The summer solstice fell on Shabbat in 1941, which meant that in Volozhin devout Jews had to wait until nearly ten o’clock at night before they could kindle a spark or flip a switch. Reuven Rogovin was such a Jew, and on Saturday, June 21, 1941, he duly sat through the long silent gloaming before turning on his radio. It was worth the wait. Louis Aragon, the celebrated French Communist writer, was visiting Moscow and a concert in his honor was broadcast from the Soviet capital that night. The reception in Volozhin was spotty, but good enough for Reuven to enjoy the music as brightness slowly drained from the sky. After the concert, the announcer read the news as usual—nothing of note. Reuven went to bed. The next morning, he didn’t bother with the radio—nothing ever happened on Sunday. But bad news came the old-fashioned way, spread from mouth to mouth: Fayve Yosef Simernicki, a local socialist activist, had died of old age. Reuven joined the small procession to the old Jewish cemetery on a knobby hillside behind the yeshiva-turned-restaurant. It was on the way to the funeral that a friend shared with Reuven another piece of bad news, more startling than the death of an old man. “Molotov [the Soviet minister of foreign affairs] spoke on the radio,” the friend confided nervously. “The Germans attacked Russia. Their planes bombed Minsk, Kiev, Harkov, and other Soviet towns.”
When the funeral was over, Reuven hurried to the people’s park in the former Volozhin marketplace. A great crowd had gathered.
I saw many of the Volozhin Jews crowded together. They argued in loud voices. They formed two camps: one was pro-Soviet and the other pro-German. Workers and artisans were sure that the Soviets would overcome the Germans swiftly. Merchants and dealers, to the contrary, were convinced that the Germans would win. They refused to listen to any of the refugees’ tales about the German atrocities and their blood-curdling deeds against Jews. They considered the accounts of horrors as Soviet propaganda. Many Volozhin inhabitants witnessed the German 1918 invasion. They assumed that the 1941 Germans would not be in any great measure different from those in 1918. During the occupation of the First World War they [the Germans] did not hurt any Jews. So they said, “It is not reasonable that this cultivated and organized nation could change during one generation. Why would they hurt us now? The people working for the Bolsheviks, and in love with them, they should be afraid now, but not the common Jews.”
Similar conversations were taking place in Rakov and Vilna and every shtetl, town, and city in Russian-occupied Poland. Nobody, not even Stalin, had had an inkling that Hitler was planning to break his pact with the Soviet Union and launch one of the most massive invasions in history. No Polish or Lithuanian Jews went to bed on the night of Saturday, June 21, thinking that they had observed their last Shabbat in freedom. Etl sang Mireleh a song, bid her mother good night, gave baby Dobaleh a late feeding in the hope that she would sleep longer. Then she got in bed beside her husband. At 3:30 A.M. on Sunday, while they slept, 3 million Nazi soldiers and two thousand Luftwaffe bombers sprang at them out of the west.
When the crisis came, the Soviet authorities proved to be useless. Scrambling to save their own necks, they left the local population utterly on their own in “bewilderment and panic.” In Volozhin there was a hasty conscription of able-bodied men under the age of fifty. A thousand reported for duty, but the Soviets could only process fifty men—and those were dispersed when a Luftwaffe squadron passed overhead while they mustered. “The authorities were busy trying to evacuate the important persons to safe places deep inside Russia,” wrote Reuven Rogovin. “The Soviets did not tell us what to do, whether we should stay in our town with the German enemy approaching rapidly or whether we should escape to Russia. Each person had to decide for himself.”
Chaim’s brother Yishayahu debated this question heatedly with his good friend Benjamin Shishka. Benjamin said he was going to evacuate with the Russians; Yishayahu tried to talk him out of it. Yishayahu was convinced he had nothing to fear from the Nazis: he was a Zionist, not a Bolshevik—let the Germans send him to Palestine if they didn’t want him. Benjamin fled east with the Soviets. Yishayahu went home to his wife and children and waited.
Rakov, twenty-five miles east of Volozhin, had one more day to wait. The Soviets organized a hasty evacuation of the schoolteachers along with a handful of intellectuals and a dozen young men who had been conscripted into the Red Army. After bidding farewell to Etl, Beyle, and the children, Khost left with this group. They were headed to Minsk—east, away from the Germans.
