Esfir Is Alive

by Andrea Simon

  Drora’s silence prompted my mother to continue. “Don’t tell me that there were losses on all sides. I know that. Nothing like we suffered, and this includes all of us former Polish citizens—Poles, Belorussians, and Jews, alike.”

  Finally, Drora spoke. “I know, Mother, it’s beyond human comprehension.” With all her pent-up emotions and her pretended indifference breaking apart, Drora began to cry, and through her sobs, she said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m a stubborn fool.”

  My mother could have agreed with her eldest daughter. She could have reiterated her moral “rightness,” but she realized how much Drora’s admission cost her. She didn’t want Drora to feel utterly defeated and disillusioned. I have to say this about my mother, she had pride too, but never let it blind her from the welfare of her children.

  She took Drora in her arms and intoned, “It’s okay, my child. You have a tremendous gift for loyalty and integrity. I am very proud of you.”

  I thought at least I would find my old friend Gittel as I had left her. What had I been thinking—that she would be unscathed? That’s what I had hoped to find about Ania in October, and how wrong I had been then.

  Gittel was also like a different person. I never thought I’d say this, but she had no interest in any game I suggested. She went to school and was the perfect, obedient student and daughter. She did confide in me that her parents were making bundles stuffed with necessities and valuables. They had vague plans to escape eastward at the first opportunity. I thought back to the days of the German occupation, not that long ago, when Gittel proudly revealed her personal escape strategy—memorizing the thirteen-mile route to her relatives.

  It was easy to fit back in school. No bullies to worry about. There were more Jewish students, and besides, there were supposed to be no differences. We were all comrades. I might as well have been in Brest. We had the same curriculum, the same books, and the teachers held a similar demeanor.

  DURING THAT TIME, there was a bright spot. It had to do with Velvel.

  We had often wondered what was worse—not hearing from him, or hearing about him. My mother had sent him letters and postcards but didn’t know if any had been delivered. Rumors stirred about mail being censored or destroyed. Before she had worried about the Arabs, and now it was the British. Drora also had heard stories of Zionist terrorists in Palestine.

  One early evening, I heard my mother shouting outside the house, definitely not desirable behavior in those days. We rushed to the door and she scuttled inside. She was beaming wider than her teeth. Without stopping to take off her coat, she waved a postcard in the air like a windshield wiper during a rainstorm. When my sisters and I gathered around her, she made sure the living-room door was closed and motioned us to follow her into the kitchen. Perl had been on an errand.

  “Here, here,” she said. “a postcard from your brother, Velvel.” As if she needed to tell us his name. “I didn’t even look to read it,” she gushed. “I left my glasses at work.” My mother, like Drora, was almost blind without her eyeglasses. “I want to read it with you, together, so we should all hear the same thing at the same time.”

  She could barely catch her breath. My mother came back from her haggard shell and emerged as the beautiful, ethereal mother of my memory.

  Wearing her eyeglasses, Drora asked if she should read it. My mother nodded.

  “Dear Family,” Drora read. “I am happy to hear you are all eating well and feeling good. I am fine. I long to see you and help my country. Yours, Velvel.”

  Like a heavy curtain tumbling down on stage after a play’s end, my mother’s face changed color and shape. Her mouth, her eyes, and her cheeks all fell; a veil of whiteness overcame her rosy complexion.

  “What?” I said. “Isn’t this good news?”

  ‘No,” Drora said. “This means our brother knows about our troubles and he probably knows more than we do since he can get more news from around the world. He is not so well himself.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “He sounds okay to me.”

  “Well, Esfir,” Drora said, “we have all taken to writing and speaking in code. He must realize from the news that we couldn’t be eating well. He says this so we should think the opposite.”

  My mother said, “He said he is fine. This means he is not fine.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Rivke said, finally breaking her silence.

  “And now he says, he wants to help his country,” my mother explained. “He no longer considers Poland or Belorussia as his country. It is Palestine. He wants us to come there.” My mother sighed and I saw a tiny tear inch down her right cheek. But, she got busy immediately, with Drora’s help, writing Velvel a reply.

  “What have you written to him?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Drora said, “Mother said that we are happy that he wrote to us. That we are doing well, working and going to school.”

  “Yeah,” Rivke said. “Mama added a line on the bottom, ‘And thanks to God you are not sick.’ But then she crossed out ‘to God’ several times so no one could read it.”

  Right then I decided not to write to Velvel. I had no idea what was good to say and what was not.

  THE DAYS AND nights seemed interchangeable. Aside from temperature changes, winter and spring had little distinction. Sometimes students were required to gather in school during the evening for certain exercises. A law passed in late June stated that Saturday was also a work day. Everyone was too busy and too tired to have a social life.

  The person I most worried about was Perl. Not running her own home, not being with Mr. Kozak, being devious and secretive, these all worked against her nature. I rarely saw her laugh, much less joke. She was no longer affectionate with me. It was as if any physical contact was too much for her to accomplish.

  When I spent time alone with her, usually cooking in the kitchen, she didn’t talk about our current lives. It was always about the past. She was about my age when she visited her aunt and uncle in a village not far from Kobrin. Her uncle had leased a dairy farm. A windmill stood alongside the road, so you couldn’t miss the place.

