Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  We took our wounded back to camp to be tended to by our doctor—a woman from Minsk named Katia. Her hands were busy that day. Later, some of our men surprised two German soldiers who had been hiding behind a bush in the vicinity, studying a map. Those Germans surrendered without any resistance and were taken back to camp for interrogation.

  Zorin could not conduct the interrogation. He was in tremendous pain. Katia had given him what treatment she could, but she did not have adequate medications and supplies for such a seriously infected wound. If the Red Army did not arrive in time with a competent battle surgeon, Zorin was in danger of having his leg amputated to save his life.

  The two captured soldiers were interviewed by some of the fighting group commanders, including myself. We learned that they were part of a group of some two hundred retreating German soldiers. The two soldiers had hoped to avoid any battles with partisans. They said that they had fired back at us only because they had no other choice—their superior officer had ordered them to do so.

  They were very afraid of us. They were showing us pictures of their wives and children, looking for sympathy. Then we realized that these two Germans thought we were Russian partisans. So we explained the truth to them. We told them what the Germans had done to our families. When they heard that their faces turned white and they started to tremble.

  They began to plead with us, insisting that they had had nothing to do with the atrocities. They had Jewish friends. One of them was in love with a Jewish woman whom he wanted to marry, but couldn’t because of his wife. After a while they realized that they could not expect sympathy from us.

  We received word from Zorin that he wanted them to be brought to his tent. He had rallied sufficiently to continue with the interrogation himself, with the help of a few of his senior staff members.

  Meanwhile, we continued our search of the surrounding area, looking for any other enemy stragglers. In that way we found a small group of three German soldiers and two Polish policemen. They were moving slowly toward us, unarmed, and with their hands clasped behind their necks. When we searched them we could not find any documents. We handcuffed them to each other and some of our men took them back to our camp. The rest of us continued to search the area, until at last we felt certain that the remaining Germans had run off.

  On our way back, we heard unfamiliar noises coming from the atrad campsite. They became louder the closer we approached.

  When we arrived, a friend of mine filled me in on what had happened. Some of the atrad members who had been left behind in camp during the fighting—the older men, the women, the children—found out about the two German soldiers being interrogated by Zorin and his staff. Those people surrounded Zorin’s tent and demanded that the Germans be brought outside for the purpose of facing severe punishment.

  They were informed by Zorin that the interrogation had to be continued for the sake of obtaining information vital to the defense of the atrad. But the atrad members refused to leave the area, and began to shout out their desire for revenge.

  At just about that time, the five new prisoners whom we had captured arrived at the camp. As soon as those prisoners were spotted, the shouting intensified. The angry atrad members immediately surrounded the new prisoners. Then the shouting drowned out everything. That was the noise we had heard as we approached our camp.

  ROCHELLE

  I was one of those shouting people.

  We were so bitter, so full of anger. Remember that in all those years in the partisans, we never really had a chance to express that anger. Even when Jack or the other men fought during food raids or other missions, it was a distant kind of fighting—firing at the Germans and the Polish police, being fired back at. You didn’t get a hold of them physically, confront them directly. And as a woman, I was never involved in any kind of fighting.

  I still remembered my mother’s last words as she was waiting to be taken to the grave, “Tell Rochelle to take nekome—revenge. Revenge!” I thought about that during the war, and I have thought about it ever since. And I always felt that I hadn’t done as much as I could have—that I didn’t put my life completely on the block in order to extract revenge. The instinct to survive was too strong.

  JACK

  Whatever I did in the war by way of fighting back—I always had Rochelle in mind as well.

  ROCHELLE

  Ultimately, what my mother asked for was an order I couldn’t fulfill. Revenge for the death of my parents, my sisters—impossible. But I would tell myself that I was in the partisans—I helped with the maintenance of the atrad, I did what I could. I would reason with myself—I reason in this way now—that it would have been stupid to get myself killed in a desperate suicide mission. Surviving and starting up a new family, as Jack and I have done, was a greater revenge—the best of all.

  But suddenly, there were the five prisoners brought in to our camp. For the first time in the entire war, personal revenge was possible for those of us standing there watching them arrive.

  We didn’t have either the physical capacity or the will to keep prisoners of war. Everybody was full of wild anger toward the Nazis and their Polish collaborators.

  Everyone started beating them—with rifle butts, fists, boots. We beat them to mush. I remember that they were lying on the ground just barely breathing. And I … I don’t think I could ever do it again … I came up to one of the German officers who had his legs spread. I started to kick him again and again in the groin. I was kicking and screaming, “For my mama! For my tate [daddy]! For my sisters!” I went on screaming out every name I could remember—all my relatives and friends who had been murdered. It was such a release! It was as if I had finally done what my mother had asked me to do.

  It wasn’t just me. The majority of the atrad members who were there participated. The Polish policemen might have received the most blows. We all knew that often the Polish collaborators had been crueller than the Germans. It felt like a mitzvah [righteous deed] for everyone to go in and give any of the prisoners a punch. To get the anger out at last.

