by Gerald Green
Karl and Felsher watched as Frey displayed some pastel drawings. The children looked like angels, not the starved, dirty, bread-grubbing kids Karl had seen outside.
“Charming,” one of the Swiss said. “Truly charming.”
Helena and I were now in what the Russian partisans, especially the Jews, called “a family camp.” Members of entire communities had fled to the forests—the old, the young, infants and people who were natural leaders like Uncle Sasha.
They lived in a true community—sharing, keeping family units intact as much as possible, looking after the sick and the old and trying to organize some kind of resistance against the Germans.
Uncle Sasha’s camp was one of the most famous. It varied in numbers from 100 to 150 people. They lived in temporary huts, tents, any kind of dwelling that could be hastily built and torn down. They were forever on the move, to keep out of the reach both of the Germans and of the Christian partisan bands, who would kill stray Jews without a moment’s hesitation. (Helena and I had been lucky in our encounter.)
The atmosphere in the family camp always seemed to me dreamlike, enshrouded in mists. People talked quietly, if at all. There was none of the noisy chatter, the gossiping, the arguing so characteristic of Jewish communities. These people had been witnesses to dreadful crimes against their families and friends; they had no time for argument among themselves, for trivia.
Only some of the children seemed to have escaped this change of character. They played ball, pulled practical jokes on one another, raced around the fireplaces and huts in the timeless way in which the young behave.
Helena and I became friendly with the young couple, Yuri and Nadya, who had been with Uncle Sasha the day they found us. They had run a photography shop in a Ukrainian village, had seen all of their relatives shot to death, had refused (as we did) to respond to a call to report to a “work camp” and had run off to the forests.
One night we ate our simple meal of groats and potatoes (food had to be bought at great risk from Ukrainian farmers, who might at any time inform on us) and we watched some men praying beyond the huts. One of the partisans was a rabbi named Samuel, a youngish man with a long, sorrowing face.
I noticed that Uncle Sasha did not join them. He sat with one of his men, poring over a scrawled map of the area, planning some kind of raid. We now had three rifles, all stolen from local gendarmes, but we needed a good deal more before we could attack the Germans.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Sasha?” Yuri asked. “He’s a doctor.”
“You’re joking. Where’s his office?” I was assailed with memories of my father—the house on Groningstrasse, the waiting room, the smell of medical alcohol as my father washed his hands. And the way he took a pulse so gently, or taped my sprained ankles, as expertly as any team trainer. And his heavy tread on the stairs, his voice, ever gentle and considerate.
“He can still take out an appendix. And with a kitchen knife. Delivered two babies since we’ve been here.”
“And the rabbi?”
“Samuel Mishkin. From the same village as Sasha. He wants to fight with us when we go out.”
“That’s my idea of a rabbi,” I said. “He might get me back into the synagogue someday.” Karl and I had not been in one since we were bar-mitzvah’d.
More men joined the rabbi in evening prayer. They bobbed and jerked their heads. Their eyes were closed. The shawls covered their heads and they seemed lost in some other world.
One of the boys, by mistake, tossed the ball into the midst of the prayers.
The rabbi picked it up and threw it away. “Get away,” he said sternly. “This is a shul.”
“It don’t look like one,” the kid said.
“I’ll take care of you later,” the rabbi said. “Where Jews gather to pray is a House of God. Now, go.”
Helena and I both laughed.
“Like when I was a kid,” I said. “I was always getting chased away for playing ball on Saturday.”
The camp—misty, smoke-filled—made me think again of my home. I asked Yuri. “How did you people get here?”
“Most of us came from Koretz with Uncle Sasha. He led us out. The Germans shot his wife and his two daughters. They killed more than two thousand Jews in one afternoon. Made them dig their own graves, undressed them, shot them. A bullet in the neck. My parents were killed. My brothers. Most of Nadya’s family. One of Uncle Sasha’s patients, he was a Ukrainian, a lawyer, a good guy, he warned us in advance. He hid a bunch of us in his cellar until the roundup was finished. Then he sneaked us out. His name was Lakov, and someday I’ll see that people remember him, if I live.”
