Holocaust (30 page)

The first picture was a pen-and-ink drawing—bleak, terrifying, entitled “Condemned.” Three bodies dangled from a gallows. SS men stood about leering. The second was called “Last Voyage”—a pencil drawing of a wagonload of coffins, each marked with a Star of David.

“Yours?” Karl asked.

“All of us.”

Maria called from the window. “Commandant,” she said. “And an inspecting party.”

Frey rolled up the drawings and returned them to the space beneath the loose board in his table.

Seconds later the SS commandant, an Austrian named Rahm, and two civilians entered. The civilians, as nearly as Maria remembers, were from the International Red Cross—Swiss, perhaps.

Rahm, the SS chief, asked cheerfully, “And how are my artists today?”

Everyone came to attention. Frey answered for all. “Quite well, Herr Commandant. All of us busy.”

Rahm beamed at his guests. “These gentlemen are from the Red Cross. They have heard about our extensive art program, our creative painters, and wanted to visit the studio. Quite an atelier, eh, gentlemen? Hardly a torture chamber, as the Jewish press keeps insisting in America. Frey, show our visitors those portraits of children.”

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 Vanya 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.

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.