by Vic Shayne
Great care has been taken to ensure that the places, people, groups, and events in this story are historically accurate. In cases where facts cannot be verified, the author has relied upon the memory of those interviewed.
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Some of the names in this book may have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Vic Shayne
Foreword © 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5107-1862-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Small, Martin, 1916-2008.
Remember us : my journey from the shtetl through the Holocaust / Martin Small & Vic Shayne.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60239-723-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Small, Martin, 1916-2008. 2. Jews--Belarus--Mouchadz’--Biography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Belarus--Personal narratives. 4. Mauthausen (Concentration camp) 5. Mouchadz’ (Belarus)--Biography. 6. Baranowicze (Poland)--Biography. I. Shayne, Vic, 1956- II. Title.
DS135.B383S677 2009
940.53’18092--dc22
[B]
2009024775
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword
Author’s Note
Preface
I Live to Remember
My Little Shtetl, Maitchet
Yiddish Culture
Answering Questions with Questions
Dreaming of a New World
Shabbat Shalom
Yearning to Touch the Past
Visiting Baranowicze
The Wrong Kind of Excitement
Living with Our Differences
All on One Block
L’Chaim—To My Father
The Meaning of Tzedakah
Our World Started to Change
The German Invasion
Photos
And Then We Were Slaves
Escape from Baranowicze
Free for Now
Partisans
More Aimless Wandering
Spring
The Awakening
Viva Italia!
Nowhere but Palestine
A War We Would Not Lose
Where’s My Visa?
America the Beautiful
Time for Reflection
The Circle Comes to a Close
I Remember
Epilogue
Afterword
Appendix
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To my mother and father,
Esther and Shlomo, and my two little sisters, Elka and Peshia.
May you always be remembered.
Foreword
I am probably the least likely person to write a foreword to this book. For one thing, I am not a Jew but a gentile. For another, I am not a historian but a journalist. For still another, I am not a Holocaust survivor but a Dutch Reformed preacher’s kid who grew up in the Midwest. Nothing in my background comes remotely close to what Martin Small experienced in his journey from Maitchet, the shtetl in eastern Poland where he came from, to Mauthausen, the concentration camp in Austria where he ended up.
So why did I accept this assignment? The first reason has to do with my journalist’s view of the world: What I see is a world in disarray, a world where nationalism is on the rise and globalism is on the decline, where cooperation and coexistence have given way to confrontation and conflict, where populism—a word we once associated with Thomas Jefferson—has become a euphemism for mob rule. The second reason has to do with Martin Small’s book: His story is a stark reminder that if we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it.
The omens are everywhere. In 2016, Great Britain voted to withdraw from the European Union. More recently, we have seen the rise of the far-right NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany), and the rise of Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States. As I write this, Trump has been in office less than two months. During this time, he has issued two executive orders banning travel to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, has deported thousands of undocumented Mexicans, and has pledged to make good on his campaign promise to build a wall along the Mexican border. Meanwhile, bomb threats on Jewish schools and community centers have become everyday occurrences. We’re not talking Germany in the 1930s, but the United States in 2017.
So when Martin Small describes an Aktion against the Jews of Baranowicze (a nearby town where he worked as slave laborer), I have to ask myself: Is this really any different than an illegal immigrant mother from Mexico being picked up and deported by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the middle of the night and separated from her six (US-born) children? Is the “Night of Broken Glass” that ravaged Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany on the night of November 9, 1938, really any different than thugs vandalizing a Chicago synagogue or desecrating a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis or Philadelphia?
One may argue that while Hitler’s targets were mainly Jews, Trump’s targets are mainly Muslims and Mexicans. But where bigotry runs amok, any minority can be a target. I learned that when I experienced, vicariously, the ordeal of three young Jewish girls from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a predominantly Catholic town in central Poland. The children, along with their parents, were herded into a ghetto and later deported to labor camps and finally to Auschwitz where, against all odds, they survived.
Like Vic Shayne, who had the daunting task of documenting Martin Small’s story for a mostly adult audience—and for posterity—I had the somewhat less daunting task of documenting the children’s stories for younger readers and then for public television. But while two of the children I interviewed were too young to remember many details of their lives before the war (they were six, seven, and ten when they were liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945), Martin Small’s story is largely the story of his life before the war—the lost world of the shtetl, a mournful elegy to a way of life gone forever.
In a way, Maitchet reminds me of the town my father came from—Strasburg, North Dakota. It is as far away from Maitchet as you can get, geographically and in every other way. But there are a few similarities. Until the Great Depression, it boasted a population of a thousand people. Even into the 1950s, it was a thriving farming community. It had two grain elevators, a Gambles store, a freight train, and two churches—a big Catholic church at one end of town and a little Dutch Reformed church at the other end. Every summer, I looked forward to visiting my grandparents and cousins at the family farm. For a preacher’s kid who moved around a lot, Strasburg was the closest thing I had to a hometown. Today, only a few hundred remain.
