Out of the Shoebox (12 page)

This
is where the diary ends.

Zelda
Finkelman-Liebling was born on March 24th, 1918 in Chortkow to Eli and Lifka
Finkelman. She studied at the Polish high school and graduated from teachers
college in Lvov on the day the German bombing started. She married Joel (Lolo)
Liebling and the two survived the war together. They were liberated on March
24th, 1944.

They
were the only survivors from their respective families. Lijuchnia did not
survive.

They
had two children in the US, Mordechai and Linette.

Joel
passed away in 1988, Zelda in 1998, may they rest in peace.

Lijuchnia

***

It
is rare to find memoirs of a Ukrainian who was a boy at the time and a witness
to the extermination of Chortkow's Jews. Despite the fact that this short
account was written after the fact and was undoubtedly edited to be "politically
correct”, or perhaps because it was, the anti-Semitism that was prevalent at
the time is so glaring. In just one page Jan's account summarizes the fate and
end of Chortkow's Jewish community.

Jan
Kruczkowski, a Polish boy from Chortkow who lived near Jews tells of this
period:

"The
Jews had completely taken over our town.  It was hard to compete with them in
commerce. They had small stores and large warehouses. The owned both grand
houses and seedy ones. They got rich slowly but methodically. They lived in the
center of town and were incredibly organized. They had schools, sports teams,
synagogues and even an athletics club called Hashmonaim. The poorer
neighborhood – the slum – was also in the center of town and later the Germans
turned it into a ghetto. I would often see how Jews would do business and
bargain. They would haggle aggressively and would praise their wares for hours.
It was difficult to get out of there without buying anything. Often people
would buy something just so they could leave the store and the annoying, pushy
salesman. The Poles, I'm afraid, did not have that talent. Jews also took over
transit. They had buses, wagons for their wares and carriages for people. Those
carriages were needed by the people of Chortkow because the town sprawls over a
large area and has an uneven topography with many hills.

I
had daily contact with Jews. I walked with them to school, and often we would
play together, but mostly we would fight. I sometimes threw rocks at their
miserable houses, especially on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. I never passed
up a chance to pull the payot of spoiled Jewish boys from rich families.

I
lived surrounded by Jews. On one side were the Weissmans, on the other side of
the yard were the Eisenbaums and their fat son Czesho who was my age, and
across the street were the Pifers who had a store. My mother had a good friend
– Trenia Golombioska. She always had poor people living at her place. Srul
lived there, a little boy with a runny nose, and his older brother Moshko.

To
this day I can smell the sweet onions, the stale lard, and the stench of the
garbage that was ever present in their house.

I
remember Srul who would look at me with hungry eyes whenever I brought candy.

In
1942 they created a ghetto in the center of town for thousands of Jews which
was completely sealed off from the outside. They gathered all the Jews from
Chortkow and the rest of the region. This Jewish quarter was in the center of
town and was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. They used concrete to block the
exits, windows and doors that faced the Arian side. At the entrances and exits
to the ghetto they posted the Jewish and Ukrainian militiamen.

At
first the Jews could still leave the ghetto to visit the gentiles they were
friends with, tell them all about the horrible conditions in the ghetto and the
cruelty of the militia. They would tell that even among themselves there were
fights for survival. The strong took advantage of the weak, the rich ignored
the poor; gone was Jewish solidarity. Fear of death took over and stifled any
feelings of honor and justice.

I'm
afraid the same things happened among the Polish people. Often they didn't want
to help, and wouldn't give even a slice of bread. They would shoo away from
their doorstep Jewish kids who came begging. Luckily there weren't many of
them, but sometimes you just had to say no.

I
remember, when the ghetto was being liquidated, a Jewish man we knew came over,
an old neighbor from Kolyoba Street, and begged us to save his life. We
refused. Our situation didn't allow us to hide him. We lived on a main street
that saw a lot of traffic and was open to all. We had a large family and my
parents couldn't risk everyone’s lives in order to hide a Jew. Did our wretched
neighbor understand our situation? He left a fur with us, and never came back
for it... for a long time I could not let go of the image of the wretched man
who begged for his life. Unfortunately, his Jewish looks left him with no
chance of surviving.

