by David Laskin
Shalom Tvi recovered his health and went back to work at A. Cohen & Sons. Sonia wept, poured out her heart in letters to her father, and dragged herself through the motions of life. It’s unlikely a “nerve doctor” practiced anywhere near Kfar Vitkin, and in any case, Sonia was too proud and too busy to seek out psychiatric treatment. She carried on by force of will.
—
The United States had been at war for only three months, but already the American family was feeling it. Ethel, Harry, and Sam all had draft-age sons; Itel had a draft-age son-in-law; and two cousins—the sons of Uncle Herman—were also of draft age. Twenty years separated Abraham and Herman, the oldest and youngest of Shimon Dov’s six children, and their first children, though technically in the same generation, were born thirty-one years apart: Itel in 1886 and Leonard in 1917. Itel and Leonard were first cousins, even though Itel was old enough to be his mother. In the American branch of the family, Len Cohn (his father, Herman, had broken ranks and dropped the “e”) was the one who saw the most action in the Second World War.
Handsome, blue eyed, and compact, Len entered Yale at the age of sixteen—no mean feat for a Jew in the 1930s—and graduated with the class of 1937. In his sophomore year he had signed on with ROTC, an odd choice for a self-described left-leaning pacifist, but he thought it would give him a chance to improve his horseback-riding skills. Two years out of Yale, he was approached by an army officer and pressured to join the reserves. “I was torn,” he recalls. “On the one hand I was a pacifist because of what had happened in the First World War—but on other hand it was 1939 and the horrors going on in Germany made me feel I should go.” Len shelved the pacifism and entered the reserves. On April 4, 1941, at the age of twenty-four, he was called up to active duty and sent to Fort Devens, outside of Boston. He was appointed second lieutenant—a “shavetail” in army slang, the lowest-ranking commissioned officer—with the First Engineer Combat Battalion of the Army’s First Infantry Division. It was the same division—the Big Red One—that his cousin Hyman had served with during the Great War.
Eight months later came Pearl Harbor and “the whole world changed for us.” The division began intensive training in amphibious landings in preparation for storming the German-held beachheads of North Africa and Europe. On the night of August 1, 1942, the Big Red One, sixteen thousand strong, shipped out of New York harbor.
Forty years after his father Herman had come to America in steerage, twenty-four years after his cousin Private Hyman Cohen had been packed into the lower deck of a British troop ship bound for the trenches, Lieutenant Leonard Cohn crossed the Atlantic with the First Division officer corps in a first-class stateroom on the Queen Mary. By November, he was fighting in the British-American invasion of North Africa.
—
Chaim never learned when or how his brother Yishayahu, his sister Chana, and their families in Volozhin died (their mother, Leah, had passed away before the war). They could have been killed in the stadium Aktion of October 1941—or they may have endured six more months of misery and wretchedness before being shot and burned to death in the Aktion of May 10, 1942. Two thousand Volozhin Jews died that stifling spring day—dragged out of the ghetto, marched to a smithy behind the synagogue, imprisoned in the blacksmith’s house, and slaughtered. Mendel Wolkowitch, a Volozhin Jew who managed to hide in an attic during the roundup, recounted that the killing was done in a leisurely, almost sporting fashion by a drunken troop of SS officers and local Polish and Belarusian policemen. The gunmen set up a table stocked “with all kinds of liquor” and they fired off machine-gun rounds “between one drink and the next. [T]hey shot into the building in order to silence the weeping of the children and the outcry of adults.” Two rabbis imprisoned in the stifling house argued about resistance: one urged his fellow Jews to “take a brick, a stone, or an iron bar . . . and attack the murderers,” but the other, quoting some sacred text, cautioned that “even when a sharp sword is pressed against a man’s throat, let him not cease to hope for mercy.” Some prisoners did manage to bash a hole in the roof of the house and get away. Wolkowitch said that when the shooting was over, “they set the house on fire and the Jews of Volozhin went up to heaven in flames.” Strays who had hidden in the ghetto were ferretted out, shot, and buried in pits along with “dead cats, dead dogs and all kinds of rubbish” that their gentile neighbors flung after them. “Father in Heaven, I thank Thee for having purified us of this Jewish filth!” one devout Christian woman cried out when day was done.
There was one final Aktion in August 1942, when three hundred Volozhin Jews were killed in the streambed of the Volozhinka. The eighty or so survivors fled, some to join the partisan bands in the forest. The town that had been revered for its yeshiva for 140 years was now Judenfrei. A single relic remained: the chaste white yeshiva building survived the incineration of its community.
