Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  On this one particular evening, we were walking along the tracks when it began to snow. The wind picked up and whistled in our ears. The snow was coming down now so heavy that we couldn’t see fifty feet in front of us. We had to turn our heads to hear each other. At one point my friend said he needed to sit down to eat, so we found a tree nearby and sat down, taking out our lunches. The tree blocked most of the falling snow. I took out a big slice of bread that my mother had made the night before, and to go with it I produced a chunk of cheese. My friend had some bacon with him, and we began to share our food and try to talk against the wind. When we finished eating, we began to walk again, but now it was snowing so heavily that we couldn’t even turn our faces to the wind. The wind, too, picked up and we were pushed along beside the tracks as we walked.

  As we stumbled along, it was like being in a hypnotic state. Everything was white and all we could hear was the whooshing of the wind in our ears, but there were no other sounds. For some reason, I wandered a bit away from the tracks but kept my eye on my friend as he followed the rails eastward. He was a dark image outlined against the white of the sky and ground. We never heard the train that was bearing down on us, and the conductor probably never saw my friend on the track in front of him. Before I could even tell what was happening, my friend was run over and completely disappeared from sight, being dragged for miles on the snowy railroad tracks out of town. Not a trace of him could be seen.

  I was shocked and sickened at what happened, but there was no one to run to. I could barely pick up my feet and my heart sunk into my stomach. How could someone be here one minute but then erased from existence in the next? The thought gripped me and I wanted to cry. I fell to my knees and stared at the track, which was already beginning to be covered up by the snow until it disappeared altogether, as if nothing had happened—as if my friend never existed. He was gone—as if it had all been a dream; as if I had been alone the entire time. Although I did not know it at the time, this was a foreshadow of what 1939 was yet to bring.

  The German Invasion

  Maitchet was so close to the Soviet Union that people thought we’d be protected from the Nazis. They clung to this hope—a flimsy defense against the Nazi advances. Maybe we’d be safe, they reasoned. Maybe it was just a political struggle over land. Maybe the Germans had all they wanted and would leave the rest of Poland to the Russians. In the meantime, we were part of the Soviet Union and life went on as it had for hundreds of years, except for perhaps a new feeling of uneasiness. A Soviet radio blackout stifled reports of what was happening in Germany and the increasing violence against the Jews.

  We were a bit nervous but on Shabbos we continued to go to shul; we worked the fields like any other time; and my father and I traveled to Baranowicze for supplies. Travel remained free and easy. But our trips were short-lived. After the “Polish Defensive War of 1939,” Baranowicze, now occupied by the Soviet Union, was overrun with refugees. The roads were crowded. The local Jewish population grew from around nine thousand to twelve thousand. That means three thousand people were milling around without a permanent residence or a way to earn an income.

  It was only a matter of time before the Germans organized their takeover of all of Poland. This was in the summer of 1941. Hitler broke his treaty with Stalin and pushed all the way through what once had been known as Poland. Maitchet wasn’t spared.

  People started to change. Many Poles welcomed the Germans with open arms, like long-lost friends instead of a conquering army. Jews who were fleeing the rapidly expanding Nazi border rushed eastward. Zayde worked tirelessly, providing as many passports and visas as he could muster for the strangers who came to his door. His visitors were more than just weary from travel. Now there was panic in their eyes. More and more Maitcheters began opening their doors to refugees. From 1940 onward, all Maitcheters had strangers living with them. We wouldn’t say no to our fellow Jews, and our population swelled to ten times its pre-war size.

  One day in 1941, Papa was working in the market area when a small family approached him—the Bachrach family, consisting of a father, a mother, a daughter named Chana, and a son about my age named Shmulek. The father of the family told Papa that the Germans were quickly advancing. Like thousands of other Jewish families, the Bachrachs had to leave all their possessions, their house, and work, and run away. Mr. Bachrach pointed to four suitcases at their feet and said, “This is all we could take. It’s everything we have.”

