So with all the untended farmland, it became a kind of grabbing game. Whoever came and settled down owned the land as a practical matter. That was the same for any livestock that had survived. Oscar was very smart. He found himself a large farm to begin with, one that had been German-run. It was located near the town of Ostroda. From that base, Uncle Oscar began to accumulate cattle.
His way of doing that was to bargain with the Russian soldiers who were handling the supply lines. As the Russian front progressed through western Poland toward Berlin, most of the cattle and other livestock in the conquered regions were being seized—as a matter of official Soviet policy—to be sent back to Russia, where there was severe famine. But there was a great deal of corruption in the process, and Uncle Oscar was good at handling the Russian soldiers in charge. He would provide them with a liberal supply of vodka, and in exchange they would give him not only cattle but horses and sheep as well. Uncle Oscar would also trade his vodka for Russian gold coins, which I’m sure he was burying in sacks somewhere on his farm.
The few weeks that we spent in Iweniec was the first time in nearly two years that I was sleeping regularly under the roof of a house. It was very difficult for me to adjust. For the first week, I felt like I was choking at night. I couldn’t sleep in the house. I was like a caged animal—I had to go outside in the middle of the night to catch my breath. If I had been by myself, I would have slept on the ground outside instead of in the bedroom.
It was awkward for us in Iweniec, what with my uncle across the street. Also, both Jack and I were thinking that it was time to go back and see how things were in Stolpce and Mir. We decided to go back to Stolpce first—it was the town that Jack and Julius had lived in as well as myself. But for now, because travel was difficult and we weren’t sure how smoothly things would go, we decided that it was best to leave Julius behind in Iweniec. So we rented him a small room and left him with a supply of food and told him that we would send for him as soon as we established ourselves somewhere.
And then we were off. Jack and I started walking by the main road. Even though the Russians had arrived, we still didn’t feel completely safe out in the open. There were still small bands of retreating German soldiers who were trying to make it back to their own lines. If we had run into them, it would have been very bad for us. It took us one very long day to finish the walk. Jack developed some trouble on the walk. The skin on his legs was still tender, and the sweat and strain caused inflammation. We would stop and ask local farmers for a handful of flour to spread over the red and raw portions of his legs. It was miserable for him.
When we were getting close to Stolpce, we stopped at the house of two different Polish farmers whom I had known before all the troubles. Both had done business with my father and my father had good relationships with both of them—they behaved as friends, and my father trusted them. When the Germans began seizing our property, my father had stored in their houses much of our family furniture, along with my father’s best clothing. The farmers had agreed, in exchange, to help our family if we ever needed help.
So I knocked on the door of the first farmer and we stood there, very tired and very hungry.
The farmer let us come inside the door for only a few minutes. I could see so many pieces of furniture that I remembered from growing up in my family. The farmer wasn’t happy to see me. Immediately he began to cry to me that he barely had enough food to feed his own family. He and his family were standing there in front of my eyes and I could see that they were not going hungry. He gave us a small chunk of bread and told us that we had to go.
The second farmer—we knocked on his door as well. As that farmer looked at me, I could see that my arrival at his door had badly spooked him—it was as if he had seen the dead come alive. It was not a happy experience for him. I could see furniture from my family in his house as well. My sense was that, if he could have killed me then, he would have done so. I asked him to help us. We were on our way to Stolpce, we were hungry, could he offer us some soup, something warm, something cold? But he said he could give us nothing. He was hungry too, and so were his children. The Germans and the Russians had taken everything. Meanwhile, his house had a prosperous look and he had a prosperous belly. He told us to go away—he could spare nothing. Nothing.
I felt as if I wanted to kill him. But I also knew that the time was over for that. And there he was with his sons and his wife. And there were Jack and myself without anyone else who gave a damn that we were alive. For that matter, that farmer could probably have killed the two of us then and there and nobody would have known where to look for the bodies or even that we were gone. The Soviets weren’t fully in control yet in Poland. It was a world without laws. You were on your own.
JACK
It was a very unpleasant experience.
But that was the way it was, as a general rule. Most Poles were not so happy to see the few Jewish survivors come back to their towns. Many of them had cooperated with the Germans and they didn’t want Jews testifying to the new Soviet rulers. So they were made uncomfortable, even frightened, by us. The majority would pretend to be nice and friendly, but only on the surface. And the ones who had been entrusted with Jewish goods were, on the whole, unwilling to admit that any agreements had been reached. The survivors, like Rochelle, could fend for themselves. There was no way for her to prove anything or enforce any legal rights. Not in the chaos of that time.
When we finally arrived in Stolpce, we saw that not only had Rochelle’s family house burned down—so had virtually the entire town. There was no place to stay. So we wound up sleeping outdoors again, with our boots as our pillows. The very next morning we started looking for transportation to Mir.
ROCHELLE
Coming back to Stolpce was very strange. When I had run away, there was still a town. Now we were standing on the edge of town and could see only a few houses and the river. It was hard to even recognize the streets. I had to strain to imagine the neighborhood and the house I had grown up in.
