Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  Two weeks later, the SS arrived. It was the SS that really established the German presence in Stolpce. Within a few days, they had linked up with the local Polish police, who were happy—delighted—to cooperate with the Nazis. Right off, they made up a list of prominent persons … mostly Jews, but also some Poles who might effectively organize against them. So seven or so of these persons were killed almost at once. At first, the Germans tried to cover up the killings. They told us that the persons had been taken to a special camp somewhere. But later we found out that they had been taken to a barren spot some seven miles outside of Stolpce. And there they were forced to dig their own mass grave.

  My father Lazar was one of them. The Nazis came for him, accompanied by some of the collaborating Polish police. They forced him out of bed and ordered him to get dressed quickly—so fast that he wasn’t allowed time to put on his shoes. He left in his leather slippers and a thin jacket. My mother told them that my father needed medication to live. They said to her, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back soon.” Their explanation was that they were going to keep my father and other prominent citizens as hostages, to make sure that there were no attacks on German soldiers by the local population.

  But what happened, as I have said, is that they were murdered immediately. After they dug their mass grave, they were killed by stoning. Only a few bullets were found in the bodies; the Germans did not want to waste their ammunition. In 1945, when the war was over, the Stolpce police—who were operating under Soviet rule again—dug up the mass gravesite as part of their investigation of Nazi crimes. My father’s slippers were still on his feet.

  A few days after they took my father away, one of the German officers returned to our house to tell us that he was doing fine. The officer said that he would take the needed medication to my father. The officer also suggested that we pack up all of my father’s best and warmest clothes, as my father would need them with winter coming. Before the officer left, we all thanked him again and again for coming. All this and my father was already dead! But this was a way for the officer to have his pick of fine clothing without the bother of searching through the house. For the time being, the Germans preferred to do things in secrecy, or by means of polite lies. The threat of death was there, but it was veiled—thinly veiled.

  The next step followed in this pattern of polite lies. The Jews of Stolpce were told to select a committee of six or so persons to serve as a Judenrat, a governing body—under Nazi control—for the local Jewish population. The German military and the Polish police would use the Judenrat to convey their orders. One of the first of these orders was to prepare and to sew onto our clothing—on the left side in the front and in the center on the back—the yellow stars with the imprint Jude [Jew] on them. They told the Judenrat that any Jew caught without these stars would be shot.

  Even before these stars, however, there was almost no chance that a Jew might pass as a Pole and evade the persecutions that way. It wasn’t that Jews were so obviously recognizable as a physical type. Often times, a German could not tell, by sight, the difference between a Pole and a Jew. But here they had the help of the Polish police. You must realize that, in many ways, the collaborating Poles were worse than the Germans. The Poles knew very well who the Jews were—in many cases, the Jews were kids with whom they had grown up. It was a chance to settle scores and grudges that had festered for years. The Poles knew which Jews had money and valuables, and could extort them whenever they wished. More than that, they now had carte blanche to inflict whatever terror on Jews they liked—breaking into their homes, beating them up, raping the women, taking whatever they wanted.

  It was not only the Polish police. Virtually all of the Polish population of Stolpce—even those people you thought were friends—were happy to cooperate with the Nazi actions. Any harm they could do to you, they did it. And if you tried to do anything outside the Nazi regulations, they would report you. These were our neighbors, our schoolmates.

  Early on, the Germans put us to work. Jews were their forced labor to clean up the mess they had made in conquering Poland. They used the young Jewish girls and boys, but also all Jewish adults who were still able to move. Only the old people—mainly old women—were left to care for the babies and toddlers. We cleaned up the rubble in the streets from all the bombing. My mother and my younger sister Sofka and I worked together. Miriam was too young.

  The Germans oversaw our labor early on; later they transferred this duty to the Poles. We knew the Germans hated us, but we didn’t yet believe that they would shoot us on the spot. I was kind of a cocky little kid—I dared to speak up to them. One day, as we were clearing, the Germans kept shouting at us, “You dirty Jews! Work harder!” And then they started to complain that they had gone to war because of us. So finally I said to them, “What are you talking about? We didn’t come to you! You came to us! How can you say we started the war?”

  One of the German officers reached for his leather whip and then grabbed me with one hand. With the other, he whipped my back again and again. It went on for five or ten minutes. As he whipped me, he said, “Now you’ll know who started the war, you dirty Jew.” My mother and my sister didn’t dare to look up—they didn’t want to see, and they were afraid that they too would be beaten if they lifted their heads. As soon as the beating was over, I was forced to go back to work picking up the rubble. My back was swollen and bloody from the whip. When I came home that night, I saw that I was striped like a zebra. I couldn’t move without pain for weeks. But I had to work every day.

  After we were finished with the roads, they had us clean up the building that had been our high school. They were using it to house German troops. I was in a group of girls assigned to wash the floors and the bathroom areas. We would be washing the toilets and the SS officers would come in and piss on our hands. And laugh.

