Remember Us

My Journey from the Shtetl Through the Holocaust

Vic Shayne, Martin Small

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781628731477
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

A New York Times Best Seller! Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them. From work camps to the partisans of the Nowogrudek forests, from the Mauthausen concentration camp to life as a displaced person in Italy, and from fighting the Egyptian army in a tiny Israeli kibbutz in 1948 to starting a new life in a new world in New York, this book encompasses the mythical "hero's journey" in very real historical events. Through the eyes of 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Martin Small, we learn that these priceless memories that are too painful to remember are also too painful to forget.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

And Then We Were Slaves

Lost in the madness of Maitchet, we had no idea that all of Poland, right up to the Soviet border, was going through the same terrifying experience. Every shtetl was in chaos and suffering from mob rule. Somewhere in this dark hour is when the first of millions were buried. Possessions were being buried all over Eastern Europe. Into the ground and under floorboards went photographs, jewelry, a small bag of coins, a Torah, and candlesticks. Shabbos tablecloths handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter were folded tightly, stuffed into a box, and buried in the yard with wedding rings, deeds, books, and papers. So many things were buried; most lost forever, with their owners buried elsewhere without nearly as much devotion, contemplation, or sacredness. The first into the ground were our things, returned to earth, given back to God for safekeeping with the hope of recovery in brighter days to come, days that never came, days that the world seems to want to forget. Days full of events that now, without ever having been there to witness these events, many are saying never happened.

The Germans had diligently converted our bigger towns into holding centers and ghettos. Warsaw, Minsk, Bialystok, Radom, Lublin, Kielce, Lodz, Krakow, and other towns were now homes to hundreds of thousands of homeless, helpless, exhausted, confused, beaten, and starving Jews. The Nazis turned beautiful, culturally-rich, and teeming towns into filthy, disease-ridden ghettos. With small armies of forced labor, they walled off sections of cities to create internment camps where people starved to death without food or water; no way out and no way back in. The Germans had plenty of Polish helpers to enforce their new law, as well as to rout out Jews in hiding. We were a bleak, occupied country with most of those occupied doing the bidding of the aggressors.

All the while, every day and night, we heard shelling and bombing and planes flying overhead, with the German army pressing on. A war was going on but we had no details, no information. Radios and telephones were forbidden to us. We sat alone with our fears. We only knew that the Germans had driven the Soviets out and to the east and that the Nazis were ruthless and murderous.

Baranowicze was converted by the Nazis to a processing center, thousands of Jews were brought from neighboring areas and forced into a new Jewish district that was walled off and gated. Behind this wall of wire, thousands of Jews were imprisoned while the Nazis carried out well-planned programs that decided their fate.

I stood at the wooden counter in my mother’s kitchen looking for something to eat. There was a slight chill in the air. I rubbed my arms with my hands. There was no fire burning anywhere in the house. My entire family was in the living room, along with some guests, huddled together waiting. Once in a while, my father would stand up and look out the window then go back to the sofa beside my mother. It was the middle of the day. Nobody was working. My stomach growled. I was growing hungrier by the moment. What was I looking for in the cupboard? Anything. I stood staring at an empty plate, my thoughts drifting far away. It was too quiet. I looked out the window. The street was deserted. I turned around and sat down on a chair and crossed my legs. This kitchen that I helped my father build was, for once, quiet. It was a foreign feeling. No pots and pans and baking dishes were clanging. The laughter was gone. The stoves were cold to the touch. It was deathly quiet. Then I heard a boom coming from the living room. What was that? It sounded like a log smashing into the front door. It jolted me. Everyone in the living room had jumped in shock.

Boom, boom, boom! Fists were pounding on the door and a young, familiar voice was shouting. Demanding. Open this door! Open or I’ll smash it in. I ran to the door. Everyone was wide-eyed. My father stood with his fists clenched at his sides as I opened our door. In front of me stood my boyhood friend, Stach Lango. His seething expression, his twisted mouth, and sick gaze belonged to somebody else. What happened to him? He pointed a pistol to my face, grabbed me by the collar, and said, “If you fight me, I’ll shoot your mother, your father, and your two sisters right in front of you.” Stach pulled me by the shoulder and yanked me out of my house. My family watched on helplessly as I was dragged into the empty street and pushed all the way to the police station and into a room with a wooden table in the center and a glowing fireplace by the wall.

A small stack of wood and some iron pokers leaned against the dirty, paint-peeling wall. Once inside, still with a pistol pointed at my head, I was forced to undress. Hurry up, goddammit, Jew! Then Stach tied me to a table in the middle of the room. I couldn’t move. My wrists were tearing from the ropes. My eyes followed him as he tucked his gun inside his waistband. He picked up one of the iron pokers and angrily shoved the end of it into the embers. He knew I was watching and relished his power over me. The iron grew hotter and hotter until the tip of it pulsated in red and white. “I’m going to kill you, Jew,” he said. His voice was monstrous. He brought the iron toward me and I could hardly bear the heat even from several inches away. Smoke was rising from the glowing tip.

