Jack was very nice to me the first weeks I was in his bunker. He gave me a pair of pants without rips and tears, and a real pair of boots to replace my two left army boots. I remember he also gave me, as my first clean shirt after all my experiences, the top part of his own pajamas, which had been part of the little bundle Jack had carried with him when he escaped from the Mir ghetto. That pajama top was the nicest thing I had to wear during my first days in the bunker. With that top and boots that fit my feet, I was suddenly fancy … all ready for the wedding!
He wasn’t physically insistent, but he was definitely in love with me. After a month or so, he did try to be more affectionate, to kiss and hug me. And I thought, “Aha! This is it. All that sweetness and protectiveness toward me was just a prelude for sex! Men just want to use you.” But I was wrong.
JACK
The relationships between the men and the women in the bunker had no fixed pattern. There were unattached men and women. And there were married couples—husbands and wives who had gotten married before the war and had escaped to the woods together.
Sex meant something different in the conditions in which we were living. It was a way to feel some kind of pleasure and to forget the misery for a while. But what you would call a romantic atmosphere did not usually exist. When you hear the stories of Jews who lived in partisan groups, you hear of couples forming, but often they were for the sake of survival through the war years only—more convenient than committed.
With Rochelle, I felt differently. Sex was not the issue then. I never pressed her on that—it wasn’t what mattered to me. A couple of times I tried very gently to get close, but when I saw the effect it had on her I stopped altogether. But I felt in my heart that she was the woman destined for me. It was that sense of things that guided me in the first weeks we were together.
I wanted to do something special for her—to get her some decent clothes to replace the pajama top, to make her feel that life in the bunker could be bearable.
One of the Jewish guys in our group was named Liss. He had grown up in the region and knew all of the farm families very well. Well, he had told us in the past about a little community called Piesochna in which there were several well-to-do farms, many of which had sons serving in the Polish police. The Polish police were the right-hand agents for the Germans, and so to strike back at their homes was very tempting, given what had happened to our own families. We had already conducted a number of raids in this area, as often as twice a week.
I figured that in one of the rich farms in that community I could find decent clothing for Rochelle and also bring back some good food to celebrate her arrival. So we went, four of us, including Liss. We all carried pistols and rifles, and in addition I had a pair of binoculars I had taken on one of the previous farm raids.
Things went very badly. About a half mile or so before we reached the farm we had in mind, the police opened fire. We were, at that point, in a fairly open area of fields and small stands of trees. The heavy woods in which we lived were roughly a mile off, so we were definitely in a tough position. It couldn’t have been that they knew our specific plans for that evening. But, as I said, we had often before been their uninvited guests, and they probably decided that it was worth watching out for us for a number of nights in a row, figuring that we would show up eventually.
When the police opened fire, Liss, who was two feet away from me, was killed right away. So I and the other two guys began to make a retreat. We were running, running, then dropping and shooting back from time to time to make sure they weren’t following us too closely. Slowly, slowly we managed to lose them and to make our way back to the woods. Once we got back to the woods we weren’t afraid anymore … it felt like home. We knew the police wouldn’t dare follow us into the woods so long as we were armed. We could have been behind any bush, picking them off.
Still, we all felt very worn out and afraid—our adrenaline was draining away. So we rested for twenty minutes or so and then made the final walk back to our bunker—without Liss, lucky to be alive ourselves.
When we made it back, I sat down in my place in the bunker, not yet ready or able to sleep. I lit a small piece of wood just to have some added light. It was then that I looked at the coat I was wearing—a long sheepskin coat. There were two bullet holes in it! Ankle-height, low holes. If either of those bullets had hit my legs, I would have fallen, been captured, probably tortured, and certainly killed. And then I saw what had happened to the binoculars I had been wearing on a strap over my chest. The metal frame had been split in the middle, between the two glasses. My binoculars had blocked a bullet that otherwise would have killed me.
Somehow none of the three bullets hit me, even though they came as close as they possibly could. Wouldn’t that be considered a miracle? In the days that followed, I would think about the dream I’d had about Rochelle’s coming, and about the holes made by the bullets that had missed me. It gave me a kind of confidence that someone was watching over me and guiding me in the right direction. Since then, to this day, I have the feeling that someone is watching.
When Rochelle saw the bullet holes, she started telling me that I shouldn’t take any more risks like that. She wanted me to be more careful.
ROCHELLE
He was overdoing it. It was almost a game with him.
JACK
It made me happy that Rochelle at least cared enough to worry about the risks I was taking. But other than showing concern, she was still very much keeping her distance during that time. The dream remained for her an unbelievable fantasy, no more.
I thought about what she said about risks, and for a couple of weeks we didn’t conduct any major raids.
But then we found out about a very large farm a mile or so outside of Mir—a rich spread, an estate—where the family had three sons and two daughters, and all three of the sons had joined the Polish police force and were actively helping the Germans to identify and kill Jews. To raid an estate like that—with its three collaborating sons in the police—would be a satisfying revenge. We figured that we could make such a large food haul from that one estate that it would reduce the need for making smaller raids so frequently—twice or three times a week, as we usually did. We could lay in a supply that might last a month or more.
