Even before we had any concrete assistance from Rufeisen, there was an underground resistance effort underway within the Mir zamek, as I have described. But we had no weapons, which meant that any plans we could make would be a matter of pure desperation. But with Rufeisen’s help, we managed to accumulate a small number of pistols, rifles, grenades, and ammunition. He would usually obtain the firearms from the storehouse of captured weapons kept by the German police. Rufeisen had risen to the rank of an assistant police chief for the town of Mir, although he was still under orders from the German commandant of the gendarmerie, Polizei Meister Reinhold Hein. Hein held Rufeisen in great affection and respect, and that helped Rufeisen maintain a position of official power through which he could help us. Of course, he had to act “tough” toward Jews in public. But he employed no violence and tried to mitigate the actions of the German police and their Polish henchmen.
A transfer of weapons would frequently go like this: Rufeisen, in his role of police chief, would come up to a small group of Jews standing about in an out-of-the-way place, maybe next to some bushes, and he would yell at them for not working hard enough. At the same time he would leave a few weapons in those bushes. Other times Rufeisen would simply make “drops” that were picked up by members of the Jewish underground later that day. On one occasion I made a pick-up of some hand grenades. It wasn’t easy. Because I seemed to be dawdling in the area where Rufeisen had hidden the grenades, a German policeman came up and slapped me hard and told me to get back to work. I had to circle back later to make the pick-up.
One of the most difficult hurdles was how to get the weapons back into the ghetto zamek without being searched. The penalty for possessing any kind of weapons was immediate death. In my own case, I was able to smuggle in the grenades through one of the zamek windows. Rufeisen was sometimes able to help us in his official capacity by taking us back to the ghetto under his own “guard.” He also promised us that he would let us know in advance of any plans the Germans might have for shchitim [slaughters].
There was some difference of opinion, early on, as to whether we should use the arms to make a stand in the zamek, or instead to make an escape to the woods and try to join up with the Russian partisans, of whose activities we had heard vague rumors. Relatively quickly, we decided on the escape option, because our position in the zamek left us with no real possibility other than quick destruction. We would also be endangering our families, the elderly, the women, and the young children. There was no possibility of discussing the matter with the ghetto population as a whole—the possibility of a leak, of betrayal, was too great. And even if we had done so, there was no likelihood of consensus to carry on an armed resistance within the zamek. In the minds of many of the Judenrat members, there was still hope of keeping the Jewish community alive by fulfilling the work commands of the Germans. This was understandable. It is difficult to imagine the worst that can be imagined. And also, for the elderly, for the women with children, there was no real option. It was all but impossible for them to imagine themselves surviving in the woods. And to attempt to escape in large numbers—including old people and infants—would have endangered the chances of any of us getting away.
For those of us who were planning to escape, it was a horror to think of leaving family members behind. But there was, in our minds, no way of avoiding the conclusion that they would die whether we ran or stayed. We were certain that the Nazis intended to liquidate the Mir ghetto just as they had all the ghettos around us. And in that belief, we were proven right. I say this without any sense of pride. But we recognized the hell we were living in—we could not but recognize it.
IV
Jack Escapes from the Mir Ghetto
JACK
Rufeisen learned in June 1942 that the liquidation of the Mir ghetto under the command of Polizei Meister Hein was set for 13 August. He conveyed the information to us a short time later. The risks were tremendous on all sides. If news got out that the Jewish population knew what was coming and when, Hein would have recognized that Rufeisen had betrayed him, because Rufeisen was the only person other than Hein who knew the exact 13 August date in advance. At the same time, it was necessary to warn the Jewish population, so that those who wished to run would have the chance. The date was revealed to some of the members of the Judenrat a week or so in advance. There were a variety of reactions. Some felt that the information must be false—the Germans could be fended off through a combination of bribes and labor. Some claimed that the information provided by Rufeisen must be a trap—how could you trust a German officer? It was due to the latter opinion that the truth of Rufeisen’s Jewish identity was revealed to the Judenrat at some point in the very last days. Rumors of the Jew posing as a German circulated quickly throughout the zamek.
Our plan was to escape on the night of 9 August—a Sunday night—four days before the 13 August liquidation date. Things were very tense in the zamek over that weekend. It was necessary for people to make a choice—to run or stay. We made it known that Sunday would be the night for everyone who wanted to run. For on that night, Rufeisen had informed us, he would lead the German and Polish police forces of the town off in the opposite direction, on the basis of an alleged tip that there were Russian partisans nearby who could be entrapped and destroyed. There was a great fear at that time that the Russian partisans might arise in Poland and hinder the German advance into Russia by breaking up German supply and communication lines. So any opportunity to crush the Russian partisans was hotly pursued. For Rufeisen, the risk of taking the police on a wild-goose chase was relatively low, because tips as to Russian partisan locations were notoriously unreliable. There would be only a handful of police left in Mir on that evening, and no guards whatsoever at the main entries of the zamek. As the Germans had no idea that we knew the massacre was coming, or that we knew of their plans to leave town on that Sunday evening, they had no real reason to fear that we would attempt a mass escape.
