It Will Yet Be Heard

A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival

Leon Thorne, Daniel Magilow, Emanuel Thorne

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781978801660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne's memoir as a work of "bitter truth" that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne's original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant's pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor's guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne's firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century's greatest tragedy.

Part I

CHAPTER 1

The Cellar

The circumstances under which I am compelled to write these lines are enough to discourage the hardiest of chroniclers. But I am driven by so strong a compulsion and commitment to put down everything I’ve experienced, witnessed, and been told about the Nazi crimes against my people that nothing short of death will deter me. The despairing cries of my fellow Jews in the ghettos and death camps never leave my consciousness. Their cries must not go unheard. I dare not hope to come out alive when this nightmare is over, but I labor at my memoirs believing they will survive me and be published.

Five of us are hiding out in the cellar, under a stable situated on the premises of an oil well in Schodnica, a Galician town in the Carpathian Mountains. In the stable overhead, there are a pig, a goat, twenty rabbits, and some poultry. The clucking and grunting go on all day long. The cellar is six feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high. We cannot stand upright, although we can stretch out when lying down.

I am here with my younger brother, David, who was a robust, happy youth before the war, very much at home in the Talmud,1 but who is now a troubled twenty-three-year-old, his health undermined by the Hitler years. Dr. Isidor Friedman, a successful lawyer before the German Stukas2 appeared over our Polish cities and towns with their message of death and destruction, is the third male member of our small group. Most affected by our sedentary life, Dr. Friedman insists that we “exercise” at least five minutes a day, even though it is impossible to stand up straight without bumping one’s head. We do deep breathing when it is not unbearably hot and knee bending. We play a little chess, Friedman and I. He plays an aggressive game but not a very good one; to keep the peace, I let him win on occasion. He has prevailed on us to learn English, which he volunteered to teach. One of the two women here, Louisa Mahler, demurred. “What use can I have for English?” she said. “At the rate the Gestapo is flushing out our people from the hideouts, I doubt if I’ll ever have any use for my own language, Yiddish!” But Dr. Friedman, one of Poland’s best trial lawyers before the war, was not easily put off. “The mind must be occupied!” he declared. The Mahler woman, recently made a widow by the Nazis, keeps busy playing cards with Esther (Stella) Backenroth, a cousin of mine who is David’s age.

Every now and then, one of our landlords raises a plank of the stable floor and throws down a Polish newspaper published in Lemberg3 and a German one from Berlin, in which, along with the propaganda, war news is given in great detail. This we read avidly, between the lines, hoping to find there what we are all fervently praying for—a turning of the tide.

Considering how little there is at our disposal, how little privacy there is, we are a harmonious group. The two women make use of the bed sheets, which they hang up whenever they find a need for them—to wash up or for other reasons. Lately, the Mahler woman has been bleeding, a little more than she customarily does, and she finds it necessary to use the sheet more frequently. Her indisposition is of some concern to all of us. I hope—we all do—she will soon improve.

There isn’t very much furniture here, but we manage. We have two spring mattresses, a wooden bench, a little narrow table capable of holding no more than two saucepans at most, and a small shelf. The spring mattresses are spaced a half meter apart, one above the other, with my brother and I sleeping on one and the two women on the other, above us. Dr. Friedman uses the wooden bench for a bed. The floor and walls of the cellar are constructed out of wooden planks.

Our only source of light is a candle, which burns day and night. Someday it may be possible for us to have electric lights installed by means of camouflaged wiring, but not yet. An air shaft built into the double wall of the stable provides us with our breathing air, but when it is hot outside, we get very little fresh air. At night, the outside air is cooler and helps us breathe.

We have a makeshift toilet. In a corner of the cellar, there is a niche, one yard wide, built in for toilet purposes, with a bucket in a box. This is what we all use, men and women alike.

Once every day, in the evening, of course, the well-camouflaged entrance to our hideout is opened up for food for the next day and a pail of water. Each day, there are potatoes, soup, some bread, and on Sunday, a little butter and a bit of sugar. We also receive tobacco, cigarette paper, matches, and candles. In return, we pass out the pots and pans used the previous day as well as the toilet bucket.

