Mitla Pass (26 page)

S
IEDLCE WAS
in a state of anxiety, the townspeople not knowing if they had been benevolently liberated or brutally conquered. The Poles disliked the Germans and Russians equally and were equally despised by both sides.

Although Yossi didn’t look particularly Jewish, he was a stranger in town, speaking mostly Russian and therefore given a wide berth. He was mistaken for one of the Russian stragglers who had dumped their uniforms, sold their weapons, and retreated.

By listening keenly, Yossi was able to gather that the main Russian force had collapsed and was in full retreat. Siedlce had been officially surrendered and would be occupied by the Germans before the end of the day.

In late morning, a few people dared to go out into the streets and, seeing things peaceful, started doing their daily chores. Others soon followed. Refilling the larders was the first order of business. Stocks were close to bare because of the prolonged fighting and there was fear that fighting might break out again. Yossi worked carefully around the Jewish marketplace and finally selected a pushcart peddler to approach.

“So, where are you from?” the peddler asked.

“Kaunas.”

“That far?”

“I was running away to escape military service. The train dumped us without warning in the middle of the countryside.”

“Listen, this happens every day with the trains, now. It’s like we don’t already have enough mouths to feed. So, you’re looking for the
shul.
There’s a soup kitchen. The rabbi’s name is Bitterman.”

“I’m not looking for a rabbi,” Yossi answered in measured tones that afforded the two a quick eye-to-eye exchange.

“Sorry,” the peddler said.

“I’d like to see somebody from Poale Zion,” Yossi said.

“I don’t know any Zionist people,” the peddler snapped quickly and gave a motion that his hands were clean.

“Thanks anyhow,” Yossi said and turned away.

“Hey, boy, come back,” the peddler said. He studied Yossi up and down several times, then asked a number of questions in Yiddish that only a Jew could answer. Satisfied, he closed his stall and ordered Yossi to follow him at a distance.

L
ATE IN THE
afternoon, Yossi Dubnow returned to the brick factory with the man called Perchik. Stubby and fiftyish, he had the deep markings of having been a lifelong worker. He was a single-minded Zionist, with his commitments dead centered.

“You boys can’t stay here long,” Perchik told them. “By tomorrow the Germans will have moved into the entire district in strength. They’ll have roadblocks up and they’ll be dragging the woods for stragglers and deserters.”

“Actually,” Nathan said, “we aren’t technically in violation of anything against the Germans.”

“Four Jewish boys on false documents,” Perchik responded. “Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t need to give any reason whatsoever to do anything they want with you.”

“Just what will they do?”

“Put you in a labor battalion,” Perchik answered. “Some survive, most don’t.”

“Well ...that’s plain enough,” Yossi Dubnow said.

“There’s only one choice. Get through the German lines as fast as you can, right now.”

“Gevalt,”
Nathan mumbled.

The Finkel brothers, followers by nature, shrugged in reluctant assent.

Yossi nodded in agreement as Perchik spread a crude hand-drawn map and marked their location at the brickyard. “There’s a gap in the German lines south of the town. I can get you through if we hit the river right away. The rest of the way to Warsaw is fairly routine.”

“And when we get to Warsaw?”

“Trading the Russians for the Germans and Poles in Warsaw is no bargain, but at least in Warsaw we have thousands of our own people and plenty of options.”

Yossi looked to the Finkel brothers who nodded in the affirmative.

“Nathan?”

“Include me out,” Nathan replied.

They looked at him puzzled.

“Perchik,” Nathan said, “maybe you’ll find for me here a hiding place for a few days. Someplace where I can get maybe a piece of bread.”

“You mean you’re not coming with us?” Yossi asked.

“Look, we’re all only trying to survive the best we can. As soon as the Germans capture my home town, Wolkowysk, I’ll go back. Believe me, I will escape from service in a German labor battalion.”

“What about Palestine?” Avni asked.

“So, what about Palestine,” Nathan answered. “You think maybe God will mount you up on wings of eagles in the middle of a war and fly you to Palestine?”“I don’t believe this!” Yossi shouted.

“What’s not to believe?” Nathan retorted. “All we were trying to do was escape service in the Russian Army. Now is not the time for Palestine. Believe me, it will still be there when we’re ready.”