You remember a town, you remember your life, your family. And then you come back after years and there’s nothing!
It wasn’t like when a soldier comes back to his town and his people come out and tell him how glad they are to see him. No one was there to rejoice that we had come home. We were a nuisance, a burden.
The people I did see whom I recognized either pretended not to see me or shied away. We were witnesses to the tragedy. They would rather not have had any witnesses. But because of the Russians, they were afraid to be openly mean or hostile. So it wound up that they stayed away from us and we stayed away from them.
An empty feeling—that’s finally what I remember about going back to Stolpce. It was, in a way, more comfortable for us when we were living in Zorin’s atrad. We had there a camaraderie—a sense of being part of the same group, the same people. In Stolpce, we weren’t part of a family and we weren’t a part of the town itself—what was left of it.
We went by foot to Mir.
There was one important side trip before we left for Mir, however. Remember that, when the Germans had first arrived in Stolpce, my family had run off to the nearby village of Kruglice, which was where one of my father’s factories was located. During that time, my father had buried two glass jars, filled with Russian gold coins from the time of the czar, in places that he specially pointed out to me. So now we went back to Kruglice to dig up the two jars. If we could find them, it would give us an emergency fund to live on. Russian gold coins were illegal to possess, but they were the best possible money on the black market.
We managed to dig up those two jars, but we were afraid the whole time. Some of the locals saw me and remembered that I was the Jew Schleiff’s daughter. They knew that I hadn’t come back to Kruglice to recite memorial prayers for my father. They must have suspected that I was hoping to recover something. And I was sure that at least a few of the locals would be happy to rob or even murder refugee Jews. Who would have looked for us? So we tried to stay
out of sight as much as possible, and we managed to dig up the jars in secret and hide them in one of our satchels.
On the way out of Kruglice, a local woodsman stepped out of the forest and started to come toward us on the road. He was carrying a long-handled axe on his shoulder. I was terrified. He stared at us but then he passed us by.
JACK
When we reached Mir, we discovered that a few dozen Jewish survivors had arrived there before us. Every few days some man or woman would show up from somewhere. There was a very small-scale Jewish community established, and that was very helpful.
We found a place to stay in a big house owned by a Jewish family—the Malishansky family. Rochelle and I took one of the rooms. In another room there were a few other survivors. The family was kind to us and we all shared meals together. Next door was another Jewish house that had survived the bombings. In that house lived my friend Simon Kagan, who had also escaped from the Mir ghetto, and who was a hero among the partisans for his demolition work on German railroads. Also living there was Simon’s sister Sarah, a very kind woman with whom we became close.
There was a Polish family living in Mir—their last name was Talish. I was happy to see them again. And they were genuinely happy that I and my father had survived. I owe the Talish family a great deal. Back in 1941, when the Germans were setting up the Mir ghetto, the Talish house was located just across the street from our own assigned house in the ghetto. The Talishes would help to get us some extra food. And I was able to sneak across and store with them some photo albums of my family. And then, returning to Mir three years later, I was able to recover those albums. There were photographs of my mother.…
I introduced Rochelle to the Talishes and they took to her immediately. They often invited us over for a lunch or a dinner that summer of 1944. That was generous—they were not a wealthy family. They lived in a little house made of clay—a father, a mother, a son. We would sit and talk together.
There was a Catholic convent in Mir. My mother Sarah had given the nuns some of her furs and clothing to store. I went there and asked for these things. But the nuns explained that they had been forced to trade most of the furs and clothing to feed themselves during the Nazi occupation. They did still have a sealskin coat and a fox collar that they returned to me. The fox collar I still have—I also have a photograph of my mother wearing it. The nuns tried to be nice and friendly, but I didn’t believe that they were happy to see me at their door.
Once we settled down in Mir, we arranged to bring Julius over to join us. He was still in Iweniec, waiting for word from us. Rochelle’s uncle Oscar was helpful to us—maybe he was finally sorry for what he had done. We communicated with uncle Oscar and he arranged for a farmer with a truck to bring Julius to Mir. We were so grateful to see each other again.
But now that the Soviets were establishing firm rule over Poland, the old problem was facing us again: all former partisan fighters were being told to register for immediate service in the front lines of the Soviet army. We didn’t want to run away again—and in any case there was nowhere left to run to. The war was still going on throughout most of Europe. Also, we enjoyed being part of a Jewish community here in Mir—a small one, but very precious to us after all the killing.
So I had to find a way to be excused from the Soviet draft. And having my father Julius with us suggested an answer. If you performed a vital civilian service, you would be excluded from military service. Dentistry was defined as vital. Good then—I would be a dentist. Why not? In wartime, no one expected you to have a diploma. My mother had been a dentist, my father had trained as a dental technician. I had a family right to claim I was a dentist—and there was no one left in Mir who knew that I wasn’t except for my closest friends and family. In fact, there was no other dentist in all of Mir at that point—so I was filling a vacuum.