There was a core group of us—the forty or so underground members—who planned to make our escape in groups of five or six, to increase our chances of at least some of us getting away and perhaps making contact with the Russian partisans. There was some intention of regrouping once we reached the woods, but that never came about. The weapons were distributed amongst the groups—there were barely enough arms to go around. But merely to possess them was a vital advantage because, as we understood it, there was a much better chance of a Jew being taken into a Russian partisan group if that Jew was armed.
We tried to explain to the older Jews in the zamek that, once we younger ones had run away, if they started to hear any rumors about a final liquidation, they should try to run away to certain areas in the country that we described to them. There were areas that Rufeisen had told us would be safest—that he himself would try to keep the German and Polish police forces away from those places once the search was underway for escaping Jews. If they managed to do so, we said that we would try to find and help them. If they refused to believe the rumors, if they still hoped that the Jews in the Mir zamek ghetto would be left to live, there was nothing that we could do.
My father Julius had no such hopes. That is how he came to survive. He was well into his middle age by this point, but he was still in good physical health. He possessed a great determination to live and an ability to be patient with the most hellish conditions. He made his escape, with another Jewish man, on 10 August, the day after our main group. For roughly a week, Julius and the other man lived in a hole they dug in the side of a hill not far from a couple of farms. During the day they would stay hidden in the hole. At night they would take turns going out and scavenging for food in the fields and the barns. I was able to learn of his location from another Jewish escapee and to come and fetch him so that he could join our group in the woods. I cannot tell you how happy I was to find my father still alive.
Julius was not alone in making his escape the day after we left. There were others—older persons, women, and children—
who ran and survived. All told, there were some 300 Jews who ran away on the days of 9 August and 10 August, before the German and Polish police returned from their wild-goose chase and reestablished close guard on the Mir ghetto. Not all of those people survived, of course. But at least they had a chance.
As I remember it, there were plans for our reuniting with Rufeisen if we managed to get away safely to the woods. Rufeisen would, of course, take a major role in the police search for the runaways. So he would be able to lead them to a certain place in the woods where we would be waiting for the police forces and could ambush them—kill as many as we could, seize their ammunition and supplies, and manage for Rufeisen to transfer over to our side during the fighting and remain with us. By that plan, there would be a twofold victory: we would manage to reward Rufeisen for his help to us and enable him to escape his dangerous position with the German police. And we would also be taking revenge—an armed attack by Jews against the butchers who had killed our families.
But that plan never came about, because, after we ran away but before the final 13 August liquidation, Rufeisen was betrayed—his identity as a Jew who had helped us was revealed to Meister Hein by a Jew from the Mir zamek ghetto named Stanislawski, who worked in the stables of the German gendarmerie. Stanislawski probably hoped to save his life by informing. He had no wife or children, only himself to care about. He succeeded in gaining one extra day of life—Meister Hein had him shot on 14 August, the day after the mass murder of the remaining Jews in the zamek.
If Rufeisen had not been betrayed, think what would have been different. Our ambush would have been a unique event in the history of the Holocaust. Perhaps the life of the Mir ghetto itself could have been prolonged by wiping out the gendarmerie stationed in the town. But instead, the traitor Stanislawski brought ruin upon himself and the entire ghetto.
What happened to Rufeisen is a story in itself. For Rufeisen was not shot by the Germans, although by all odds he should have been. He managed to escape, because Meister Hein, who cared for Rufeisen like a son, refused to take immediate punitive action against him, even after he learned that Rufeisen was a Jew who had supplied arms to the ghetto. There could be no greater betrayal of Hein’s plans than this! But Hein allowed Rufeisen to live, even invited him to eat with the other German officers while he deliberated on what Rufeisen’s fate should be. During the meal—it must have been with Hein’s tacit understanding—Rufeisen slipped away and hid himself in a wheat field outside Mir. Soon enough the German police were searching for him—it was as if Hein had given Rufeisen a chance to live or to die, and to leave the final result up to fate.
Within a few days, Rufeisen found a place to hide—a Catholic convent in Mir, located near the offices of the German gendarmerie. During the remaining war years, Rufeisen not only served in a Russian partisan unit but also converted to the Catholic faith. After the war, he moved to Israel—still feeling himself a Zionist—and took vows as a priest and a Carmelite monk. His new name as a monk is Father Daniel and he calls himself a Christian Jew and works to improve relations between Christians and Jews in Israel. He has also maintained friendly relations with the survivors of the Mir ghetto. I am grateful that, in the summer of 1944, after the Russian liberation of Poland, I had a chance to meet briefly with Rufeisen and to thank him for risking his life to help us. During a visit Rochelle and I made to Israel in the 1970s, I was again able to pay a visit to Rufeisen—who was by now Father Daniel—and to express my gratitude.
Rufeisen’s fate became known to me much later, of course. On the night of 9 August, as I made my escape with my fellow underground comrades, we knew very little beyond that we should run to the woods and hope for the best. Even with the police out of town and no guards standing at the main entrance of the zamek, we dared not simply walk—or run—out of the main entrance. Instead, we used a window that opened out onto rubble and a long open field with the woods at the other end. We left in groups of five.
