by David Laskin
Depressed though she was, Sonia heeded her father. Areleh would turn five that November. Leahleh was already nine. They had no first cousins, no aunts or uncles. Their family had shrunk almost to nothing. Sonia felt it was her duty to bring another life into the world.
—
At Klooga the slaves had a new greeting for each other: “May we be liberated as soon as possible.” The front was approaching. By the first week of August “mighty explosions and bombardments” were audible in the camp day and night. Everyone was scrutinizing the guards for signs of a change of mood, a shift in their intentions. The Germans seemed anxious, and some tried to make peace with the prisoners. “Soon you will be liberated,” they told the Jews. “And our lot is bad. They will slaughter us with no mercy.” The male prisoners were taken to the beach. The midday soup became thicker.
What did it mean?
They endlessly debated this question. The optimists said it was obvious: the Nazis were losing the war, the Red Army was closing in, soon they would go free. The pragmatists said it was unlikely the Germans would simply walk away and leave them. There were rumors of mass evacuations from Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Maybe the prisoners would be moved west with the retreating German army? Maybe they would be relocated to another camp? The pessimists said that the Germans always destroyed the evidence and covered their tracks. Klooga would be no different.
And so the summer of 1944 drained away. Kruk wrote on August 29, “You can sense the front. . . . All around us is noise, pilots are being shot at and do not relent, day or night.” But still the work details went out every morning and returned exhausted every night. Five hundred prisoners were shuffled from Klooga to Lagedi, a more primitive camp near Tallinn. Rumors flew that these prisoners were going to be transferred to Danzig, that they would end up at the Stutthof concentration camp, that they had already been shot in the forest or drowned in the Baltic. “May we be liberated,” they kept saying at Klooga—a talisman, a prayer. If they could only hold out another day, another hour.
On September 19, the prisoners were routed out of the barracks as usual at five in the morning and assembled in the plaza where the roll was called. The devout among them remarked that it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah: by the Jewish calendar, it was exactly a year since they had been imprisoned here. They all noticed the armed guards. Usually four guards stood by while the roll was called: now there was a platoon of men with weapons.
They were lined up and counted, but they were not given their fake coffee and they were not sent to work. Instead they were told that their evacuation to Germany was imminent. They would be traveling by ship to East Prussia. At seven o’clock an order was issued for 301 strong healthy men to leave the plaza. Ten Estonians escorted them out of the camp. Those who remained were ordered to cross their legs under them and then sit on their legs. In a few minutes their muscles went numb. The plaza was filled with two thousand temporarily paralyzed prisoners.
Everyone thought the same thing: evacuation to Germany meant life. They had made it this far. The war would be over soon. The Allies would march on Germany, Hitler would fall, they would be liberated. Shimon would join his aunt and uncle in Palestine. Or his cousins in New York. He was sixteen years old. His body would heal; the wounds would crust over; he would cease to be prisoner #641 and become a human being again—the crown of creation!
The 301 healthy men who had been pulled from the ranks were told they were being sent back to work. They must finish the job that remained undone from the previous day. In fact they did go to work, but not on any tasks they had done before. The guards took them to train cars stacked with logs and ordered them to unload the logs and carry them into the forest. When all the logs had been moved, the guards ordered them to build four platforms, spread out in the clearing. The instructions were precise: they must lay four large logs on their sides to form a square and then build a kind of floor inside the square out of split crosspieces and shorter logs. At the center of each square they erected four upright poles about a foot apart. It looked like the start of a compound of summer cottages: four log platforms, thirty-foot square, each one fitted out with the framework for a central chimney.
The work was going smoothly until one of the workers ran from the forest back to the camp plaza and shouted, “Jews, save yourselves, they are killing us!” An SS officer silenced his voice with a bullet. The assembled prisoners, paralyzed from sitting on their legs, could do nothing but stare at each other in horror.
In midmorning, twenty-five men dressed in black boots and peaked caps arrived in the camp—“special commando,” some said, which everyone knew was a euphemism for death squad. At 11 o’clock the twenty-five disappeared into the dining room. The lunch was brief; the kitchen staff remarked on their rude manners.
The prisoners were fed at noon. A big hearty meal. One remembered it as pork, another as flounder, another as “an unusually rich soup.” “Why all of a sudden this big meal?” one woman wondered. “We smelled a rat.”
Around 2:30 they heard the first shots—a burst of fire, a pause, another burst. “At first people said it was military maneuvers,” Tola Urbach remembers. “But after it happened repeatedly we can no longer deny that it’s the end. People became hysterical.” The women started screaming; men and women got to their feet and pushed their way to the perimeter of the wire. Then the special commando began the cull. Armed guards entered the plaza, counted off a group of men—some said it was twenty-five, others said fifty to a hundred—and marched them into the forest. The remaining prisoners huddled on the ground; the women hugged each other. They strained their ears to the forest. In a few minutes they heard the shots—a volley of automatic fire followed by the pops of single bullets. Then silence. Then the guards were back for the next load. Only men.