Yishayahu and his wife, Henia, had two children, a girl and a boy; Chaim’s sister Chana and her husband, Meir Finger (Yishayahu’s business partner), also had a son and a daughter. Four cousins of Leahleh and Areleh, two aunts and two uncles—gone forever without a grave, a prayer, a coffin, a date of death. Only the cause of their deaths can be surmised: bullets or fire, like their relatives in Rakov. Though in truth, bullets and fire were but the agents of death. The cause must be hunted elsewhere.
—
May 1942 was when Maiden Form switched over to “war production mode.” In addition to bras, the factories were now churning out pants, coats, shirts, and undershorts for the military, along with mattress covers, parachutes, pup tents, and mosquito netting. There was many a hoot of laughter when GIs spotted the Maiden Form Brassiere Company logo stamped on their army-issue briefs—but it kept the name in broad circulation. Not that bra production slackened off. “Women workers who wore an uplift were less fatigued,” claimed Itel—and the War Department bought it. Itel managed to secure a “declaration of essentiality” from the government that gave Maiden Form priority in receiving scarce materials. God only knows how the war would have gone if American women did not have the proper support. Since rubber, elastic, and metal hooks and eyes were impossible to come by, William and his design team made some adjustments. Gingham plaid had to be substituted for imported lace—less sexy, but eminently practical for all those hardworking Wacs, Waves, and nurses.
Itel, as usual, was miles ahead of the rest of the pack. Though a third of the company’s resources went into war production, bras continued to sell briskly on the home front. The “Variation” line set a company record in 1943 when sales hit 2 million. Itel kept pouring money into advertising even though everyone told her she was crazy and all the competition was retrenching. She knew that this war wouldn’t last forever. When it was over, women would still be wearing bras; thanks to Itel’s campaign to “safeguard the value and goodwill of Maiden Form’s name,” more women than ever would be wearing Maiden Form bras. The United States had only just begun to fight, but Itel already had her eye on the big money waiting to be made when peace returned.
—
The war forced Sam to change his job. Before the war, A. Cohen & Sons’ bread and butter had been cheap consumer goods made of chromium, steel, copper, cast iron, and silver, but these materials were declared “strategic metals” after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The product lines dried up overnight. Unlike Itel, the boys were not able to persuade the War Department that chromium-backed hairbrushes, stainless steel flatware, waffle irons, pewter cocktail shakers, and oxidized copper radio lamps were essential for the war effort. The company was hit with a merchandising crisis. After thirty years in the field as a salesman, Sam was brought “inside” to help find suitable stuff for the company to sell.
It was a bittersweet moment. Being inside put Sam on a par with Harry and Hyman, but selling had always been his forte. He was good at schmoozing, wheedling, pressuring, persuading. Good with people. Now he had an executive role in an impossible business climate.
Sam beat the bushes and came up with “fringe” lines of products made of glass, ceramic, and cloth. Gold, though restricted, was still available so the company edged into the jewelry business. The brothers caught a break when they managed to secure some semiprecious German stones that had been seized by the Alien Property Custodian. Woodrow Wilson had originated this office during the First World War to appropriate enemy assets held in the United States—and President Roosevelt resuscitated it by executive order in March 1942. German and Japanese merchandise, real estate, business, and intellectual property in the United States now belonged to the U.S. government. When the Alien Property Custodian put the lot of semiprecious German stones up for auction, A. Cohen & Sons scored a big chunk, and the brothers cut some lucrative deals with leading jewelry manufacturers. “The purchase of the stones put us solidly in the jewelry business,” Hyman remarked later. Even with business barely limping along, the brothers were scrupulous about abiding by quotas and adhering to government price regulations. They also promised the union that all employees “fighting to preserve our American Way of Life” would be able to resume their former positions after the war.
It went without saying that the jobs of family members in uniform were safe. All three of Sam’s sons were in the military—Sidney was with the 82nd Airborne Division; Lester had been drafted by the navy (he trained briefly at Annapolis and shipped out, but he had a nervous breakdown while home on leave and, after a stint in a military mental hospital, got an easy berth on a submarine hunter based in Florida); Marvin, the third son, was stationed in the Pacific. With Leona, the youngest child, away in college, only Dorothy remained at home with Sam and Gladys. Even in the best of times, Dorothy grated on everyone’s nerves; with the anxiety of three brothers in the service, she became unbearable.