Thanks to our landlords, two families, we live as we do. Both Stanisław Nendza and Franz Janiewski are oil workmen who formerly worked for us. Although Poles are forbidden by the German authorities, on penalty of death, to aid Jews, these two Polish families have dared to help us.

We are grateful to them, naturally, but it should be pointed out that they are not placing themselves in danger for idealistic reasons alone. They are hiding us from the Gestapo for material reasons as well. First, we pay them very well for their cooperation, and in addition, we have promised them, in writing, that half our fortune in the Schodnica oil wells—which we are confident will be restored to us after the war—will belong to them. The papers have been signed by us and are here in the cellar.

I write while lying on my cot, leaning on the bucket of water, which is covered by a thick piece of cardboard. This is my desk.

It is difficult here, but we know what the alternatives are. Our people have been massacred in the cities and deported to death camps; none are left in the towns. Even in the labor camps, according to my latest information, only a few thousand are left. In 1939, three and one quarter million Jews lived in Poland.

It is questionable whether we five can survive in the cellar until the end of the war. We are too vulnerable. Hideouts are being uncovered all the time. A word spoken too loudly, a cough, or sneeze can be heard by a passerby in the street above.

Time is short. I must get on with my work. I will write with objectivity, without embellishment. I’ll make my notes in copybooks and send them, along with my notes from the camps and ghettos, by way of my landlords, to an “Aryan” friend of mine. Should I survive the war, I plan to arrange for publication. Should I perish, I have arranged to have the notes sent to Jewish organizations in the United States or Palestine with the intent of having them published.

And now, in the name of God, I begin to write.

1. The Talmud is the major body of Jewish law and tradition.

2. The Junkers Ju 87 airplane was commonly called a Stuka, an abbreviation of Sturzkampfflugzeug (“dive bomber”).

3. The city known in German and Yiddish as Lemberg (Lwów in Polish and L’viv in Ukrainian) was the capital of the province of Galicia. More than 140,000 Jews, a third of the city’s total population, lived there at the start of World War II. Thorne refers to it variously as Lemberg and Lwów.

CHAPTER 2

Schodnica

Schodnica is so small, it is not even on the map. Buried in the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia, fifteen kilometers from the closest railway station, it had a population, at the outbreak of the war, of five thousand, one-fifth of whom were Jews.

Years ago, there occurred what some Jews in town called a “revolution.” It was a trivial event, really, too trivial for any historian to record. As a matter of fact, it is altogether doubtful that the event even happened. As the story goes, an Austrian policeman (Galicia then belonged to Austria) stabbed a man in a café owned by a Jew, causing a near riot by a crowd of rowdies who threatened to burn down Jewish homes and kill their inhabitants. Fortunately, a heavy rain came pouring down, drenching the crowd and dispersing it.

Because the incident was one of the few turbulent and threatening moments in our placid town, I heard it alluded to as a “revolution” during my childhood.

Although a quiet town, Schodnica was not an insubstantial one. It was the first locality in Eastern Galicia where oil was discovered, more than one hundred years ago. A Jew played a major role in its discovery.1

His name was Meilich Backenroth; he was the grandfather of my grandfather. He found the oil by accident. Digging in his garden, he was surprised by a sudden spurt of dark-brown liquid shooting out of the ground. It was crude oil—of which he had not the slightest idea—used in those days as cart grease and for lighting purposes, in a rather crude fashion. The full significance of Meilich’s discovery was realized only some time later by his youngest son, Itzik. The young man, wearing sidelocks and the fringe garment of a pious Jew, took his life in his hands and started for Lemberg and then for the distant capital, Vienna, carrying with him a bottle of the liquid for analysis. Soon after his return, hundreds of engineers descended on our once-peaceful town to drill for brown “liquid gold.” Oil brought wealth to Schodnica, and the Backenroth family prospered. The Jewish community, comparatively small, was tolerated by the Christians and permitted to lead its own life.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the good life, the peaceful life, came to an abrupt end. Moving from the east, Soviet troops occupied Lemberg and Schodnica. All property was expropriated, and the now ex-owners of the oil wells were reduced to the status of beggars. Two years later, on Friday, July 4, 1941, a pogrom broke out in the area. The Russian troops had evacuated the sector five days earlier, and the natives—the Ukrainians, practiced in the art of pogroms—assaulted Schodnica before the Nazi armies approached the town.2

Several days later, the Wehrmacht stormed into town with Slovakian troops and issued the following order:

1. 1. All Jewish men between the ages of twelve and sixty and women between the ages of eighteen and forty must register for forced labor.
2. 2. All Jews ten years old and over must wear a white badge ten centimeters wide, embroidered with the Star of David, eight centimeters wide.