Doba had been sixteen years old in the last months of the Great War when the Germans marched into Rakov. She remembered it perfectly. They were all afraid when the Germans entered the town, but it quickly became apparent that they had nothing to fear. The Germans stole nothing, burned nothing, insulted no one. They sang while they marched.
The German soldiers who entered Vilna on June 24, 1941, neither marched nor sang.
There had been bombing raids on the city on Sunday and again on Monday—but by dusk the droning of aircraft receded. As night fell, Lithuanians took to the streets and Jews shut themselves in their apartments. Doba and Shepseleh’s front windows gave on Pivno Street, a major thoroughfare, and they stood looking out from behind the curtains at their Lithuanian neighbors milling around below. In the street, the sound of distant engines rose in a whining crescendo—the motorcycles of the German vanguard. The soldiers rode two to a bike—one driving, the other training a machine gun at the windows of the buildings. Next came tanks decorated like parade floats, with huge red banners stamped with black swastikas at the center, and then the artillery and finally an endless stream of trucks crammed with soldiers. The bystanders cheered and waved white cloths and shouted “Valia, valia!” (Long live). The Lithuanians joyously welcomed their Nazi “liberators.”
Pivno Street was silent and deserted when Doba, Shepseleh, and the boys awoke on Tuesday, June 24. The shopwindows were shuttered; even the arch under the Ostra Brama was empty. Everyone who had the will and the means to escape was heading east with the retreating Red Army. Everyone who remained in Vilna was now a subject—or prisoner—of the Third Reich.
“I don’t know and cannot imagine what has happened with them,” Shalom Tvi wrote Sonia frantically. “Have they stayed where they were or have they escaped to Russia? Only one thing is clear to me, that wherever they are it is not good. May God allow that they be healthy and alive. For mother it would be better to remain in Rakov, also for Etl with the children and Doba with the children it would be better to remain, because whatever happens, they would be in their own beds, and they would not be starving. But for Shepseleh and Khost it would be better in Russia.”
Even half a world away, they knew each other’s thoughts and anticipated each other’s decisions. Doba and her children stayed put and slept in their own beds. Etl and her daughters did the same. Khost fled for the Soviet Union. Or tried to. In the event, the party of Rakov teachers and intellectuals was too slow, and the Germans caught up to them outside Minsk. Khost and the others were taken prisoner and marched into Minsk with the entering Wehrmacht. He was the first of the family to disappear.
The Nazis had had two years of experience in the gutting of Jewish communities, and by the summer of 1941 they had gotten it down to a science. First they removed the leaders. A couple of random public killings instilled fear and enforced submission. Next the able-bodied men were targeted. The cowed survivors fell quickly into line.
But there was always room for improvement. Vilna, with its combustible mix of cultured Jews, anti-Semitic Lithuanians, and stateless Poles, became a kind of laboratory for Nazi terror and mass murder.
Shepseleh’s job, whatever it had been under the Soviets, ended the day the Germans took control. Overnight, he joined the huge ranks of the Jewish unemployed: Jews who were fired from Vilna’s hospitals, universities, and public offices; Jews whose businesses were shut down or appropriated or “Aryanized”; Jews who were replaced by Lithuanians. Shepseleh stayed inside with the boys—already Jewish men were being attacked or grabbed off the streets. On June 28, a dead body was found near their home on Pivno Street. Doba left the apartment only when they needed food. Jews were now forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, to converse with a gentile or set foot in a gentile home, or to appear on the city’s major thoroughfares. Doba took her place in line outside the food shop, but the Lithuanian neighbors shoved her to the back. Gentile women who a week ago had smiled at her and stopped to ask after her sons now turned their backs. The Nazis had quickly set up a Lithuanian police force to do their dirty work, and Lithuanians signed on enthusiastically. The next time Doba went out for food, the Lithuanian police were on hand to divide shoppers into two lines—one for Aryans, one for Jews. Doba spent the morning of July 4 sewing: starting that day every Jew in Vilna had to wear two badges—one on the chest, one on the back—of yellow circles set in a square of white cloth, with the letter J stitched like a barbed hook at the center. Four days later the orders changed and they had to replace the patches with yellow armbands. So Doba had to sew four of those.
Or by that time, maybe only three.