  When I think back, I’m not sorry for what I did. I don’t think I could do it again now. But at that moment we were all so filled with anger, anxiety, bitterness. Seeing the enemy in our midst was all it took for us to explode. We had been forced to live like animals and for that moment we became animals.

  It’s also important to say that those emotions did not last in me. Maybe two weeks later, after the Russians liberated us, Jack and Julius and I were passing through a Polish town, looking for a place to sleep that night. And we walked by a house and there sitting in front of it was a group of unarmed and wounded German soldiers—so badly wounded they could no longer run or even move very well. They were under a very loose Soviet guard, awaiting their fate.

  They were just sitting and looking at us. And I looked at them. Both Jack and I were still carrying pistols that had been given to us in Zorin’s atrad. The advantage was all ours. But after leaving the woods for even a short while, I was becoming human again. Already I couldn’t have done to these soldiers what I had done to the German prisoner in the atrad. That had been in the heat of battle, so to speak. I saw those Germans in front of us now as human beings, broken, wounded, hungry, and miserable. I thought, “They are just soldiers who were drafted and sent to the front—somebody’s son or father.” I not only could not kick them, I couldn’t even say anything bad to them.

  I didn’t have it in my heart to give them something to eat or drink. I hadn’t progressed that far yet. But I could walk by and ignore them without hurting them. And that was a big step forward!

  JACK

  As for the five prisoners in our camp, Zorin had tried to hold back the crowd that day. But he was helpless.

  The other two German prisoners were ultimately released to the crowd as well, once their interrogation was completed. There was no way that we were going to keep them as prisoners of war. Zorin had seen what the mood of the atrad was.

  The fate of the prisoners
was crowded out of our minds once we took a tally of our own casualties. Six of our fighters had been killed, eleven wounded. We buried our dead and grieved that they had to die so close to the time of liberation.

  Meanwhile, the news about Zorin’s leg was not good. The Red Army was coming very close—according to the radio they were within a few miles—but even that would be too late. The infection was spreading rapidly. Amputation would be necessary. It could wait until the Red Army surgeons arrived. But there was no way that the leg could be saved.

  Shortly after receiving that news, Zorin asked to be taken outside of his tent, so he could talk to the entire atrad.

  His leg was heavily bandaged, and there were tears in his eyes even before he began to speak.

  I wrote an account of his speech for a Yiddish newspaper [the Landsberger Zeitung] after the war, and I quote from it now, in an English translation I prepared myself:

  “Dear friends, we were together for a long time, and I was always proud of your heroic deeds and sacrifices. Together we have suffered, fought, cried, and shared good times.”

  He wiped his tears, relaxed a few seconds, and continued—

  “In a few hours we will finally be liberated. We will disperse in different directions, forget each other, and probably never see each other again.

  “It looks like I will remain an invalid for the rest of my life. Please don’t forget me. Please stay in close contact with me. You are my family.”

  He could not continue. Tears covered his face, and all of us cried together.

  We realized that what he had said was the truth. Our future was uncertain. Who knew what would happen to us, or where we would build our new homes?

  I am happy to be able to record his speech in this book, in honor of Simcha Zorin. It was true what he said—I never saw him again after the liberation. But I will always remember him as an unselfish savior of Jews during the war.

  ROCHELLE

  We all thought, as we listened to Zorin’s speech, that liberation was only hours away. But that did not prove to be the case. There were a few days more of fighting before the Red Army arrived. Our men were constantly skirmishing with the Germans—right to the end. Some of them lost their lives.

  I thought to myself, “This is no good.” I could not let Jack be killed when we were so close to surviving.

  So, in the final two days, I pleaded with Jack to follow a plan I had devised. I put a babushka on him and a blouse and a long skirt that covered up his legs. I told him to bend his head and hunch his shoulders and walk with difficulty, like an old woman. I disguised him because I did not want the other women to be resentful about Jack staying with me while their men went off to fight.

  And Jack managed to look like an old woman. He was stooped, and moaning, and the other women never knew it was him.

  It saved his life. That I know.

  There was another man in Zorin’s atrad. He had been a neighbor of mine in Stolpce, and he had escaped to the woods along with his son. Well, both the man and his son were killed in a final ambush with the Germans. They had lived through so much.… We were liberated within a day by the Russians.

  JACK

  Why did I agree to disguise myself in that way? To understand what I did, you have to understand this—Rochelle and I were madly in love. We had made it that far, through so many years of misery, and we had started to believe that we had a future. We were talking about one day living in a house together, having children … enormous plans and dreams.

  Even so, if it had been left to me alone, I would have gone out and fought. But Rochelle was in tears, begging me not to. And my father Julius was the same way. My wife and my father wanted me to live. I could not stand to cause either one of them so great a pain as would have been the case had I died on the verge of our freedom.

  This is the truth of the matter. It is the only explanation I can give.

  There were terrible tragedies in those final two days. The Germans were literally running for their lives through the forest, heading west to their fatherland by any route they could find. Russian planes and artillery were pounding the main routes, so the German troops were disorganized and desperate—but still highly trained and heavily armed. There were constant risks, constant ambushes.