With a maddened calm, Stach told me, “I’m going to kill you slowly. I want to hear you scream.”

My heart raced and I felt sick. The poker was pushed slowly and torturously toward my face, and all I could think of was, “God, take me quickly.” I called out for God, God my rescuer and confidant, the God I knew as a Yeshiva student, the God of our Torah. Where was God in all of this? I braced myself for the worst as Stach came toward my eyes with the iron. The heat was burning me from several inches away, and the glowing tip of the poker was sizzling in the humid air. Sweat beaded up on my forehead then dripped into my eyes. I shook uncontrollably and waited for the inevitable. Then the door flew open and Stach turned to face his friend who was exhaling puffs of steam and trying to catch his breath. He had been running, racing against time to find Stach and tell him something of urgent importance. He whispered something in Stach Lango’s ear. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but without a word spoken to me, I was untied and set free. I don’t know why. I don’t know to this day why they let me go. I ran out the door and ran and ran until I came back to my house in a pool of sweat and called for my mother as I burst through the front door. I saw her face through my tears and she opened her arms. I held her tightly and felt every fiber of her dress in my hands. I breathed in her hair and laid my head in my own perspiration, and tears running down her neck and soaking her collar. I couldn’t let go, and she held me; I was her baby and she held me. She sat down and I dropped to my knees as Momma held my head on her lap and stroked my face. I sobbed and she tried to console me.

Months passed. Our every move was tentative, and we took our lives in our hands with each step away from our homes. We did very little, the bare necessities on our farms and with our animals. There were daily killings—people were burned, beaten, and butchered, taken out of town and left for dead. People were constantly disappearing. Mothers were worried sick about their boys and husbands. They waited and waited, but it was over. They would never come back home. All of our days were coming to an end. One by one. A distant scream, a shot, pleas for mercy, shattering glass waking us from our beds in the middle of the night. Lives were tragically coming to an end. Cousins, neighbors, friends. The murder rate was sometimes ten, twenty, or thirty a day.

Then they came for me again. Stach Lango and a group of his friends. I cannot even remember most of the details, only that I was in my house with my family and the Bachrachs when fists started pounding on our door so loudly that we thought it would split in two. Black boots, farm boots, muddy, heavy boots kicked at our door, the door my father built with his two strong hands; the door I helped set upon its new hinges in my other life. Standing on our porch, stomping on our veranda, they kicked and punched. They called for us, Shmulek and me.

When we came to the door, we saw a wall of angry, hateful men and boys outside, spilling onto our front lawn, standing and stomping in my mother’s flower beds. Stach Lango pointed his gun at me and said, “Come on, let’s go.” I didn’t know what to think. Were we going to replay the events months earlier when he had been about to burn me alive? Then his gang pushed in through the door and grabbed me and Shmulek. There were horses and wagons lined up, one after another on our street. Several men pulled us outside, kicking and punching us and prodding us with the handles of farming hoes and rakes. We tried to cover our heads and faces from the blows as we were being shoved. I don’t know if I fell or not, but in an instant we were carried along by a mob to the middle of town where the market square was, in front of Zayde’s house. The market was crowded with more than a thousand people. We were all in one another’s way, tripping over one another, turning in different directions, trying to understand the confusion. Next, one by one we were dragged over to a wagon where, along with all the other young men, we were tied by our necks to the wagon’s railings. Three or four of us were bound to a single vehicle. There were some from Maitchet, others from towns nearby, and boys like Shmulek who came from the west with their families trying but failing to reach the Russian territory. I looked around and saw so many familiar faces: the same boys who stood with me to fight off the Cossacks; the same ones who studied Torah with me in the shtiebl. We were all there: every young man they could get their hands on. As I was being shoved and beaten, I saw my friend, Rabbi Chonyeh Goldstein, thrown to the ground. He struggled back to his feet and was dragged to a wagon. Also near me were my friends Chaim Novomicheski, Yankel Silverman, and Mayer Rozanski. A couple of Poles a few yards away were tugging at the arms of a woman. I couldn’t see her face. She tried to pull away, to sit, to kick as she wailed. One of the men took out his revolver and shot her in the head. A dark-haired doll, rumpled and broken, laid lifeless with a gentle red stream trickling away from her body.