Nadya picked up the story. “Other Jews joined us. From Berdichev, Zhitomir. All the ghettoes were being wiped out. The Germans were killing all the Jews.”
“But why? Why?” Helena asked.
“They don’t need reasons,” I said. “Any excuse works for them, because they have the guns and we don’t.”
Yuri shifted his legs, threw a twig into the fire. “This is our fifth camp. We have to keep wandering. They know we’re out here, and every now and then the SS sends patrols into the forests. They don’t want a single Jew left alive in Russia.”
“When will you fight back?” I asked.
“When we have enough guns,” he answered.
Nadya shook her head. “It is not easy. Uncle Sasha says we cannot desert the old people, the children, the sick. That is why he calls this a family camp. We must survive as a community, he says, a yishuv.”
I looked at the partisan leader. He was sitting alone now, smoking one of those flimsy Russian cigarettes, staring into the flames. He had a tough, lined face, but underneath it there was gentleness and compassion, and again I saw my father.
“Why doesn’t he pray with the others?” I asked.
Nadya responded: “He ripped his prayer shawl after his family was murdered. He tells all who come here, no more accepting death, no more marching peacefully to death. We will die anyway, so we must die fighting.”
“But,” Helena said, “you are just a handful of people. Thousands have been killed, tens of thousands who did nothing.”
“Be tolerant,” Nadya said. “People were overwhelmed. They never believed it would happen. And who had guns, who knew how to organize a resistance? Before they knew it, they were arrested, marched off, killed.”
Uncle Sasha got up from his seat near the fire and walked toward us. He seemed tired all the time, driving himself to another day of wandering, keeping the “family” together.
“Weiss, you can start guard duty,” he said to me. “You know how to shoot?”
I pointed to the old bolt-action rifle he shoved at me. “Will that thing fire?”
“If it doesn’t use it as a club.”
“That I can do.”
He smiled. “You look as though you’ve been in a few fights.”
“I have. And I won most of them.”
We started walking to the edge of the camp, where the sentries were posted, twenty-four hours a day. He looked at me from the corner of one eye. “What are you smiling about?”
“I was thinking … my father is a doctor.”
“Where?”
“He was in Berlin for many years. Then he was deported. He lives in Warsaw, the last I heard.” We paused. Helena was standing nearby. “Funny. He once wanted me to go to medical school.”
Uncle Sasha laughed. “Couldn’t look at blood?”
“No. Just a rotten student.”
I felt a warmth toward him, something vital that had been missing in my life since the day my father had been deported, since I had run away from Germany.
Helena came forward. “May I walk his post with him?”
“I guess so,” Uncle Sasha said.
A boy of about fourteen, carrying another of those ancient rifles, approached.
“Vanya will show you your post. Stay awake. And no talking. You are soldiers.”
We started to follow V
anya into the woods. On an impulse, I turned and spoke to Uncle Sasha. “That fellow Samuel, the rabbi,” I said.
“What about him?”
“Will he perform a wedding?”
“Why not? And you can even owe him his fee. He’s married several people here already. But save the romance for when you’re not on guard duty.”
Helena kissed me. She was shivering slightly. We held hands. I slung the rifle over my shoulder.
We were married by Rabbi Mishkin two days later. The women of the camp made a wreath for Helena’s hair out of evergreen leaves, and a veil from an old lace shawl that one of the women had brought from her village.
One of the partisans was a fiddler and he played strange, wild tunes, dancing around us, now acting the fool, now making his violin wail as if crying. My mother would surely have sniffed at his performance.
We stood under a canopy—the Yiddish word for it is chupa, I learned, with much joking about my “goyishness”—and were married, joined as man and wife by the partisan rabbi.
“Some Jew,” Uncle Sasha said, teasing me, as the service was about to begin. “The yarmulka doesn’t even look like one on his head. He wears it as if it were a Boy Scout cap.”