Herman Kruk was a Warsaw-born journalist, library director, and bibliophile, who kept a meticulous diary of his experience in the war. Soon after the Nazis took Warsaw, Kruk escaped and made his way to Vilna, where he continued to write faithfully in the diary. Actually, what Kruk composed was less a diary than a modernist collage, a kind of verbal newsreel of official orders, newspaper headlines, rumors, overheard dialogue, eyewitness accounts of arrests, evacuations, random violence, orchestrated violence, vital statistics, laments, surrealist street theater, and intimate cries of grief and fear. Kruk went prospecting in the mud of occupied Vilna and whatever he hauled out he wrote down. The diary survived and remains one of the most vividly textured accounts of daily life under Nazi occupation.
On July 3, 1941, Kruk wrote:
In the past two days, the snatching assumed a mass character. It is dangerous to leave your home.
PEOPLE ARE DRIVEN OUT OF THEIR APARTMENTS
Most recent events: they come at night, drive the whole family out of the apartment, take the men away, and the rest remain with their belongings in the open courtyards. The apartment is sealed. And there isn’t anybody to protest to.
At some point, very likely early in July, Shepseleh was snatched. The exact circumstances will never be known but the range of possibilities was narrow. The Nazis were ingenious but repetitive: the same scenario with only minor variations was executed thousands of times in those weeks. It could have happened in the courtyard of the Pivno Street apartment building in the middle of the night or in broad daylight on a city street. Shepseleh might have been hurrying down an alley with some precious object that he intended to trade for food or simply standing by the window when he was spotted and reported. The vise of a hand closed on his arm, the snout of a gun tapped at the small of his back, a shoulder shoved his shoulder, and they had him. Already there was a Yiddish word for them: hapunes—snatchers.
Shepseleh was forty-four years old that summer, thin, refined, healthy but not robust. What he wanted most in the world was to support his family. As the hapunes led him away they told him that they were taking him to work. “To work, to work,” they kept shouting, never saying where or at what. Work was good—or better than nothing; work was life for Doba and the boys. Shepseleh was put in a sealed courtyard or a holding pen at Lukiszki Prison with an ample platoon of “co-workers”—fifty or sixty men in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, many, like him, wearing suits and ties, some carrying small suitcases or little leather kits for their razor, toothbrush, and comb. So they could stay tidy while they worked. They were marched out of Vilna to the south into the fields that pressed up close to the city. It was infernally hot and dry in Lithuania that summer, and in no time the men’s shirts and the armpits of their jackets were wet through with sweat. Shepseleh was accustomed to spending summer afternoons sitting in the shade outside a dacha playing chess with Shimonkeh and Velveleh. It had been years, decades, since he had walked so far under the blazing sun. Finally the fields gave way to woods of pine, oak, and maple. The sun was broken by needles and leaves into flecks of gold. Birds trilled liquidly. Some of the men asked for water but the guards hurried them along. Shepseleh could make out the occasional peaked cottage roof between the tree trunks: they were in dacha country. Paneriai the Lithuanians called this forested summer colony—Ponery in Polish, Ponar in Yiddish. Shepseleh’s family had never vacationed here but he had heard of it. Halutzim used to come to picnic amid the wildflowers. Ponar meant rest, quiet, trees echoing with birdsong. Why on earth were they being taken to work here?
From the diary of Herman Kruk:
On the tenth of this month [July], a rumor came to the Judenrat that people were shot in Ponar. The Judenrat didn’t want to hear anything and considered it an unfounded rumor.
Ponar was a gift that the Soviets had unwittingly left behind for the Germans. In the last months of their occupation, the Soviets had started work on a massive fuel-storage facility adjacent to the existing rail line at Ponar. The plan was to excavate a series of pits in which to sink fuel tanks, but the Germans arrived before the project was completed. Nonetheless, one pit measuring sixty feet across and twenty feet deep was in place, a second sixty-foot pit had been partially dug out, and five satellite pits had been started. One of the pits had a twenty-foot-deep trench going halfway around its perimeter. The Nazis understood at once that these immense empty cavities in the earth could be used for something other than fuel storage. The business of mass slaughter was just ramping up in the summer of 1941. Later it would become routine, but in the early days the planners and designers were still making it up as they went along. Ponar was an inspired bit of improvisation.