  In the fields, she had wandered with her cousins and siblings among the flowers and trees. Big maples framed the house. The leaves were placed under loaves of bread while they baked. When she described the various wildflowers, she inhaled deeply as if she could still smell their aromas.

  “On this farm,” she said one evening, “there were animals everywhere, plus dogs and cats in the house. Birds filled the courtyard. There was a large barn with stalls for the cows and horses. A hay loft was above. Behind the barn, there were a vegetable garden and fruit trees.”

  “That’s nice, Perl.”

  She continued, “I so loved the thick dark syrup made from sugar beets.”

  My mother heard Perl talk to me, shrugged, and left the room. This gave me the impression that Perl was exaggerating. But I didn’t care, if it made my aunt happy. Then her eyes twinkled and she pinched my cheek, almost like “old” times in Brest.

  In the late evenings or on Sundays, my mother and Perl sewed, embroidered, knitted—whatever they could do. They made uniforms, shirts, slacks, tablecloths. Before the summer began, Rivke and I assisted in the more menial sewing jobs like loading the spools, sorting the thread colors, cutting patterns, arranging the cut pieces. My mother would leave us instructions to follow when they were at work so that their assignments would be easier when they got home.

  By mid-July, Rivke and I could sew almost anything the adults could, though we were not half as good. We also learned to forage in the garbage bins outside any place that served or contained food, including my mother’s provision warehouse. If she knew, she’d have killed us.

  Everyone in the family traded whatever we could, often bribing an official for a favor or two. As my grandfather said, “Az men shmirt nit, fort men nit.” We all broke laws; we were all suspect. We followed our prescribed paths and didn’t look to our sides, though we often turned around to see if anyone was
following us.

  Rivke and I continued the sewing work all day in the summer, though we took time out to attend youth concerts and sporting events, usually with Gittel. Otherwise, I didn’t see Gittel often. She had a job helping at the hospital. She said it was pretty disgusting work and didn’t elaborate. We rarely played with Miriam. We were ten and feeling years older. We didn’t talk about this, but I was sure she would have agreed that our childhoods were over.

  PART III

  German Occupation

  1941-1944

  On Sunday, June 22, 1941 at 3:15 A.M., Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—a massive military assault invading Russia across a broad area. The surprise attack included crossing the Belorussian border. On June 24, the Germans captured Kobrin. At the time, the Jewish population of western Belorussia, counting Jewish refugees from western Poland, was about 670,000. The Jewish population of Kobrin was 8,000.

  I am here, too, solitary,

  Sick, wrapped in a shawl,

  And I step slowly in the snow among the trees,

  And no one knows

  That I am still myself.

  —Kadya Molodowsky, “Otwock”

  Thirty

  THE PERMEATING CHOKING odor of burned rubber, singed hair, and overcooked meat; the thunderous booms and whizzing of bombs; and the sadistic nearing and waning staccato from automatic gunfire . . .

  “The synagogue is burning,” a man yelled, running down the street. Fire spread to other houses. I heard shouting and screaming.

  We turned on the radio. The announcer said that the aggressive Nazi army had attacked the peaceful Soviet Union. The “peaceful” Soviets would retaliate.

  Drora came home early from work and said that there was an onrush of people streaming into the provisions warehouse. Everyone was looting, even the Jews.

  In the occasional silence of the following day, we heard the roar of airplanes in close formations. At first we thought they were Russians coming to our rescue. Then we heard they were Germans. Russian trucks and tanks clogged the streets. People climbed in open trucks. Panic swept our retreating occupier.

  Tremendous explosions. Our house shook. I looked out the window at balls of fire. This is what had happened during the German invasion of 1939. Surely, the Russians would save us again. We blacked out the curtains as we had done almost two years ago and sat by the kerosene lamp all night. The streets were empty. I peered outside from beneath covered window panes; occasionally I saw beady eye pinpricks in my mirrored light and sharpened my incisors by gnawing at the skin around my lips. I had become exactly what the newspapers portrayed of my race, a harrowed burrowing rodent.

  The next day, German planes flew again. Small Russian armored cars left the city. From our window, we saw German motorcycles. Each had a sidecar with another soldier holding a machine gun. Before long more Germans arrived in trucks and smaller vehicles, followed by heavy tanks and cannons on tractors.

  Was it my house or my body that was in a constant state of vibration?

  We couldn’t believe that the mighty Soviet Union had gone down so easily.

  Some of our neighbors reclaimed their houses from the Soviets. The shuffling and reshuffling of households occurred overnight. I had a moment of happiness daydreaming of running freely in our home.

  “We have to get out of here,” Drora said the following afternoon. She had been at a friend’s house, someone she wouldn’t identify. Another of her many mysterious contacts.

  “Where should we go?” Rivke asked.

  “To Khane’s,” my mother said. “I have to get to my parents.”

  We huddled together and tried to move as a group. Germans poured down the streets. On the next street, we saw Jewish men plucked out of the crowds and shot before us. There was a communal roar at the first one and then murmurs of “Oy Gotenyu!”

