Jack and Rochelle

by Lawrence Sutin

  JACK

  I was working on how to get us all out of town. Finally I found out that the best route was through Sczeczin, a small town in eastern Germany. From there, we would have to figure out how to proceed further. We decided to travel there together with another couple we had met in Lodz—David and Nechama Garmizo. They were good people, and by combining our funds we could manage the bribe expenses better.

  We made our move in August 1945. The man we bribed was both Jewish and an officer in the Soviet army. He sympathized with us, but he still wanted his payoff. He did get us all on a Soviet army truck with a canvas camouflage covering. Then he covered us up with boxes and boxes of supplies. And he told us that the truck would pass through a Soviet checkpoint and that if we made a sound we would all end up in Siberia or dead. We made it through safely.

  In Sczeczin, we stayed only a few days, renting a room from a German family with a large house. Immediately we started checking out the possibilities for getting to Berlin. We were very frightened the whole time we were in Sczeczin—it was a mixed German and Polish population, and memories of the war were still very fresh with everyone. There were no smiling faces from the landlord’s family, or from the people we passed as we walked through the streets.

  Luckily, we very quickly arranged to get to Berlin, which was by now no more than a day’s drive away. Again, we found a Russian army officer to bribe and the three of us were hidden on a supply truck—not as large as the last one, more like an oversized jeep with a canvas-covered storage bed.

  We were very anxious to make it to the American sector of Berlin, because we had learned that there was a Jewish-American relief organization established there called HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society]. There was also UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration], which helped Jewish refugees. But mostly we wanted to reach a territory that was administered by Americans—not by Russians, Poles, or Germans.

  All the same, we had no idea what to expect if we made it to Berlin. We knew only that we could have greater peace of mind in terms of our day-to-day safety. The past was weighing so heavily upon us that it was difficult to think about the future.

  ROCHELLE

  Everyone was telling us that getting to Israel was difficult if not impossible. The British wouldn’t allow it. And the Western countries didn’t want us either—there were very strict policies and quotas controlling immigration by Jewish survivors. So we were thinking to ourselves, “Are we just going to wind up sitting in a refugee camp in Germany? In the lion’s den?”

  JACK

  The last border crossing into Berlin would be the most difficult of all. That was because Berlin was a highly contested area, carved up into sectors by the four major Allies, and so movement in and out of the city was under very careful scrutiny. But we had all taken so many chances since we first ran away from the German ghettos that we really weren’t so frightened by this.

  The ride was a very bumpy one. I remember that we were all packed together very tightly and were tossed up and down. There was a little piece of protuding metal in the frame just above my father’s head. Julius kept hitting it and his skull began to bleed. He showed tremendous control—he never moaned or made so much as a sound, because we had been warned to keep absolute silence. We put a handkerchief on it to stop the bleeding. I was afraid that he had been seriously injured. But he came through all right.

  At last we reached the final checkpoint leading into Berlin. The officer we had bribed knew just how to handle the guards. He handed them a bottle of vodka and told them that he was just transporting supplies. After a few minutes of conversation they waved him through.

  After some more driving, the officer pulled the truck over to a corner and leaned in back to whisper to us. We were still in the Russian sector of Berlin. He couldn’t take us all the way into the American sector, because he had no right to enter that sector. But the American sector was only a block away. That block was a no-man’s-land, he said, disputed between Russia and America and sporadically patrolled by both. It was up to us to make it the rest of the way. He said to us, “Get out of this truck and run. If the Russians catch you, you’ll know that it’s Russian territory tonight! There’s nothing more I can do for you. Run like hell!”

  We grabbed the little baggage we had and we ran. We made it past that block and a block or two more. We saw no one. It was nighttime, and Berlin was a badly bombed-out city. We saw a few standing buildings but many more that were nothing but rubble.

  But even though we didn’t know where the Americans were, we knew that we were in their sector at last. And that was a tremendous relief to us. For the first time, the war felt really over.

  X

  From Germany to America

  ROCHELLE

  We were definitely confused. Now that we were finally in the American sector of Berlin, we were lost!

  It was made even more strange by the fact that Berlin was so badly bombed-out that in some directions you could see for miles.

  But we kept walking and began running into people and asking directions. And after a few hours, we met someone with a car who knew his way around. The man gave us a ride to the building where HIAS carried on its operations.

  When we went inside, we saw that there were maybe two hundred Jewish refugees from all over Europe. That was the temporary location where all the newcomers were being kept. There were four large rooms, with roughly fifty Jews to a room. Each person was given a cot, a blanket, and some canned food. There was also a little cafeteria where you could get something hot to eat or drink.

  HIAS put us up that night. The next day it was explained to us that we would be transferred in a few days to a DP [Displaced Persons] camp somewhere in Germany. There had been several of those established in various locations throughout what would become West Germany. Every day the names of some of the Jewish refugees were called and they were taken off by trucks for resettlement in these DP camps.

