Remember Us

by Vic Shayne

  With a maddened calm, Stach told me, “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 of 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. The heat was burning me from several inches away, and the glowing tip of the poker was sizzling in the humid air. Sweat beaded up on my forehead then dripped into my eyes. I shook uncontrollably and waited for the inevitable. 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 had been running, racing against time to find Stach and tell him something of urgent importance. 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 tears running down her neck and soaking her collar. I couldn’t let go, and she held me; I was her baby and she held me. She sat down and I dropped to my knees as Momma held my head on her lap and stroked my face. I sobbed and she tried to console me.

  Months passed. Our every move was tentative, and we took our lives in our hands with each step away from our homes. We did very little, the bare necessities on our farms and with our animals. There were daily killings—people were burned, beaten, and butchered, taken out of town and left for dead. People were constantly disappearing. Mothers were worried sick about their boys and husbands. They waited and waited, but it was over. They would never come back home. All of our days were coming to an end. One by one. A distant scream, a shot, pleas for mercy, shattering glass waking us from our beds in the middle of the night. Lives were tragically coming to an end. Cousins, neighbors, friends. The murder rate was sometimes ten, twenty, or thirty a day.

  Then they came for me again. Stach Lango and a group of his friends. I cannot even remember most of the details, only that I was in my house with my family and the Bachrachs when fists started pounding on our door so loudly that we thought it would split in two. Black boots, farm boots, muddy, heavy boots kicked at our door, the door my father built with his two strong hands; the door I helped set upon its new hinges in my other life. Standing on our porch, stomping on our veranda, they kicked and punched. They called for us, Shmulek and me.

  When we came to the door, we saw a wall of angry, hateful men and boys outside, spilling onto our front lawn, standing and stomping in my mother’s flower beds. Stach Lango pointed his gun at me and said, “Come on, let’s go.” I didn’t know what to think. Were we going to replay the events months earlier when he had been about to burn me alive? Then his gang pushed in through the door and grabbed me and Shmulek. There were horses and wagons lined up, one after another on our street. Several men pulled us outside, kicking and punching us and prodding us with the handles of farming hoes and rakes. We tried to cover our heads and faces from the blows as we were being shoved. I don’t know if I fell or not, but in an instant we were carried along by a mob to the middle of town where the market square was, in front of Zayde’s house. The market was crowded with more than a thousand people. We were all in one another’s way, tripping over one another, turning in different directions, trying to understand the confusion. Next, one by one we were dragged over to a wagon where, along with all the other young men, we were tied by our necks to the wagon’s railings. Three or four of us were bound to a single vehicle. There were some from Maitchet, others from towns nearby, and boys like Shmulek who came from the west with their families trying but failing to reach the Russian territory. I looked around and saw so many familiar faces: the same boys who stood with me to fight off the Cossacks; the same ones who studied Torah with me in the shtiebl. We were all there: every young man they could get their hands on. As I was being shoved and beaten, I saw my friend, Rabbi Chonyeh Goldstein, thrown to the ground. He struggled back to his feet and was dragged to a wagon. Also near me were my friends Chaim Novomicheski, Yankel Silverman, and Mayer Rozanski. A couple of Poles a few yards away were tugging at the arms of a woman. I couldn’t see her face. She tried to pull away, to sit, to kick as she wailed. One of the men took out his revolver and shot her in the head. A dark-haired doll, rumpled and broken, laid lifeless with a gentle red stream trickling away from her body.

  We were tied up with our hands bound at the wrists behind us. The rope dug into our flesh, burning our skin as it scraped and tore into us. Our throats ached with harsh, wiry rope pushing into our windpipes and cutting off our circulation around our necks. Our eyes were open wide, but with more and more people crowding the square, we could not see more than dust, clenched fists, and a train of wagons driven by farmers. Wagon wheels shifted unsteadily as the horses revolted against a deafening roar of hate and commotion. Tied up and jostled, we waited under the sun drowning in a din so loud it stifled the sounds of our mothers as they screamed for us in torment through the windows of our houses. Scores of young men fell to their knees then, without the use of their hands, and being choked from the ropes around their necks tried to right themselves. I widened my stance and inched closer to the wagon to avoid being knocked over as the horse up front shifted position and yanked the wagon.

  I had been torn from my mother, father, and two little sisters; I could not take one last look at them. Any chance to utter a single word to them, to say “I love you” with words or gestures, was stolen from me. No words of parting. No warm and loving hug, robbed of my mother’s softness, of my father’s strength and courage, of my sisters’ sweetness, of Zayde’s wisdom, of Bubbie’s loving gaze. A suffocating feeling of loneliness swept over me in the stampede. We were entwined souls ripped harshly apart in the darkness of mid-morning, in the silence of a riotous crowd whose hate and vengeance was now an avalanche. Someone—I did not see who—hollered an order in uneducated gutter language. Another brought his riding whip cruelly down onto the horse tied to the other side of the wagon. The animal screamed and the wagon jolted, wrenching our necks and forcing one or two others beside me to their knees. They struggled to their feet just in time as the wagons pulled away with all of us running in tow to keep up with them. Some, starting with a limp from the force of the wagons at their joints, were doomed not to make it. Our families watched from their windows with burning eyes as we became part of a long parade of slaves dragged out of town.

