The Forest of Vanishing Stars

by Kristin Harmel

  And then the world had sound again, and the man who had once been her father was falling back on the snow, his blood red and angry and mingling with hers. He gasped for breath, gasped for life, and Yona found her voice at last. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, using the last of her strength to turn her head toward him. He was lying on the snow beside her, his head tilted toward her, and so their eyes met once more, and in them, she could see disbelief and a great, deep fear of what was to come. “I’m sorry,” she murmured again, and then he gasped once more, and the light in his eyes went out forever, leaving behind an empty, ruined shell.

  Yona closed her eyes, exhausted. Zus was safe now, though it was impossible to know whether her father had been alone. What if he’d been traveling with other deserters? What if another angry German had heard the gunshot and was already on his way here? “Run,” she whispered, forcing her eyes open again. Zus hovered over her, his tears falling. “Danger… You must run,” she managed to say.

  “No.” His voice was choked but firm. “No, Yona. I never had the chance to tell you what I came back to say. I came to tell you I was wrong. That I want to open my heart again. That I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  She could see a future stretching before him, beautiful and bright. Children. A solid home. Food on the table and flowers in the garden. But it wasn’t her life, wasn’t her future. It was his, and she wanted him to live it, to be happy. “Go, Zus,” she whispered. “If you don’t, you will die.”

  “Then so be it.” He was firm through his tears. “But I will not lose you, Yona.”

  “Zus,” she began, but she couldn’t manage to say more, for she could no longer hold the air in her lungs, could no longer remember how to pump blood through her veins. So instead, she gazed up at his face, his beautiful face, as he picked her up in his arms. She was weightless, floating, suspended in air, and then, because it hurt too much to see the pain in his eyes, she looked past him, up at the vast sky visible above the skeletal trees. There, the night stretched on forever, a road to a heaven that had been there all along.

  As the last of the light slipped away, he carried her out of the clearing, back toward the camp, his tears falling warm on her frozen face as the world faded around her and the stars vanished from the sky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Seven months later, thousands of refugees once marked for death poured from the mouth of Poland’s vast forests, alive and free, though the world they’d once known lay in ruins. The final weeks in hiding had been the deadliest; all through the woods, the Germans had struck back as they retreated from the advancing Red Army, felling scores of innocent Jews who had survived the war only to lose their lives in its waning days. Shimon and Leonid were among the final victims; they had been on patrol when a dozen fleeing Nazis had approached the camp, and the men had managed to open fire, killing four soldiers, before being shot themselves. The Rozenberg brothers, roused from their sleep by the noise, had run into the woods and doubled back, encircling the Germans from behind and finishing them off before they could reach the main camp.

  In the months since Yona had been shot, the group had grown, eventually numbering fifty-three by the time the spring thaw came. When they reemerged into the world, with Chaim as their leader, his wife and boys beside him, there was joy at the war’s end, but also great sadness at all that had been lost. In Nowogródek, in Pinsk, in Lachowicze, in Lida, in Mir, in all the towns they’d come from, they found the homes they’d once lived in occupied by others. They found news of countless loved ones who hadn’t returned and never would. They found synagogues burned to the ground and townspeople astonished to see Jews who had survived. They found a world that no longer felt as if it had a place for them in it.

  Those who had survived the war, though, knew that they had to find a way to go on. And so they lived and thrived as best they could, some resettling in the towns they had once called home, most leaving tattered Slavic villages behind for a new life somewhere else. Chaim, Sara, and their boys went to Israel, as did Miriam, Oscher, and Bina, and the families of Shimon and Leonid, the wives vowing to start over to build a new life, a safe life, for their young children. Ruth, Pessia, Leah, and Daniel immigrated to Israel, too, hoping for a new start, and sixteen years later, when Daniel lost his life on a reprisal mission after an attack on his adopted country, Ruth and her daughters grieved deeply, but they were proud that Daniel had died fighting bravely for the rights of Jews to live in peace. It was a war that seemed to know no end.