Thus it began. Jews were put to cleaning sewers and gutters. Although not physically demanding, the work was intended to humiliate and degrade. Receiving no pay, Jews were allotted a daily bread ration of seventy grams; non-Jews received four hundred grams.

Soon after the Germans arrived, Gestapo agents entered the nearby village of Urycz, drove all the Jews to a forest, and murdered them. The sole survivor was a six-year-old boy named Leichtman, whose father had immigrated to America several years before and had earlier sent papers and money for the family to join him. The Germans invaded Poland a week before the family was to leave for America. The Gestapo officer in charge of the massacre, a murderer named Monta, had sworn he would not let even one solitary Jew in town escape with his life. But the Leichtman boy marred the German’s plan, managing to make his way—more dead than alive—to Schodnica, where his uncle lived.

Monta, an ethnic German who had lived in our region for several years, was not appeased by the Urycz massacre. He made arrangements to massacre the Jews of Podhorodce as well. This murderer, who many years earlier had lost a lawsuit to a Jew named Pyrnitzer, was having his revenge. He spared only the lives of two Jews, Katz and Weiss, who had testified on his behalf at the trial.

It was in this fashion that the Jews in the nearby villages perished.

News of the murder rampage, when it reached us in Schodnica, caused wild panic. Rumors flew that the Gestapo intended to kill all of us in the region. Abandoning our homes, carrying with us what we could, we fled to nearby cities, some to Borysław, some to Drohobycz, some to Stryj. My family ran to Sambor.

1. The discovery of oil in Eastern Galicia in the mid-nineteenth century led to the rapid modernization of what was previously a provincial backwater of the Hapsburg Empire. Particularly after the discovery of a massive gusher in 1895, Schodnica attracted international attention, and like other population centers such as Borysław and Drohobycz, it became an oil boomtown. The Backenroth family played a central role in developing the oil industry in the region. For more on this history, see Valerie Schatzker’s The Jewish Oil Magnates: A History, 1853–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015) and Alison Fleig Frank’s Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

2. As recounted in a 1959 yizkor (memorial) book, Germans occupied Schodnica on July 1, 1941, and “actively assisted the local gangs” of Poles and Ukrainians in the ensuing three-day pogrom (an anti-Jewish riot). Two hundred Jews were murdered, most in a nearby forest.

CHAPTER 3

Sambor

Before the war, Sambor, a town in eastern Galicia, had a population of twenty-one thousand, one-third of them Jewish, many of them earning their livelihood as grain dealers and craftsmen. The town was famed as the home of Rabbi Uri Yolles, the founder of the Sambor rabbinic dynasty, who attracted hundreds of followers and admirers from neighboring towns and distant places.1 They came in large numbers to Sambor, seeking advice from the Rabbi and paying homage. During the time of the Baal Shem Tov, a great Talmudist made his home in Sambor, Rabbi Yitzhak Charif. Understandably, the Jews of the town took great pride in the two spiritual leaders and in Sambor, where they once lived.

Soon after the invasion, the Gestapo gave the Jews of Sambor four hours to pay thirty-five thousand złotys, threatening to execute all the members of the newly established Jewish Council unless the order was carried out.

I must digress for a moment and state my views about the Jewish Council, which was a German creation.2 We Jews had nothing to do with its formation or functions; the members had not been democratically elected but were appointed by the German military authorities. The newly elected Polish mayor of a locality would propose to the military a Jew of his acquaintance as Obmann (chairman). This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction by Daniel H. Magilow
• Foreword: “Out of the Ashes” by Yitzhok Varshavski (Isaac Bashevis Singer), Forverts, August 20, 1961, Translated by Marc Caplan
• Author’s Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Illustrations
• Index