Trap (9781476793177)

by Tanenbaum, Robert K.

Moishe sat up and experienced a moment of dizziness. He’d started taking naps after closing the bakery for the day so that he could stay awake a little longer at night. It was the only time he had to read anymore; but if he didn’t rest before dinner, he’d only make it a few pages in whatever book he had before he’d be snoring. He was a voracious reader, as if making up for the lost time stolen from his youth. Afraid that time would run out before he could finish, he’d devoted himself to the classics. Just that year he’d finished Moby-Dick, The Sun Also Rises, Heart of Darkness, How Green Was My Valley, and Anna Karenina. Currently he was working on David Copperfield.

  However, there was another reason to rest up this afternoon. Rose Lubinsky had asked if he and Goldie would sponsor a book signing at Il Buon Pane that night. “Mostly friends and supporters, including some of my colleagues at the New York Charter Schools Association,” she said. He had, of course, quickly agreed. “We’d consider it an honor.”

  Based on Rose’s estimate, they had expected maybe twenty people. However, they had not counted on a review of Rose’s book appearing in the Sunday New York Times, describing it as a “powerful memoir of loss, courage, sacrifice, and salvation” and “a little known, and heart-rending, story from the Holocaust that has been nearly lost with the passage of time.” The article had mentioned that there would be a signing at the bakery.

  “I didn’t mean for them to put that in the article,” Rose had apologized. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” Moishe replied. “Me mind free advertising? Between the front room and the back, we can seat maybe sixty people in a pinch.”

  Moishe could hear Goldie puttering about in the kitchen of their apartment above the bakery, a two-story brick building built at the turn of the twentieth century, preparing holishkes, one of his favorites. His wife liked falling asleep next to him as he read. She avoided naps, per se; to be honest, she had more energy than he did. She’ll probably outlive me, too, he thought, which is good because I would not want to ever be without her.

  Goldie still had nightmares about her time in the death camps. But even though he always asked if she wanted to talk about them, she always responded that she was not going to “ruin a moment of sunshine or destroy a day of love” by letting the nightmares take up any part of her waking life. “It is my way of getting back at the Nazis,” she signed to him the first time he asked. “They are gone—no more than ashes in the ground and the shades of nightmares. But I am alive. I laugh, I love, I enjoy every moment I spend on this earth with my beloved husband. I won, they lost; that’s all that needs to be said.”

  Moishe did not have nightmares often, but his tended to stay with him longer. Transported with his family to Sobibor from the Netherlands, he was the only surviving member. His mother and sister had died in the gas chamber within the first few hours; his father had later died of typhus.

  It was shortly after that he met Simon Lubinsky and his father, Shlomo, a jeweler. They’d been deported from the village of Wieniawa near the city of Lublin; the women and younger children in the family, plus Simon’s grandparents, consigned to the same cruel fate in the gas chamber. Thin and bookish, Simon had immediately attached himself to Moishe, already a hardened survivor of the camp. The younger boy’s dependence grew when Simon’s father was executed with a garrote by a cruel Ukrainian guard named Demyan Voloshyn.

  In late spring 1943, new inmates arrived at Sobibor with disturbing news. They were part of a work party assigned to dismantle the death camp at Belzec and hide every trace that it had ever existed. Those prisoners still at Belzec were lined up and shot, and only the new arrivals had been kept alive due to their expertise in hiding the evidence of mass murder. Inmates like Moishe began to talk with those they trusted about revolting. “We’re all going to die,” he told Simon. “But I would rather die fighting these bastards than waiting to be butchered like sheep.”

  However, the conspirators lacked any military training and leadership beyond a teenaged boy. Then in September, a different sort of prisoner arrived at the camp: Soviet-Jewish prisoners of war led by Polish-Jewish prisoner Leon Feldhendler and Soviet-Jewish POW Alexander Pechersky. These were not shopkeepers and craftsmen, at least not anymore; they were battle-hardened veterans who had no intention of dying without a fight, and began to form a plan for an uprising. They trusted few of the other prisoners, who they knew might turn them in for some bit of food or another day avoiding the gas chamber and firing squads. But they did confide in a few who seemed to have some fight left in them, such as Moishe Sobelman, who insisted that his friend, Simon, be included.