  Clinging and clutching, we managed to get to my aunt Khane’s; and they were gathering dishes, linens, towels, and wrapping them in sheets.

  “What are you doing?” Perl shouted. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “We have to bring belongings to the center of town. It was an order from the Germans. We heard it on a loudspeaker,” Khane said. “Papa understood the German immediately.”

  “God will help us,” my grandfather chanted like a prayer. “He will provide.”

  “No, Papa,” my mother said. “We will provide, provide all our life’s blood to the Germans. It’s not enough that we sacrificed already to the Germans and then to the Russians.”

  “This can’t last long,” my grandmother said. “God willing.”

  My grandfather had been to the synagogue. As it was burning, a group of rabbis watched, praying. They said that the German commandant had asked to meet them, but they were afraid that they wouldn’t be strong enough so they sent a delegation of important men. When the men returned, they reported that the Germans ordered every Jewish man and woman, from sixteen to sixty (females until fifty-five) to report for work, which was, they understood, to be hard labor.

  “We have to be careful,” my grandfather said.

  This got me really scared. My grandfather was a man of the mind, not action. For action, he relied on God. He often said, “Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht,” meaning, “Man plans and God laughs.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well . . .”

  “Tell us! We children have a right to know,” I said, amazed that I could speak to my grandfather this way.

  “You’re right, Esfir,” he said, with a tone of defeat. “I heard the Germans rounded up a hundred and seventy leading people,” he said. “They took them to a nearby village, made them stand silently. Some were ordered to get shovels and dig their own graves. Some tried to escape but were caught and torn apart by dogs.”

  “Got in himl!” Grandma Elke cried.

  “They not only burned the synagogue, but the Jewish hospital and a rabbi’s house.”

  “Got in himl!” my grandmother said again. On this day, those were the only words she could speak.

  “The whole place is on fire,” my grandfather said.

  “Oh no,” Perl said.

  “And this is definitely not for the ears of the young, so go busy yourselves for a while.”

  This time I didn’t protest. My sisters and I went into my grandparents’ downstairs bedroom with my cousins, but we listened by the door to the living room.

  “They threw Jews in the fire alive.”

  Drora ordered us away from the door so we couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She was allowed to go back. Then she returned and reported to us. She said that they were considering what to do. Perl thought we should try and get back to Brest. My grandfather said he had heard it was much worse there. Brest had been the first military target of the Germans. In a blitzkrieg, German Panzer troops annihilated the Soviets. Those tanks! Five hours after the Germans encircled the Fortress, they entered the city of Brest.

  How did my grandfather know this? I hadn’t given him enough credit for having informed sources, as well as a respected voice in matters other than religious.

  The adults listed every relative and friend they had outside Kobrin. Maybe they could go to my grandfather’s sister-in-law in Visoke. (His brother Hymie died shortly after we had visited.) Or hide in the countryside at another relative’s farm. But since the Soviet invasion, no one could be certain where these people were or if their homes still existed.

  Then we heard that the roads were being bombarded from the air. It was becoming clear that no matter what path we chose, it would be difficult, if not impossible. In any case, my grandfather said we should pack our valuables and set aside our most practical clothes for wearing layers under our winter coats—and be ready at any time. He didn’t have to tell us this. We were already packed and ready to go.

  When we got home, our Russian tenants were gone, leaving nothing behind.

  For the next few days, we stayed home with our emergency “kits” close by. I took out a notebook and fl
ipped though it until I found the folded-up letter I had recently stuck inside.

  At the Brest train station, when I last saw Ida, she had been heading to meet Russian soldiers who were taking her toward Volchin. Perl and I hadn’t wanted to leave Ida at their mercy, but Ida had been adamant and, as always, it was impossible to argue with her when she set her mind to something. Perl had said to me during those long hours on the train that she felt terribly guilty about allowing Ida to go off the way she had. She felt responsible for all the girls’ safety. I shared Perl’s concerns, and even her guilt, but realized that we had no better options to offer Ida at the time.

  We never believed those soldiers would help her, but they did.

  A few weeks before the German invasion, one of the Russian soldiers came to our house. My mother was sure this was the end for us. At first, she wouldn’t open the door. The solider shouted, “Please, I have news from Ida, Ida Midler.” At the mention of Ida’s name, my mother opened the door partly even though there was a good chance that this was a ruse. I was standing behind her and peeked from the side. He had a broad and guileless smile, strawberry-blond hair, and gold-flecked brown eyes. There were streaks of dirt following the lines on his forehead.

  “Are you Esfir?” he said. He was so much taller, all he had to do was lean over my mother.

  I nodded.

  “I have a letter here from your friend Ida.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yes, we met in Brest. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  “What do you know about her?” I walked away from my mother, not caring if there was any danger. News of Ida was worth any punishment.

  “She traveled with my comrades and me in our truck. She stayed inside with the boxes of ammunition. It was dangerous. We got her to Visoke. She walked home from there.”

  I was getting suspicious. “How do you know that she reached her home?”

  “Because I saw her again. There was a platoon sent to oversee the Bug River and on the way back, we stopped in Volchin.”