  Some who had survived the Second World War in the great woods would spend the rest of their lives trying to forget the things they had endured, the things they had lost. They started over, lost touch, tried to move on. Others stayed in place, forever conscious of the impossibility of ever righting the scales, of ever taking back the moments that had been stolen. All of them, though, were forever tied to the dark forests of eastern Europe—the forests that held their secrets, the forests that held their dead.

  Many years later, well into the next millennium, children still told tales of the old woman who lived deep in the heart of the Nalibocka Forest, the one with one green eye and one blue. Some wondered if she was real at all, though others swore they had seen her singing to the stars, speaking to the squirrels, swaying with the trees. They believed she was a witch, and they whispered stories of terror and fright about her in the hallways of schoolhouses where children of all races and religions now learned side by side.

  But they didn’t know the old woman at all. They did not know she had been the wife of a man whose heart had opened once more, jagged edges and all, and who had stayed by her side until his own peaceful, quiet death at the age of eighty-nine. They did not know that she was the mother of two children, well into their sixties now, who—though they had moved out of the forest long ago, one to Israel, one to France—loved her with all their hearts and visited her whenever they could. They did not know that she was a proud Jewish hero who had discovered who she was in the darkness and who had helped give life to many who might not have otherwise lived.

  And that was just fine with her. She belonged there, among the trees, in the night that always embraced her, under a ceiling of sky splashed with endless stars. And on the sixteenth of July, 2019, she died quietly in the little cabin she had built with her own hands, both of her children beside her, under the light of the first full moon of her hundredth year of life, just as an old woman had promised she would, so many years before.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On December 5, 1941, the life of Aron Bielski changed forever.

  The youngest of twelve, Aron, then fourteen, was out doing chores in his small Polish village of Stankiewicze, when he saw a police vehicle pulling down the lane. Dropping everything, he ran and hid in the barn.

  He had good reason to be terrified. The Bielskis were the only Jews in town, and the Germans—who had occupied Poland months earlier—had been hunting his older brothers for months, in conjunction with local authorities who collaborated with them. In fact, Aron hadn’t spoken a word since the day that summer when the police had tried to elicit his brother’s whereabouts by forcing the frightened boy to dig his own grave—and then lie in it—at gunpoint.

  As he watched from his hiding place, the men arrested his parents, Beila and David, and took them away. It was a Friday, and by Monday morning, they were dead—murdered along with more than four thousand other Jews and dumped into a mass grave just outside the nearby town of Nowogródek. Also killed that day were the wives of two of Aron’s older brothers, as well as his baby niece.

  “My husband cannot forgive himself,” Aron’s wife, Henryka, told me in July 2020, just days before Aron’s ninety-third birthday. “All were killed, and he survived.”

  Aron fled into the woods, where he reunited with two of his older brothers. By March, there were seven others with the three Bielskis, and by the summer, their group had grown to thirty, including a fourth brother, Tuvia Bielski, the oldest among them.

/>   For the next two years, as the Germans moved Jews first into ghettos and then to concentration camps, the group grew, moving deeper and deeper into the dense woods, until they numbered twelve hundred. Remarkably, almost all of them survived the war.

  Their story unfolds in startling, breathtaking detail in the 2008 Edward Zwick film Defiance (starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber), as well as in the 1993 nonfiction book of the same name by Nechama Tec, on which the film is based. Both were resources I used in writing The Forest of Vanishing Stars, which sets the main character, Yona, on a collision course with a group similar to the small Bielski group in the summer of 1942, before it grew in size. It’s important to note that though the fictional group in this novel is similar in location to that early Bielski group, the fictional characters are not directly based on any real people; in fact, I wrote the rough draft of the first half of the book before I ever spoke with Aron and Henryka.

  Still, it was enormously important to me to get the details right, and that’s one reason why I did a huge amount of reading and research—and why I was so grateful to talk to Aron (who changed his surname to “Bell” after moving to the United States). The conversations I had with him—and with Henryka, also born in Poland—gave a beating heart to the vast collection of details I had accumulated. “Sorrow,” he told me in our first conversation, “teaches a person how to live, how to survive, what to do next.”