  Have you ever seen a human body torn apart from being dragged over a rocky road? This is what happened to two of my friends who tripped or fell from exhaustion. The rope from the back of the wagon dragged them screaming and moaning. Then the screams stopped. All I heard was a body, then another, bumping in torn pieces along the road. Their legs were ground down into bloody stumps and their faces were no longer faces at the end of bouncing ropes.

  My biggest fear for the moment was not keeping up and falling. With very little energy from a lack of food and sleep, we were pulled along by our necks like this for miles. We would stop for an hour or so here and there to rest the horses, then we were off again until we reached a little farm town called Koldichevo. When we got there, the Poles were raping girls and women out in the open.

  We were at last untied then pushed with gun barrels into a barn that was partially filled with cold standing water and animal refuse. We were given a piece of bread and stayed in Koldichevo for two or three days before being tied up again and dragged off to Baranowicze.

  Baranowicze. This was hardly the city I remembered. The busy Jewish hustle and bustle had been smothered. The Nazis created a Judenrat that told us to find a place within
the ghetto and settle down. We were all kept as prisoners awaiting our next instructions.

  With its great network of railroads directly and indirectly connecting Baranowicze with every city from Moscow to Berlin, Baranowicze was now a way station for Jews from shtetls north and south. Who would have thought that the trains that once brought fathers home to their families and Yeshiva bochers, like me, to learn from the greatest teachers would now be the instruments of an ultimate and irreversible tragedy. Jews were being packed into train cars and carried away, far away from this land and these memories. No more Jewish life, no more families, the last vestiges now just a memory.

  The buildings of downtown Baranowicze, inside the ghetto, were makeshift homes for twelve thousand people concentrated into a small area, with six or seven buildings. More than a quarter of its Jewish ghetto population was made up of Jews from other areas. Even more were on their way as the Nazis meticulously swept through every shtetl in eastern Poland. I tried to imagine Baranowicze as I knew it only a couple of years earlier. I wondered what had happened to my uncles in the garment and lumber business. Where were the rabbis and the Yeshiva students?

  The once-enchanting Baranowicze of my youth had become an ugly, desolate prison. Gone were the prosperous Jewish businessmen. Their houses and properties scattered throughout the countryside were no longer theirs. The best of their homes were stolen and occupied by Nazi officers. Local gangs ransacked smaller houses; others were left intact as Polish neighbors simply moved in and carried on life as usual. Small farms and fields or mills owned for generations were now abandoned. And shops in the middle of town stood empty, looted, lifeless.

  The Baranowicze ghetto was cordoned off with fences guarded by Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians who anxiously waited for an opportunity to murder or beat up the Jews, Russian prisoners of war, or other “enemies” of the new Nazi order. If you were found outside the ghetto you were to be shot—no questions asked.

  In Baranowicze, Shmulek and I found ourselves among a crowd of others who were brought there in the same manner. We were all forced into one wave of men and older boys through makeshift gates guarded by Polish police until shoved in behind the fence of the ghetto. Others, including women, mothers, grandmothers, children, babies, and toddlers, were forced onto the trains, locked in hot cars with standing room only, then shipped out to concentration camps in never-heard-of towns.

  Along with the few young Jews from Maitchet, Shmulek and I melded with hordes of others from surrounding areas to await our fate. We had no idea what would happen next.

  It was not our right to know our fate. There were only rumors but no real information. What would happen to us? Word spread that we would be used as laborers. What we were not told, but what we suspected was that we had become dispensable, unhuman beings. We had already seen that to shoot a Jew was like killing a fly. Our lives were worthless. The term “labor” was a convenient lie. Real laborers in a normal society had a value, but we were slaves, prisoners who committed no crime. This condition forced me to adjust, to see the world in a different way—without a future. My life as a person ended when I was forced into a crowd of angry, confused, tired, and defeated men and locked in this ghetto at Baranowicze.

  As days turned to weeks, my goal was only to survive in the midst of a dozen people daily lining the sidewalks, exhausted and filled with fear, or taken out in small groups never to return.

  Once the ghetto was stocked full of Jewish prisoners, the Nazis established work details that were sent out every morning. Some of us were made to clear roads, others to labor in fields. Still others dug mass graves. Without knowing it, they were digging their own graves, so they could be massacred in large numbers and swallowed up by the earth.

  Every long, stressful day in Baranowicze was one step closer to death. Dead bodies were strewn on the sidewalks until we stopped noticing our own efforts to step over them on the way to scrounge for food and water. Vacant eyes, swollen bellies, hopeless, helpless faces. Confused, sad, and beyond anger, with no more bodily fluids left to produce tears. Baranowicze was dying quickly.