  By that fall only six hundred prisoners were left in the camp and it was evident that the Germans were planning something. On October 14, Feldhendler and Pechersky decided they couldn’t wait any longer. The plan was to kill all the guards and walk out of the main gate of the camp. They began by covertly killing eleven German SS officers and several guards. But they were discovered and had to break into the armory to battle the remaining Ukrainian guards.

  When prisoners who were not part of the uprising plan realized what was happening, some joined in but others were too frightened and cowed and remained in place. Meanwhile, three hundred prisoners rushed through the gate and under the fence only to face a minefield surrounding the camp. Many died in that rush to freedom, cut down by bullets or explosions.

  Moishe chose to cross the minefield, being careful to try to step where others had until reaching a spot where the man in front of him had died in a blast. After that he was on his own. “Stay back,” he ordered Simon, “and then follow in my footsteps.” Somehow they both reached the forest.

  Of the three hundred escapees, half were either cut down by bullets and bombs or rounded up and executed in the days that followed. Less than half who survived would not live out the war—they were killed by either Germans or native Poles. Some, like Moishe and Simon, were able to find and join partisan fighters and for a time were welcomed.

  In late 1944, their band encountered a group of armed Ukrainians, former prison camp guards, trying to make their way east to the advancing Red Army. The two friends had heard that after the uprising, the remaining prisoners had been executed and the Germans rapidly demolished the Sobibor camp and plowed it under to make it appear as if the land was only a farm. Now the Germans were retreating, and their Ukrainian henchmen were trying to rejoin their former comrades.

  The two groups might not have fought except that suddenly Simon stood up from where he’d been kneeling behind a tree. “It’s Voloshyn,” he shouted at Moishe, and then without saying anything else began advancing on the Ukrainians, firing as he went.

  Moishe stood and began to attack as well, pulling the other partisans into the fight. The Ukrainians tried to fight back but outnumbered and outgunned, they were driven back. Not even bothering to take cover or deviate from a straight path, Simon ignored the bullets whistling around him and continued shooting at the largest of the enemy fighters.

  Moishe looked up just as a bullet struck Voloshyn. He saw the impact that spun the man around before he fell to the ground.

  Seventy years later, Moishe remembered the moment in vivid detail. But when they were still a hundred yards from the body of their tormentor, new shots rang out. Red Army troops, drawn by the sound of the guns, had appeared from the forest on the other side of the Ukrainians, who called out in Russian that they were being attacked by Jews. The tide of the battle turned and the partisans were forced to retreat.

  After the defeat of Germany in 1945, Simon hoped to return to his former home in Lublin. “You can join me,” he said to Moishe. “We’ll find wives, have families together, and remain friends forever.”

  However, like many Jews who tried to return to their homes, Simon learned that he was no more welcome than he had been when the Germans invaded. In fact, Polish nationalists took up where the Germans left off in blaming Jews for their troubles. It became dangerous to remain in Poland as the Soviet Union seized the Eastern bloc coun
tries.

  “I’m going to try to go to America,” Moishe told his friend one day. “I want you to come with me.”

  Simon would not meet Rose for several more years, after he’d come to the States with Moishe and Goldie Sobelman. One day he’d returned from a reunion at the New York Holocaust Museum for Sobibor escape survivors and breathlessly told Moishe that he’d just met “the most beautiful woman in the world and my future wife.”

