Читать книгу My Sack Full of Memories - Zwi Lewin - Страница 12

7

The foundation stones of history are dates. Perhaps in the history of Europe in the twentieth century, none is more memorable than 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began.

Do I recall this day? Do I remember Germans invading Bielsk Podlaski? We were told that within eight days the German troops had taken the capital city, Warsaw, and so Poland had fallen. I was only five-and-a-half years old and the day was, in my memory, like any other day.

Map of the German invasion of Poland 1939

There is only one day I remember from that time; I was standing on the street, near our petrol pump, watching an endless row of trucks rumbling past. They were military, loaded with soldiers – so many that I still remember being stunned by this parade of might. Yet, there was no fear in my memory, for it seemed this was something not to be missed, but also not to be afraid of. It was the Russian invasion of Poland I was witnessing.

If dates are the foundation history is built on, then the façade is the subsequent skimming over of detail. The fall of Poland is often considered a straightforward event, but it was more complex. Two weeks after the Germans invaded Poland from the west, the Russians invaded from the east. Being allies, they agreed on the division of Poland with Germany retaining the west, while the east, nearest Lithuania and including Bielsk Podlaski, came under Russian rule.

The part of Poland adjoining Germany, including Warsaw, saw the rapid introduction of the German mode of dealing with its Jewish citizens: yellow badges, Jewish laws, and the construction of the Warsaw ghetto within months. It is no wonder that during the chaos of those early weeks thousands of Jews fled German-occupied Poland into the Soviet-occupied area. Bielsk Podlaski grew to having over 6000 Jews, with all these refugees from the German-occupied part of Poland. Many continued to travel further east into Russia, where the Russians, allies of the Germans, saw them as enemy aliens or traitors, and so many of these early refugees disappeared, either killed when found, or sent to work in camps in Siberia, where most them perished.

We were not fearful when the trucks rolled in. The Russians were the new rulers and, while they had their own idiosyncrasies, such as the Communist State, they were not any more overtly anti-Semitic than they had been when they had previously ruled Poland, and they were not on the pathway to murder their Jews, unlike their Nazi allies at the time.

Life continued as normal from my viewpoint as a young child and I can only assume my parents then pumped petrol into Russian rather than Polish military vehicles. Being the only petrol pump in Bielsk Podlaski, they must have been assured of ongoing business. The Lewins would have still sold groceries. While stores and businesses would have been nationalised and central State-run stores established, I doubt if much change took place in the day-to-day lives of my parents in the year or so the Russians were there.

Life must have been normal enough for my parents to consider less weighty matters than having a world war around them and instead dealt with a more personal matter. A request had come from my grandparents in Lithuania that it was time to reconcile and for my parents to travel and bring us children to meet them for the first time. Had my mother been in secret contact with her mother, Mina, over the years, or did the circumstances of the war encourage this communication?

I am uncertain when that request came, but after the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939, travel to the independent state of Lithuania would have been difficult. Lithuania controlled its own borders and behaved much as an ally of Germany. So, I suspect the request to return to Lithuania came over a year later when circumstances changed once more.

In June 1940 Lithuania was invaded by Russia and its independent days were over. The Russian invasion was accompanied by arrests and the seizure of private businesses and properties, and was deeply resented by the Lithuanians. Unfortunately, the Soviet Communists who now governed included Jewish leaders, which fuelled the tinder-dry Lithuanian anti-Semitism even further in the times that followed.

Yet, the upshot for us was that from late 1940 and into 1941, eastern Poland and neighbouring Lithuania were now both back under Russian rule as they had been at the time both my parents were born. The border between the two states was open. My parents could leave Bielsk Podlaski in Poland and travel to Vishey in Lithuania if they so wished.

It was most likely early in 1941, possibly March or April after the winter snows had melted, when Yitzchak, my father, crossed from Poland to Lithuania. He was travelling alone, for my mother wanted her parents to approve of her choice of husband before she brought herself and us children to see them – similar to how she handled Dvora, her mother-in-law, when they had reconciled all those years earlier. My mother may have been standing up for her perceived rights, or may have been seeking an apology, but the explanation I later heard from her was that because the fuel business needed one of them to be there, they couldn’t leave together.