“Wait a minute!” Yossi cried. “You, Nathan Zadok, were my inspiration. You remember the Poale Zion Conference in Minsk? I, Yossi Dubnow, sat in the back row of the auditorium listening to you. Lenin is a liar, you said. And the crowd began chanting Lenin is a liar. The only path for the Jewish people is the path out of Russia to join our people in the redemption of our homeland. We must blaze a path to our promised land now and we must make settlements, so that when this war is over, hundreds of thousands of Jews will follow our example, yours and mine. You see, I remembered every God-damned word you said—”

“Listen, Minsk was Minsk. At this moment my family needs me more than Eretz Israel.”

“You’re a coward and a liar,” Yossi said, slapping Nathan across the face.

Perchik stepped between them and pushed Yossi away.

“Oh, you can’t imagine how courageous he was shouting down at us from the platform in Minsk.”

“Shut up, Yossi!” Perchik demanded. “Or I’ll make chicken soup from you.”

“Are you angry with me, Perchik?” Nathan sputtered.

“Why do you think I risk my life running our boys through the battlefields? You’ll never be anything but a
shtetl
yid. You’ll live groveling and spouting out every phony street-corner philosophy and you don’t deserve any better.”

Nathan was more than willing to explain, to argue that his decision was motivated by his overpowering love for his family. But he had no one to argue with. They left him standing there in the clay pit, ankle deep in water in his shabby, ill-fitting coat, and lost themselves quickly in the lingering smoke and fog that had come up from the river.

W
ITH
Y
OSSI GONE,
the way became difficult for Nathan. He was frightened all of the time, indecisive a good part of the time, and lost a great deal of the time. Somehow he made it to the outskirts of Bialystok before he collapsed from hunger and fatigue in the barn of a peasant. Nathan had not been too crafty in his moves. A farmer and his son had watched him cross their fields and crawl up into the hayloft. He had barely dozed off when he was awakened by a hard kick in the sole of his shoe and ordered in Polish to stand up.

Nathan wobbled to his feet and grimaced as the prongs of a pair of pitchforks pinned him against the wall.

“Russian deserter,” the farmer ventured to his son.

“No, I am Nathan Zadok. I am a Russian, but I am not in the Army. I was traveling west and the train stopped out in the middle of nowhere. I am only trying to get home to Wolkowysk.”

The farmer and his son digested this suspiciously.

“So, I can be going on my way now?” Nathan said.

The farmer’s eyes opened wide as something occurred to him. “Yid?”

“Pull down your pants!” the son ordered.

“I’m a Jew,” Nathan whispered dejectedly.

Smelling the extra reward the Germans had put out on stray Jews, the farmers trussed Nathan up, threw him into a cart, and drove him to a barracks the Germans occupied at the freight depot of the railyard. The peasant was paid a bounty, enough for a bottle of vodka, and Nathan was dragged off by a pair of guards to the office of the commanding officer.

“Russian stray, Jew boy,” one guard said. “He told a couple of Poles his name was Nathan something, but his papers say Pinchas Hirsch.”

“So, who are you?” the officer demanded.

“I am truly Nathan Zadok of Wolkowysk, only trying to get home,” he answered in German.

The officer studied Nathan’s smallness, calculated his worthlessness. He wouldn’t last two weeks in a labor battalion. What’s the difference? Every day, a hundred more, a thousand more. Jews were fleeing all over the landscape, clogging the roads, cramming the rails. The German shook his head and laughed aloud—everyone’s trying to chop off their tails with a carving knife. ...

Nathan trembled but remained wordless. The German detested Nathan’s silence. Why didn’t the Jew boy at least plead for his life? Why didn’t he argue? Was the acceptance of inevitable death so easy for him? As he picked up his pen to sign an order, the guard leaned over the desk.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but Major Mühldorf is having some trouble getting organized in the marshaling yards. He badly needs someone who can translate from German into Polish and Russian.”

“How good is your German? I don’t mean Yiddish. I mean German.”

“I read Schiller and Heine,” Nathan managed through dry lips.

“Polish?”

“I have lived on the border most of my life. My Polish is fluent.”