Mercifully, it was a short ceremony. In deference to my ignorance, much of the service was conducted in Yiddish, close enough to German so that I understood it. Years ago, I had lost all my knowledge of the Hebrew Karl and I had briefly studied in cheder. Those strange vowels and impossible verbs had rattled around in my head, no competition for soccer scores, bicycling races, prize fights.
But I was respectful and happy, and when Helena and I exchanged rings—cheap copper bands, fashioned by a jeweler who was a member of Sasha’s band—and I kissed her gently, I felt fulfilled, part of an old tradition. An odd thought rattled through my head as the rabbi recited the service. If they want to kill us so desperately, then surely we are worthwhile, valid, of importance to the world….
“Beloved, come the bride to meet,” the rabbi intoned, “The Princess Sabbath let us greet …”
There was a reading from the Bible, none of which I understood, but which Sasha later translated for me. In distress I called upon the Lord and He answered me with great deliverance …
Finally, I was told to smash with my boot a kitchen glass set on the earth. (A good wine glass should have been used; but there was none in camp.)
I did so, shattering the glass.
People cheered, shouted, and the fiddler struck up a gay tune.
“Kiss the bride, kiss the bride!” all shouted.
“I suspect they’ve kissed a few times before,” Uncle Sasha said, winking at us.
Helena and I kissed. Her eyes were rimmed with tears.
“May your years be blessed with happiness, and fulfillment, and children,” the rabbi said. “And above all undying love for each other and for the Lord our God. In the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you are man and wife.”
Sasha dug me in the ribs. “New responsibilities now, Rudi. House, insurance, a burial society. Save your money.”
We laughed. Money! We lived like wandering ghosts, worse than gypsies. Perhaps it explains why I have adapted so well to life on the kibbutz. In my years of wandering I learned how little a man needs to get by.
People began to dance, holding arms, forming circles, kicking, singing. Sasha hugged me. “We will outlive these bastards who want to kill us,” he said. “And soon we will have our revenge. You and Helena and the other young ones will live in peace again, I swear it.”
Nadya took Helena’s arm. “We’re sorry there’s no roast goose for the wedding feast—not even a herring.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “We are happy.”
I was a bit embarrassed—I never liked being the center of attention unless it was on a soccer field—when they joined arms and danced around us.
Ten minutes later the wedding celebration ended.
Avram, one of the sentries, came racing into the camp. A Ukrainian farmer, one who had treated us decently and had traded with Uncle Sasha, had seen Nazi patrols along the road.
“Break camp,” Sasha ordered. “Tents down, fires out. We are moving out again.”
Helena and I gathered up our meager possessions—the tin cup and plate, the knife and fork, our blankets. “It wasn’t much of a honeymoon,” I said to her.
“You owe me one, Rudi.”
I took her in my arms. “And much more.”
Yuri grabbed us both, ordered us to help dismantle the tents and pack them.
So ended my wedding day. Soon we were marching, into the night, deeper into the forests.
Erik Dorf’s Diary
Minsk
February 1942
From the beginning of this damned incident, Heydrich and I had misgivings about it. (I don’t mean our overall operation; I mean this specific incident involving Reichsführer Himmler.)
I’ve gotten two stories on how it came about.
One is that Himmler asked Colonel Artur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B—the action team that is responsible for the Moscow area—to arrange a sample “liquidation,” so that he might himself see how the job was done.
The other story is that it was Nebe’s idea. Trying to curry favor with the boss.
In any case, neither Heydrich nor I liked the notion. We discussed it sotto voce, as we walked across a frozen field outside the Russian city of Minsk. Since this was just a “demonstration,” Nebe’s men had rounded up about a hundred Jews, all male except for two.
“Nebe is an idiot,” Heydrich whispered to me. “I know our esteemed Reichsführer better than he does. He’s full of theories, and he’s good at measuring Jewish skulls, but he doesn’t like to get close to blood.”