  Finally our names were called. We had been assigned at random to the DP camp in Feldafing. Our driver was a black man—the first black man we had ever seen. We didn’t get a chance to talk much with him because he was up front in the cab with one of the male Jewish refugees for company. The rest of us sat in the back freight bed. It was a drive of two days, in September 1945. It was cold and drizzly most of the time. We covered ourselves with blankets.

  Feldafing was a little community not far from Munich in southern Germany. It had been a German army-training center, and there was a cluster of seventy houses that had been built to house German army personnel and their families. Those houses were now being used for the DP camp, which had a Jewish refugee population of two hundred or more. In the room to which we were assigned, there were roughly thirty other people. We slept on bunks.

  The camp was run jointly by HIAS and UNRRA. The UNRRA officials registered us and supplied us with food and clothing. They also asked us straight off if we had relatives anywhere in the Western world … places like the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa. If so, they would make contact with those relatives for us and let them know where we were. The idea was that perhaps those relatives could help us economically or even make it possible for us to join them.

  JACK

  Julius had a brother, Louis, who had left Russia for Johannesburg, South Africa, well before World War II began. Louis sent us a few packages of food and a little bit of money. But Julius was not close to his brother, whom I never met. And we had no interest in going to live in South Africa.

  We asked again about Israel, and again we were told that the British would never let us go there. They were trying to maintain peace with the surrounding Arab lands by forbidding further Jewish immigration.

  As for America, we knew that Rochelle had some family in America—her Uncle Herman had gone to America before World War I. She had never met him and didn’t know how to contact him.

  So we stayed for a few months in Feldafing in a kind of limbo.

  Then the auth
orities decided to close up the Feldafing camp and to transfer us to a new camp located in a suburb of Munich. The new camp was called Nei Freimann. During the Third Reich, the camp—which was like a small town, with maybe two hundred houses—had been used to house SS officers and their families.

  Nei Freimann was much nicer than Feldafing. The houses were nothing fancy—they had a small downstairs and a small upstairs that was a finished attic area. The houses were each shared by three Jewish families—each family had one room, with a common kitchen. There was also a small shared bathroom—the toilet was a wooden bench set up over a hole in the ground that we cleaned out twice a year.

  Our address, I remember, was Tulinger Street, number eleven. It was our first real home in five years.

  Rochelle and I lived in a small room downstairs, and Julius had his own even smaller room—almost a closet—next to ours. In the center of our bedroom were a table and chairs for dining. It was at that table that Julius made the crayon drawings, based on his wartime memories, that have been reproduced in this book.

  There was a little front yard with a small plum tree and a small apple tree. In the backyard was a little barn filled with hay and old broken-down pieces of furniture. And next to the barn was a little garden, nicely fenced-in, with some vegetables and a few more fruit trees. In the summer months we could sit in the garden and relax in private. We even rigged up a little shower back there. The workings were very simple: we punched holes in a bucket, hung it up on a tree branch, and poured water through it with another solid bucket. We took turns. A wonderful luxury!

  We were settled, but we would have been living on just the bare basics if we had depended strictly on HIAS and UNRRA. I decided to find a way to make some money for us. In the UNRRA supplies we received, American cigarettes were included. I didn’t smoke, so I began to accumulate the cigarettes to trade on the black market, where they were much in demand. In that way I managed to obtain a very fine Leica camera, one that had been used during the war by the Luftwaffe for aerial surveillance. And I began to teach myself photography. I managed also to obtain on the black market an enlarging machine, along with other equipment, so I could develop my own photographs in our little room.

  I started by taking pictures of small children and of family groups to sell to the families. I was already writing news stories for a Jewish newspaper that had been started up especially for survivors living in German DP camps. It was called the Landsberger Zeitung. One of the great services it performed was to publish lists of names of survivors and their whereabouts, so that survivors could find their families, friends, and loved ones. For the paper I wrote eight or so articles—memoir essays—describing not only my experiences with the partisans, but also recounting acts of heroism by fellow fighters, such as my friend Simon Kagan. I soon arranged to start taking pictures for the newspaper as well. Soon I became their lead photographer and was assigned to major events like the visit of General Eisenhower to the Nei Freimann camp in 1946. Things went so well with the paper that, when one of its editors managed illicitly to emigrate to Israel to work on the Hebrew newspaper HaBoker [The Morning], he sent me an invitation to come to Israel to take on a reporter’s job there. It was very flattering and exciting, but it meant nothing without a visa for myself, my wife, and my father. And that was still, as a practical matter, impossible.

  By taking pictures for families and for the newspapers, I became quite well known within the Nei Freimann camp. But all the same, I was very surprised by what came out of all this familiarity. There was an election held to form a committee of refugee Jews who would work with UNRRA to help administer the camp. Some people put my name on the ballot. There were maybe a couple of dozen names in all. And I was elected as the leader of the committee! That I never expected.

