Out of the Shoebox Read online

  Sunday, February 6th, 1944

  The days are getting longer – 6 am in the morning is bright and 4 pm it gets dark. I can’t sleep and wait for the morning light to start the day. Actually what for – the days are like ages, and to live through one is very hard. So many thoughts run through my head in these 18 hours a day, because again and again I live through the macabre scenes. Today we discussed the final liquidation of the camp with its death. And naturally I thought of Zanka and I saw a grave full of other bodies and again the reproaches came back to me, why did I let her go by herself, why didn’t I stay with her. Maybe it’s easier to go to death with someone dear beside you. She went to the truck holding Libcha’s arm (our cousin). I can still see the open truck with a chair in front of it for everyone to step on it in order to get into the truck. What perfidy! They take people to slaughter but they give them a chair to make it easier to step into the truck – that’s “western culture” humanity. I could scream – howl from pain – call to heaven for revenge. Until the liquidation I didn’t know so much hatred – such strong desire for revenge. I swear I am going to instill upon Lijuchnia hate for all that’s German. Maybe Mel is going to come home, please God, and he’ll avenge Zanka’s death. But with all that, we’ll never get Zanka back, and the wound is never going to heal. I remember the little girl who jumped on the truck. She lost her mother before (they shot her before the liquidation) and the Aryan who kept her didn’t want her anymore and brought her back to the labor camp from which they were now taking her to be shot. I keep on thinking how this little girl was going to meet death completely unaware of what’s going on. I connect her with the phrase which was said to us by our hostess, “do I have to take off my little chemise too?” The Aryans are repeating this question among themselves with sorrow, now how can we take it! I can’t stop thinking about it. I must admit that no death is more painful than a child’s. It’s such an innocent being – so little, it didn’t have a chance to live – it didn’t harm anybody – so why does it have to die? You just can’t think about it. It’s a typical slaughter of the innocent. I hope that the blood of these innocent ones shall fall on their and their children’s heads – amen. This doesn’t ease the pain at all. God, please spare Lijuchnia! Let me be able to be with her. I think I sinned, so please God forgive me and let me sacrifice [myself] for her. The days go by so slowly. Yesterday we had a good news broadcast.

  This is where the diary ends.

  Zelda Finkelman-Liebling was born on March 24th, 1918 in Chortkow to Eli and Lifka Finkelman. She studied at the Polish high school and graduated from teachers college in Lvov on the day the German bombing started. She married Joel (Lolo) Liebling and the two survived the war together. They were liberated on March 24th, 1944.

  They were the only survivors from their respective families. Lijuchnia did not survive.

  They had two children in the US, Mordechai and Linette.

  Joel passed away in 1988, Zelda in 1998, may they rest in peace.

  Lijuchnia

  ***

  Testimony

  It is rare to find memoirs of a Ukrainian who was a boy at the time and a witness to the extermination of Chortkow's Jews. Despite the fact that this short account was written after the fact and was undoubtedly edited to be "politically correct”, or perhaps because it was, the anti-Semitism that was prevalent at the time is so glaring. In just one page Jan's account summarizes the fate and end of Chortkow's Jewish community.

  Jan Kruczkowski, a Polish boy from Chortkow who lived near Jews tells of this period:

  "The Jews had completely taken over our town. It was hard to compete with them in commerce. They had small stores and large warehouses. The owned both grand houses and seedy ones. They got rich slowly but methodically. They lived in the center of town and were incredibly organized. They had schools, sports teams, synagogues and even an athletics club called Hashmonaim. The poorer neighborhood – the slum – was also in the center of town and later the Germans turned it into a ghetto. I would often see how Jews would do business and bargain. They would haggle aggressively and would praise their wares for hours. It was difficult to get out of there without buying anything. Often people would buy something just so they could leave the store and the annoying, pushy salesman. The Poles, I'm afraid, did not have that talent. Jews also took over transit. They had buses, wagons for their wares and carriages for people. Those carriages were needed by the people of Chortkow because the town sprawls over a large area and has an uneven topography with many hills.