The
summer of 1942 saw the first Aktion. I saw Jews led in groups of four along
Kolyoba Street towards the train station where train cars were waiting for
them. In the first row were Rabbis and older men in their traditional clothes,
long beards and payot. Sometimes younger men helped support them. They prayed
loudly and wailed. It was a horrific sight. I saw them all: Czesho Eisenbaum
with his parents, Pifer (who had a store) with their son who was a friend of
mine from school, and old Wasserman. When they passed by the house they waved
and shouted. I guess they were saying goodbye. We stood at the window and
didn't know what to do, how to act. Fear of the thugs stopped me from getting
closer to neighbors and acquaintances even though we all knew they were walking
to their death."

Based
on the Polish-to-Hebrew by Yehudit Shifris (as published on chortkov.org)

***

I
assume that in most families of second-generation Holocaust survivors, or those
who managed to reach Palestine before the Holocaust, there lurks an untold
story.

The
first half of the 20th century was a tumultuous period, full of awful
tragedies, expectations, new beginnings, the budding of new life, hope and
disappointments. Most of us learned to live alongside the collective family
memories with their emotion-laden silence. We picked that up from our parents,
some of whom were experts in suppression and concealment. Many viewed memories
as a weakness, something tying them to a trauma from which they wished to
escape for good. Dealing with memories was tantamount to entering a danger
zone, where they would have had to cope again with a personal trauma that had
required all their energy to distance themselves from, so that they could lead
a normal life. Those who led their lives in the shadows of Memory Lane often
became depressed. But most welcomed the challenges of life in a new country as
a chance to ignore the past, if not by obliterating the memories then at least
by not talking about them with their offspring. Like many of my generation, I
was born into that way of life. The past was not spoken of in our home. Perhaps
they also wanted to shelter me from the knowledge of evil.

Not
only the memories were hidden, so were the photos. The cardboard shoeboxes and
yellowing envelopes containing old photos were a mystery to me. Many Holocaust
survivors and early settlers kept old photos: of their families, friends, and
the places they came from. Those pictures were kept in envelopes and shoeboxes,
never organized in photo-albums. Only once these people had children did they
start placing the new pictures in albums. It was as if the old history was
locked away, hidden and erased from memory, or at least downplayed, stashed
away, isolated from everyday life, while the new life was deemed worthy of
preserving as new memories. For all I knew, maybe they did sometimes look at
the old photos, but if so, it was done secretively, far from our inquisitive
eyes, on nights when sleeplessness reigned. It’s an amazing yet common
phenomenon: many of us, after our parents’ demise, found a veritable treasure
of old photos, at least some of which were a mystery to us: Who were these
people? How were they related to us? Where do they belong in this memory
puzzle? I believe that, whether consciously or not, these pictures were kept
hidden away in order to avoid questions, fearing that answers to those
questions would stir memories and feelings that were too difficult to cope
with.

My
gaze into the past is like gazing through fog. That insight came to me during
my trip with my wife to Acadia National Park in the US. At that point in time
I’d just received the memoirs of Tonia Sternberg – Pepe Kramer’s friend –
possibly the only witness to the murder of my mother’s family. One morning,
Raya and I went out on a boat tour among the inlets and islands along the shoreline
of Acadia National Park in Maine. That day, sailing conditions seemed adverse
initially: a thick fog enveloped the water, strangling the seascape under its
gray blanket, and we couldn’t see much. But gradually, we got used to the
grayness, heard sounds and voices through the fog, and glimpsed sights that
emerged from the mist: a fishing boat pulling up its crab net; a buoy with its
cylindrical head facing skyward, topped with a red bell, its clanging monotone
sounding to the rhythm of the waves, warning of an approaching collision. From
time to time the shape of a lighthouse emerged through the thick fog indicating
a new shoreline, a relic of days gone by when this was a busy water way
frequented by ships. Much later, Raya told me sailing through the fog felt like
an enchanted voyage. The fog alternately revealed and concealed the secrets of
the place, creating tension between the observable and the hidden, and the
feeling that the landscape was not to be taken at face value. Throughout this
half-day voyage we didn't see the entire shoreline, nor an uninterrupted view
from one horizon to the other, even once. Nonetheless we did not feel as if we
were missing anything, but rather it felt like a voyage among sights and sounds
that told the story of a place. This experience helped me explain and define to
myself my feelings about uncovering my family’s past: a type of looking through
mists where the visible is only a fraction of the picture, most of which is
hidden; but the light flickering through the haze enabled me to paint a picture
of my family and connect with hitherto unknown memories of a past long gone. I
managed to feel a longing for my father, whom I’d erased from my memory years
ago – or so I thought. And suddenly he was back.