My father and I set up a dental practice in a room in our house. Because of my father’s training, we at least had a general knowledge of how to make things look right. We didn’t have a real drill, so we rigged up a drill made out of wooden parts except for the drill-point itself. We powered the drill with a foot-pump. We had no other dental tools. As for novocaine or any other anesthetic—we had none. But we let the Mir population know that we were dentists. Some of the farmers would come in and I would drill their teeth. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was doing.
ROCHELLE
He was making holes in good teeth, he was making holes in bad teeth. He put on an act to stay alive. And yet somehow his patients were satisfied with his work.
JACK
After a short time, the Soviets moved me into a small building they fixed up for first aid and other medical services in Mir. There was a woman in charge of the building and I gave her a list of the equipment I needed to fully practice dentistry. She sent a requisition to Minsk and after a few weeks most of what I had asked for arrived. We were in business! Even so, I couldn’t have carried on without my father. Julius was very creative. He made false teeth out of brass handles he would scavenge from the bombed-out houses in Mir. He found a machine in town with which he could flatten and shape the handles. You can imagine how well they fit in the mouths of our customers.
It began to circulate among the dozen or so Jewish houses in Mir that I was not really a dentist—so very soon my customers were exclusively Polish locals. I could remember that many of those locals had been highly enthusiastic when the ghetto had been created and all the misery followed. So when they came for my services, I would tell them, “Listen, this isn’t Germany. I’m not obligated to work on you if you’re not a Soviet official or soldier. So if you want my help, you bring me food.” And so they started bringing bread, butter, honey, potatoes, now and then a chicken. For the first time in God knows how long we had plenty of food. We had enough to share with the others in our house.
To pull that off as I did, I had to be filled with bitter and angry memories. Because as a dentist I was a complete fake. But I remembered what I remembered. And when the people whom I knew had collaborated with the Nazis would be sitting in my chair squirming and screaming, I would think to myself, “If I could, I would drill off all your teeth!” With patients whom I didn’t remember from those days, I just tried to do as little harm as I could.
But then, in the autumn of 1944, a genuine Russian dentist showed up in Mir to help with the medical center they were trying to establish. We were very frightened. I was sure that he would spot me as a fake immediately and report me to the authorities.
His name was Zenowey. He was a nice looking man, with dark bushy hair and a round face. They put up a second dental chair for him just three feet away from my own. We would be working within constant sight of each other.
For the first day or two, while they were setting things up for him, we had a chance to get to know each other. Zenowey was an easy and outgoing person. He asked about how I had survived the war and I told him. He told me about his days in the Soviet army. He saw combat duty but had been wounded and was discharged and allowed to practice dentistry again.
Then the first patients for our newly expanded dental office began to arrive. Zenowey would take care of one, I would take care of another. I noticed that he kept glancing at me as I worked. I figured the end was near. But I didn’t give up. I kept drilling and drilling and drilling. Zenowey didn’t say anything. But I noticed that he was trying to work fast so that he would be free to take care of the majority of the patients who came through the door.
It went on for a week or so. Meanwhile, Zenowey and I were becoming close friends. We enjoyed talking to each other, sharing stories of the war. And I saw from the way he worked so hard that he had a good heart.
Finally, one day as we were sitting and talking, Zenowey took a look at me and suddenly burst out laughing.
I asked him what was the matter. I kept my face as serious as I could.
He said to me, “What a fine actor you are! You’re as much a dentist as I am a carpenter!”
I couldn’t try to lie to him—the truth was too obvious. So I confessed my situation to him. I told him that my mother had been a dentist and that Julius actually knew a thing or two from his technical training. I admitted that, because of all the killing in Mir, I couldn’t feel too sorry for my patients. And most importantly, I explained that my choices were drill teeth or be sent to the front to die. And that I loved Rochelle and wanted to live and to start up a real life with her.
Well, Zenowey listened to all that. Then he told me that he had spotted me as a complete fraud within ten minutes of our working together—just as I had feared he would. But Zenowey added, “Don’t worry about it—it will be a secret between us.”
Zenowey started to give me some pointers on how to perform a few basic dental procedures. He instructed me that if a patient came in for something beyond those procedures, I should just pretend to be busy with something else and let Zenowey take care of it. That was the kind of friend he was.
But I also knew that I could not keep pretending to be a dentist forever. So I was looking for a more secure position in the Mir medical center. Then one day a Russian official came in and announced that he wanted to organize a group to teach first aid in the schools and to adults in evening classes. It was being done all through Poland, because with so few trained doctors people needed to be taught how to care for themselves.
I had studied first aid in school. So I volunteered to help organize those classes. And I was genuinely good at doing the organizing—no more faking needed. I soon became the administrator for the first aid programs throughout the region, assigning classes to the few doctors and nurses we had. I even had the opportunity to give instructor jobs to friends like Simon Kagan.
Jack and Rochelle Page 17