  But life wasn’t always sorrowful for Aron—or for the many Jews who lived in Poland before the German occupation. The Bielskis had a good life. They owned a mill, and Aron has happy childhood memories of riding horseback, playing in the nearby forest, and even walking six miles to school. “I was a king,” he told me with a shrug. “I was beginning to be a king.”

  But then, of course, life changed. “The Germans came,” said Henryka, “and everything turned upside down.”

  In the heart of the Nalibocka Forest—the same forest where Yona spends much of the novel—the Bielskis set up not just a camp but a society. “They had their own hospital, their own jail, they had a place that was a kitchen, a sewing place where they were fixing clothing, because there were twelve hundred people,” Henryka explains. “They were self-sufficient. They had doctors, nurses, everything.”

  But most of all, they had each other. They found community, and they survived the war because they found trust, life, and hope in the darkness.

  * * *

  After speaking with Aron, I found myself thinking often of his parents, who were taken away to a horrible fate, just as six million Jews were across Europe. Henryka told me that to this day, when Aron first wakes up in the morning, he often sees his father before him. “He was so scared in the forest,” she said. “But his father is always with him, always.”

  When I thought about the guilt Aron has lived with his whole life—the guilt of surviving while so many others died—I wondered what his parents would have thought to know their youngest son has lived into his nineties. His very survival is a triumph over evil, and his whole life—as well as the existence of his three children, fourteen grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren—is a testament to that.

  During our conversation, Aron paused at one point and said, his voice trembling, “You have to remember one thing for the rest of your life: hardship teaches a person life.” I can’t think of a more important message as we emerge from the shadow of 2020, the year in which I wrote this book. I think many World War II novels remind us that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, and that as a human race, we can all triumph over the darkness. But this year I needed to hear that—and to internalize it, to make sure it found its way into both my life and my writing—more than ever. To hear it from a survivor was even more impactful.

  On a personal note, I’d like to add that much of the Jewish side of my own family, on my father’s side, actually hails from an area of eastern Europe not too far away from where The Forest of Vanishing Stars takes place—something I didn’t realize until my brother sent me a link to a family tree he was putting together on Ancestry.com. (Thanks, Dave!) It was amazing to discover that my great-great-grandparents—Rudolph and Rose Harmel—had in fact emigrated from Poland to the United States in August 1888, fifty-one years before Hitler’s army invaded their former homeland. Rudolph died in 1932, but Rose lived until 1941—long enough that she must have known of the horrors that were beginning to befall the people she’d left behind. I don’t know if I had distant relatives—perhaps sisters, brothers, or cousins of my great-grandparents—who were caught up in the Nazi terror, but I would imagine I did. It’s incredible to think about fate and how the decisions our ancestors made—mine’s decision to leave Poland in 1888, for example—affect us so much to this day.

  In The Forest of Vanishing Stars, as in real life, many Jews in Poland made decisions that impacted the future, too. They stood up. They fought back. They survived. And when you think of the odds they faced in Poland, that’s truly incredible.

  According to Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust remembrance center based in Israel, more than 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of World War II—more than any other country in Europe. In fact, they made up 10 percent of Poland’s population, the highest percentage of Jews anywhere in Europe. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 2.8 million and 3 million Polish Jews were murdered during the war. That’s somewhere between 84 percent and 91 percent of the entire Jewish population of the country.

  Think about that for a moment. Approximately three million Jewish people were murdered in a single country. Jewish casualties in Poland far outweighed those in any other country during the war—and yet people somehow found a way to survive against those staggering odds. It’s incredible and inspiring, and as I spoke to Aron Bielski, I felt almost as if I were having a conversation with a real-life superhero. He was young during the war, and it was certainly his older brothers who did the most to build their society of salvation within the woods. But Aron played a role, too, and he’s still here to talk about it. What a gift to us all.

