I Shall Live (11 page)

Enlargement of the area in Poland where the Orenstein family was moving from town to town during the 1939–t1943.

One day in the middle of July, Felek, Sam, Father, and I were sitting in our room, discussing the situation. Father wasn't feeling well and was lying on the sofa. Our landlady looked through the open window and told us, “The Germans are going from house to house rounding up Jews for work.” We quickly decided to go upstairs to the attic. Father wouldn't join us. “I'm not going,” he said. “I'm sick—they can't use sick people to work for them.”

A minute later, from the little attic window, we saw an SS man and two Ukrainian policemen enter the house. First we heard the Ukrainians shout in broken German,
“Juden—Arbeit”
(Jews—work). Then we heard the German screaming, and there was a great deal of commotion. We saw them leave our house and enter the one next door, from which they soon emerged, taking our neighbor and his son with them. They continued down the street, looking for more Jews.

Our landlady came to the foot of the attic stairs and called, “They're gone. Hurry, your father needs help.” We ran downstairs. Father was sitting on the sofa, the top of his head covered with blood. “Don't worry, it's not bad,” he reassured us. We cleaned and bandaged the cut, which was superficial, while our landlady told us what had happened.

The SS officer had been angry at not finding any men in the house except for Father, and ordered him to get up from the sofa. “I'm sick. I can't go to work,” Father replied. The German put his revolver right to Father's temple and said,
“Verfluchte Jude
[Damned Jew], you come or I'll shoot you.” “Go ahead and shoot,” Father answered. “I can't go. I'm sick.” The German then struck Father on the head with the butt of his gun, spat, repeated “Verfluchte Jude,” and walked out, followed by the two Ukrainians.

As she recounted this, the landlady shook her head. “Your father is a
meshugene
(crazy). He tells a German, ‘Go ahead and shoot.' I thought he was a dead man for sure.” Once again Father had demonstrated his extraordinary coolness and toughness; how many men would refuse to obey an order with a gun to their heads?—especially when at the time it seemed to be merely a matter of a day's work.

We learned within an hour or so that the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers had gone searching through the main Jewish section of Ołyka, taken all the men they could find, about four or five hundred, loaded them into trucks, and driven off. The men's families were not particularly concerned; most thought they would be back by the end of the day. By evening, when the men had not yet returned, their families were beginning to worry, but not for their lives; it was more a question of their being hungry and perhaps mistreated.

The following morning a man came back with a bone-chilling tale. A Ukrainian school friend of one of the Jewish boys who had been taken away told his parents that from a distance, just outside the town, he had seen the Germans and the Ukrainians shoot all the Jews they had taken to “work” and bury them in ditches left over from World War I.

The general reaction was of disbelief. One of the men started
shouting, “He is a liar, an anti-Semite! He's trying to torture us with worry. The Germans wouldn't do that.” Sam, always the pessimist, thought the boy might be telling the truth. Felek and I didn't believe it. Father didn't say much; perhaps he agreed with Sam but didn't want to worry us. So many men had been taken away that in about half of all the Jewish families in Ołyka someone was gone—a father, a son, a son-in-law, an uncle, a cousin.

They waited nervously all that day, but there was still no news from the men. By next morning the nightmare was becoming a reality. One of the Ukrainian police confided in his girlfriend that it was true, the Jews had been killed. She in turn repeated the story to a Jewish friend of hers. Even then, faced with this confirmation, many people refused to believe it. They still thought the stories were being spread by anti-Semites who wanted to scare the Jews.

