Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (35 page)

—We were more afraid of the special police agents than we were of the Germans. Even the Generals were scared of them…

—Fear…All through the war, fear reigned…

—If it weren’t for Stalin…Without an “iron hand,” Russia would have never survived.

—I wasn’t fighting for Stalin, I was fighting for the Motherland. I swear on the lives of my children and grandchildren that I never once heard people shouting, “For Stalin!”

—You can’t win a war without soldiers.

—God damn it…

—The only thing to fear is God. He is the judge.

—If God exists…

[
They sing in chorus, a slightly discordant chorus.
]

And so, we need just one victory!

One for all, no matter the cost…

A MAN’S STORY

—My whole life, I’ve kept my arms at my sides! I didn’t dare breathe a word of any of this to anyone. Now, I’ll tell you my story…

I remember, when I was little, I was always afraid of losing my father…Fathers were taken away at night; they’d vanish into thin air. That’s how my mother’s brother, Felix, disappeared…He was a musician. He was taken away for something very stupid…total nonsense…He was at a store with his wife and he said, “The Soviet regime has been around for twenty years, and they still can’t make a decent pair of pants.” Today, they say that everyone was against it, but I’ll tell you—the people supported the mass arrests. Take my mother…Her own brother was in prison, but she still maintained, “They made a mistake with our Felix. They have to sort that out. But people need to be punished, look at all the crime all around us.” The people supported those policies…Then the war came! After the war, I was afraid of ever remembering it…My war…Afterward, when I tried to join the Party, they wouldn’t accept me: “What kind of communist are you if you were in the ghetto?” I kept my mouth shut. Never said a word…There was a girl named Rozochka in our partisan division, this pretty Jewish girl, she’d brought books with her. Sixteen years old. The commanders took turns sleeping with her…They’d crack jokes about her: “She still has little kid hair down there, ha ha…” Rozochka ended up pregnant. So they took her off deep into the woods and shot her like a dog…People had kids, of course, there was a forest full of healthy men. The usual practice was that when a child was born, it would immediately be taken to a village. Left at a farmstead. But who would take a Jewish baby? Jews had no right to have kids. I returned from a mission. “Where’s Rozochka?” “What do you care? This one’s gone, there’ll be another one to take her place.” Hundreds of Jews who’d escaped from the ghettos had gone into the forest. Peasants would capture them and give them up to the Germans in exchange for a bag of flour, a kilogram of sugar. Write that down…I’ve held my silence for long enough…A Jew spends his whole life afraid. No matter where the stone falls, it hits him.

We didn’t make it out of Minsk as it went up in flames because of my grandmother…Grandma had seen the Germans in 1918 and tried to convince us all that the Germans were an educated people who would not touch civilians. A German officer had been quartered at their home, and every night he had played the piano for them. My mother started vacillating: Should we leave or not? Because of that piano playing, naturally…We ended up losing a lot of time. One day, the German motorcycles rode into the city. Some people welcomed them in traditional costume—embroidered shirts, bearing bread and salt. Joyously. Many thought that that because the Germans were here, we’d finally get to lead normal lives. A lot of people hated Stalin and now they could stop concealing it. So many new and strange things emerged at the outbreak of war…

That was when I first heard the word “kike.” Our neighbors started knocking on our door and shouting, “That’s it, kikes, your days are numbered! You’ll answer for what you did to Christ!” I was a Soviet boy. I had completed fifth grade, I was twelve. I couldn’t fathom what they were talking about. Why were they saying those things? I still don’t understand it…I come from a mixed family: My father was a Jew, and my mother was Russian. We celebrated Easter, but in a special way: My mother would tell us that it was the birthday of a very special person and bake a cake. For Passover (when the Lord took mercy on the Jews), my father would bring matzo over from my grandmother’s. The times were such that we didn’t advertise it…You had to keep quiet.