At four o’clock, five young men were called out and taken away. Thirty minutes later they were back. “We managed to find out that the five men had pulled a car loaded with two drums of gasoline to the forest,” wrote one of the prisoners.
Another group of men was removed from the camp and marched into the forest. And another. The male prisoners dwindled away.
When the men got to the clearing, they understood. The log platforms were the foundation—or rather the first layer. The next layer was made of human beings, rows of men lying facedown on top of the logs. Each man had a hole at the back of his head next to his ear. But the structure was not yet finished. The new batch of prisoners had to build the next layer. First they stacked split logs on top of the bodies, then they were ordered to lie down, heads facing out, on top of the logs. Then came the bullet to the brain, though not every shot was accurate. Some of the shots missed altogether; some merely clipped off a wound; some entered the head but failed to kill.
Then the guards went to fetch the next layer.
As evening fell, about a hundred prisoners made a break for it. In the fading light they slipped past the wire and dashed into the barracks. One enterprising soul cut the power line. The rest scattered, hiding under beds and in cupboards, racing upstairs to the second floor. SS guards stormed the barracks and opened fire with machine guns; eighty-seven prisoners were killed on the ground floor. But the SS left the second floor alone. It was getting dark. Maybe they were tired. Or scared.
The shooting in the forest went on into the night. When all the men were gone the women got their turn; last were the patients and staff of the infirmary.
After the shooting stopped there was a long interval of silence and then the sky exploded. “From the upstairs of the barracks we saw yellow and red flames,” said one of the men hiding on the second floor. “We did not know what was going on. We lay there and we heard whispering in the corners. We looked out on yellow and red flames.” “A wall of fire spread over the area,” wrote another. “Over the noise of the crackling fire we heard the impatient calls of the Germans shouting again, over and over, ‘Schnell, schnell!’” (quickly,
quickly). While the flames roared into the night sky, the Germans fled.
—
The pyres of logs and bodies were still smoldering when the Red Army liberated the camp five days later. The Germans had not destroyed the evidence after all. The pyres were standing, blackened but intact. Many of the bodies were barely singed, though others were charred to stumps. Of the estimated 2,000 prisoners killed at Klooga on September 19, 1944, 491 could be identified. Only 108 survived.
Prisoner 641 was not among them.
Shimon Senitski, the great-grandson and namesake of the priest and scribe Shimon Dov HaKohen, was the last of his family to live and die in Europe. Two branches remained, but the third and oldest branch of Shimon Dov’s family ended in a pyre of logs and corpses in the Estonian woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
POSTWAR
FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
Neighbors in Camp Klooga often ask me
Why do you write in such hard times?—
Why and for whom? . . .
. . . For we won’t live to see it anyway.
I know I am condemned and awaiting my turn,
Although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle.
Drunk on the pen trembling in my hand,
I record everything for future generations:
A day will come when someone will find
The leaves of horror I write and record.
People will tear their hair in anguish,
Eyes will plunge into the sky
Unwilling to believe the horror of our times.
—HERMAN KRUK
The truth came slowly and in fragments.
One of the relatives in New York remembers a group from Rakov coming to the house on Andrews Avenue with a list of names of landsmen who had been killed and asking Shalom Tvi whether he could identify any of them. But there is no mention of this visit in the letters Shalom Tvi wrote faithfully, fanatically to Sonia every week in 1944 and 1945. From these letters it is clear that he never received definitive confirmation of the deaths, the synagogue fire, the actions at Volozhin, the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, the pyres at Klooga in which his grandson perished. In the absence of news, he was left alone to conclude the worst.
A relative in the Bronx, when asked many years later how Shalom Tvi dealt with his gaping loss and uncertainty, replied, “He took it with a grain of salt.”
This was a façade. He did not take any of it with a grain of salt.
On July 6, 1945, two months after Hitler committed suicide (April 30, 1945) and the Germans surrendered to the Allies (May 8, 1945), Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia and Chaim begging them to secure a certificate that would allow him to immigrate to Palestine:
Dear Children, try any way with those who manage the certificate affairs, don’t leave them in peace. Apply every day and tell them about my tragedy and about what has happened to our family. Here in America I have also lost everyone [Gishe Sore, his sister-in-law, had died on February 16, 1945; his sister Leah Golda, Rose’s mother, died on June 19]. My dear sister had been my only consolation. I had spent all the Shabbats and holidays with her, and now I am left by myself. I don’t even have a person to whom I can open my heart and cry. Dear children, make an effort for me and knock on all the doors in every possible place and maybe you will succeed in stirring some feelings of pity. I am sitting here on embers.
It had been four years since Sonia received a letter postmarked Rakov. The envelope trembled in her hand. The handwriting was unfamiliar. The name of the sender—Hillel Eidelman—rang a faint bell. The letter was dated June 23, 1945—and given how erratic the mail was in those days, it probably arrived at Kfar Vitkin at around the same time as her father’s letter of July 6.
Greetings, Beyle’s Sonia!
Our fate is very bad.
