Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  When our service had finally ended, and maybe the rain had stopped, the sun would peak through the clouds and take the chill out of the air all the way home. I would more times than not leave the kalte shul filled with questions that I could finally ask Zayde: How did the Jews cross the Red Sea? Where is the Red Sea? Have you ever seen it, Zayde? How did this happen? What did this mean? Have you been to Eretz Yisroel? Where is God? What does He sound like?

  Zayde would think for a minute then say, “God led the children of Israel out of the land of the Egyptians, Motel Leib. And do you know what they discovered as soon as they parted?”

  “Freedom?” I asked. I was proud of my answer.

  “Danger,” Zayde answered. His smile had disappeared and his eyebrows lowered in seriousness. “We discovered a world of danger, and we’ve been living in that world ever since.”

  I think about my Zayde every day. In my head I hear his words of wisdom and I hear him singing in shul. I close my eyes and I am with him. I close my eyes and see it all: my entire childhood and all those who are still so dear to me. Then I think of the danger that we were all in as I walked with Zayde down the road, the heels of our shoes clacking against the cobblestones. Jews were always living on the edge of danger. It was on Zayde’s mind, and now it would always be on mine. It had been this way for all Jews since our people left Egypt.

  Yearning to Touch the Past

  Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Maitchet. Over the years I have reunited with a few remaining friends who once lived in our faraway home. I have painted paintings and drawn pictures of it. I have pored over my books and family photographs. And I have even written poems:

  Greetings to my little town, in a faraway land.

  Greetings to my little house; I’d like to touch you with my hands.

  You have changed by now. I love you so.

  You, Maitchet, are so dear to me, with pain in my heart.

  Now, so far away and so many years behind, I stop to ask Why.

  I know the world is stormy now.

  There are broken-down, old trees.

  Overflowing riverbanks, and blood up to my knees.

  There was beauty once up there; I wonder where all this has gone.

  There was life; there were children playing from morning to dawn.

  All has gone, just memories.

  In Silence, from far away, I greet you; I touch you and I cry.

  Today my memories meld with the present: inseparable and inconsolable. What I remember of Maitchet is not enough to bring me closer to what I have lost, but I have no choice. Memories will have to do. My little hometown is gone. All the Jews are gone. I am here so far away. My memories hold onto a place that can no longer be touched with the five senses. My memory alone holds the Shabbos voices, the village marketplace, Zayde’s house, and the gentle wind blowing the leaves on the summer trees. I hear the slow current of the river and the ladies’ singsong voices as they wash their laundry at the water’s edge. I dream that I can touch the past. My memories form a foggy, well-worn bridge to this other world from which I came.

  It is October 2007. I have made it to the ripe old age of ninety—almost ninety-one—and I hold in my hand a letter. The envelope still bears two twenty-five groszy stamps from Poland. A rubber-stamped indicia bears the name Molczadz. I stare at this remnant. It is real. The ink from Zayde’s pen is real. His handwriting survives, as do his words. Perhaps with scientific instrumentation we would discover hairs from Zayde’s beard on this letter, or maybe oil stains from his loving fingers. Zayde wrote this letter in 1928. His handwriting is on it, in Yiddish, as clear and crisp as if he just laid it into my hands. “Here, Motel Leib, I want you to read this letter. I wrote it eighty years ago while you were a ten-year-old boy playing outside my window. Here, Grandson, read my words, hold this letter in your hands, and you will be able to touch me once again.”

  Zayde’s letter brings the news of the old country to the new. Zayde’s letter crossed the Atlantic and was delivered to my Aunt Frieda, my mother’s sister, who had been living in New York since

  1922. My grandfather was asking for money. Things were not going entirely well, financially speaking, and American dollars would go a long way in our corner of the world. Zayde writes to Aunt Frieda that my great-grandmother died. He tells her nothing about Nazis or atrocities; these things are of the future and do not yet exist.

