recalling that day, Pesche elaborated, “I knew the refugees were running back and forth across the Russian border. I figured that if we kept moving, we would be safe.” Leaving Mordy, with no place to go, was a brave and remarkably prescient choice. It was the last time Pesche saw any of her immediate family.
For the next several months, Pesche and the other refugees who went east with her, managed to stay alive in the thick forests on the banks of the Bug River, inside the Russian border. When rumors reached them that the Russians were advancing west, they made their way back to Poland, sleeping on the ground at the border until authorities opened the crossing.
The refugees learned their way through the forest, mastering how to avoid being swallowed by the swamps, marshes, and decayed wood. “In the forest, we collected and ate blueberries and mushrooms,” remembered Pesche. “But, it was a dangerous place. One man who lost his way in the forest began screaming for help. The others tried to find him by following the screams, but by the time they found him the next day, he was dead.”
Pesche was unwilling to discuss all the details about her war years until she was in her eighties and was already showing the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. Moishe “came exactly the day that I had to leave.” Her saga of what she went through alone and what they went through together became entangled, but one story, memorialized on videotape, still brings me to tears. She tells of how they sometimes escaped from place to place by hopping on the trains that regularly made their way through the Polish/Russian battle zone. In one instance, the train was moving slowly, so Moishe was able to climb on the train. However, Pesche who had a bandaged leg and was carrying Lenny, couldn’t climb up after him or keep up with the moving train. In panicked desperation, she threw the child up to Moishe as she walked on, the train leaving her behind. How they managed to find each other once again remains a mystery.
After the Russians and Germans signed a non-aggression pact in 1939, dividing Poland between themselves, approximately 250,000 Jewish immigrants were allowed across the Bug River into Russia. Many were transported to Siberian work camps. Although conditions in the camps were very harsh, those Jews who survived in Siberia were spared deportation to concentration camps.
Pesche explained that they had refused Russian passports so they had to stay one step ahead of the Russians to avoid transport. Eventually, inexplicably, Pesche, Moishe, and Lenny were among those who decided once again, to cross the Bug River, which was near to where they were living in eastern Poland before they, too, were transported to Siberia, “a real hell.” Food was rationed; for instance, for a child, they allowed five grams of bread and half a glass of milk. Moishe who did not want to do manual labor (he preferred bartering), was forced by the Russian authorities to cut down trees, as was Pesche. As Pesche told it, “We did what we had to do.” In return for labor, they received “a piece of bread and a glass of milk.” They also bartered for food using shirts and underwear rescued from dead soldiers, which they bleached and sewed into other clothing items. They bartered cigarettes for bread. There was no bedding except for a small bed fashioned out of straw for Lenny.
On one occasion, Moishe was imprisoned by the Russians as punishment for black market “hondling”—that is, selling goods without a permit. He spent a couple of months in jail before Pesche was able to bribe the jailers to buy his freedom.
Some of Moishe’s siblings’ children had left for the United States and Israel in the 1920s and 30s and were spared likely annihilation in Europe. Moishe’s one remaining brother and sister were not so lucky. They were just two of three million Jews who were exterminated in Poland alone, half the total number of European Jews during the War—not in or from combat, but by plan of the Nazi regime. Those murdered represented 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews. Records show that most of those Jewish refugees who surrendered or were caught in Eastern Poland were immediately transported to the Belzec or Treblinka extermination camps. It is a staggering number of people to come from one country and could not have happened without the help of much of the local population. It is nothing short of a miracle, not just remarkable luck and ingenuity, that Pesche, Moishe, and Lenny survived as had others who chose to flee rather than surrender.
It was extremely painful for Pesche to recount the losses but I think she felt it was necessary to keep the memories of those who were gone. It was equally hard for me to listen without getting upset about the unspeakable evil that was done, while marveling at their inner strength and resilience. Re-telling the tale always brings tears to my eyes. Through those chats with Moishe and Pesche I learned to speak Yiddish, interrupting to ask about an unfamiliar word. Although Pesche spoke a passable though fractured English, when talking about old times she reverted to Yiddish.
Amid the stories of horror, Pesche was overjoyed to learn after the war that one of her nephews, Binyumin’s son, Shimon, survived the war. I met Shimon and his wife when they visited Philadelphia from Buenos Aires in 1967.
Shimon and I hit it off and he was very eager to share his story. He told me, “I and a few other young men escaped from a concentration camp somewhere around 1943 and hid out in the countryside, moving from farm to farm where we stole food and lived in underground tunnels. One day, I was accidentally discovered by a Polish farmer who was going to expose me. I had no choice but to kill him with my bare hands in order to save myself. Another more tolerant and kind farmer hid me in an underground bunker for the remainder of the war. It must have been another year. Every few days he would bring some food and news.”
Shimon survived the war, then made his way through Italy and various other places, until he found a haven in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lived to a ripe old age. There, he continued to reap the rewards of perseverance and hard work through his children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren until 2012 when he passed away, already in his nineties.
Chapter Fifteen
NEU FREIMANN, MUNICH
AS THE WAR came to an end in 1945, more than 11 million refugees were freed by the Allies from concentration camps, labor camps, and prisoner-of-war camps. Added to them were millions more who ran
in terror from the advancing Russian Army because of rumors of rape, looting, and murder. At first, most of the displaced persons’ needs were provided by the Allied forces. Eventually, it was the United Nations Refugee Assistance Committee (UNRAC) that arranged for the refugees to be either returned to their native country or to be temporarily settled in Displaced Persons (DP) Camps all over Europe. Moishe, Pesche, and Lenny joined their ranks when they left Siberia, choosing not to become Russian citizens.
Initially, Moishe’s family rode another train back to Poland to find extended family, expecting survivors. They could find not a single family member still alive in Mordy, nor evidence that Jews had lived there. No graves, gravestones or cemeteries. There were no other Jews. As in Mordy, Mizrich’s (where Pesche’s family lived during the war) Jewish population was totally annihilated. All its Jews murdered. Unwilling to remain among people, some of whom hated them enough to kill them, Moishe and Pesche agreed to be re-settled in an American-run DP camp, Neu Freimann, located in the outskirts of Munich, Germany. This had been an already existing planned community for workers, turned into a self-sustaining encampment by the US Army. A chain link fence was installed to separate its inhabitants from the German population.
The planned community was originally built in 1934 by the Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) workers who were part of the growing war machine. They were engineers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who knew they were building their own future homes. When construction was completed, each of the workers was permitted a house chosen by lottery.
The American Army, under the auspices of the UNRAC, took over the community, evicting its German residents. Thousands of refugees, mostly Jews, arriving in successive waves took their place.