That’s where the comparison ends. It wasn’t the war that decimated the town; it was the
lack of economic opportunity. Eventually, most of my cousins and their contemporaries sought their fortunes elsewhere. Most have prospered; some have extended the family tree beyond the United States to different parts of the world. But theirs was a different kind of diaspora than what the Jews experienced. For the children of Strasburg, it was an escape from the farm. For Martin Small and the children of Maitchet, it was an escape from death.
So why is his story important to us? History is immutable. We can’t change it, but we can change what we do with it. A few months before Martin Small passed away at age ninety-one, a reporter from the Denver Post interviewed him about his life in Broomfield, Colorado, where he and his wife had gone to be near their daughter and her family. “People here listen to me,” he said. “The Holocaust changed one word, love to hate. People here changed hate to love.”
Martin Small’s story inspires us. We see how through sheer power of will he rose from trauma to rebirth, how he became an integral part of his community, and how he transcended hardship and heartbreak to find his Promised Land in a country that, at least until now, welcomed the weary and worn in search of a better life. His story is a compelling one, and it is relevant to our time.
Milton J. Nieuwsma
March 16, 2017
Author’s Note
When I began writing this book in Martin Small’s name, he was a sprightly eighty-seven-year-old. He was lucid, quick-witted, and light on his feet. He enjoyed a good joke, an occasional shot of his favorite Russian vodka, challenging his rabbi in the middle of Shabbos services, and creating works of art in his basement. He had a wonderful intellectual curiosity, a gift for languages, and a love of music. However, both he and I were somewhat concerned that this book—Martin’s life story—would not see the light of day until after his passing. For this reason, I worked around the clock and, for nearly four years, spoke with Martin at least once a day. I was in awe of his memory, especially as I checked, to the best of my ability, his recollections against historical facts and events. By the age of ninety-one, after more than eight decades had passed, Martin was still remembering the names of the children in his neighborhood, conversations with his grandfather, and the layout of his shtetl. The summer before Martin’s ninety-second birthday, the first printing of this book came out. He was thrilled not merely to see his story in print, but to be able to physically hold it in his hands. He realized a life-long dream of memorializing, in permanent form, the family that was taken from him so that he could connect them to the new family that he and his wife, Doris, created here in America. He passed on an invaluable legacy. Shortly after Martin and I celebrated the release of this book, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and passed away in Doris’s loving arms in his home on a cold November morning just weeks before his ninety-second birthday. Days before, I visited him on his death bed and he reiterated the solemn words that he had spoken throughout his sojourn during the Holocaust: “Jerusalem, if I forget thee, may I lose my right arm.” In doing so, he cast his eyes upward and they filled with tears. His love for his people, his religion, and his family were inseparable and forever in his heart. It is my hope that this love shall grant you cause for reflection as you read his story and consider what has forever been lost.
Vic Shayne
Preface
I was twenty-five years old in the beginning of spring, 1942. I stood at the wooden counter in my mother’s kitchen looking for something to eat. There was a slight chill in the air. I rubbed my arms with my hands. There was no fire burning anywhere in the house. My entire family was in the living room, along with some guests, huddled together waiting. Once in a while, my father would stand up and look out the window then go back to the sofa beside my mother. It was the middle of the day. Nobody was working. My stomach growled. I was growing hungrier by the moment. What was I looking for in the cupboard? Anything. There was nothing left. I stood staring at an empty plate, my thoughts drifting far away. It was too quiet. I looked out the window. The street was deserted. I turned around and sat down on a chair and crossed my legs. This kitchen that I helped my father build was, for once, quiet. It wasn’t natural. My little sisters and my mother weren’t baking or cooking. It was a foreign feeling. No pots and pans and baking dishes were clanging. The laughter was gone. The stoves were cold to the touch. It was deathly quiet. Then I heard a boom coming from the living room. What was that? It sounded like a log smashing into the front door. It jolted me. Everyone in the living room had jumped from the shock.
Boom, boom, boom! Fists were pounding on the door and a young, familiar voice was shouting. Demanding. Open this door! Open or I’ll smash it in. I ran to the door. Everyone was wide-eyed. My father stood with his fists clenched at his sides as I opened our front door. In front of me stood my boyhood friend, Stach Lango. His seething expression, his twisted mouth, and sick gaze belonged to somebody else. What happened to him? He pointed a pistol to my face, grabbed me by the collar, and said, “If you fight me, I’ll shoot your mother, your father, and your two sisters right in front of you.” What was I to do? It was hopeless. Stach pulled me by the shoulder and yanked me out of my house. My family watched helplessly as I was dragged into the empty street and pushed all the way to the police station and into a room with a wooden table in the center and a glowing fireplace by the wall.