But as days passed and none of the men were heard from, the terrible truth had to be accepted—especially since we were now hearing similar stories from other nearby towns. Worse yet, actual eyewitness accounts of the mass killings of thousands and thousands of Jews, including women and children, were coming from the Russian side. A wounded German officer on the way home from the Russian front told one of the men working at the Ołyka train station of an unbelievable slaughter in Kiev: a hundred thousand Jews—men, women, and children—murdered in a ravine.
*

This was the first time we had heard of mass extermination, and at first I rejected the monstrous thought. Women, old people, babies, being murdered on such a scale—it was simply not conceivable. But while my mind pushed the thought away, my heart was gripped with terror. Most people refused to believe the story, unable to accept such a possibility, that not only they themselves, but
their entire families, the whole Jewish people, might be wiped out. They seized upon any rationalization, however improbable; perhaps the Germans considered all Jews inside “Old Russia” to be Communists. We, the “Europeans,” they would surely leave alone. These were frantic days and frantic discussions. It was difficult for us to absorb the thought of mass slaughter of little children and old people. How could we begin to grasp the fact that we were going to be killed just for having been born Jews—and that there was nothing on this earth we could do to prevent it?

In the meantime, the Germans continued to advance on all fronts. They surrounded Leningrad, occupied Kiev, then Kharkov, and were approaching Moscow. It seemed only a matter of days before Leningrad and Moscow would fall. How long could the Russian army continue to resist? Then I saw a bold red headline in a German army newspaper dated October 3, 1941: H
ITLER
: T
HE
W
AR IS
W
ON
. O
NLY
M
OPPING
-U
P
O
PERATIONS
R
EMAIN
.

I was crushed, my heart broken. This was the end of hope. I wept silently, in despair. Now that Hitler was the master of Europe, all her resources at his disposal, how long would it be before the free world could defeat Germany? Ten or twenty years—maybe never. It seemed unbelievable, illogical, insane, that this maniac, this mass murderer could control the destiny of hundreds of millions of lives, but he did. It seemed that nothing and nobody could stop him now. True, there was still America, with her fantastic productivity, but what good was she, an ocean away? And America hadn't even declared war on Germany. Only helpless little England was still free, fighting on alone, her sole defense the waters of the English Channel.

The world was dark, dark, dark! Even to an optimist like me, everything looked hopeless. For the first time ever I began questioning whether life was worth living. Hitler seemed invincible. In 1939 he had conquered Poland in days, in May and June of 1940 he had dealt
a crushing blow to the combined Anglo-French armies, and now the world was witnessing the quick destruction of the Soviet army.

It never occurred to us to doubt the truth of that headline; until then all Hitler's announcements of victory had proven completely accurate. We had no way of knowing then that for the first time Hitler had announced a victory that wasn't really his. I was so depressed that for days I wouldn't look at a newspaper or listen to a radio.

In the meantime the Germans and their Ukrainian henchmen stepped up their persecutions. They formed a Judenrat, a Jewish council like the one in Hrubieszów, composed of elders whose terrible job it was to see that German orders with respect to the Jewish community were carried out. All Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star. Arbitrary and exorbitant fines were imposed, which the intimidated Jews paid, often out of the savings of a lifetime. Jews were brutally beaten and kicked while at work and in the streets. The brutalizing process was in full swing, and we felt totally helpless in this small town, where we were strangers even to the local Jews.

We still had a little money left, but it wouldn't last long. We started thinking of moving west, closer to home, hoping to get to Hrubieszów, even though we had heard that the Germans were still guarding the border. But perhaps they were treating the Jews better in Poland; after all, we told ourselves, Ołyka was part of eastern Poland, which had been “contaminated” by the Communists for two years. These were foolish rationalizations, but we grasped at any notion, however ridiculous, that offered even the feeblest ray of hope.

We met a local Ukrainian truck driver who transported oil drums for the German army, and made arrangements with him to take us as far as Włodzimierz.

It was a cold day in October. We met the truck driver after dark on
a narrow street not far from where we were lodging. He told us to climb inside some empty oil drums in the back of the truck, and laid more drums over us. The road was full of potholes; crouched inside the drums, we were nearly deafened by the clanging as the truck jolted and lurched along. Approaching Łuck, a large town between Ołyka and Włodzimierz, we suddenly heard a German command: “Stop!” We could see nothing, only heard the soldiers questioning our driver, and his replies in broken German. At last we heard
“Los, los”
(Out, out). The truck started up and we breathed again as it picked up speed.