  I had daily contact with Jews. I walked with them to school, and often we would play together, but mostly we would fight. I sometimes threw rocks at their miserable houses, especially on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. I never passed up a chance to pull the payot of spoiled Jewish boys from rich families.

  I lived surrounded by Jews. On one side were the Weissmans, on the other side of the yard were the Eisenbaums and their fat son Czesho who was my age, and across the street were the Pifers who had a store. My mother had a good friend – Trenia Golombioska. She always had poor people living at her place. Srul lived there, a little boy with a runny nose, and his older brother Moshko.

  To this day I can smell the sweet onions, the stale lard, and the stench of the garbage that was ever present in their house.

  I remember Srul who would look at me with hungry eyes whenever I brought candy.

  In 1942 they created a ghetto in the center of town for thousands of Jews which was completely sealed off from the outside. They gathered all the Jews from Chortkow and the rest of the region. This Jewish quarter was in the center of town and was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. They used concrete to block the exits, windows and doors that faced the Arian side. At the entrances and exits to the ghetto they posted the Jewish and Ukrainian militiamen.

  At first the Jews could still leave the ghetto to visit the gentiles they were friends with, tell them all about the horrible conditions in the ghetto and the cruelty of the militia. They would tell that even among themselves there were fights for survival. The strong took advantage of the weak, the rich ignored the poor; gone was Jewish solidarity. Fear of death took over and stifled any feelings of honor and justice.

  I'm afraid the same things happened among the Polish people. Often they didn't want to help, and wouldn't give even a slice of bread. They would shoo away from their doorstep Jewish kids who came begging. Luckily there weren't many of them, but sometimes you just had to say no.

  I remember, when the ghetto was being liquidated, a Jewish man we knew came over, an old neighbor from Kolyoba Street, and begged us to save his life. We refused. Our situation didn't allow us to hide him. We lived on a main street that saw a lot of traffic and was open to all. We had a large family and my parents couldn't risk everyone’s lives in order to hide a Jew. Did our wretched neighbor understand our situation? He left a fur with us, and never came back for it... for a long time I could not let go of the image of the wretched man who begged for his life. Unfortunately, his Jewish looks left him with no chance of surviving.

  The summer of 1942 saw the first Aktion. I saw Jews led in groups of four along Kolyoba Street towards the train station where train cars were waiting for them. In the first row were Rabbis and older men in their traditional clothes, long beards and payot. Sometimes younger men helped support them. They prayed loudly and wailed. It was a horrific sight. I saw them all: Czesho Eisenbaum with his parents, Pifer (who had a store) with their son who was a friend of mine from school, and old Wasserman. When they passed by the house they waved and shouted. I guess they were saying goodbye. We stood at the window and didn't know what to do, how to act. Fear of the thugs stopped me from getting closer to neighbors and acquaintances even though we all knew they were walking to their death."

  Based on the Polish-to-Hebrew by Yehudit Shifris (as published on chortkov.org)

  ***

  Memories

  I assume that in most families of second-generation Holocaust survivors, or those
who managed to reach Palestine before the Holocaust, there lurks an untold story.

  The first half of the 20th century was a tumultuous period, full of awful tragedies, expectations, new beginnings, the budding of new life, hope and disappointments. Most of us learned to live alongside the collective family memories with their emotion-laden silence. We picked that up from our parents, some of whom were experts in suppression and concealment. Many viewed memories as a weakness, something tying them to a trauma from which they wished to escape for good. Dealing with memories was tantamount to entering a danger zone, where they would have had to cope again with a personal trauma that had required all their energy to distance themselves from, so that they could lead a normal life. Those who led their lives in the shadows of Memory Lane often became depressed. But most welcomed the challenges of life in a new country as a chance to ignore the past, if not by obliterating the memories then at least by not talking about them with their offspring. Like many of my generation, I was born into that way of life. The past was not spoken of in our home. Perhaps they also wanted to shelter me from the knowledge of evil.