A small stack of wood and some iron pokers leaned against the dirty, paint-peeling wall. Once inside, still with a pistol pointed at my head, I was forced to undress. Hurry up, goddammit, Jew! Then Stach tied me to a table in the middle of the room. I couldn’t move. My wrists were tearing from the ropes. My eyes followed him as he tucked his gun inside his waistband. He picked up one of the iron pokers and angrily shoved the end of it into the embers. He knew I was watching and relished his power over me. The iron grew hotter and hotter until the tip of it pulsated in red and white. “I’m going to kill you, Jew,” he said. His voice was monstrous. He brought the iron toward me and I could hardly bear the heat even from several inches away. Smoke was rising from the glowing tip.
“I’m going to kill you slowly. I want to hear you scream.” My heart raced and I felt sick. The poker was pushed slowly and torturously toward my face, and all I could think was, “God, take me quickly.” I called out for God—God my rescuer and confidant; the God I knew as a Yeshiva student; the God of our Torah. Where was God in all of this? I braced myself for the worst as Stach came toward my eyes with the iron. Then the door flew open and Stach turned to face his friend, who was exhaling puffs of steam and trying to catch his breath. He whispered something in Stach Lango’s ear. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but without a word spoken to me, I was untied and set free. I don’t know why. I don’t know to this day why they let me go. I ran out the door and ran and ran until I came back to my house in a pool of sweat and called for my mother as I burst through the front door. I saw her face through my tears, and she opened her arms. I held her tightly and felt every fiber of her dress in my hands. I breathed in her hair and laid my head in my own perspiration and in the tears running down her neck, soaking her collar. I couldn’t let go, and she held me; I was her baby and she held me. She sat down and held my head on her lap and stroked my face. I sobbed and she tried to console me.
How did this happen? How did things get to be this way? How did my friends—whom I played with—turn into murderers and rapists? The world was turning inside out in my little town in Poland. The clouds had darkened our world almost overnight. And still, the worst was yet to come.
I Live to Remember
For many years I have wanted to write this book. Many Holocaust survivors have written books, and I wasn’t sure how this one would be any different. My biggest concern was trying to understand for myself why I wanted this to be written. Maybe the point of writing is, if nothing else, an expression. I am not trying to prove anything to anyone. I am not trying to get people to believe that the Holocaust was real or that it was literally an unbelievable period of history. I am not looking for sympa
thy or any worldly gain.
I want you to understand that the Holocaust was, and is, a very personal event. Historians, psychologists, and other well-meaning experts tend to present the Holocaust through an impersonal story of facts, figures, political landscapes, economic downturns, and loss of culture. But this is not what the Holocaust means. The Holocaust was, above all else, a deep and traumatic occurrence that cannot be comprehended by the loving mind and heart. It was a personal event for each and every one of us who suffered through it and managed to survive. We are talking about human beings here, family and friends. We are talking as well about an entire culture, a Yiddish civilization born and nurtured in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Ours was a rich culture with real people who had real feelings, hopes, dreams, aspirations, ideas, personalities, and creative impulses. Regular people; extraordinary people.
Can I hold back the tide and keep people from thinking about the Holocaust as a generalized event in which six million Jews died? This is my hope. I want you to understand a little about the world from which I came, a world that is no longer alive—a world of ghosts where a murdered language cries out from the past. I want you to realize that my family and friends were not “lost” in the Holocaust. They were murdered and tortured but not lost. I want you to think about your own mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I want you to think of those who are closest to you and how you could not bear to lose them to unthinkable, shameless, mindless, purposeless, and hateful acts. When we forget that these were real, close, vibrant, feeling people—individuals—who were murdered, then we cannot ever hope to find the deeper impact and grief associated with the loss and suffering.
I am offering this book to the world not as a historical, psychological work but rather as a remembrance. This is a strange paradox for me because, since the terrible years of the Holocaust, I have been haunted by my memories. I have been tortured by my own mind, just trying to understand what happened and why. I reach out blindly through the darkness for my mother whose hand I cannot grasp. I sense that she is there but cannot feel her. I can find no good answers for any of what has happened. I must rely on dreams, memories, and nightmares. Yet the human mind does not always allow for selective impressions. I cannot remember only the good and forget the bad. Here is the paradox. To forget the Holocaust would mean forgetting my family. This I have decided never to do. Nor will my mind indulge me in remembering the good and forgetting the horrible.