We discussed it within our own group. Our advantage was that we were, by this stage, well-supplied with pistols and rifles and hand grenades and even some automatic weapons. But we understood that we needed more men on the raid than our own usual small contingent of five or six. Not far from our bunker were some other small Jewish underground shelters. We talked over our plans for the raid with two other small groups and finally we reached an agreement—each of the three groups would send four men. We would take as much in the way of food, clothing, and supplies as we could carry and split it evenly between the three groups. If we didn’t have enough room to store it all, we would give it to certain friendly farmers to store for us. It was late November or early December, and we could feel the brunt of the winter coming on. Extra food and clothing would be especially welcome at that time.
We set out early on a very snowy and stormy evening—we had waited for the worst weather possible to cover our movements as thoroughly as possible. The march took us three hours. When we drew close, we sent three men ahead to scout out the farmhouse. When they came within thirty yards or so, a couple of dogs started to bark. They quieted the dogs with food, as we had planned, and then we all picked up our pace, first surrounding the house and then breaking into it.
There were about seven people at home, the old parents and some of the daughters and maybe some servants as well. Immediately they started crying and begging. We held our rifles on them and told them that we knew about the three sons who had joined the police. We asked them if they knew how many Jews their sons had killed.
Some of the other guys started to search the house and they found some Jewish ritual plates, candlesticks, and Torah ornaments, plated with silver and gold. There was also
, I remember, a silver ritual cup designed for the Passover seder [festival meal]. Finding these things made us really mad.
We opened up the trapdoor to the cellar and found down there a number of big barrels full of food—salted pork, ham, sausages, honey, bread, and more. We hauled all of the food out of the cellar, then herded all of the residents of the house back down in there. We told them to sit there quietly or else we would kill them and burn the entire place down. We also pushed their watchdogs in there, to make sure there would be no more barking that night. We then covered up the trapdoor with some very heavy furniture to make sure they would not escape too quickly and call for help.
Meanwhile, three of our men, whose families had been in the meat business, found a small number of calves and sheep. They were experienced enough to quickly herd the livestock and bind their feet to make it easier to take them along.
Then we had to figure out how to carry all of the food away. We solved the problem by finding two hauling sleds alongside their barn. We hitched two horses to each of these, then loaded them up with the livestock and the barrels. We packed in some Christmas baked goods we found—cookies and cakes. We also took lots of warm clothing and some cooking utensils and tools—any useful things we could find. Even with the four horses and the two sleds, that was all we could handle at one time.
Before we left, we debated amongst ourselves as to whether to burn the place down or not. The deciding factor against it was that, if we set fire to the house, the flames and smoke might be seen by the German and Polish police forces in Mir. So we decided not to bother with it. But one of the men found some large canisters filled with kerosene and emptied them all around the house, on the rugs, furniture, and woodwork. He was hoping that the residents might set fire to the house themselves, once they managed to push open the trapdoor and then attempted to light some lamps in the house, which we had left totally dark.
We managed to transport the loaded sleds most of the way back to our bunkers. Obviously, we could not drive up all the way with them, as we would have been leaving tracks that could have been easily followed. So some distance away, we simply let loose the horses, knowing that they would go back to their owners rather than stay in our part of the wilderness. Before we did that, we thought of giving the horses to some of the farmers we knew who had helped us. But then we figured that the danger of the horses being traced—they were branded and clearly belonged to the estate we had raided—was too great. None of our friendly farmers would have wanted to take the risk.
As for the farmers, we couldn’t always be sure which of them really were genuinely friendly to us. For example, we left the calves and sheep we had taken with a farmer named Petrovich—the same one who had taken in Tanya. As I told you, the Russian partisans were convinced he was a police spy and later killed him and Tanya and his sons and burned down his house. I cannot say if they were right, but that was a risk you took with any civilian you decided to trust. But Petrovich took care of our livestock and we all benefited from that—we came back later for some meat, and Petrovich himself ate well from that hoard, as we had invited him to do.
A few days later, though, our group heard from some other farmers who had gone into Mir that the Germans were really outraged at what had happened. The thought of Jews carrying on a raid so close to their headquarters really infuriated them. If they had caught me at that point, they would have cut me into little pieces.
There was talk of an all-out intensive search for the Jewish partisans who had pulled it off. So we were afraid, for a while, that there would be a sweep through the woods that might mean the worst for our group and some of the others as well. But at that time we had some luck on our side, for a change. The winter storm continued on through the day after the raid. The wind was blowing like crazy and it must have covered up all of the footsteps and sleigh tracks. Because we were left in peace in the weeks that followed.