We were tied up with our hands bound at the wrists behind us. The rope dug into our flesh, burning our skin as it scraped and tore into us. Our throats ached with harsh, wiry rope pushing into our windpipes and cutting off our circulation around our necks. Our eyes were open wide, but with more and more people crowding the square, we could not see more than dust, clenched fists, and a train of wagons driven by farmers. Wagon wheels shifted unsteadily as the horses revolted against a deafening roar of hate and commotion. Tied up and jostled, we waited under the sun drowning in a din so loud it stifled the sounds of our mothers as they screamed for us in torment through the windows of our houses. Scores of young men fell to their knees then, without the use of their hands, and being choked from the ropes around their necks tried to right themselves. I widened my stance and inched closer to the wagon to avoid being knocked over as the horse up front shifted position and yanked the wagon.

I had been torn from my mother, father, and two little sisters; I could not take one last look at them. Any chance to utter a single word to them, to say “I love you” with words or gestures, was stolen from me. No words of parting. No warm and loving hug, robbed of my mother’s softness, of my father’s strength and courage, of my sisters’ sweetness, of Zayde’s wisdom, of Bubbie’s loving gaze. A suffocating feeling of loneliness swept over me in the stampede. We were entwined souls ripped harshly apart in the darkness of mid-morning, in the silence of a riotous crowd whose hate and vengeance was now an avalanche. Someone—I did not see who—hollered an order in uneducated gutter language. Another brought his riding whip cruelly down onto the horse tied to the other side of the wagon. The animal screamed and the wagon jolted, wrenching our necks and forcing one or two others beside me to their knees. They struggled to their feet just in time as the wagons pulled away with all of us running in tow to keep up with them. Some, starting with a limp from the force of the wagons at their joints, were doomed not to make it. Our families watched from their windows with burning eyes as we became part of a long parade of slaves dragged out of town.

Have you ever seen a human body torn apart from being dragged over a rocky road? This is what happened to two of my friends who tripped or fell from exhaustion. The rope from the back of the wagon dragged them screaming and moaning. Then the screams stopped. All I heard was a body, then another, bumping in torn pieces along the road. Their legs were ground down into bloody stumps and their faces were no longer faces at the end of bouncing ropes.

My biggest fear for the moment was not keeping up and falling. With very little energy from a lack of food and sleep, we were pulled along by our necks like this for miles. We would stop for an hour or so here and there to rest the horses, then we were off again until we reached a little farm town called Koldichevo. When we got there, the Poles were raping girls and women out in the open.

We were at last untied then pushed with gun barrels into a barn that was partially filled with cold standing water and animal refuse. We were given a piece of bread and stayed in Koldichevo for two or three days before being tied up again and dragged off to Baranowicze.

Baranowicze. This was hardly the city I remembered. The busy Jewish hustle and bustle had been smothered. The Nazis created a Judenrat that told us to find a place within the ghetto and settle down. We were all kept as prisoners awaiting our next instructions.

With its great network of railroads directly and indirectly connecting Baranowicze with every city from Moscow to Berlin, Baranowicze was now a way station for Jews from shtetls north and south. Who would have thought that the trains that once brought fathers home to their families and Yeshiva bochers, like me, to learn from the greatest teachers would now be the instruments of an ultimate and irreversible tragedy. Jews were being packed into train cars and carried away, far away from this land and these memories. No more Jewish life, no more families, the last vestiges now just a memory.

The buildings of downtown Baranowicze, inside the ghetto, were makeshift homes for twelve thousand people concentrated into a small area, with six or seven buildings. More than a quarter of its Jewish ghetto population was made up of Jews from other areas. Even more were on their way as the Nazis meticulously swept through every shtetl in eastern Poland. I tried to imagine Baranowicze as I knew it only a couple of years earlier. I wondered what had happened to my uncles in the garment and lumber business. Where were the rabbis and the Yeshiva students?

The once-enchanting Baranowicze of my youth had become an ugly, desolate prison. Gone were the prosperous Jewish businessmen. Their houses and properties scattered throughout the countryside were no longer theirs. The best of their homes were stolen and occupied by Nazi officers. Local gangs ransacked smaller houses; others were left intact as Polish neighbors simply moved in and carried on life as usual. Small farms and fields or mills owned for generations were now abandoned. And shops in the middle of town stood empty, looted, lifeless.

The Baranowicze ghetto was cordoned off with fences guarded by Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians who anxiously waited for an opportunity to murder or beat up the Jews, Russian prisoners of war, or other “enemies” of the new Nazi order. If you were found outside the ghetto you were to be shot—no questions asked.

In Baranowicze, Shmulek and I found ourselves among a crowd of others who were brought there in the same manner. We were all forced into one wave of men and older boys through makeshift gates guarded by Polish police until shoved in behind the fence of the ghetto. Others, including women, mothers, grandmothers, children, babies, and toddlers, were forced onto the trains, locked in hot cars with standing room only, then shipped out to concentration camps in never-heard-of towns.