  * * *

  I’d love to give you a few notes on the real historical basis of The Forest of Vanishing Stars. I played around slightly with a few dates and minor geographical details to make the story work, but everything was based on the real history of the area.

  Chana’s family, whom Yona meets toward the beginning of the novel, fled from the Volozhin ghetto, just north of the Nalibocka Forest. Just like the other ghettos mentioned in the book, the one in Volozhin was real. In August 1941, more than three thousand Jews from Volozhin and nearby villages were moved into a tiny ghetto. They were often shot at random, such as during an October 1941 Aktion, during which three hundred Jews were brought, ten at a time, to be killed in a field just outside the ghetto. In May 1942, the Germans oversaw a mass execution, carried out by local collaborators, in which more than fifteen hundred Jews were shot dead and then incinerated in a field. Another eight hundred were rounded up and machine-gunned down in a building. In August 1942, three hundred Jews were burned alive. The ghetto was finally “liquidated” in 1943.

  Aleksander’s group comes from the Mir ghetto, about fifty-five miles south of Minsk. There, the killings began early. On July 20, 1941, the Germans rounded up nineteen Jewish and three non-Jewish intellectuals and murdered them in the forest. In October and November of that year, another two thousand Jews were killed, and the remainder of the Jews in the area were moved into a ghetto. Jews there received a ration of just 4.4 ounces of bread each day. In May 1942, the surviving Jews were moved into the large, run-down Mir Castle, to which there was only one entrance, making it harder to escape. But a Polish Jew named Oswald Rufeisen managed to infiltrate the local police station as a German translator. He tipped off ghetto prisoners that a liquidation was coming—and he helped distract police while an escape took place. More than two hundred escaped into the forest, as did Rufeisen himself, who later converted to Catholicism, became a friar, and moved to Israel. Th
e remaining 560 Jews in the ghetto were murdered in August 1942.

  Zus’s group comes from the Lida ghetto, which was established in September 1941. In May 1942, around a thousand workers and their families were pulled aside, and the remaining Jews—5,670 of them—were murdered. Soon, Jews from other settlements were moved into the Lida ghetto, and in March 1943, there was another round of killings; some two thousand Jews were shot just outside town. The ghetto refilled with Jews from elsewhere once again, eventually numbering four thousand, and the ghetto was liquidated in July 1943, with the remaining prisoners sent to the Majdanek death camp.

  Escapes took place from all three ghettos—and from others nearby, too. Many of the Jews who found their way to the Bielski encampment had escaped from ghettos. In fact, members of the Bielski group—including Aron—ran rescue missions into the ghettos to persuade people to leave, and to show them how. “Aron was a tiny boy,” Henryka recalled during our conversation. “He was going into a hole under the gate into the ghetto to get people out. One day, they made a huge mission. One hundred fifty people escaped through a tunnel they had dug by spoon. It led one hundred fifty meters, maybe two hundred, under the fence, until they finally escaped out of the ghetto.”

  Those escapes were miraculous, seemingly impossible. The vast majority of Jews did not make it out—and those who did faced nearly insurmountable odds on the outside, too. Finding their way to larger groups, where refugees could pool their knowledge and resources, was key.

  I’d like to touch on a few other historical elements of The Forest of Vanishing Stars.

  The nuns Yona encounters in the middle of the book were loosely inspired by a real-life group of eleven nuns known today as the Blessed Martyrs of Nowogródek. In the summer of 1943, life had become very difficult in the town of Nowogródek, near the Nalibocka Forest. The Jews of the town had been executed or deported, and sixty townspeople, including two priests, had recently been murdered. In the middle of July, 120 townspeople were arrested by the Germans and slated for execution, and the nuns, led by a woman named Sister Maria Stella, decided to offer themselves in exchange for those prisoners. The Germans accepted the nuns’ offer, and on the morning of Sunday, August 1, the eleven sisters, ranging from age twenty-six to fifty-four, were driven into the woods, shot, and buried in a mass grave.