Sam and Gladys no longer saw Shalom Tvi every day, because they had moved out of the Andrews Avenue duplex into a place of their own a few blocks away, on the corner of Andrews and West 179th Street. They weren’t greenhorns anymore—why should they all live crammed together in one small house? Harry and Hyman had apartments in Manhattan, and Itel had her own private palace on Long Island Sound. It was time for Sam and Gladys to spread out a little. Even with wartime shortages and austerity, they could afford it.
Sam remained loyal to his father’s shul and he davened there with Shalom Tvi every Friday night and Saturday morning. Sam had no memories of his cousins in Palestine—Chaim had been a toddler and Sonia not even born when he left Rakov—but Shalom Tvi showed him pictures: two sunburned pioneers in shorts and sundress, a cinder-block farmhouse, a citrus grove, two adorable sabra children. As for Doba and Etl and their husbands and children, Shalom Tvi didn’t bring them up and Sam didn’t ask.
—
Shalom Tvi was in the habit of strolling over to his sister Leah Golda’s house every Shabbat, so inevitably he saw a good deal of Rose, the younger daughter of Leah Golda and the late Shmuel Rubenstein. Twenty-three years old in 1942, Rose was a pretty, articulate, thoroughly Americanized girl who lived at home with her mother and kept a diary during the war. Rose recounted gathering around the radio every night to listen to “Hitler’s raucous, roaring voice, Roosevelt’s paternalistic, calming voice, and Churchill’s literary, pedantic tones.” She wrote about installing blackout shades in the windows of their Bronx home, about cars driving at night with no headlights through eerily dark city streets in which “a cigarette light showed for miles.” The air-raid siren was tested every Thursday at 11 A.M. In the summer, her family went to Swan Lake in the Catskills, and occasionally Itel and William sent their chauffeured car around to take Rose to the Saturday night shows at the President Hotel (a Borscht Belt fixture). “We were the poor relations. Itel and William never wanted to see my brother Louis—he reminded them of their lost son, Lewis.”
At the start of the war, Rose had been working for A. Cohen & Sons (six days a week, 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. for fourteen dollars a week—a two-dollar premium over the normal wage because she was family), but when her uncle Abraham died she decided to quit and take a job with a rich enterprising refugee. She was eager to strike out on her own. After her sister, Betty, got married and her brother Sol was drafted, Rose was left alone with her mother. She didn’t like to complain, but it was hard to be stuck in the Bronx caring for an ailing widow while New York was “teeming with servicemen of every allied nation.”
Rose’s diary has a photo of her uncle Shalom Tvi taken at Betty’s wedding, in 1942. He sits with his hands clasped, wearing a kippah and tie, handsome, dignified; his mouth curves up slightly in a dim smile, a smile of obligation. Rose wrote under the photo, “Shalom Tvi came here for a visit and couldn’t go back because of the war.” Nothing else.
But there was something else. Seventy years later, when pressed to speak about the war years, Rose came out with a memory that she had long kept to herself: “Shalom Tvi walked over to our house every Saturday. One Saturday when he came, my mother was bedridden and I was alone with him. He got very amorous and grabbed me on his lap and felt me all over. I had to fight him off.” Rose couldn’t recall exactly when this happened but she was sure it was after Shalom Tvi’s family had been killed by the Nazis. It had never happened before and, since Rose told her family, her brothers made sure it never happened again. As soon as she disclosed the incident, Rose regretted it. “He was a nice man but he had this terribly devastating event in his life. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DESPAIRING PEOPLE
The killing had stopped. The old, sick, and disabled, the strong, healthy, and male—and plenty of others besides—were already dead. The small ghetto had been disposed of at Ponar the previous October (1941) and another nine thousand souls had been slaughtered in the Gelbschein Aktion of November 3, 1941. A few minor roundups continued into December and then, at the start of 1942, the killing in Vilna stopped. Vilna ghetto was now classified a “working ghetto,” a euphemism for labor prison barracks—and why would the Germans kill off their workers when the wages were so low and the incentives to work so powerful? Yellow permits (“the blood-drenched delusion,” one ghetto prisoner called them) were handed out to the fortunate, the well connected, the determined and resourceful: permit holders left the ghetto every day at dawn and returned at dark, sometimes with a bit of food they had scrounged. Doba had no permit. “They had nothing, nothing,” said Tsipora Alperovich, a cousin (on Beyle’s side) who lived in the ghetto with her mother. “Doba was very poor. Sometimes my mother gave her some soup. Doba had to battle every day for her life.” Tsipora was one of the lucky ones: though she was only fourteen, she had a job at a factory making German military uniforms. She and her mother survived on beans and horse meat.