  Not only the memories were hidden, so were the photos. The cardboard shoeboxes and yellowing envelopes containing old photos were a mystery to me. Many Holocaust survivors and early settlers kept old photos: of their families, friends, and the places they came from. Those pictures were kept in envelopes and shoeboxes, never organized in photo-albums. Only once these people had children did they start placing the new pictures in albums. It was as if the old history was locked away, hidden and erased from memory, or at least downplayed, stashed away, isolated from everyday life, while the new life was deemed worthy of preserving as new memories. For all I knew, maybe they did sometimes look at the old photos, but if so, it was done secretively, far from our inquisitive eyes, on nights when sleeplessness reigned. It’s an amazing yet common phenomenon: many of us, after our parents’ demise, found a veritable treasure of old photos, at least some of which were a mystery to us: Who were these people? How were they related to us? Where do they belong in this memory puzzle? I believe that, whether consciously or not, these pictures were kept hidden away in order to avoid questions, fearing that answers to those questions would stir memories and feelings that were too difficult to cope with.

  My gaze into the past is like gazing through fog. That insight came to me during my trip with my wife to Acadia National Park in the US. At that point in time I’d just received the memoirs of Tonia Sternberg – Pepe Kramer’s friend – possibly the only witness to the murder of my mother’s family. One morning, Raya and I went out on a boat tour among the inlets and islands along the shoreline of Acadia National Park in Maine. That day, sailing conditions seemed adverse initially: a thick fog enveloped the water, strangling the seascape under its gray blanket, and we couldn’t see much. But gradually, we got used to the grayness, heard sounds and voices through the fog, and glimpsed sights that emerged from the mist: a fishing boat pulling up its crab net; a buoy with its cylindrical head facing skyward, topped with a red bell, its clanging monotone sounding to the rhythm of the waves, warning of an approaching collision. From time to time the shape of a lighthouse emerged through the thick fog indicating a new shoreline, a relic of days gone by when this was a busy water way frequented by ships. Much later, Raya told me sailing through the fog felt like an enchanted voyage. The fog alternately revealed and concealed the secrets of the place, creating tension between the observable and the hidden, and the feeling that the landscape was not to be taken at face value. Throughout this half-day voyage we didn't see the entire shoreline, nor an uninterrupted view from one horizon to the other, even once. Nonetheless we did not feel as if we were missing anything, but rather it felt like a voyage among sights and sounds that told the story of a place. This experience helped me explain and define to myself my feelings about uncovering my family’s past: a type of looking through mists where the visible is only a fraction of the picture, most of which is hidden; but the light flickering through the haze enabled me to paint a picture of my family and connect with hitherto unknown memories of a past long gone. I managed to feel a longing for my father, whom I’d erased from my memory years ago – or so I thought. And suddenly he was back.

  My father had been replaced by a picture on the wall. My father died on December 21, 1958. The Hebrew date was the 10th of Tevet [5719]. That’s why I hated Israel’s national poet, Haim Nachman Bialik, who was born on the same Hebrew day (though in 1873). Every year, when my school held its annual Bialik festivities for the poet, celebrating his birth, I would secretly weep for my father’s death. Whenever our homeroom teacher wrote that date in chalk on the blackboard, I’d brace myself for the question: “Children, who was born on this day, years ago?” Though no one in class knew the answer better than I, I never bothered to raise my hand or call out the answer: I was too busy mourning my father. Years later, the emphasis on the 10th of Tevet was shifted to other memorials: the day of remembrance for all Holocaust victims whose burial place is unknown; and the fast of Tevet commemorating the beginning of the siege on Jerusalem laid by Nebuchadnezzar II and ending with the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. As a child, I thought that those events were more suitable to commemorate my father’s death. Today, looking back, I wonder how come he died on one of the two days on which he used to pay his respects to the memory of his murdered family – Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and the general day of remembrance.

  I was raised in a secular home. My parents celebrated Jewish holidays, but as a rule didn’t attend synagogue services. Once a year only, on Yom Kippur, my father used to go to synagogue, to take part in the Yizkor prayer in memory of his family and friends. My mother kept score with God for not having prevented the murder of her family, and chose to pay her respects to their memory at home. My parents used to light a yahrzeit (memorial) candle every Yom Kippur and 10th of Tevet.