How could they be planning a reunion during the war? They would have had no indication that the gears of the Holocaust were already grinding up the Jews in the German half of Poland, for by 1940 the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos had trapped the Jews of those large cities into a death spiral – 1941 was a year before the Wannsee Conference that introduced the term ‘Final Solution’, but the Nazi intention was quite clear; just the efficient German mechanics for the process needed to be refined.

With Germany and Russia being allies, my parents would have heard or known little of this in their part of Poland. For them life went on and my mother could consider a visit to Lithuania to see her parents in this period of calm. My father during his visit would have impressed my grandparents, Chaim and Mina. Well dressed, educated, wealthy with his own business and a family of renown in Bielsk Podlaski, he would not have needed long to impress the farmer and his wife.

My mother must have been satisfied with her husband, Yitzchak’s, reception and so it was May or June of 1941 when we went to see my grandparents for the first time. I recall it was sunny and not cold, so summer was underway. My mother would have had a passport indicating she was a Lithuanian going home to see her parents. There would have been no indication she was Jewish, as the Russians did not require yellow stars on the clothing. The Russians may have stamped the papers or the border may have been unmanned, but I don’t recall any hold-up on the way. The border wasn’t far away. We dressed and packed lightly for the planned short trip.

There was a bustling river crossing at the Polish–Lithuanian border and, being an inquisitive boy of seven, I watched with fascination as our hired boatman steered our vessel through the strong current so we were not swept downstream and were able to reach the jetty on the other side. Boats were going back and forth as the river wasn’t very wide. Was it the Neiman River we crossed that day?

It was a peaceful day, for my mother was to make peace with her parents after an absence of seventeen years. The headstrong eighteen-year-old girl was now the smartly dressed thirty-five-year-old mother of an eleven-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. She was experienced in running the family business and her household, and had married into a good family. She was able to hold her head high when she returned to Vishey.

On the other side of the river, my grandfather, Chaim, a full-bearded outdoor man in his sixties, waited with a droshky with which he then took us to Vishey. My mother sat beside her father and we children travelled with the suitcases in the back. I remember Chaya took her school bag with her. It was a leather satchel with an ornate flap and a curved handle. I don’t recall what she had in it.

When we reached Vishey, my mother saw her mother, Mina, for the first time in all those years. I have no memory of how the reunion took place.

Chaya and her satchel

I was only seven, but still have some memories of the house in Vishey. Half of the ground floor was a stable. I slept above the stove in a nook into which I had to be lifted, the pripetshik. This is the Russian word for the shelf above an oven, adopted into Yiddish and later immortalised in the Yiddish song ‘Oyfn Pripetshik’ which is usually translated as ‘On the Hearth’. It was the same nook Tila had been lifted into after her fall through the ice years earlier, and where she was found dead the following morning.

I didn’t know this. I still remember it was warm and snug from the fire below. Even though it was early summer, the nights were still cool. I remember the garden – a brown horse, a cow, goats and many chickens and, of course, the lake. It must have been a delight for me.

I don’t recall how long we were in Vishey, but I suspect the trip would have been planned to be for just a week or two. My mother needed to return to her role in the business. It would have been unlike her to holiday for long or to neglect her husband or her duties, for throughout her life she never failed to fulfil her commitments.

My mother would have found that her brothers and sisters – my uncles and aunts – had grown up and moved on in the seventeen years she was absent. The three younger sisters, Rivka, Malka and Bruria, were no longer children. Bruria had made aliyah years earlier and was living in Palestine. Her brothers, Daniel and Yosef, also were no longer in Vishey. Of the seven surviving children of Chaim and Mina, she may have only found her younger brother, Shmuel, still there.

It was important for the family reunion that she should see her siblings before returning to Poland.