I remember that from the raid I brought back for Rochelle a pretty blue blouse and lots of other clothing—anything I could find that I thought would be nice for her. She accepted the clothing. And I think she was relieved that nothing had happened to me on the raid. But still, she was uncomfortable with my feelings for her. They made no sense to her. She was still frozen inside from all that had happened to her—which at the time I could only guess at, since she was absolutely unwilling to talk enough to give me any details.
I knew that things were difficult, and that Rochelle would need time. But what happened next I did not expect.
One day, in December, Rochelle left the bunker for what she said was a walk. But then she didn’t come back. It was getting dark, and we thought maybe she had gotten lost. One of us went to check with a nearby group as to whether they had seen her. The news came back to me that Rochelle had decided to leave my bunker and to join that group instead. She figured that I would somehow try to stop her if she told me directly, and so she slipped out casually, taking only the clothes she was wearing.
The other group consisted mainly of a number of young boys in their teens, as well as an older woman in her forties and her son, who was only ten. It was not as well organized a fighting and raiding force as our group. Plus we had both a doctor and a pharmacist with us then. But the next day, when I went over to talk to Rochelle to try to find out why she had left us, she told me that she felt more comfortable in that group. She liked it there and she was going to stay there.
I left Rochelle and returned to my own bunker. I was disappointed, but not only disappointed. I felt disgusted and angry as well. The worst thing, from my point of view, was that Rochelle had left without telling me, without even saying good-bye. The men in my group really let me have it in the days that followed. They would say, “You see what happens? You treated that woman like a queen. And now she craps on you and leaves you!”
During those first days, my attitude was if that was the way Rochelle wanted it, the hell with it! I made up my mind to do nothing more—just to let her go. The others in the group wouldn’t leave me alone, though. They made constant jokes, teasing me that Rochelle had left me for a group made up of little boys.
ROCHELLE
I made up my mind to run away because I became convinced that, even though Jack was gentle and respectful toward me, eventually it would come down to having sex with him in order to survive. I didn’t want sex on any terms, and the fact that Jack was declaring his love to me didn’t make it any sweeter. I wanted no part of love either.
I became aware of another group living not far from us in their own bunker. A bunch of young boys, and then an older woman, Gittel, and her little son. And the fact that the other boys were so young was a positive factor for me. I wasn’t afraid of the sexual advances of a bunch of immature twelve- and fourteen-year-olds. I’d just give them one kick in the head and that would be the end of any love affairs they had in mind.
Another positive was the presence of Gittel acting as the “mother” for the group as a whole. It had the atmosphere of a little orphanage in the woods, and it was difficult for Gittel to keep up with all the demands upon her. I had talked with some of the younger boys a few times, and they assured me that I would be very welcome in their group because it was so hard for Gittel to keep up with all the cooking and camp work that she had to do. That set me thinking about how ideal it would be for me to work with Gittel, help her peel potatoes and all the rest, and get away from the love and attention business that Jack had in mind.
So I made arrangements in advance with the boys to come over to their bunker on a set day. They had talked it over with Gittel and she was happy with the idea. So when the day came I left. I didn’t say a word to Jack or to anyone in his group. I didn’t say thank you or give any reasons why. I picked myself up and walked over to the other bunker.
Gittel was really like a mother to me, very kind. I helped her cook for the boys. One of our common meals was a dish we called palnitzes, a kind of flour-and-water cake baked over the fire. I had peace of mind … no one was going t
o make advances on me. I had a job to do, and that was it.
One thing I remember from this time was that on the day I had left Jack’s bunker for the new group, I was wearing a blouse and a pair of boots that Jack had gotten for me from the raid on the large estate outside Mir. The blouse and the boots were of high quality. A couple of days after I left—Jack had already paid his visit and gone back—one of the guys from Jack’s group, his name was Maryan, came over to my new bunker and said, “Izik wants his boots and his blouse back.”
JACK
That was a lie. I never said that. He probably just wanted them for himself.
ROCHELLE
At the time, however, I believed that Maryan was speaking the truth. It fit my attitude about men to believe it. If you don’t sleep with them, they take back the boots, the clothes, and everything else! It made me so angry that my answer to Maryan was, “That’s too bad. I’m keeping my stuff!”
Maryan also told me that in the days since I had seen him, Jack had become very sick, with a high fever. He also said that Jack was depressed and wanted to shoot himself.
JACK
Yes, that was true. I was very disappointed. What had come to me in the dream was a vision of helping and loving Rochelle that gave my life in the woods a meaning. When that vision was lost, the purpose of going on seemed lost as well.
ROCHELLE
What made it even worse was the embarrassment he felt at being made fun of and treated like a schlemiel [fool]. He had done everything he could for me. He tried to insist that his group treat me nicely. And I just ran away, leaving him with his hurt feelings and a group that was mocking him constantly.
It got to me when I learned that Jack had actually fallen ill and wanted to end his life. I didn’t know how to handle that. But I didn’t go to visit him. I tried instead to put it out of my mind. I didn’t enjoy the thought of his misery, and I didn’t want to see him in the midst of it. But I was not going to go back.
Jack and Rochelle Page 11