  The Bachrachs were from a big town called Mezritch on the new German border, about sixty miles southeast of Warsaw. Mezritch had more than twelve thousand Jews; in fact, most of the town was Jewish and it had been that way since the mid-1600s.

  The Germans took over Mezritch in the middle of September 1939 then withdrew a couple of weeks later to let the Soviets occupy the town. Less than a month later, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets abandoned Mezritch to be reoccupied by the Germans. At about this time, hundreds of Jews began to flee to the east, looking for a place—any place—to go that was still under Soviet control. Toward the end of 1939, Mr. Bachrach told my father that a Judenrat was formed. This word, Judenrat, was new to us but would soon become a common phrase throughout all of Eastern Europe. Whenever the Germans took over an area, they created a Judenrat—a council made up of Jews to act as the intermediary between the German command and the Jewish community. The Judenrat was eventually to be put in the impossible position of enforcing Nazi racial policies on its own fellow Jews. Sometimes this meant helping with “selections”—deciding which Jews were to be murdered, which ones would be sent on trains to concentration camps, and which Jews would be given over to work camps.

  Under Action Reinhard (named after Hitler’s highest-ranking Nazi official in charge of the Final Solution), more and more Jews were forced into Mezritch—it became a way station to the concentration camp Treblinka. The Bachrach family escaped that horrible fate—if only for the time being.

  When the Bachrachs reached Maitchet, they were tired and frightened. They had had a glimpse of our future. Papa insisted the Bachrachs come home with him. Momma would feed them and find them a place to stay in our house. They could take their time to decide where to go and what to do next. Over the next few weeks, the Bachrachs poured their hearts out to Momma and Papa, using words that we never heard before, like deportations, concentration camps, work details, and ghettoization. Their stories were unbelievable—people being forced to turn over their homes, being robbed on the street by the police, and even being shot. Despite their plight, we still wondered how any of this could be possible. Thousands of people were on the roads running eastward through Poland. Every avenue was lined with refugees so thick in some places that traffic slowed to a crawl. Good thing, we thought, we were safe in Soviet-occupied Poland. The Germans would never be able to invade Russia. It was much too vast and had a powerful army. As Soviet citizens, we could look around us every day and see that all was normal—it seemed that the Russians were once again in control. Zayde was, after all, put into position as mayor when Maitchet was a Russian village. We were safe, we kept telling ourselves.

  I was spending a lot of time with twenty-year-old Shmulek Bachrach during this time. He was a house painter by trade and wasn’t particularly interested in the Talmud or Jewish learning; yet we had enough in common to become friends. He was easy to talk with and more than willing to help out with my chores and pull his own weight as a guest in our home. At one point he told me that we were not safe from the Germans and that the Germans were murdering people in the streets. “If not for my parents,” Shmulek told me, “I would run away as fast and as far as I could go—maybe to Palestine.”

  I was alarmed. I tried to imagine the picture he painted of thousands of people on the road with their belongings, violence in the streets, and German soldiers taking over one shtetl after another, but still, it was too difficult to understand what he was saying to me.

  “The Germans come into the towns and take out the J
ews and shoot them on the side of the road. I saw this happen,” Shmulek told me.

  I was so convinced by Shmulek’s account of German cruelty that one day I went to my father and pleaded with him to leave Maitchet. “We have to go,” I said. “They’re killing the Jews. We should leave right away.” My father listened to what I had to say as we paced outside in front of our house that stood at the end of the street lined with all of my uncles’ houses. It was very clear that this was all we had.

  “Our whole family is here,” Papa told me. “This is our home; where could we go?”

  “Away,” I tried to argue. “We should all leave.”

  “What would we have? We should leave all that we have and everyone we know? And then what?”