None of us survived, no one from your family or from ours. I’m as alone as a solitary stone. . . . I am writing to tell you that the entire village was burned with everyone burned alive. . . . [They] were pushed into the synagogue, kerosene poured in there, then hand grenades thrown in and burned them. Mercy on them! There were mothers with their children there. May God preserve the martyrs of Rakov. They didn’t stop until everyone was burned up. Now we see nothing more than little pieces here and there.
Write to me. I would continue my letter but I’m sitting here, crying, with trembling hands. It is very difficult to write you such news.
So now Sonia—and Shalom Tvi—knew the truth, at least about the Rakov family.
—
On July 31, 1945, ten months after her nephew Shimon was shot and burned at Klooga, Sonia gave birth to her third child—another son. She and Chaim named the child Shimon.
On August 23, Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia to congratulate her on the birth of the son. “I think that [the new baby] will truly be fortunate, because right after his birth I received the certificate [for entry to Palestine]. The child has brought you luck, and with the help of God our good luck will also begin and I shall deserve to see you.” He promised to bring many beautiful presents with him when he came, though the date of his departure could not be fixed until he received a new Polish passport, which could not happen until Poland’s new government opened its consulate in New York. More red tape. More waiting.
At the end of the letter he mentioned in passing that a big parade had filled the streets of Manhattan after the news of the Japanese surrender was broadcast on August 14.
—
Shalom Tvi never forgot the old man with the cane who had blessed him when he was a little child in Volozhin. “May you have light your entire life,” the old man had said after Shalom Tvi led him home by the light of his lantern one autumn night. “May you have light throughout your journey.” Shalom Tvi told Sonia that he always believed that this blessing spared his life.
The Polish passport was finally issued on October 28, 1946. Shalom Tvi booked the first available passage on board the SS Marine Carp and sailed out of New York. On the Application for Reentry Permit filed with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, he indicated that his reason for going abroad was to visit family, that he intended to be absent from the States for “less than one year,” and that his temporary address overseas would be Kfar Vitkin, Palestine. Only the last of these assertions was strictly true.
Shalom Tvi arrived at Haifa harbor on February 2, 1947, a tumultuous time in the Land. The Jews in Palestine, enraged by Britain’s continued adherence to a strict immigration quota and their punitive treatment of illegal Jewish immigrants, were embarked on a terrorist campaign aimed at forcing the British out. When the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, the British acknowledged that their continued presence was untenable. The newly formed United Nations was enlisted to resolve the matter. On the night of November 29, 1947, Sonia, Chaim, Shalom Tvi, and the children gathered around the radio that Shalom Tvi had brought with him from New York. They were listening to the broadcast of the United Nations General Assembly vote on Resolution 181, which called for the end of the British Mandate and the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Shimon was only two years old, but he heard the story repeated so many times that it became a memory of his own. When the last vote was cast and the numbers were tallied—thirty-three nations in favor, thirteen opposed, ten abstentions (including the British)—Kfar Vitkin went crazy. “We ran in our pajamas to the moshav center,” recalls Shimon, “and we all danced together. Everyone was banging pot lids together. They opened the market and gave sweets to the children. It was a night of joy.” Shimon also remembers that the moshavniks went to the British army base near Kfar Vitkin and shouted to the illegal immigrants detained there that they were now free.
The joy ended in violence. On the official termination of the British Mandate, on May 15, 1948, the Arab states mounted a full-scale war aimed at driv
ing the Jews from the region. The fighting was particularly bitter around Jerusalem. Arab forces overran the Jewish quarter in the Old City in the first days of the war. On May 28, the Old City’s Jewish community surrendered and some 1,500 Jewish residents were evacuated. Jewish West Jerusalem was surrounded and virtually cut off. In desperation Israeli forces opened a bypass route, dubbed Burma Road, to supply the besieged residents. Chaim, an experienced truck driver, was pressed into service to drive an armored supply truck stocked with food and medicine. When the fighting was intense, he spent the night—or several nights—in West Jerusalem. Eight Israelis died on Burma Road in a Jordanian attack on June 8. Sonia was frantic whenever Chaim stayed over. Shimon remembers that one time after an agonizing absence, his father drove the truck back to Kfar Vitkin with ice cream for the children, but it had all melted by the time he arrived.
In the course of the war, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled their villages in Israeli territory, settling in miserable refugee camps that still exist today. The Arabs who had remained at Wadi al-Hawarith, the Bedouin farmlands from which Kfar Vitkin had been carved in 1929, abandoned their homes—the village was “ethnically cleansed,” as the Palestinians put it—after May 15, 1948. In 1998, an estimated 15,672 refugees traced their ancestry to Wadi al-Hawarith—and the figure is certainly far larger now. In six months of fighting, the Israelis repulsed attacks from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and then pushed into territory beyond the boundaries drawn by the UN partition plan of 1947. A broad swath in the center of the country, from the Galilee south to Beersheba, along with a chunk of the western Negev was now part of the State of Israel. On January 7, 1949, a cease-fire went into effect that both sides, finally, observed. A state of “neither war nor peace” ensued. Sixty years later this remains more or less the status quo in the region. Within a year of the cease-fire, the Jewish population of Israel almost doubled, from six hundred thousand to 1 million.