Doba and the boys would have starved were it not for Shepseleh’s older brother Yitzchak Senitski. Before the war, Yitzchak, a prominent educator, had run Vilna’s Dinezon School and directed sports programs and field trips for the city’s Jewish youth. After Shepseleh disappeared, Yitzchak took Doba and her sons under his wing. He was a good man, a confirmed bachelor in his late forties, brave, kindhearted, respected in the community—the ideal uncle. According to the May 1942 census of 15,507 ghetto prisoners, Doba, her two sons, and Yitzchak lived together at Strashuno 15—an address they shared with 437 other people. Tsipora, who lived in a different building in the ghetto, recalled that the four of them divided a small room with another family: the average “living space” in Vilna ghetto was about eighteen square feet per person. Yitzchak kept the family going on what he earned as a teacher in the ghetto school.
Yes, there were schools in the ghetto. After the initial days of tumult and murder, schools were opened. Yitzchak played an active role as organizer and chair of the Teachers’ Association. Shimonkeh was fourteen in 1942; Velveleh was ten. Going to school was the most wonderful thing that had happened since they were shut in the ghetto the previous September.
“The opening of the ghetto s
chool was fantastic for us,” recalls Tsipora. “We sat on the floor to write. We had a club. We sang. We put on plays. The Song of the Partisans became our anthem—As the hour that we longed for is so near, Our steps beat out the message—‘We are here!’ For us school was just life.” Tsipora and Shimonkeh, who were the exact same age, sat on the floor in the same classroom. They sang the same songs, wandered through the same crowded courtyards, looked at the sky over the same thirty-foot-high wooden walls. Seventy years later, Tsipora would remember Shimonkeh as a tall skinny boy, nice-looking, quiet. She remembered him playing with a yoyo. She remembered that he suffered serious hearing loss.
No memories survive of Velveleh. In the last photos taken before the Nazi occupation he was lengthening out, shedding his baby fat, and losing the angelic roundness of his face. The bombing at the start of the war made him nervous. He was musical. No one in the family ever breathed a word of complaint about him. Tsipora can bring back nothing about him, and what she recalls of Shimonkeh—the yoyo, the deafness, the long bony physique—reveals nothing of his inner life. The mind and spirit of a fatherless youth on the cusp of adolescence can only be surmised from fragments left by other prisoners.
This much is clear. At fourteen, Shimonkeh was old enough to bristle at the sight of the leather-jacketed Jewish police that the Nazis appointed to cow and club and rob their own kind. He was old enough to burn with desire, to fall in love, to ache for beauty and dream of violent, heroic revenge. He was old enough to take part in the culture of his city and to feel proud that, as one writer put it, “the insanely wild conditions of life did not break the Jewish creative spirit.” A few doors down the street was the ghetto library—always thronged. Librarian Herman Kruk (the escaped Warsaw journalist and diarist) threw a party for the community when the one thousandth book circulated. “The book unites us with the future, the book unites us with the world,” wrote Yitzhak Rudashevski, the teenage ghetto diarist, on the day of the celebration. Bundists protested “No theater in a graveyard!” when a ghetto theater was organized early in 1942, but soon the variety shows, musicals, and satirical sketches were playing to full houses. Shimonkeh had learned to play chess from his father—maybe he played in one of the ghetto chess competitions; maybe he won. A nearby courtyard (everything was nearby) served as a cramped sports stadium. A youth group collected ghetto folklore—“dozens of sayings, ghetto curses and ghetto blessings are created before our eyes . . . the ghetto folklore is . . . cultivated in blood,” wrote Yitzhak Rudashevski in his diary. His youth club organized a committee to record the history of Courtyard Shavler 4: they interviewed residents, analyzed the responses, and concluded that “everywhere [there was] the same sad ghetto song: property, certificates, hide-outs, the abandonment of things, the abandonment of relatives.” Shimonkeh was old enough to feel the agony of abandonment; old enough to mourn the death of a beloved teacher, to see the poetry in snow drifting against ruined walls, to breathe the melancholy of autumn nights when workers hurried through the streets with their shoulders hunched and the child vendors stood over trays of moldy potatoes and a couple of cigarettes scrounged from God knows where. “Frozen, carrying the little stands on their backs, they push toward the tiny corner that is lit up,” wrote Rudashevski of the child vendors. “They stand thus until they hear the whistle and then they disappear with their trays into the black little ghetto streets.” Maybe Shimonkeh stood by a tray in the cold to sell whatever his mother had left.