  When this four-page letter, on lined paper, in blue ink, was written in cursive Hebrew from Zayde’s pen, the problems of life in Maitchet were still small—trivial by most standards. Outside his window, from his writing desk, he watched as his grandchildren ran across the market square kicking a soccer ball. And from the other direction, ten minutes later, he watched one of his sons riding an old hay wagon into town from the fields. These sights made him smile and filled him with happiness. Maybe if I hold Zayde’s letter to my ear I can hear his laughter. Maybe I can hear him call Bubbie, “Come here, come watch out the window. There goes Shlomo. What’s he carrying all by himself? And look at Zimmel pushing that cart. Shhh. Here comes Motel sneaking around the back of the house. He thinks we don’t see him. Did you leave a cake for him on the window sill?” Zayde’s smiling eyes still gaze upon his words that I now cradle in my hands.

  I cling to Zayde’s letter of no great significance because it is so very important and meaningful—a contradiction of terms, I am sure. But you see, with this letter I can have my grandfather once again. I can feel his hand, the hand that used to hold my hand along the snow-packed roads of Maitchet on the way to shul. Now I am left with Zayde’s letter and a dozen photographs to remember my family.

  From time to time I sit at my kitchen table, take out my pictures, and stare at my mother’s face. I have to thank her for thinking ahead. She was as aware as anyone that Jews were never safe in our corner of the world, and the next pogrom was always around the corner. In her wisdom, my mother sent copies of family photographs to her sister, Frieda, for safekeeping. These are wonderful photographs, some more than a hundred years old. I’m looking at one now. I am on the right and beside me, on the edge of my grandfather’s forest, are my two little sisters, Elka and Peshia. I’m a strong, healthy young man in the photograph, and my sisters are girls without a care in the world. They’re wearing dresses Momma made for them and they’re smiling into the camera. I can almost hear them giggling. “Take the picture already,” Peshia tells Momma. “We want to go pick flowers before supper.” I have the photograph still, but my beautiful sisters, like the flowers, are all gone.

  Visiting Baranowicze

  Before daylight, my mother would pack my father and me provisions for our daylong trip to Baranowicze. It was a slow, twenty-mile ride by horse and wagon. Momma made us cheese sandwiches and kugel and put them in a sack along with some fruit that was grown in our family’s little orchard. Heading southeast by horse-drawn wagon, my father and I would first travel through a little shtetl called Mush. Baranowicze was only a couple more miles down the road.

  As a teenager, a trip to Baranowicze was a great adventure—a place far from home with a thousand exotic sights and sounds. It was a big, busy, industrial city that by today’s standards would hardly be noteworthy. But in the days before the war, Baranowicze was the center of our world.

  Baranowicze was first a village owned by a Polish family named Rozwadowski in 1706. By the end of the 1700s the town became part of the Russian Empire. A hundred years after this, Baranowicze was “on the map” because it became an important railway junction of the Warsaw-to-Moscow and Vilna-to-Lviv lines. By the late 1800s, more than five thousand people lived in Baranowicze and half were Jews. In the center of town were wide roads paved with round fieldstones. Hundreds of people were walking here and there.

  At the time of my first visit, in the early 1930s, about twenty thousand people were living in the city.

  Baranowicze was a trading post for every kind of product you could think of—from pillows to jewelry. The thick forests around Baran
owicze made the area a lumber capital, where trees were milled, stacked in warehouses and yards, sold, loaded on trains, and shipped to the four corners of the country. As we rolled along in our wagon, we’d see lumber piled twenty feet high, with workers hauling it off to trains waiting to take it to Germany or some other far-off place. Since Baranowicze was also home to a large Polish army base, much of the town’s industry was geared to supplying the military with basic needs, including food, uniforms, leather belts, and hats.

  Baranowicze had every kind of store you could think of. While my father conducted business, I took the opportunity to walk all over the city, poking my head into shops and warehouses. Workers were making and selling shoes, foods, candies, baked goods, metal wares, kitchen appliances, sewing machines, wagon parts, picture frames, glass wares, furniture, cooking utensils, and clothing. One of my uncles in Baranowicze had a big, popular hardware store that sold tools and equipment for farmers, homeowners, and the local industry. Another uncle owned a lumber store. We visited my uncles whenever we came to town.