Hitler and his henchmen deemed the business of genocide too vast, complex, and important to be handled by the Wehrmacht—the regular army. Instead, the SS (Schutzstaffel—“defense echelon”), a paramilitary police force that reported directly to Hitler, was tapped to set up an elite unit called the Einsatzgruppen (“special duty groups” is the rough literal translation—“mobile death squads” captures their function). Tough Nazi loyalists were recruited to be Einsatzgruppen foot soldiers; its officers included a large proportion of lawyers, doctors, doctorates, even a few pastors. The four Einsatzgruppen (lettered A through D) were further broken down into subunits of Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos. Since the manpower of the entire Einsatzgruppen was only about 3,000 (each of the four main groups had between 600 and 1,000 men), efficiency and ingenuity were essential.
Einsatzkommando 9, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe B with about 160 men at its disposal, was assigned the task of “cleansing” Vilna, a city with 60,000 Jewish residents and an additional 20,000 Jewish refugees. It was a daunting task but Einsatzkommando 9’s leader, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Alfred Filbert, a lawyer from Darmstadt, set about it energetically. Filbert put together an auxiliary force of 150 men cherry-picked from the Lithuanian political police to assist with the work; he had lists drawn up of Vilna’s Jews, with a separate category for wealthy families, intellectuals, and political activists; he ordered “snatchers” to target the leaders and able-bodied men first so as to leave the women, children, and elderly defenseless. And he had the good fortune of inheriting a ready-made mass murder site at Ponar. “The executions are to take place away from cities, villages, and traffic routes,” SS commander Heinrich Himmler specified. “The graves are to be leveled to prevent them from becoming places of pilgrimage. . . . Executions and places of burial are not to be made public.” Ponar was perfect on every score.
Ponar was supposed to be a secret but there were witnesses to what happened there that July. In the first week of the month, a couple of Wehrmacht drivers and a clerk saw a column of prisoners marching on the road and they followed them to the site. They noted that the men moving the column along with their carbines were not Nazis but Lithuanian civilians wearing armbands. The clerk reported that all the prisoners were men “between about twenty and fifty. . . . These prisoners were really quite well-dressed and most of them were carrying hand luggage such as small suitcases.” When they reached the site, the prisoners were marched around the perimeter and into the semicircular trench that ringed one of the partially excavated pits. They were ordered to stand silently in the twenty-foot-deep trench, but not all complied. According to one of the drivers, “An elderly man stopped in front of the entrance for a moment and said in good German, ‘What do you want from me? I’m only a poor composer.’ The two civilians standing at the entrance started pummeling him with blows so that he literally flew into the pit.”
Shepseleh was not one for making trouble. He took his place with the others in the trench. He waited for his pick and shovel to be issued. But no work tools were in evidence. Instead the men with the carbines ordered all of them to take off their shoes, jackets, and shirts. Jackets and shoes were to be piled on the side of the trench. Shirts were to be wrapped around their heads and faces. Anyone who was slow or reluctant got slammed with a truncheon or the butt of a rifle. The orders were loud, clear, quick but incomprehensible. Shepseleh was told to grasp the naked waist of the man in front of him. A pair of wet trembling hands grasped his waist from behind. Shepseleh and nine other men were marched like that out of the trench. The ten of them stood in a blind human chain at the lip of a pit intended for fuel tanks. The air exploded, bullets ripped into flesh, and Shepseleh fell into the pit. The witnesses differ on exactly how the firing was done. One said there were ten Lithuanian auxiliaries armed with rifles or handguns—one for each victim in the batch. Another swore the killing was done by one man with a light machine gun. When Shepseleh’s body fell into the pit, it landed on a pile of warm bodies. Some of them were still alive. A guard stationed above the pit used his pistol to finish off anyone who was moving.
“We stayed there for about one hour,” one of the witnesses said later, “and during this time some four to five groups were executed, so I myself watched the killing of about forty to fifty Jews.” The witnesses made no move to stop or protest what they saw, but their consciences were not entirely defunct. “We all said to one another what on earth would happen if we lost the war and had to pay for all this?”
By the end of the day, Shepseleh’s corpse was embedded in a layer of four hundred fresh corpses. Before calling it a night, the guards sprinkled them with a thin coating of sand and lime so the pit would be ready for the next day’s slaughter. Witnesses recalled seeing the sand shift and heave for hours afterward.
Still, they all died eventually. By September, twenty thousand Jews—most of them men, like Shepseleh, in the prime of their lives—were missing from Vilna.