Along with the few young Jews from Maitchet, Shmulek and I melded with hordes of others from surrounding areas to await our fate. We had no idea what would happen next.

It was not our right to know our fate. There were only rumors but no real information. What would happen to us? Word spread that we would be used as laborers. What we were not told, but what we suspected was that we had become dispensable, unhuman beings. We had already seen that to shoot a Jew was like killing a fly. Our lives were worthless. The term “labor” was a convenient lie. Real laborers in a normal society had a value, but we were slaves, prisoners who committed no crime. This condition forced me to adjust, to see the world in a different way—without a future. My life as a person ended when I was forced into a crowd of angry, confused, tired, and defeated men and locked in this ghetto at Baranowicze.

As days turned to weeks, my goal was only to survive in the midst of a dozen people daily lining the sidewalks, exhausted and filled with fear, or taken out in small groups never to return.

Once the ghetto was stocked full of Jewish prisoners, the Nazis established work details that were sent out every morning. Some of us were made to clear roads, others to labor in fields. Still others dug mass graves. Without knowing it, they were digging their own graves, so they could be massacred in large numbers and swallowed up by the earth.

Every long, stressful day in Baranowicze was one step closer to death. Dead bodies were strewn on the sidewalks until we stopped noticing our own efforts to step over them on the way to scrounge for food and water. Vacant eyes, swollen bellies, hopeless, helpless faces. Confused, sad, and beyond anger, with no more bodily fluids left to produce tears. Baranowicze was dying quickly.

For the time being, I forced myself to stay strong. Hard work was nothing new to me, but the uncertainty of life created more and more anxiety. Only death awaited me in this ghetto. I had to get out, even though I knew that a work detail could be a death sentence. So far, Shmulek Bachrach and I had avoided selections for work details. We had escaped the notice of the guards, spending our days out of sight or, when appropriate, blending in with the masses.

Looking around, I could see that some of the older or frailer men would never survive any kind of labor. Their delicate fingers were meant for pointing to the pages of the Torah and their weak legs to take them to shul or to spend the day sitting at a desk. They were scholars or merchants, never having pulled a plow or carried heavy bundles on their backs for miles. I was a farm boy, and these were city men. They would never make it. They would be the next to go, and their families would never know what happened to them.

I trusted that God would give me the strength to take on the unknown that was ahead of me. In the meantime, I slept in the street, as the few buildings inside the ghetto were overcrowded with those wearier than myself. People were sleeping in stairwells, hallways, looted-out stores, abandoned offices, and warehouses. Some died in their sleep, and the smell of death grew heavier each day. Shmulek and I slept at night using our jackets as pillows, but we did not rest. We asked ourselves whether this was it—whether this was how our lives were to end.

Each day people were randomly singled out to leave for work. Overseen by German soldiers, our guards would assemble a group from our ranks who were taken away to work clearing fields, cleaning out railroad cars, repairing roads, digging trenches, and erecting buildings—all for the Nazi war machine. Not everyone came back.

One day a tall, good-looking Nazi officer in a brown uniform came to the ghetto and asked if there were any painters among us. Standing slightly behind him was his Polish interpreter, a man named Grabowski. Shmulek, a painter by trade, raised his hand then prompted me to do likewise. The officer, known as Herr Doktor Wichtmann, nodded his head and pointed at us. “Diese” (those), he said. Grabowski pushed his way through the crowd standing near the gate, then grabbed Shmulek and me by the sleeves.

We were selected to leave the ghetto. But where were we going? Should we have felt lucky? Were the others envious? Why should they be? Maybe it was better not to be separated from the rest; maybe it was a cruel trap. The Germans were quickly gaining a reputation for cruel tricks. A work detail was many times not a work detail at all. They marched you to the forest, ordered you to the edge of a ditch, then started firing their rifles. Twenty, fifty, a hundred at a time, shot into a ditch, and covered over by Russian prisoners and another work detail of Jews. We wondered, we feared, what we were volunteering for. But we feared even more to ask. To ask often was the end of it all. We di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Preface
• I Live to Remember
• My Little Shtetl, Maitchet
• Yiddish Culture
• Answering Questions with Questions
• Dreaming of a New World
• Shabbat Shalom
• Yearning to Touch the Past
• Visiting Baranowicze
• The Wrong Kind of Excitement
• Living with Our Differences
• All on One Block
• L’Chaim—To My Father
• The Meaning of Tzedakah
• Our World Started to Change
• The German Invasion
• Photos
• And Then We Were Slaves
• Escape from Baranowicze
• Free for Now
• Partisans
• More Aimless Wandering
• Spring
• The Awakening
• Viva Italia!
• Nowhere but Palestine
• A War We Would Not Lose
• Where’s My Visa?
• America the Beautiful
• Time for Reflection
• The Circle Comes to a Close
• I Remember
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author