The trip to Włodzimierz seemed endless. My knees hurt and I developed a tremendous headache from the banging and clanging of the steel oil drums. At last we stopped. The driver came back and moved the empty drums so that we could get out. “All right, we made it,” he said, “but I wouldn't take a chance like that again for any money in the world.”

We got out of the drums and climbed down from the truck to find ourselves on a dark, deserted street in Włodzimierz. Our legs were so stiff from crouching for so many hours that we needed a few minutes before we could even start to walk.

We went to the Burstyns', where Father and I had roomed during the Soviet occupation. Mr. Burstyn greeted us warmly, but had no room for us in his house. The town was already overcrowded with Jews from neighboring villages who had been forced by the Germans to move there; twenty thousand Jews were now in Włodzimierz, compared to a prewar population of twelve thousand. Mr. Burstyn
was very helpful, though, and in the morning found a small room for us in the same neighborhood.

Conditions in Włodzimierz were even worse than they had been in Ołyka. Everybody was terrified; the stories of mass killings on the Soviet side of the Ukraine had had a paralyzing effect on people here as well, and the brutalizing process we had seen beginning in Ołyka was far more advanced here. Beatings and killings were no longer isolated incidents, but commonplace. The Germans were tightening the screws with increasing cruelty. There were only about a dozen Gestapo in Włodzimierz, but these were sufficient to control twenty thousand Jews, for they had recruited about a hundred Ukrainian policemen, who enthusiastically did most of the Gestapo's dirty work for them. These Ukrainians had had nothing before the war; now they had plenty of food, carried weapons, which they used freely, and were encouraged to beat and torture Jews whenever they felt like it.

The Judenrat, executing the orders of the Germans, supervised the distribution of food, registered Jewish workers, and delivered them to the places to which they had been assigned. Most members of the Judenrat had no choice but to do the Germans' work for them; either they had served in the Jewish town administration before the war, or they were prominent citizens and appointed by the Germans specifically to this post. Refusing such an appointment would have meant certain death.

The Judenrat in turn set up the Jewish police, mostly a bunch of riffraff who were more than willing to enforce German regulations against their Jewish brothers in exchange for more favorable treatment for their own families. And in some cases they were beating and otherwise abusing their fellow Jews entirely on their own initiative.

To make matters worse, I now developed water in my lungs. I
was running a high fever, and the doctor couldn't get me the medicine I needed. I was growing weak, and the family was worried. I often thought while I was ill how much better it would be for me to die then and there, in bed, than to survive only to be murdered later by the Germans. I used to kid the doctor, who was a very nice man: “You know, Doctor, with you around I might get lucky and die right now.” The doctor would smile ruefully, recognizing how true this was.

News of “actions” against Jews were now arriving thick and fast from neighboring towns and cities: Łuck, Równo, Pi
ń
sk. As yet there had been no total exterminations in this area, but thousands of people who had been captured by the Gestapo had been taken to the outskirts of town and killed. An “action” was clearly imminent in Włodzimierz.

This meant a new and urgent need for hiding places, which had to be very cunningly disguised. Many families were constructing these
skrytkas
(hideouts) in their houses, and people who didn't have one tried desperately to secure a hiding place elsewhere. Our landlord built a double wall with a door that perfectly matched the paneling of the wood, and in front of the door he placed a wooden cabinet. In order to get into the skrytka between the two walls, one had to open the cabinet door, swing out a shelf, crawl inside the cabinet, push through its back wall, and open the hidden door leading to the skrytka. Then you closed the cabinet door, got into the skrytka, swung the cabinet shelf back into position, and closed the door in the wall. We congratulated our landlord on his masterpiece. The Germans would never find us.

In some houses, skrytkas were built in a crawl space between the ceiling and the roof, again with a cleverly disguised entrance. The actions in the Western Ukraine during this period of the occupation were only partial. All the Jews who were captured by the Germans
during these searches were killed, but those whom the killers were unable to find returned to their homes once the action was over. It was a game of hide-and-seek in which the prize was one's life, and a cleverly constructed skrytka meant the difference between life and death.