  Part of what Papa said made sense. We, the Shmulewicz family, were never people to run away from our problems. We stood up to the Gentiles when they spewed their hateful anti-Semitic words at us. We defended ourselves against the raiding Cossacks. We stuck together. My father never backed down. It was clear that Papa would never turn and run; he was a strong man with a strong sense of reason and honor. Looking down our street, seeing the line of homes owned by Zayde’s sons, the idea of picking up and leaving seemed ominous. I tried to imagine our entire block deserted, without cousins or uncles or aunts. I tried to imagine the silence. I couldn’t and neither could Papa.

  This was our world. Maitchet was us, and we were Maitchet. Most of all, Maitchet was part of the Soviet Union. The Germans would have to be crazy to invade Russia. It would be suicide. No, it was obvious, by all logic, that we would be spared the German cruelty spreading throughout Europe. Why would the Germans want Maitchet anyway? Maybe Papa was right.

  Yet people in town—in stores, in the shtiebls, in shul—talked about the war and the Germans and the shifting politics. It was unavoidable. And so, for the first time, I was faced with thinking about the real possibility of losing everything. The German army was advancing swiftly to the east. Like so many others, I held a bundle of conflicting and confusing thoughts in my head. As a young man, I knew I could run. I could leave it all behind. I had nothing but my family keeping me in Poland. But my father and mother had their home, their neighbors, their Yiddishkeit, their traditions. For them, the thought of leaving—of fleeing—was impossible. And how could I leave? I would be abandoning my family. For the same reason I never went with my friends to Palestine, I felt I had to stay in Maitchet and wait out the storm. All storms pass.

  We weren’t rich. There were so many of us. Things had been bad for the Jews many times before. How bad could things get? No, we would stay in Maitchet with the other Jews, the other members of our family. We would stay in our beautiful home across the street from the Greek Orthodox church and its bright white walls and its friendly priest and his family. Nothing had changed in Maitchet. No need to panic. We were safe here.

  If you’ve never been faced with the idea of having to leave everything at a moment’s notice, then it’s hard to describe what was going through our minds. These conflicting thoughts become an obsession. I now had a firsthand understanding of how all of those people felt who had been coming to Zayde’s door in the middle of the night. And though my mother’s sister, my Aunt Frieda, was already living in New York, America wasn’t even real to us. We didn’t give it a second thought at the time. We would just wait and see. Nobody could imagine or predict what was to come. It defied logic. It was random and surprising. And it was so sudden that we were in a state of paralyzing shock. We had never encountered such behavior, and we certainly never expected it from our friends and neighbors. As it turned out, it wasn’t just the Germans that we should have been worrying about. Our worst enemies, as strange as it sounds, were our friends.

  One cool, dewy morning, carrying a sack of flour over my shoulder, I was walking down the street with Shmulek talking about my friends, the Zionists, who had left for Eretz Yisroel the prior summer. We guessed what they might be doing now, working on a kibbutz in the desert. We laughed, we sang a song on the road back to my house, then we worked the rest of the day planting seeds in our garden.

  The next morning we were met with a new world. Nothing looked the same. There were clouds hanging low, hardly blocking out a blood-red sky. No birds. Nobody breathed. At the break of dawn, Maitchet was awoken with the ugly, guttural sounds of German motorcycles spitting up a cloud of dust a half mile long. A few other vehicles followed close behind, carrying maybe a dozen German soldiers. Maitchet had been invaded. Just like that. Hitler’s henchmen had reached our very door. But it wasn’t the kind of invasion you might think. There weren’t hundreds of trucks teeming with an army of soldiers. No tanks came through and no heavy artillery rolled in. Germans didn’t march down our street in front of our houses, goose-stepping over the cobblestone pavement past the Greek Orthodox church, past Zayde’s house, and into the middle of the town where the marketplace was held. No German rifles were fired; no homes were set ablaze. No, this was a quiet invasion at first; it was a presence, a change of ownership. Completely without warning or ceremony, the Russians were gone and now we were in German-occupied territory. This was the spring of 1941.