My mother sewed yellow stars onto our clothes…For several days, none of us could bear to go out. We were ashamed…I’m old, but I still remember how it felt, how embarrassing it was. There were leaflets lying around all over the ground in the city: “Liquidate the Commissars and Jews,” “Save Russia from the Bolshevikike Regime.” Someone slid one of those leaflets under our door…It all happened so fast…Rumors started spreading that American Jews were collecting gold to bail all of the Jews out of Europe and bring them to America, that Germans loved order but hated Jews, so Jews would have to spend the war in ghettos…People attempted to make sense of what was going on…to catch onto a thread…Even hell is something that people will try to understand. I remember…I remember how we moved into the ghetto like it was yesterday. Thousands of Jews marched through the city…With children, with pillows. It’s funny: I brought my butterfly collection with me. It’s funny now…The residents of Minsk spilled out onto the sidewalk to watch: Some were curious, others were full of malicious glee, but a number of them were in tears. I didn’t look around much, I was afraid of seeing one of the boys I knew. I was ashamed…I remember the constant shame…

My mother took off her wedding ring, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and told me where to take it. That night, I crawled under the barbed wire…A woman was waiting for me at the place where my mother had sent me. I gave her the ring, and she poured out some flour for me. In the morning, we realized that instead of flour, she’d given us chalk. Whitewash. That’s how we lost my mother’s ring. We didn’t have any other valuables…We started bloating from hunger…Peasants with big sacks hung out outside of the ghetto day and night, waiting for the next pogrom. Whenever Jews were taken away to be shot, they’d let them in so they could loot their abandoned homes. The Polizei searched for valuables, while the peasants took anything they could find. “You won’t need any of it anymore,” they’d assure us.

One day, the ghetto went quiet like it usually did before a pogrom. Even though not a single shot had been fired. That day, there wasn’t any shooting…Vehicles arrived, lots of vehicles…Kids in nice suits and boots, women in white pinafores, and men with expensive suitcases poured out of them. Their suitcases were incredible! All of them spoke German. The guards and convoy troops were at a loss, especially the Polizei. They didn’t scream or beat anyone with their batons, they kept their growling dogs on their leashes. It was pure theater, a play…it felt like we were in a play…That same day, we learned that these were Jews they’d brought over from Europe. We started calling them the Hamburg Jews because the majority of them had come from Hamburg. They were disciplined, obedient. They didn’t attempt to outsmart or trick the guards, they didn’t hide in any of the secret spots…They were doomed…They looked down on us. We were poor, badly dressed. We weren’t like them…we didn’t speak German…

All of them were shot. Tens of thousands of those so-called Hamburg Jews…

That day…it’s all a fog…How did they kick us out of the house? How did they transport us? I remember the big field on the edge of the forest…They selected the strongest men and ordered them to dig two big pits. Deep. While the rest of us stood there and waited. First, they tossed all the little kids into one of the pits…they started burying them…Their parents didn’t even weep or beg. Everyone stood there in total silence. Why, you ask? I’ve given it a lot of thought…When a wolf pounces on you, you don’t try to talk to it, you don’t beg for your life. Or if a wild boar charges you…The Germans looked down into the pit and laughed, threw candy in it. The Polizei were dead drunk…Their pockets were stuffed with wristwatches…They buried the children alive…Then they ordered everyone else to jump into the other pit. We stood there, my mother, my father, my little sister and I. Our turn came…The German in charge noticed my mother was Russian and gestured to her: “You’re free to go.” My father shouted, “Run!” But she grabbed onto him, clutched at me: “I have to be with you.” All of us pushed her away, we begged her to leave…but she was the first one of us to jump into the pit…

And that’s all I can remember…I regained consciousness when I felt something sharp strike my leg. I cried out in pain. Somebody whispered, “Sounds like one of them’s alive.” Men were digging through the pit with shovels, removing the shoes and boots from the corpses…Taking everything they could find. They helped me out. I sat on the edge of the pit and waited and waited…It was raining. The ground was very warm. They cut me off a hunk of bread, “Run, kikeling. Maybe you’ll survive.”

The nearest village was deserted…Not a soul around, but the houses were intact. I wanted to eat, but there was no one to beg for food. I wandered through the village alone. On the side of the road, I’d see a rubber boot, a pair of galoshes…a kerchief…Behind the church, there were charred bodies. Blackened corpses. It smelled like gasoline and frying…I ran back into the forest. I lived off mushrooms and berries. One day, I came upon an old man chopping wood. He gave me two eggs. “Don’t set foot in the village,” he warned me. “The men will tie you up and turn you over to the commanding officers. They just caught two little Jews that way.”