  There were SS officers staying in our own home in those opening weeks. We still kept our single room, but the other Stolpce refugees had been moved out. The ghetto for the Jews was not created until two months after the Germans arrived. So there we were, living for some weeks with an SS officer upstairs and some regular German army officers downstairs. The regular officers were not so bad. They were heading toward the Russian front and were more worried about what was going to happen to them there than they were about the Jews. Those officers even shared some of their rations with us. I remember that one of them said to us one day, “I look at you and I feel sorry for you, because I know what’s coming.” We asked him what he meant, but he said he couldn’t tell us.

  After we were done at the school, we were set to work cleaning the Kommandantur—the command building where the local head of the SS had his office. It had been one month since my father was taken away, and I wanted badly to find out how he was doing. For some reason, I decided that I would knock on the door of the chief SS officer and ask! There I was, a Jewish girl, grimy from my work, explaining what had happened to my father and asking if he had gotten the clothes we had sent along to him. The German officer who had taken those clothes had promised that we would hear from my father—but we hadn’t. I told the chief SS officer that I knew he was a big man in town. Could he find out about my father and then let me know?

  The SS officer looked at me as if he thought something was wrong with my mind. But I think he also felt sorry for me. After all, he could have had me beaten or killed. But he didn’t even holler at me. He said, “I don’t know anything about your father. But if I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  When I came home and told my mother what I had done, she nearly became hysterical. She couldn’t believe it. She kept saying over and over, “You could have been shot on the spot!”

  About two months after the initial occupation, the actions against the Jews were intensified. The SS gave orders to the Judenrat and the Judenrat passed on the orders to us. First, we were told to turn in all our gold and jewelry. We kept two jars of gold coins that we had buried, but we turned in all our other remaining valuables. My
mother gave up her wedding ring. She had no choice. If you were caught with any jewelry at all, you were shot. The next order required us to turn in all fur coats. They were more common in Poland than they are today in America. They were for warmth, not show. Finally, when everything of value was gone, they told us to pack what we could carry and move into the ghetto. We could no longer live in our own homes—they were turned over to the German officers or to cooperative Poles.

  The ghetto was located in the worst part of town. The Germans surrounded it with thick barbed wire, leaving only a single large gate for both entrance and exit. The gate was always guarded by the German SS and the local Polish police. Every time a Jew walked in or out he was searched.

  Shortly after we were moved into the ghetto, nearly all the remaining young and middle-aged men were taken away. That included my uncles and nephews. We were told that they were being sent to a labor camp. Primarily women and children and old men remained in the ghetto. There was nobody left to organize anything.

  It was just the four of us then—my mother and her three daughters. By that time, we had all given up hope that the Germans were really keeping my father alive as a hostage. Too many Jews were disappearing, too many stories were circulating about mass murders of Jews in other ghettos. We understood that the Germans did not need my father as a hostage. All the Jews in Stolpce—in all the ghettos—were hostages of the Nazis. It was terrible, after so many lies from the Germans, to realize the truth that our father had been murdered. And then we had to live with that truth while the murderers walked about us in triumph, in control of Poland, in control of all our lives. For my mother, it was hell. For myself and for Sofka as well. Miriam was so young, she was blessed to have no real understanding of it.

  When we first moved into the ghetto, we were assigned to live in an old meeting hall where the Baptists in town used to pray. They brought in some old furniture and jammed in dozens of Jewish families. You had only as much space as you needed to sleep. There were two woodstoves that everyone used for cooking and for warming themselves. There was not much to cook—we were on minimal food rations, stale bread or worse. There was no place to bathe, so you couldn’t keep clean. At night you couldn’t sleep well, no matter how tired you were, because the mattresses were filled with bedbugs that sucked the blood out of you. When you woke up in the morning, your sheets were red with blood from the bugs you had squashed while rolling over in your sleep. During the day, the lice took the bedbugs’ place. They were in our hair, in every crevice of our bodies. We itched, we had rashes that were as red and thick as welts.

  My mother was very frail. It was now up to me to make sure that the family was provided for. We were assigned to work in a sawmill. My mother started to work there with me, but she couldn’t keep up the pace. It was too hard for her to carry the big boxes of sawdust. So she remained in the ghetto—the Germans allowed older people and very young children to stay back because they were earmarked for death soon enough in any event. My younger sister Sofka was in good enough physical condition to work. We had both been chubby prior to the German invasion, and even though we had lost a great deal of weight, we still had our strength. But Sofka refused to go to the sawmill. She was in despair and would say, “Why should I work until I freeze? They’re going to kill us anyway.” As for Miriam, who had just turned nine, she had been frail from the beginning. In the ghetto, she became very thin and weak. She couldn’t walk without support—we almost had to carry her. Miriam was disintegrating in front of our eyes.