  What happened over the next month is a blur of terrible memories. Our neighbors, the Polish farmers and townspeople, went through a Kafkaesque metamorphosis and became something unrecognizable and surprising—something inhuman. We who had lived with these people our entire lives could not recognize them. They welcomed the Germans, brought flowers, and stood along the sides of the road, joining in the fascist cause with the briefest of invitations. Why? Possibly this was their opportunity to have everything that belonged to the Jews. It was time to get even and release the anti-Semitism that had been bottled up for so long. It was time to lose all pretense of morality.

  Remember that we are speaking of a poor town of ignorant, superstitious, and jealous people who, up to this hour, had been kept in line only by common decency, an oppressive Soviet government, and the dictates of the law. But now the Germans made all that was disagreeable and taboo socially acceptable. With peer pressure and the new Nazi law, cruelty became the norm.

  At the beginning of summer, when the skies should have been blue and the birds chirping, only black clouds rolled in from the west, threatening to smother Maitchet in hellish darkness. The fate of hundreds of other shtetls had now taken root in our small town.

  Our Polish neighbors became more than just willing collaborators and enablers—they became the leaders and the initiators of every unspeakable act that lies dormant in the soul of evil beings. When the Germans came in, they enlisted the help and cooperation of the Polish police. The head of police, Vlojik Ulashik, the brother of my childhood friend Tamara, had a dilemma that needed to be worked out. Vlojik was married to a Jewish woman. His daughter was therefore half Jewish. He had been married for ten years to his wife and they had a good relationship; we’d see them walking through town with their daughter on Sunday mornings. But this was a new day in a new life. When the Nazi command challenged the Poles to abandon their Jewish neighbors, and they were told there would be a death penalty for helping the Jews, Vlojik marched all the way home from the police station and brought his wife and daughter to the center of the town square for Nazis, Poles, and Jews to see. He then pulled out his service revolver and shot his wife and his daughter in the head. Just like that, Vlojik Ulashik proved his loyalty to the Nazis and set an example for every Pole in Maitchet that a Jew was of no value as a human being. We couldn’t believe our eyes. This was only one sign of things to come.

  What could have happened that would change these people from neighbors into monsters? Is it conceivable that behind every smile, for years on end, was an insane soul with murder on his mind? Was it really possible that these people who worked, played, and interacted with us really hated us all along? Were they simply pretending for hundreds of years? These Poles, our “friends” and coworkers, classmates, and playmates, needed no great amount of encouragement or prompting by the Germans to carr
y out the Final Solution in Maitchet. As soon as the Germans arrived with only a handful of soldiers and an officer, the Poles took the cue. This was their opportunity to show their colors, take revenge, and steal all they could lay their hands on. They would have their orgy of gluttony and disgrace in full view of, and with complete sanctioning by, the new law.

  The first order of business was to force all of us Jews of Maitchet into our homes. If you had a gun or a hunting rifle, you were made to give it up or were shot on the spot. If you tried to run away or hide you would also be shot.

  We dared not go outside. One or two Jews unfortunate enough to find himself or herself outdoors met with savage beatings in the middle of the street by gangs of roaming Poles. They were kicked, screamed at, punched in the face, spat upon, and humiliated. A few were beaten to death. All that the rest of us could do was watch from our windows and try to make sense of it all, which, of course, was impossible. There was no sense at all. No humanity, no dignity. It was surreal.

  We couldn’t even run to our relatives’ homes to see if they were safe, if they had any information, if they had a plan. It turns out that they didn’t. None of us knew what to do. We were stunned. We were prisoners in our own homes.

  Shmulek and his family had run away from Mezritch to this—something as bad and maybe worse. They had merely delayed their fate. The Nazis had occupied, with exacting and brutal force, the major cities of Krakow, Warsaw, and Vilnius. Nearby Baranowicze was at this time being converted into a ghetto with a labor camp.

  With no automobiles or telephones, there was nowhere to run. Every road out of Maitchet led to another German-occupied town. A feeling of hopelessness was just around the corner as days passed without our being able to set foot outside. People began to grow hungry. The long, torturous hours turned into black, horror-filled nights.