  I had a number of duties that were very satisfying. We organized day-care centers where mothers who needed to work could leave their children. And we set up schools in some of the houses, where small classes of children could get real attention from their teachers. We also managed to convince the American leaders working for UNRRA that, even though we had a doctor in the camp, he couldn’t be of real help to us unless he received adequate medical supplies. That was accomplished. Finally, we established a nice series of cultural programs—regular film showings, and even occasional stage performances by Jewish American singers and performers who would come over to entertain us.

  But the leadership position did not give me sufficient power to make all of the changes in the camp management that should have been made. For example, I was in charge of making sure that the supplies of clothing that came to Nei Freimann were distributed equally amongst all of the Jewish refugees. But throughout the system of clothing delivery and distribution, there were crooked dealings. Good clothing would be stolen overnight and then sold on the black market the very next day.

  ROCHELLE

  The situation was known to everyone. Officially, America was very good in sending clothing. As a practical matter, the good clothing seldom reached the people they were intended for—at least not without a high black-market price. That’s why this little rhyming Yiddish song became popular in our camp:

  Lebn zol America, in naches und in gedule.

  Vos zi hot unz ungeshiekt, onetzes afule!

  [Long live America, through good times and through bad.

  What she has sent to us—a bounty of rags!]

  JACK

  The situation was the same with linens, towels, Hershey bars, cigarettes, or favorite foods like sugar, fresh milk, eggs, bread, or Spam and other canned meat. Those were somehow always unavailable—the truck hadn’t arrived.

  ROCHELLE

  But there was always plenty of powdered milk, powdered eggs, peanut butter, and ketchup.

  JACK

  And if you went around the corner to the black market, there were all the items on sale that they had just told you hadn’t arrived.

  There was at least one definite benefit for us from my position as camp leader. I had been given a set of official stamps for use in creating identification documents for incoming refugees. That meant that I could make sure that Julius, Rochelle, and I had all the documentation we needed to live safely. It also meant that it was easy for me to arrange things for people whom we especially wanted to help. That was important, because we had found out that an aunt of Rochelle’s, named Ronke, along with her daughter Sofka, had survived and were living in a DP camp in the English sector of West Germany.

  It was a chance to reunite with real family, and so I not only arranged for documents, but also for Ronke and Sofka to move into a spare room in our house that had opened up when the former residents had managed to emigrate to the West. We all became very close to each other. It was an atmosphere we had thought we would never experience again. Now Rochelle and I each had some living family members. Later we became friends with a second surviving daughter of Ronke’s, named Eva, and with her husband Sam as well. But they did not move to Nei Freimann.

  But Rochelle went beyond family in her hospitality. She made our house the social center for all of Nei Freimann. Her reputation among the Jewish survivors was second to none. If you had just arrived in the camp, you were told that if you went to Mama Sutin’s place you could get something to eat, to drink, even a place to sleep for the first night or two, until you got settled. Our guest bed was the dining-room table in our kitchen, which we covered with blankets.

  Rochelle’s most popular dish was pickled herring. It was delicious. People would crowd into our kitchen to get their servings.

  ROCHELLE

  I was pickling herring twice a week and I still couldn’t keep up with the demand. It was a two-day process: washing the herring, soaking it, pickling it. The smell of the herring would fill our little house. With the pickled herring I would serve bread and butter—the bread was challah [Jewish egg bread] that I would bake several loaves at a time. I also baked sweet rolls. People would sit at our table and eat and thank me as if those were the fi
nest delicacies in the world.

  I enjoyed having family and friends to cook for. There was a man who arrived in Nei Freimann during that time who had lived down the block from me in Stolpce. His name was David Zuchowicki. Today he lives in Israel and we are still in contact. Back then he was a skinny survivor, a very warm and funny man. We became friends immediately. He was always declaring his love for me then, and he still does today—all in good fun. I remember that when David first arrived, the kitchen table was already taken for the night by another guest. So we took the door of our bedroom off its hinges, laid it flat on two chairs, and there was a cot for David.

  It was a pleasure to feel so much a part of that new life of friends and family. But there was something that still felt missing inside of me.

  After I had lost the baby in Lodz, I was so devastated. A child had been taken away who belonged to me—and I felt a tremendous need to replace him somehow. I couldn’t wait to get pregnant again. I wasn’t alone in that—most of the young Jewish couples around us in Nei Freimann were starting families. They wanted to begin a new generation, to affirm to themselves and to the world that some of the Jewish people had survived and would make new lives for themselves.

  In June 1946, we succeeded. That was a great joy, but I was also very worried. I was afraid that it would happen again—that I would never give birth to a live baby.

  The baby was due in early February. It was a comfort to me that this time I had my aunt Ronke living in our house. She talked to me and helped to make me feel ready.

  During the time I was pregnant, a number of our close friends suggested to Jack and me that we conduct a real Jewish wedding ceremony to declare our love for each other. That wasn’t a strict legal necessity for us. We had already obtained three different sets of papers—from the Soviets, the Poles, and the Germans—confirming that legally we were married. But the idea was that a Jewish ritual, as opposed to a civil ceremony, would carry with it more emotion and joy.