I remember how fast I ran when it came to be my turn. When I had played soccer, I was pretty good at going up and down the field at full speed. But running in pure terror was new to me. My head was spinning. I was so afraid, so excited, that I wasn’t myself at all. I felt like someone watching myself from above racing for my life.
We all made it into the woods that night, thanks to Rufeisen. As I mentioned, our original plans called for us to try to regroup once we made it to safety. But then news reached us from a later escapee that Rufeisen had been betrayed and captured. That killed any hope of an ambush, and made us feel far more insecure about our position. So we broke up into small groups and set about trying to survive in the woods. Our hope at that point was still to join up with the Russian partisans, but as yet we had no idea where they were.
In the early weeks of our escape, the five young men in my group hid out in the woods, not too far from a main road. We dug a shallow underground shelter, about five feet wide, ten feet long, and six feet deep. We made a cover for it out of branches and evergreens. We were about a mile away from a farmer named Kurluta—the same farmer with whom I had hidden as a farmhand earlier in the summer. Kurluta was very friendly to us. He gave us food. He also gave me a rifle and a pistol, at a time when any working weapons were a treasure to us. We gathered enough rifles to go around. One problem we faced was that we couldn’t keep getting food just from Kurluta—not only was that too great a burden for him, but it would also endanger both him and us, as it would make our movements too predictable. We didn’t want to walk into a German trap.
So twice a week, during the evening, we went out to the unfriendly farmers who were cooperating with the Germans. We asked them for food and we would take it on our own if they didn’t give it to us. If we found some Jewish memorabilia in their homes, like menorahs [ritual candelabra] or other items that were clearly stolen from the homes of the Jews of Mir, we got mad and smashed up everything in their houses. Sometimes, we beat those jerks up a little.
Because of those visits, food was not a big problem as we moved into autumn in the woods. At first we cooked by making a small wood fire, but then we got smarter. We found some bricks and built a little fire pit, burning the wood between the bricks and cooking up whatever food we had on metal wires we used as spits over the flames. We cooked late at night, to avoid having our fire spotted by Germans patrolling the woods, or by Polish passersby who might inform on us. Most of the time we ate potatoes, sometimes with mushrooms. Less often we had sausages or other kinds of meat. We could get bread from the farms fairly often, and now and then we could obtain milk, but what we mostly drank was water from the streams.
As the summer came to an end, our small group joined up for a brief time with a larger group of partisans—some fifty to sixty in number. Those people—roughly 60 percent Jews, 40 percent Belorussians—came from various towns in the region: Mir, Stolpce, Nieswierz, Turec, and Horodej. We had heard of the group from other Jewish runaways we met in the woods. There was no question of constructing an underground bunker for so many people. We kept constantly on the move and slept on the ground in thickly wooded areas.
One of the members of the group was a Russian soldier who claimed to have been left behind the lines during the German advance through eastern Poland. He was a politruk [political advisor], someone who was supposed to be trained to keep a Soviet presence amongst the Polish people and organize resistance against the Nazis.
The politruk suggested to us that we launch a surprise attack on a German police station just outside of Nieswierz. We had rifles, a good supply of ammunition, even a few automatic weapons. To demolish a police station was a tempting dream for us. So we spent a long evening in discussion, working out a plan. And then we headed toward Nieswierz, which was no easy matter—the march was roughly sixteen miles long, and it took us a full two days and two nights. Remember, we had to be in constant hiding, to move in darkness. The plan was that once we were within striking distance, we would rest for a day. Then, at four A.M. of the following morning
, we would move out, surround the police station, and attack. We would throw some grenades—we had only a few—and keep up a steady rifle fire. If all went well, we would burn the station building to the ground, kill a good many police, and maybe even take two or three as hostages. From the hostages we hoped to obtain information about any plans the Germans had to sweep through the woods and hunt out Jewish groups. There had also been some talk in our camp, especially by the boys from Nieswierz, that we could take revenge on the hostages for what had been done to our families.
But nothing that we had planned came into being. As the time neared for our four A.M. assault, we noticed that our politruk was suddenly missing—a terrible and frightening blow. We figured that, most likely, the politruk was a German spy who had run off to rejoin his bosses. But we weren’t sure. Maybe he had just gone off to scout out the station and the surrounding terrain. So what were we supposed to do now? If the politruk was a spy and if we went on with the attack as planned, the Germans would surely be waiting for us and we would be killed. On the other hand, our chances of a safe retreat were less than good.
We waited to see if the politruk might come back on his own. But by daylight he was nowhere to be seen. So we started to gather our things and to pull back as fast as we could.
Before we could make any start at a retreat, we were hit by intense automatic weapon fire—whether it was Germans or Polish police or both we couldn’t be sure. Bullets were flying over my head, all around me. There were screams. I remember one boy from Nieswierz. He was carrying a machine gun, and when the police opened fire he moved closer to the direction of the shooting and fired back for ten, maybe fifteen seconds. God knows what had happened to his family. But he fought back very bravely. Very soon his body was covered with blood, and he was dead, with maybe six or eight bullets in him.
Jack and Rochelle Page 7