My
father had been replaced by a picture on the wall. My father died on December
21, 1958. The Hebrew date was the 10th of Tevet [5719]. That’s why I hated
Israel’s national poet, Haim Nachman Bialik, who was born on the same Hebrew
day (though in 1873). Every year, when my school held its annual Bialik
festivities for the poet, celebrating his birth, I would secretly weep for my
father’s death. Whenever our homeroom teacher wrote that date in chalk on the
blackboard, I’d brace myself for the question: “Children, who was born on this
day, years ago?” Though no one in class knew the answer better than I, I never
bothered to raise my hand or call out the answer: I was too busy mourning my
father. Years later, the emphasis on the 10
^th
of Tevet was shifted
to other memorials: the day of remembrance for all Holocaust victims whose
burial place is unknown; and the fast of Tevet commemorating the beginning of
the siege on Jerusalem laid by Nebuchadnezzar II and ending with the
destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. As a child, I thought that
those events were more suitable to commemorate my father’s death. Today,
looking back, I wonder how come he died on one of the two days on which he used
to pay his respects to the memory of his murdered family – Yom Kippur (the Day of
Atonement) and the general day of remembrance.

I
was raised in a secular home. My parents celebrated Jewish holidays, but as a
rule didn’t attend synagogue services. Once a year only, on Yom Kippur, my
father used to go to synagogue, to take part in the Yizkor prayer in memory of
his family and friends. My mother kept score with God for not having prevented
the murder of her family, and chose to pay her respects to their memory at
home. My parents used to light a yahrzeit (memorial) candle every Yom Kippur
and 10
^th
of Tevet.

It
did not rain in December 1958 – it was a drought year. On a Sunday night, a
cool but cloudless evening, my father died. He died suddenly, at home,
following a heart attack. Only a wall stood between me, and my father with my
weeping mother. Within a short while I was sent upstairs to our neighbors, the
Rothsteins. I was told briefly that Father wasn’t feeling well and that
everything will be all right. But apparently it was not all right. The
following morning I was sent to “aunt” Rachel, a close friend of my mother’s,
where I stayed another day. I was told that my father was unwell, my mother
took him to the hospital but he couldn’t have visitors. My father’s funeral was
held on that day. While I was playing Monopoly with imaginary friends, my
father was being laid to rest. The next morning I was sent back to school,
without a word of explanation. I guess a second-grader shouldn’t miss school,
certainly not for two days running… My time in school was brief: already at the
morning assembly a kid came up to me and asked whether I was the one whose dad
died the other day. My reaction was swift and hard: I punched him in the face.
I don’t think I was punished for it, but the truth quickly sank in. The looks
of the other school kids left no doubt: my father was dead. On my way home, I
was greeted by the obituary notices pasted on the pillars at the entrance to
the building. I think I've never tried to visually recall those seven days of
mourning. But today, through the mists of time, I vaguely recall an image of
myself entering our home. My mother, pale and puffy-eyed, surrounded by her
women friends. My sister, sitting in a corner, watching me, dazed. And as if in
slow-motion, they both got up and walked over to me. I don’t remember much crying,
neither mine nor my sister’s. I think I felt a dissociation, which accompanied
me all my life. No one ever spoke to me of, nor discussed with me, my father’s
death. He just died one day, left our lives, to be replaced by a picture on the
wall.