  Some people had looked at the lovely, lively Rose Kuratowski—she’d taken her family name back—and the skinny, rather plain Simon with his Orthodox dress and wondered how long such an odd couple would last. But Moishe and Goldie knew that Rose was smitten with her “kind, gentle, wise” husband and that he in turn adored her above all else. Even more tragedy had not destroyed them when their only child, a son named for his grandfather Shlomo, died in Vietnam serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

  As Simon had predicted, he and Moishe had remained friends, serving as each other’s best man at their weddings and even gone through the bar mitzvah together as “old men” in their twenties. As the years passed, both had done quite well in America—Moishe with his bakery and Simon as a diamond merchant. Shortly before meeting Rose, Simon had gravitated toward a more Orthodox brand of Judaism and took to wearing the Orthodox style of broad-brimmed black hat, black suitcoat, starched white shirt, and black pants. “I want to look Jewish in memory of my family,” he explained to Moishe.

  Many years had passed and life in America had done much to keep the ghosts of the horrific past at bay, but it had all come back with the force of a hurricane the previous November, when neo-Nazis had rampaged in New York on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The young fascists had broken the windows in his shop and ransacked the interior while he and Goldie stayed in their apartment above the store. He stood by the door with a meat cleaver in his hands, determined to defend his wife with his life, until the sound of approaching police sirens had chased the bastards away. But the fear remained, dredging up old memories that troubled his sleep.

  The attack had thrown him into a deep depression as he was reminded that the ghosts of the past lived on in the hateful minds of the living. The joy he found in running the bakery left him, as did the genial way he usually greeted his guests. Instead he found himself wondering which of them secretly harbored anti-Semitic feelings.

  As usual, it was Goldie who coaxed him out of it. One morning as he was dragging his way through the routine, snapping at his employees and hardly saying a word to his customers, she grabbed him by the elbow and propelled him to the door leading to their upstairs apartment.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she signed, her hands flying the way they did when she was angry.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, though he knew what she was getting at.

  “You’re acting like all the life has been sucked out of you,” she signed. “Why? Is it those half-wits who broke our windows? After all we’ve been through you’re going to let a few Nazis ruin the years we have left? The years we’ve earned?”

  Moishe’s shoulders slumped. “We can’t escape the past.”

  Anything else he was going to say left his mind when Goldie grabbed both sides of his face. “Only if you let it catch up to you,” she said, speaking aloud for one of the rare times, which generally only happened when she was really angry or really happy. “And if you do that, then they’ve won. After all these years, they’ve won.”

  She reminded him of the note he’d written to her that had changed her mind after she’d rejected his initial proposals of marriage when they were still in Europe. He’d started by handing her a note saying he wanted to marry her and have children. But she’d scolded him in a message she wrote back. How can you talk about love and marriage and bringing children into a world as evil as this one? Stupid man.

  However, he’d persisted, asking her the same question day after day until one day he walked up and said goodbye. Although she’d pretended that she didn’t care, she asked nonchalantly why he was going. He told her he was going back to Sobibor to lie down and die there.

  “But why?” she’d signed.

  “If they can stop us from falling in love, marrying, and having children,” he’d replied, “if they can convince us that there’s no more room in this world for love, then they’ve won anyway. Why not give them my bones, too, to mix with those of my sister, mother, and father and so many of my friends.”

  In that moment, Goldie’s heart had melted. She’d agreed to marry him, and they’d kissed for the first time. And many years later, she’d reminded him of what he’d written to her. “That’s the man I married. That’s my fine Jewish warrior. That’s the good and decent man who stood up to the darkness and vanquished it.”

  Looking in her merry blue eyes, Moishe felt the burden drop from his shoulders. He laughed. “Your fine Jewish warrior? I hadn’t heard that one. . . . Sooo, what should a fine Jewish warrior expect from his lovely Jewish wife when he returns from the wars?” He’d wiggled his eyebrows suggestively until the anger left her face and she giggled.

  “We’ll see if he’s truly returned or if he’s putting on an act hoping to get lucky,” she said, and then laughed as she sidestepped his attempt to grab her.

  With the dream fading into the blackness from which it had come, Moishe got to his feet and shuffled out to the kitchen as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He spotted the holishkes cooling on the counter. Goldie was preoccupied with something else so he snuck over and was preparing to grab a bite when he heard his wife clear her throat behind him. He froze and turned.