  So the three of them stayed behind in the ghetto and I worked with other young girls in the sawmill on the outskirts of Stolpce. It was the winter of 1941–42. My job had two parts. I would sweep the sawdust into boxes and then dump the sawdust into the basement furnace to fuel the sawing machines, which ran by steam. And I also ran the machine that cut the bark off the raw boards. When the cutting was done, I would load the boards onto carts and wheel them outside and then load them onto the customers’ wagons. During the day you froze, but you weren’t allowed even to warm your hands. The Germans did allow us to bring as much bark as we wanted back into the ghetto. Bark was garbage to them, waste material, but we could use it as fuel for the woodstove. It burned wet and smoky, but we could get some heat from it and cook on the metal stovetop. Our staple was a flour-and-water paste from which we sometimes made a kind of pancake; other times we boiled it up into a thin soup. I remember a special meal we had in the fall of 1941, just after Yom Kippur. My mother had somehow obtained a small quantity of milk from a Jew who had smuggled it into the ghetto. Milk was a rarity, a delicacy. My mother put some into our flour-and-water soup, and we ate it as if it was the traditional meal to break the Yom Kippur fast. It tasted unbelievably good.

  I remember an incident from that time that tells you how little, as a general rule, we could count upon our neighbors to help us. There was a Belorussian man named Schekele who used to sell pork to my father’s factory-supply stores. Supposedly, he and my father were good friends. So before we were moved into the ghetto, my mother and I had gone to Schekele and asked him to take some of our nice living-room furniture and keep it in his own house. The idea was that, if we somehow managed to live through the German occupation, we could come back for our belongings. And in the meantime, Schekele could help us out with some food here and there if we were starving.

  One day, while I was working at the mill, I saw Schekele. He had come with a big load of cut trees to be made into boards. We were being watched carefully as we worked, and the rule was that we were not supposed to speak to any Polish civilians and they were not to speak to us. But somehow I managed to sneak near to Schekele and beg him to bring me some food for my family—a loaf of bread, anything. Immediately, Schekele started to cry that he himself didn’t have anything to eat. There he was, nicely dressed and doing business with the Germans, and he was telling me he was starving. Two days later, when Schekele came back with another load of trees, he slipped me a small jar of honey. That was all he could give, he told me. I had to smuggle this jar back into the ghetto by hiding it in a load of bark. At least it was something I could give to my mother, and that she could give to her daughters as a rare sweet taste on the tongue.

  In the spring of 1942, around Passover, my grandmother Ethel Schleiff died. She was already in her seventies, and she came down with a cold that turned into pneumonia. In the ghetto, if you got sick, that was it. No doctors would come to treat a Jew. She had been living with her daughters—my father’s sisters—and some of her other grandchildren, all of them crowded into a single room. I was not her favorite, but still there was contact between us, and I remember that I stopped by one morning on the way to being taken to the sawmill. Her daughters had laid out her body on the floor; she had died during the night. My little nephews and nieces were frantically running around her. I remember that one of them was pulling open her eyelids and yelling, “Grandma, wake up!”

  Finally, the remnants of the Chevre Kaddishe in the ghetto—the old men who belonged to the burial organization that my father Lazar had devoted himself to—took Lazar’s mother’s body and buried her in the Jewish cemetary not far from the sawmill. And everyone talked about how lucky Ethel Schleiff was to have died a natural death with her grandchildren around her, given the alternatives. Ethel must have been a tzaddik [righteous one] to have deserved such good fortune! Besides, in Jewish tradition, if you died around Passover it was a sign that you were going straight to heaven.

  By that point everyone in the ghetto understood clearly that our days were numbered. During the spring, the Germans had already started in on wholesale shchitim [slaughters] of Jews in the neighboring towns, including Mir. Often, not all of the Jews were killed in the first shchite—there were always a few who happened, by chance, to be on the road or in the fields. A few others hid themselves away. So there were always two or three subsequent “cleanings”—the Nazi term was Judenrein [clean of Jews]. The killing was a constant. We heard about it in the ghetto throug
h word of mouth. And there was no place to run away, no safe territory.

  The summer passed. Every time I left for work in the morning, I would think to myself that maybe my mother and sisters would not be there when I came back. But, in my thoughts, I would not include myself with them in that fate. I had a premonition that it would happen to them and not to me. I would wonder to myself, “Why do I think that they’re going to die and I am not?” I couldn’t explain it then. I can’t explain it now.

  I never told my family about this. But I always thought it. It was not a happiness to me. It was not even what you would call hope. It was just a sense within me.

  Then came the autumn of 1942. The day after Yom Kippur—a year from the time of our delicious milk-and-flour soup—I woke up in the morning to go to work as usual. The procedure was that we were marched to work in a group guarded by a German soldier and a local Polish policeman. So we were used to an armed presence.

  But that morning I looked out the window and saw that the ghetto was surrounded by German troops and Polish police armed with machine guns. It was like a siege! All of it had been set up during the night while we were sleeping.

  Everybody started crying, screaming. We didn’t know what to do. Someone asked one of the Germans if they were still taking out Jews for labor duties that morning. The answer was yes. I ran to the main gate of the ghetto and saw that it was so. Then I came running back to our room. As for my youngest sister Miriam, it was impossible—she was so weak she could hardly walk, much less do labor. But I begged my mother and my sister Sofka to come with me to the sawmill that day. I pleaded with them, “Come with me! Maybe they won’t notice that there are two more people in the labor group. You have nothing to lose! Come!” But Sofka said that she didn’t want to go and my mother Cila said that she wouldn’t leave Miriam to die all by herself. She just hugged Miriam and said, “Whatever happens to her is going to happen to me.”