The German drummed his fingers on the desk a moment. “Take the yid to Major Mühldorf. If he can use him, all right.
If
not, bring him back for transfer.”

Major Rudi Mühldorf, the yardmaster, had arrived on the scene only a few days earlier. He was a hoary old civilian railroad man who had been pressed into military service.

His immediate problem was to get the yard and roundhouse into functioning order, the difficulty of the task being compounded by the need to use three languages. Nathan assured him of his value. Mühldorf neither liked nor disliked Jews. He liked trains and only trains.

Bialystok was now a key junction in the German advance into White Russia, the Baltic, and the Ukraine. Troops and artillery supplies would be pouring through to the fronts, but Mühldorf was faced with the chaos of war as well as an antiquated rail system. He was determined to make Bialystok at least a smooth operation, even if not by Germanic standards of perfection.

Thus Nathan earned himself a cot in the yardmaster’s building, German enlisted men’s rations, and a distinctive cap and armband to denote he was a protected worker.

Nathan thanked God he was not one of those hundreds passing through the yard in locked freight cars for the labor gangs, to repair rails and bridges. The death rate among them was fearsome.

Nathan spent most of his time at a desk translating manifests, repair orders, parts requisitions, regulations, and schedules. He was on call several times a day to straighten out foul-ups due to language. The major benefit of his situation was that he could help his family.

The German occupation was conducted with merciless disregard for civilians. With all the meat and poultry markets out of operation, Yehuda Zadok was again without a means of making a living. Everything usable from the land was confiscated by the Germans, leaving the population to fend for themselves.

The desperate food situation was made more devastating by a massive epidemic of typhus.

Material poured into the Bialystok depot for transshipment to the front, and a predictable black market evolved and flourished. Most of the rail system was operated by German civilians whose patriotism could easily be compromised.

Major Mühldorf knew the drill well. A little thievery always accompanied the romance of freight yards. Once in a while, when a black market gang became too greedy he would have them strung up or shot, to cool the fervor.

Nathan made himself an inconspicuous “honest broker” between buyer and seller for a small and reasonable piece of the transaction. It was a simple matter for him to hitch a ride to Wolkowysk, a few hours away, at least once a week with a package of food for the family.

Wolkowysk, 1920

Y
EHUDA
Z
ADOK
was back at his old stand, slitting the necks of chickens.

For years there had been a broil of armies—Reds, Whites, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Polish, all bashing at one another to snatch off pieces of the Czar’s fallen empire. While they slaughtered one another, they all shared a common enemy, the Jews. But the postwar, post-revolution pogroms paled even the worst of them a half century before.

“If you’re a Jew,” Yehuda told Sophie, “it seems you have to face the history of the world all over again, every day.” Yehuda’s forays into religious ecstasy at the chopping block eased his pain, but his thoughts were also invaded by the future of his family.

The saddest of days was the Sabbath and visits to the cemetery. The two youngest Zadok children, Reuben and Bessie, died in one of the typhus scourges before the end of the war.

The cemetery sat in a grove of leafless silver-bark birches, their bony top limbs pointing upward like fingers twisted in anguished prayer. Tombstones had been overturned and graves robbed during the pogroms. Desecration was perpetual.

Yehuda would wait at the cemetery gate so that Sophie could have her time alone with her two dead children. She had long mastered the art of muffling grief, but the loss of Bessie and Reuben had inflicted permanent pain.

Yehuda’s mind was always on the family. All but Bessie and Reuben had survived the war, but now he had to face the business of dissolving the family and scattering them forever.

For him and Sophie there would be no move. Palestine? Out of the question. Palestine was for young people. The matchmakers were chirping around to find suitable mates for his three girls, Rifka, Sarah, and Ida. They weren’t exactly raving beauties and the daughters of a
shohet
were not likely to catch a prince. Moreover, Rifka was too late for a really desirable marriage because of the war.

Yehuda hoped they would marry perhaps a carpenter, perhaps a leather worker, and if God smiled, a butcher, a merchant. For the daughters he did not worry so much, not that he wasn’t an affectionate and loving father. In his daily prayers he beseeched that at least one of them would remain in Wolkowysk and have children and maybe the pain in Sophie’s eyes might go away in time.