One day, I fell asleep and woke up to a bullet flying over my head. I leapt up, “Germans?” It was these two young guys on horseback. Partisans! They laughed and started arguing: “What do we need a little kike for? Let’s go…” “Let the Commander decide.” They brought me to the regiment encampment, put me in a separate mud hut.
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Had someone stand guard over me…I was summoned for an interrogation: “How did you come to find yourself in this regiment? Who sent you?” “No one sent me. I climbed out of a mass grave.” “But maybe you’re a spy?” They punched me in the face twice and threw me back into the mud hut. Toward evening, they pushed another two Jews in there with me, young men in nice leather jackets. From them, I learned that they don’t accept Jews into partisan regiments unless they come with weapons. If you don’t have a weapon, you have to bring them gold, some gold object. They had a gold watch and a cigarette case—they even showed me. They demanded to see the Commander. Soon, they were taken away. I never saw them again…but that cigarette case did end up in our Commander’s possession…and one of the leather jackets. I was saved by a friend of my father’s, Uncle Yasha. He was a cobbler, and cobblers were considered as valuable as doctors. I became his assistant…

Yasha’s first piece of advice: “Change your last name.” My last name is Friedman, so I became Lomeiko. His second piece of advice: “Keep your mouth shut, or else you’ll get a bullet in the back. No one will be held accountable for killing a Jew.” That’s how it was…War is a swamp, it’s easy to get stuck in it and hard to get out. Another Jewish saying: “When the wind is strong, the trash rises to the top.” Nazi propaganda had infected everyone, and the partisans were anti-Semitic, too. There were eleven of us Jews in the regiment…and then there were five…People would intentionally have conversations in front of us like, “What kind of warriors are you? They lead you off like sheep to the slaughter…” “Kike cowards…” I held my silence. I had a friend in battle, this hotheaded guy named David Greenberg. He’d talk back to them, stand up for himself. He ended up getting shot, and I know exactly who killed him. Today, that guy’s a hero, strutting around, showing off his medals. Acting all heroic! He murdered two Jews for allegedly sleeping on duty. And another one for the brand-new Parabellum pistol he coveted…Where could you run to? The ghetto? I wanted to defend my Motherland…avenge my family…And the Motherland? The partisan commanders had secret instructions from Moscow: Don’t trust the Jews, don’t let them into the regiments, annihilate them. They considered us traitors. We learned the truth about all of this thanks to perestroika.

You feel sorry for people…But horses…Do you know how horses die? Horses don’t hide like other animals: dog, cats, and even cows will run off somewhere, while horses just stand around waiting to be killed. It’s hard to watch…In the movies, cavalry soldiers charge in whooping, brandishing sabers over their heads. Nonsense! Pure fantasy! There were some cavalrymen in our regiment for a little while, but they disappeared pretty quickly. Horses can’t walk through deep snow, let alone gallop—they get caught in snowdrifts. Meanwhile, the Germans had motorcycles—two-wheelers, three-wheelers; in winter, they’d put them on skis. They’d ride by laughing, shooting our horses and riders. Some of them would take pity on beautiful horses—many of them must have been country boys…

The orders: Burn down the Polizei hut, along with the family…It was a big family: a wife, three kids, a grandma and grandpa. At night, we surrounded them. Nailed the door shut…Drenched the house in gasoline and set it on fire. We could hear them screaming inside. The little boy tried to climb out the window. One partisan wanted to shoot him, but another one stopped him. They threw him back into the fire. I was fourteen, I didn’t understand a thing…All I could do was try to remember it. And now, I told you the story…I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.

I remember a blockade…The Germans decided to clear out their rear units and set their SS divisions on the partisans. They hung lights on their parachutes and started bombing us day and night. After bombing, they’d shell us. Their division was retreating in small groups, they were evacuating their wounded, they’d gag them and put special muzzles on their horses. They were leaving everything behind, even domestic livestock, who ran after their retreating owners. Cows, sheep…we were forced to shoot them all. The Germans got so close we could hear them, “Oh Mutter, Oh Mutter”…Smell their cigarettes. Each of us had a final bullet…but it’s never too late to die. One night, three of us were left behind as the rear guard. We cut open the belly of a dead horse, tossed everything out of it, and climbed in. We spent two days like that, listening to the Germans go back and forth. Shooting at them from time to time. Finally, the forest was completely silent. We climbed out covered in blood, guts, and shit…half-insane. It was night…We saw the moon…