I
never said goodbye to my father. Over the years, very gradually, my childhood
memories of him faded until they disintegrated completely. Only his picture on
the wall over my mother’s bed continued to stare at me for years, until the day
I noticed that the photo had been changing, getting younger with each passing
year.

Memories
should be nurtured. That’s the only way to preserve them. And nurturing them is
done through a story that breathes life and validity into them. You relate the
memories, and they return the favor by growing stronger and finding a safe,
permanent spot in your consciousness, until they become part of you. That’s how
the story of going fishing with Father evolved into the nearly sole memory of
my childhood; a live memory that lets me describe details in the most amazing
clarity: My father’s clothes, down to the last detail; the clothes his friends
Grave, Grossman and Israel wore; the minutiae of the decrepit balcony of the
one-story cement building from which we fished; the slippery rock I climbed
onto, the  better to cast the bait into the water; the way the fish looked and
smelled, and the salty smell of the water. I caught thirteen fish, whereas
they, the expert fishermen, didn’t catch a single one. No wonder this was the
memory I chose to nurture – memories of a proud kid. For years I’d see those
images in front of my eyes at bedtime, during school, during hard times, and
times when I thought of my father. Moments when I suddenly missed him, or just
out of the blue, for no apparent reason. Over the years, I gathered facts about
my father’s life. He seemed to me a man who made his dreams come true until his
dream was cut short. According to others’, he was the persevering type, a man
who tenaciously strove to reach his goal, who felt compelled to reach the
targets he set for himself. That’s what drove him to leave Chortkow for Vienna
to study engineering and architecture. That’s how he decided to immigrate to
Palestine. That’s why he didn’t give up but continued to court my mother
despite her parents’ objection and returned to Europe to propose to her and
marry her. That caused him to insist on leaving Poland, with my mother and her
sister, when WWII broke out, brought them to Palestine, saving their lives. And
that was the motivating force behind his decision to quit working as an
architect and switch to a career of a philatelist, converting his hobby into a
profession that would provide my family with an income for a long time after he
passed away.  Though I always drank in every word when people spoke of my
father, still I could not create a complete picture of him in my mind. Perhaps
because, over the years, my mother stopped talking about him. My sister never
talked about him, and our relatives kept their comments to occasional
observations such as “You’re so much like him…” or “You have the same
personality.” Such comments begged more questions, aroused my curiosity; but
they were never accompanied by any substantial story that could add details to
his character, paint him as a real figure rather than one becoming increasingly
vaguer to me with time.

My father’s home at 279 Szpitalna,
Chortkow

And
suddenly he was back. The story of the lot brought my father’s memory back from
oblivion. During the year of my quest I kept thinking that I was looking not
only for the lot in this puzzle but for my father’s story, and with it, the
story of the family I never got to know.

I
got to know my father’s assertiveness, and to marvel at his command of the
Hebrew language and his beautiful penmanship in the new language he learned in
his youth, before coming to Palestine. The search for information related to
the forgotten lot managed to create a new memory. The missing details were
completed by fragmented facts and the process of discovery itself, which, combined,
created a new experience, a kind of collective memory of the family and the
era. This patchwork memory enabled me to learn not only about my father and my
family but also about the town of Chortkow and its fate.

During
my entire youth there were but two cases where the wall of silence cracked just
enough for me to peek into my parents’ “Chortkowian” past. In both cases it had
to do with books. First, there was The Chortkow Book – a book commemorating the
Chortkow community, edited by Dr. Yeshayahu Austri-Dunn published in 1967. The
second was “Af Echad, Af Echad Lo Ohev” – “No one, no one loves” by Ora
Shem-Or, published in 1969. The two books are quite different. The first is the
impressive work of the so-called Book Committee of the Chortkow Association,
and funded by them; the second is a collection of short stories by Israeli
writer Ora Shem-Or, née Sonnenschein, originally of Chortkow.