  Many of the Jews of Baranowicze—close to ten thousand by the late 1930s—did very well for themselves. The Jewish community not only contributed to the prosperity of the city but also met its own needs with Yeshivas, hostels, an orphanage, charitable organizations, homes for the aged, soup kitchens, a Hebrew-language high school, and ten synagogues. Jewish theater, restaurants, inns, and bakeries also thrived. There were so many Jewish merchants in Baranowicze that on Shabbos the downtown area became deserted.

  Though my father sometimes traveled to Baranowicze with other businessmen, I was thrilled when he invited me along as his travel companion. It was so exciting that sometimes I had trouble falling asleep the night before our trip. Taking our wagon, the journey was a day’s travel, and we’d stay overnight, taking our time to pick up all of the kinds of goods and supplies you couldn’t find in Maitchet. One thing I remember very clearly was the Swiss cheese we bought in one of the stores; a delicacy not found at home. And in a chocolate shop you could buy Swiss, German, Dutch, and Belgian varieties. My father used to buy chocolates and candies to bring back to Maitchet and sell. This was my favorite part of the trip, because the biggest treat would be to have a meal of chocolate and bread.

  I also remember my grandfather’s sister’s son Nechemia Bitensky, who sold material for suits, pants, women’s clothes, and draperies. He was a rich merchant with a thriving business. His big factory was popular among clothes makers from all around because of the variety of materials he offered from England, China, and other places. Bitensky’s friend in Baranowicze was a famous beer brewer named Pupko. Pupko was a member of Poland’s most popular brewery family. The company was founded in 1876 by Nissan Pupko, then passed to his sons Meilach and Simon Pupko. The main brewery in Lida (in Belarus, northwest of Baranowicze) had electric motors with a total power of eighty-seven horsepower and included a steam mill and a sawmill. There were branches of the firm (at least bottling plants) in Baranowicze, Nowogrudek, Grodno, Vilna, and other towns across eastern Poland, Lithuania, and western Russia.

  Two large Yeshivas made Baranowicze, among other things, a Jewish cultural center that attracted boys from many other shtetls to study the scriptures. While we were in town, we could pick up any one of six weekly Jewish newspapers published in Baranowicze and read about the Polish Jewish community and about what was going on in Palestine and the rest of the world. No matter where the papers came from, we could always read them as they were printed in Yiddish. And because Baranowicze was such a center for business, there were many wealthy families living there. On our way in and out of town we would admire their fancy homes with gleaming fences and well-manicured flowering gardens with tulips, narcissuses, and sword lilies.

  Even though I had well-to-do uncles down south in the Baranowicze garment industry, most of my family’s clothing was still made at home by my mother. However, once a year my mother’s parents, Sheyna and Eliyahu Bielous, who lived up north in a shtetl called Morozovichi, presented me with a new store-bought suit and hat. My grandmother and grandfather in Morozovichi loved to spoil me with new clothes. In these days now, when you hop in your car and run to the mall, the excitement and novelty of store-bought clothing is lost. But in those days, it was a special occasion to bring home to Maitchet and try on a suit of clothes stitched by machine operators and made of fine materials from the big city. My whole family would all pile in our wagon and drive until we reached my grandparents’ home, which sat on the edge of a lake and stream. My grandfather Eliyahu owned a mill, so we never left without at least a sack of freshly ground flour to take back home with us. Once in a while we would stay for the weekend, and when Shabbos came around, my grandfather stopped talking. He never spoke on Shabbos—his way of resting, I suppose.

  Baranowicze was a happy place for me. It was full of energy and excitement, where the Jewish community was respected and thrived. The wide-open spaces, broad streets teeming with people coming and going, and the surrounding neighborhoods created a wonderful mixture of peace and excitement. When at last we drove out of town, we left with satisfaction, our wagon loaded down with goods and supplies for us and our relatives back in Maitchet. On the sandy road out of town, back toward Mush, people waved to us from their yards until the pretty houses with their flower and vegetable gardens disappeared behind us.

  The Wrong Kind of Excitement

  I have many fond memories of Maitchet and my childhood. But life wasn’t without its dangers.