“Neither do I, sir,” I said.
“But you have gotten used to it,” the chief said.
I did not answer. But I suppose I have. In view of the great goal, the wartime necessity of isolating and diminishing Jewish influence, we must have the courage to face up to onerous tasks.
The hundred or so Jews were assembled alongside a deep ditch. They were naked. Nebe explained to Himmler that his men had already shot 45,000 Jews in the Minsk area.
Colonel Paul Blobel, who was walking with me, muttered, “Piker. We got rid of thirty-three thousand in two days at Babi Yar.”
The party halted perhaps twenty yards from where the Jews were standing, and a curious thing happened. Himmler’s eyes came to rest on a young Jew, quite tall, well formed, with blue eyes and blond hair.
To our amazement, the Reichsführer walked up to the youth and asked if he were a Jew, refusing to believe that such a Nordic-looking fellow could be one.
“Yes,” the man said. “I am a Jew.”
“Are both of your parents Jews?”
Heydrich and I exchanged looks—critical, dismayed.
“Yes.”
“Do you have any ancestors who were not Jews?”
“No.”
“Then I cannot help you.”
Heydrich whispered to me, “At least he did not deny his heritage. That took a bit of courage.”
I wondered if subconsciously Heydrich was thinking about the rumors of his own Jewish blood.
“Whenever you are ready, Reichsführer,” Nebe said.
“Yes … yes …”
The soldiers opened up with their machine pistols and the Jews fell in heaps into the ditch. We observed Himmler. He was trembling, sweating, wringing his hands. Incredible. This man who passes out orders daily on the mass murder of millions could not bear to see a hundred shot!
Through some strange coincidence, the two women in the group were not dead. They were merely wounded, and their naked arms kept reaching up, imploring.
“Kill them!” screamed Himmler. “Don’t torture them like that! Sergeant, kill them! Kill them!”
At once the women were dispatched with pistol shots in the neck.
Himmler stumbled about as if he were going to faint.
“First time … you realize …” He was choking.
“Miserable fucking chicken farmer,” Blobel said to me. “We kill Yids by the hundreds of thousands, and he gets sick when he sees a handful go to their Jewish God.”
Nebe then made things worse by telling the Reichsführer that this was a mere hundred, and that the good German soldiers who had to shoot thousands daily were being affected by it. Of course, they obeyed and they understood their duty to the Reich and to Hitler, but some of these men would be “finished” for life. (I disagree, but I said nothing; it is amazing how much cognac and cigarettes and loot from dead Jews can keep our enlisted men going—that and the assurance that as long as they are shooting Jews, they will not be shot at by the Red Army.)
Himmler, moved to his very soul, then made a brief speech to the assembled officers.
“I have never been prouder of German soldiers,” said the Reichsführer. There was a heavy smell of gunpowder in the air. A work party of Jews was shoveling dirt over the dead.
“The men are appreciative, Reichsführer,” Heydrich said.
Himmler’s eyes were glazed, lost behind his prissy pince-nez. “Your consciences can be clear. I take full responsibility before God and the Führer for all your acts. We must take a lesson from nature. There is combat everywhere. Primitive man understood that a bedbug was bad, a horse good. You may argue that bedbugs, rats and Jews have a right to live, and I might agree. But a man has a right to defend himself against vermin.”
His voice, that schoolmasterish, low voice, dwindled. In the privacy of this diary, I am forced to note that he is, with his pinched face, sparse hair, paunch, and sissified voice, hardly the ideal of the Aryan hero. How much more of an ideal is Reinhard Heydrich! No wonder they detest and distrust each other.
Himmler’s eyes took us all in. “Heydrich, Nebe, Blobel … all my good officers. This shooting is not the answer. We must look for more efficient ways of getting this business done.”
Later, Himmler was taken on a tour of an insane asylum. He told Nebe to finish off the inmates, but in an efficient, clean manner, something more “humane” than shooting. Nebe suggested dynamite.