  During the final days of the war, both Russian and Jewish partisan groups in the Nalibocka Forest captured some of the retreating German soldiers. But I don’t think that any of the groups kept prisoners. For all of the groups, but especially for the Jewish partisans, the greatest interest was in capturing Gestapo and SS personnel. They were the specially trained killers, the ones who led and organized the butchering in the ghettos. They were often easy to identify because they had tattoed lightning bolts and other special symbols on their arms—out of pride at who they were and what they did. No one felt sorry for the SS men and they were usually beaten severely and then killed.

  Finally, there came the day when one of our men came running into the atrad campsite with the news that the Red Army tanks were coming. We all made our way as fast as we could to the main highway, which was some two miles away. There we saw a steady stream of Russian tanks and troop trucks. They were heading west, chasing the Germans back to their borders.

  We tried to make ourselves realize that we were free. As we watched the tanks pass, it began to sink in. Slowly.

  We hardly knew what to say to each other. We hugged and laughed and cried.

  IX

  Under the Soviet Yoke Again

  JACK

  Once the Russian army took control of the region, we were able to move out of the wilderness.

  There was no possibility of keeping the atrad together. Most of the Jews in the atrad were from Minsk or other towns just across the Russian border. And there were many Polish Jews like us as well, from various towns. Once the need to hide from the Germans had ended, almost everyone wanted to go back to their hometowns, wherever they were, and to find out what had happened to their families. There were also some men who wanted to join up with the Red Army, just so they could continue to fight the Germans.

  Rochelle and Julius and I knew what had happened to our families. We weren’t really sure where to go at first. All of a sudden we realized that we actually were survivors! But it took quite a while for it to really sink in that we were free again, that the Germans were no longer there to kill us on sight.

  Ultimately, our plan was to head back to our hometowns of Mir and Stolpce, to see what was left there. But that would have meant a very long journey on foot. For the time being, we just wanted to find some kind of transportation that would take us out of the wilderness.

  Then, one day, we saw that there were some empty Soviet army trucks that were heading east to Minsk. The trucks were going to load up with food and supplies there and then transport them back to the western front, which was pushing through Poland on the way to Germany. The drivers of the trucks allowed us, and other Jews as well, to hitch a ride to Minsk. We knew a couple there with a house—they had invited us to stay with them until we figured out what to do next.

  During our drive to Minsk, the sides of the main roads were piled high with bodies of dead German soldiers. The Russians had been strafing the retreating German troops from fighter planes, then shoving their corpses to the side of the roads to allow their own troops to go through. From the heat of the sun the bodies had begun to bloat. Some of them looked like inflated balloons. There was a terrible odor. We had to cover our noses.

  It was fine with me. The more corpses the better.

  ROCHELLE

  There were mountains of bodies, not just piles. Two or three stories high. The smell, the flies … it was terrible.

  Soon after we arrived in Minsk, we learned that the Soviets were requesting that all males who had fought in partisan units were to report and register at an official Soviet office they had set up. We decided not to register immediately … to wait instead, and to see what the purpose was. That was a smart idea because we learned a few days
later that the partisans who were registering were being told to report for immediate induction into the Soviet army. They were handed uniforms on the spot and sent straight off to the western front.

  Seeing what their plans were for us, we decided that we should not stay in Minsk much longer, or in any part of the Soviet Union, for that matter. So we took to the roads again. We managed to get a ride on one of the Soviet supply trucks heading west. We had to switch trucks several times to get where we wanted to go, which was anywhere over the border into Poland. Finally, we wound up in a town called Iweniec.

  We found an abandoned house that we could stay in. And by some strange chance that is beyond explanation it turned out that living across the street from us was Uncle Oscar and his Polish woman Antonina, along with the rest of her family. Antonina by that point lived as his legal wife under his real name, because Oscar no longer had to pose as a Pole.

  ROCHELLE

  So suddenly there was Uncle Oscar as my new neighbor.

  We managed to keep things on a superficially friendly basis—it was very, “Hi, hello there, have a nice day.” We couldn’t completely avoid each other, because that would have seemed very suspicious to his wife, and I did not want to cause trouble.

  He tried to be nice to me. He would give us some potatoes, flour, bread. He would bring the food over to us. I would never go to his house. His wife was a very jealous type, and she seemed to sense something, what I can’t say, but she certainly didn’t like having me around. That was all right with me. I avoided all situations that might leave Uncle Oscar and me alone together. I knew that I could never be close to that man again, or even respect him.

  I later learned that Iweniec was just a temporary stopping place for Uncle Oscar and his wife. When the war was barely over, Oscar was already in the process of making himself a wealthy man again. As the Germans retreated and the Russians took over, there were a number of farms left abandoned in northern Poland, in the region that had been known as Prussia. The Poles or Belorussians who had owned them had been killed, or taken into slave labor—in some cases by the Nazis, in some cases by the Soviets—as political undesirables. Some of these farms had been run by wealthy Germans during the time of Nazi control.