  As I look back into the past, I remember a time when the sun was setting as I headed home for dinner one early spring day. I was nearly nineteen years old. The last of the snow was melting on the roadside; puddles made the roads muddy, the air was chilly, and the lights were just going on inside the homes. On this particular evening, it was all peaceful and quiet, except for the sounds of a few distant voices, or maybe a horse neighing as his owner led him into the barn for the night. My stomach began to growl as I made my way home, imagining what my mother was cooking for dinner.There was a dreamy, beautiful feeling about Maitchet, a feeling that I sometimes get just sitting down in my backyard now and studying my ripening tomatoes on the vine.

  Momma was an amazing cook. She and my sisters would spend an entire day in the kitchen preparing dinner until the unforgettable aroma seeped through windows and doors and eventually wafted out onto the street before melding with the smells of scores of other meals from other homes—beef stew, cooked carrots, boiled potatoes, fresh greens, soup, and baked bread.

  I picked up my pace as the shadows grew longer behind me. The sky had turned orange-yellow and thick gray clouds sat low over Maitchet. Fires were being lit in the homes, and puffs of smoke filled the air from chimneys. Few people were out on the street except for stragglers like me. The neighborhood stood in silence as I approached my house. At the far end of our street, after finishing his work, Zayde had seated himself down for dinner and Bubbie brought him a bowl of hot chicken soup. Meanwhile, my father was locking our horse in the barn behind our house. He walked into the house and closed the door behind him. I was about to unbutton my coat and take the last few steps toward our front door when I heard a low rumbling noise, like thunder. But it wasn’t thunder. My heartbeat quickened and my ears perked up. It wasn’t my imagination. The sound of galloping horses grew louder and soon I spotted a gang of riders off in the distance. I could barely make out how many there were—close to twenty, I guessed.

  A warning rang out. In the quiet of the neighborhood it was loud and clear. I heard someone from some corner or behind a fence scream “Cossacks!” In a panicked, high-pitched voice, he yelled the warning over and over. Maybe he was running from the horsemen, I couldn’t see. Now, out from the Jewish homes poured dozens of strong boys with wooden sticks, iron bars, knives, and farm tools. “Cossacks!” the voice screamed. And then I saw him, a teenager running toward me, holding his hat in one hand and racing along with a tree limb in his other. He was pointing back toward the horsemen a
s he tripped and fell in the street. He got back up, hands scraped and his pant leg torn at the knee, and he continued to run. All around me I heard mothers locking their doors and windows as the sky grew darker. I grabbed a stick or a club that was near me and rushed into the street where the others had now gathered. We fanned out across the road and waited anxiously. In no time the Cossacks were completely in view, just a hundred meters away, then fifty. I saw their faces. I watched them rushing toward us with black eyes and bushy mustaches, dressed in dark grays and blacks with long coats flapping wildly alongside their saddles. Clumps of dirt flew off hooves in every direction, spotting the riders’ faces in mud as they brandished their swords in the air, screaming at us: “Death to the Jews!” Several of them waved flaming torches in the air. Then they were on our cobblestone street and the sound of the horses was deafening.

  They came to kill us and to burn our homes to the ground, but we swung our iron pipes and garden tools over our heads and fought with every ounce of strength within us. We lashed out with our makeshift weapons, knocking the soldiers off their horses, breaking bones with our iron pipes, and throwing firewood, stones, and whatever we could get our hands on at the riders.

  The Cossacks came to give us trouble, but this time they were the ones who were surprised. We were Jews who fought back. We were strong and quick to defend ourselves. The Jews of Maitchet knew better than to hide in our homes and let them have their way. Even some of the Poles joined forces with us. This time the Cossacks got more than they bargained for. We knocked a lot of them off their mounts, clubbed them, and sent them back where they came from, running and limping down the road until the last of them disappeared into the darkness. Then at last, we tended to our wounded, assessed the damage, put out a few small fires, and stood around in groups, still holding onto our weapons in case they came back. Each of us had a theory about whether they would return, maybe bringing more with them the next time.