  It did not rain in December 1958 – it was a drought year. On a Sunday night, a cool but cloudless evening, my father died. He died suddenly, at home, following a heart attack. Only a wall stood between me, and my father with my weeping mother. Within a short while I was sent upstairs to our neighbors, the Rothsteins. I was told briefly that Father wasn’t feeling well and that everything will be all right. But apparently it was not all right. The following morning I was sent to “aunt” Rachel, a close friend of my mother’s, where I stayed another day. I was told that my father was unwell, my mother took him to the hospital but he couldn’t have visitors. My father’s funeral was held on that day. While I was playing Monopoly with imaginary friends, my father was being laid to rest. The next morning I was sent back to school, without a word of explanation. I guess a second-grader shouldn’t miss school, certainly not for two days running… My time in school was brief: already at the morning assembly a kid came up to me and asked whether I was the one whose dad died the other day. My reaction was swift and hard: I punched him in the face. I don’t think I was punished for it, but the truth quickly sank in. The looks of the other school kids left no doubt: my father was dead. On my way home, I was greeted by the obituary notices pasted on the pillars at the entrance to the building. I think I've never tried to visually recall those seven days of mourning. But today, through the mists of time, I vaguely recall an image of myself entering our home. My mother, pale and puffy-eyed, surrounded by her women friends. My sister, sitting in a corner, watching me, dazed. And as if in slow-motion, they both got up and walked over to me. I don’t remember much crying, neither mine nor my sister’s. I think I felt a dissociation, which accompanied me all my life. No one ever spoke to me of, nor discussed with me, my father’s death. He just died one day, left our lives, to be replaced by a picture on the wall.

  I never said goodbye to my father. Over the years, very gradually, my childhood memories of him faded until they disintegrated completely. Only his picture on the wall over my mother’s bed continued to stare at me for years, until the day I noticed that the photo
had been changing, getting younger with each passing year.

  Memories should be nurtured. That’s the only way to preserve them. And nurturing them is done through a story that breathes life and validity into them. You relate the memories, and they return the favor by growing stronger and finding a safe, permanent spot in your consciousness, until they become part of you. That’s how the story of going fishing with Father evolved into the nearly sole memory of my childhood; a live memory that lets me describe details in the most amazing clarity: My father’s clothes, down to the last detail; the clothes his friends Grave, Grossman and Israel wore; the minutiae of the decrepit balcony of the one-story cement building from which we fished; the slippery rock I climbed onto, the better to cast the bait into the water; the way the fish looked and smelled, and the salty smell of the water. I caught thirteen fish, whereas they, the expert fishermen, didn’t catch a single one. No wonder this was the memory I chose to nurture – memories of a proud kid. For years I’d see those images in front of my eyes at bedtime, during school, during hard times, and times when I thought of my father. Moments when I suddenly missed him, or just out of the blue, for no apparent reason. Over the years, I gathered facts about my father’s life. He seemed to me a man who made his dreams come true until his dream was cut short. According to others’, he was the persevering type, a man who tenaciously strove to reach his goal, who felt compelled to reach the targets he set for himself. That’s what drove him to leave Chortkow for Vienna to study engineering and architecture. That’s how he decided to immigrate to Palestine. That’s why he didn’t give up but continued to court my mother despite her parents’ objection and returned to Europe to propose to her and marry her. That caused him to insist on leaving Poland, with my mother and her sister, when WWII broke out, brought them to Palestine, saving their lives. And that was the motivating force behind his decision to quit working as an architect and switch to a career of a philatelist, converting his hobby into a profession that would provide my family with an income for a long time after he passed away. Though I always drank in every word when people spoke of my father, still I could not create a complete picture of him in my mind. Perhaps because, over the years, my mother stopped talking about him. My sister never talked about him, and our relatives kept their comments to occasional observations such as “You’re so much like him…” or “You have the same personality.” Such comments begged more questions, aroused my curiosity; but they were never accompanied by any substantial story that could add details to his character, paint him as a real figure rather than one becoming increasingly vaguer to me with time.