  For the time being, I forced myself to stay strong. Hard work was nothing new to me, but the uncertainty of life created more and more anxiety. Only death awaited me in this ghetto. I had to get out, even though I knew that a work detail could be a death sentence. So far, Shmulek Bachrach and I had avoided selections for work details. We had escaped the notice of the guards, spending our days out of sight or, when appropriate, blending in with the masses.

  Looking around, I could see that some of the older or frailer men would never survive any kind of labor. Their delicate fingers were meant for pointing to the pages of the Torah and their weak legs to take them to shul or to spend the day sitting at a desk. They were scholars or merchants, never having pulled a plow or carried heavy bundles on their backs for miles. I was a farm boy, and these were city men. They would never make it. They would be the next to go, and their families would never know what happened to them.

  I trusted that God would give me the strength to take on the unknown that was ahead of me. In the meantime, I slept in the street, as the few buildings inside the ghetto were overcrowded with those wearier than myself. People were sleeping in stairwells, hallways, looted-out stores, abandoned offices, and warehouses. Some died in their sleep, and the smell of death grew heavier each day. Shmulek and I slept at night using our jackets as pillows, but we did not rest. We asked ourselves whether this was it—whether this was how our lives were to end.

  Each day people were randomly singled out to leave for work. Overseen by German soldiers, our guards would assemble a group from our ranks who were taken away to work clearing fields, cleaning out railroad cars, repairing roads, digging trenches, and erecting buildings—all for the Nazi war machine. Not everyone came back.

  One day a tall, good-looking Nazi officer in a brown uniform came to the ghetto and asked if there were any painters among us. Standing slightly behind him was his Polish interpreter, a man named Grabowski. Shmulek, a painter by trade, raised his hand then prompted me to do likewise. The officer, known as Herr Doktor Wichtmann, nodded his head and pointed at us. “Diese” (those), he said. Grabowski pushed his way through the crowd standing near the gate, then grabbed Shmulek and me by the sleeves.

  We were selected to leave the ghetto. But where were we going? Should we have felt lucky? Were the others envious? Why should they be? Maybe it was better not to be separated from the rest; maybe it was a cruel trap. The Germans were quickly gaining a reputation for cruel tricks. A work detail was many times not a work detail at all. They marched you to the forest, ordered you to the edge of a ditch, then started firing their rifles. Twenty, fifty, a hundred at a time, shot into a ditch, and covered over by Russian prisoners and another work detail of Jews. We wondered, we feared, what we were volunteering for. But we feared even more to ask. To ask often was the end of it all. We didn’t ask. We didn’t resist. We followed Grabowski out through the ghetto gates.

  It was a sunny, cool summer morning as we obediently shuffled out in front of Grabowski with Dr. Wichtmann walking ahead of us in his crisp brown officer’s uniform and shiny black boots. His hair was a blond-brown and carefully combed beneath his officer’s hat. His fingernails were manicured and his back kept straight to impress us with his superiority. Expensive cologne wafted through the air—a strange diversion from the smell of death we were leaving behind. Dragging our feet, with our stomachs growling, we followed the tall officer at a brisk pace for ten or fifteen minutes along cobble-stoned Wilenska Street. He walked on the sidewalk, a place forbidden to Jews. We walked in the road, past the buildings, along fields of wild flowers, weeds, grass, and scattered fruit trees until the ghetto was no longer in sight. We were, by now, a mile away, far enough for Wichtmann not to smell the stench or be inconvenienced by the groans of the starved and dying. We were in the country, with the forests lying not far beyond and the breezes free to blow over wide open fields of tall, yellow-brown grass
.

  At last we arrived at the doctor’s house, his new quarters. Wichtmann had taken possession of the home and land of a well-to-do Jew who would never return. The outside of the home was being groomed by Russian POWs working without rest under the sun. They were shirtless and their ribs stuck out of their skin. A few guards sat in the shade of nearby trees keeping an eye on them. Whether the guards were Germans or Ukrainians, I could not tell.

  All around the house, the gardens were bearing flowers. Broad-leaved trees were in full bloom now and shaded the home and yard. A clean, bright white picket fence ran along the front of the house, separating the lawn from the sidewalk. Like my own home in Maitchet, this house also had a front porch made of wooden planks and trimmed with a railing. On the property were a couple other buildings too, maybe a maid’s quarters, where the Russians now lived ten to a room. There was another building as well just behind the main house—a tiny structure with only a couple of windows that were tightly shut, even in the summer heat. Little did we know what hell was going on in there. Later, I was to find out.

  When we stepped inside Wichtmann’s house, we knew it had once belonged to a rich family. Fine furniture and carpets adorned the rooms. Windows were covered with delicate curtains and the floors were polished to a shine. Elaborate, expensive paintings hung on the wall, specially brought in from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries. Wichtmann had found paradise in Baranowicze. He was working on putting his personal touches on this prize of a home—Germanizing it on the fringe of the new German frontier.