  Goldie was looking at him with one eyebrow raised. “What do you think you’re doing?” she signed.

  “Nothing.”

  “You old liar. You were trying to steal a holishke.”

  Moishe pretended to be chagrined. “I was just trying to ensure that the quality was up to your usual standards.”

  “I can assure you it is,” Goldie replied with a laugh. “But dinner’s not quite ready. There will be no holishkes for you until you go downstairs and make sure everything is ready for the book signing. It starts at eight, which gives us less than two hours.”

  “Fine,” Moishe pouted. “Slave driver.”

  Moishe returned to the bedroom and got dressed. He then walked down the stairs and through the door leading to the bakery, where he navigated in the soft illumination of the street lights coming in through the newly replaced windows.

  When he first purchased Il Buon Pane from its original owner, the man who’d given him his start in the business, the bakery was comprised of the building on the corner. However, due to its growing popularity, when the store next door became available he purchased it and opened a large sitting area for his customers to relax, enjoy their coffees and baked goods, catch up on the latest news, and meet with friends. That afternoon the sitting area had been transformed into a small auditorium, with rows of folding chairs provided by the charter schools association and set up by the Karp boys after they got out of school, facing toward a podium where the guest of honor would speak.

  Moishe went back into the bakery kitchen, turned on the light, and looked with satisfaction at the trays of strudel, cinnamon rolls, and cherry and blueberry cheese coffeecake he would be serving at the book signing. He then turned on the industrial-sized coffee urns before wandering back out into the front of the store.

  Walking over to the door, he was about to turn on the lights when he looked across the street and froze. Lurking in the shadows, he could see four or five figures of men with bald heads talking together in a group. But that wasn’t what sent a chill up his spine. It was the red armbands with the white circle on which the black swastika was imprinted.

  Moishe left the lights off and hurried upstairs. He told Goldie about the men across the street.

  Goldie thought about it for a moment. “If they’re trying to intimidate us into canceling the book signing, it’s not going to happen,” she signed. “But we have to be mindful
of our guests’ safety. Call Butch; he’ll know what to do. Then call Rose and Simon and warn them. After that we’ll have our dinner.”

  So it was that an hour later as people began arriving for the book signing, the guests found a strong police presence standing in front of a small group of neo-Nazis protesting using bullhorns and signs with slogans like The Holocaust Is a Jew Lie! and Don’t Believe the Zionist Lies of Lubinsky. The police set up barriers across the street from the bakery and told the men, mostly young, to remain behind them or face arrest. Meanwhile, a group of counterprotesters, many of them minorities and charter school supporters, had formed kitty-corner from the bakery and across from the Nazis, so the police had stationed several more officers between the two groups.

  When Butch Karp arrived with his wife and sons, he sought out Moishe and Goldie in the crowd. “Sorry you have to put up with those idiots,” he said, indicating the skinheads.

  “All part of living in America,” Moishe said with a shrug. “Even Nazis have the right of free speech. I’m good with it, but thank you for arranging the police help, and it looks like Rose has a few supporters in the other crowd.”

  “Thank Detective Clay Fulton,” Karp replied. “I told him about it and he got right on it. He’s outside now making sure no one does anything stupid. Ah, it looks like your guest of honor is arriving.”

  Moishe turned to see Rose Lubinsky enter the bakery. Simon was already there, having come from his job while his wife had been attending a political rally for the charter school bill. She hesitated at the door and glanced over her shoulder at the Nazis across the street. Her face was ashen when she turned back and walked swiftly over to the Sobelmans.

  “I am so sorry,” she cried. “I’ve brought this upon you.”

  Hugging his friend, Moishe stepped back and patted her shoulders. “Nonsense. I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said. “We have to stand up to the darkness and vanquish it.”

  “Well, you are very brave and gracious,” Lubinsky said.