part0020

AFTER THE OVERNIGHT train ride, we arrived in Bologna, Italy. From there we transported by truck to Modena, where the Brigade had taken over an old Italian Academia Militare . The Brigade took charge of the building and used it to house refugees. We slept on the floor with blankets. It was there in Modena that Herschl bought me my first new pair of shoes since the liquidation of Wierzbnik on October 27, 1942. I took pleasure in the luxury of my new shoes. My mind turned to Shimmale, the shoemaker from Wierzbnik who used to make shoes for my family, and I wondered about his fate.

After the war, people desperately searched for information about loved ones. I met someone in Modena who had been with my father at Buna. He confirmed what I had feared, that my father had become another victim. I was alone in the world, adrift in a sea of other lost souls. Zvi Unger heard that there was more opportunity for us in Rome, so we decided to take our chances there. I already spoke Yiddish, Polish, and German, and was learning enough Italian to get by. We had no money for train tickets, but we also had no fear, so when the train conductor asked for our tickets, “billete, billete,” we simply handed him a page from a Siddur , a Jewish prayer book written in Hebrew that the American soldiers had given us, confidently proffering it as if it were some sort of U.S. or Allied pass.

In Rome, we met other refugees who allowed us to stay with them on the floor of their pensione . Many organizations were already assisting survivors and refugees. The United Nations Relief Agency (U.N.R.A.), and the Joint Distribution Committee, commonly referred to as “The Joint,” provided us with T-shirts, underwear, and other basic supplies. We began selling these wares to local Italians. Zvi Unger and I had saved up enough money to get our own hotel room. We kept going back to U.N.R.A. for handouts, giving a different name each time to receive a parcel. We were gathering an inventory that we kept in our hotel room.

We traveled all over Rome on the streetcars. When asked for our “billete,” we simply responded “Prisionero Tedesco,” German prisoner, and the Italian train conductors left us alone. We had no money to buy food, so we often took advantage of our Italian hosts by eating in their cafes and restaurants, sneaking out before the check arrived. At this stage of my life, I looked for shortcuts, but only to satisfy my hunger. I had no interest in cheating anyone. I was still in survival mode, utilizing the skills I had learned during my years navigating the camps.

The Vatican began baptizing refugees, especially children, paying them 30,000 lire for undergoing the process, so we decided to “convert.” We stood before a priest who uttered a few incantations in Latin, waved his hands in front of us, splashed some holy water on us, and declared us Catholics. We collected our 30,000 lire each and went on our way, knowing full well that once a Jew, always a Jew, no matter what the Vatican decreed. Hitler cared not if someone had converted. All that mattered was whether someone had Jewish blood running through their veins, no matter how diluted.

We had become so good at using false names with the U.N.R.A. and successfully going back many times undetected, we thought we would try to be converted by the Vatican a second time. However, I was easy to recognize due to my small stature, so when I went back to try and collect another 30,000 lire, someone from the church recognized me, and I was forced to run from there. The last thing I wanted to do was to survive the Nazis just to end up in an Italian jail.

Later, I was overcome with an unknown illness. All I remember is a high fever. Zvi took me to a local hospital, which transferred me to another hospital run by nuns. I communicated with the nuns in German, but could not understand their Italian, nor discern what was ailing me. After two weeks in the hospital, feeling better and having regained my strength, the doctors discharged me. Zvi arrived at the hospital to pick me up.

“We are out of business,” he announced. “Someone stole our inventory from our hotel room.” As disappointing as the news was, I felt hopeful that we at least had something to look forward to in terms of reaching Palestine.

On Yom Kippur 1945, having recently turned fifteen, I, along with my band of refugee brothers, entered the Grand Synagogue of Rome. I stayed for about fifteen minutes. I felt compelled to go to shul, more for the sake of tradition and out of respect to my departed parents and grandparents, but not out of any religious fervor, and certainly not for God. I was not about to ask God to forgive my sins, not when that same God allowed the brutal murder of one and a half million Jewish children, like my brother, Chaskel. I did feel grateful though to think back on the year that had passed since the previous Yom Kippur holiday, when I was saved from the quarantine barrack. How close to death I had been, and now, here I stood – a free man, able to go to a shul . Did any synagogues even remain standing in Poland or Germany? It was a remarkable gift to freely attend a Jewish service, given how practicing Judaism, even possessing any Jewish objects, (a prayer book, tefillin, etc.) could have resulted in death in the ghetto and in the camps.

I sensed that my luck in Rome was running out – I had almost been caught at the Vatican for trying to collect the conversion money twice, I had skipped out on numerous tabs at local restaurants, our inventory of goods from U.N.R.A. had been stolen, and I had just spent two weeks in an Italian hospital speaking German, a language that I could no longer bear to hear, let alone speak. The time had come for me to get on a better path.

“Zvi,” I said, “I heard about a school in the South in Santa Maria al Bagno. I think we should make our way down there. Other young survivors are going there, and the Brigade is helping them get to Palestine.”

But Zvi refused to go with me. “Michulek, I must return to Germany to look for my dear sister. I have heard rumors that she may have survived. I too wish to make my way to Palestine, but first, before I leave the graveyard of Europe behind me, I must know for sure if I have any surviving family members, and if it is true that my sister has survived, I must find her. You have been like a brother to me, and if you go to Palestine, I will find you there. Now, I want to give you this small sum of money to go by way of Bari to Santa Maria al Bagno.”

Again, another goodbye. It was hard to bid farewell to my comrades from the camps, but especially those like Kiva, Herschl, Mendel, and Zvi whom I knew from childhood in Wierzbnik. They knew me when I was a part of a family, part of a community. Now here I was alone in the world, charting a new path for myself.

Santa Maria al Bagno was a respite from the outside world. There, hundreds of young survivors, between fifteen and seventeen years old, recuperated and began planning their futures. There were eight groups, each with a Hebrew name: Hatikvah (“The Hope”), Geulim (“Redeemed”), Gur Ariyeh (“Young Lions”), Atid (“Future”), Moledet (“Homeland”), Tzabarim (“Native of Land of Israel”), Dror (“Liberty”), and Frumka, which was for girls, although I do not recall ever seeing girls during my stay at Santa Maria. I was in the aptly named Geulim .

Other than my hospital stay, it was in Santa Maria where I slept, for the first time since my liberation, in an actual bed with linen sheets. It was a small but important comfort. I was beginning to feel human again, and to take delight in the luxury of something I had once taken for granted. There were thirty-five of us in Geulim. We stayed together at Santa Maria and throughout our Journey to Palestine, where we were split into two groups that went to separate Kibbutzim.

Throughout the war, I had heard many rumors. Rumors about where various transports were going, where the train cars were headed, which towns no longer existed, which towns in Eastern Germany now held prisoners, etc. It was only at Santa Maria that I first learned of Treblinka.

Treblinka was comprised of a forced labor camp and a death camp. German and Ukrainian guards operated the camp. Barbed wire surrounded the camp, with tree branches interspersed throughout the wire in order to camouflage the fence and to obstruct any view of the camp from the outside. The camp was in a fairly remote area, about twelve miles northwest of the village of Treblinka. There was a train platform and barracks for sorting prisoners’ belongings and a simulated train station, to deceive prisoners into believing they were in fact being transported to other locales. Upon exiting the trains, men were separated from women and children, under the lashes of Nazi whips and the barked orders of Nazi and Ukrainian guards. The platform held discarded clothing and other items. Guards told the prisoners that they needed to shower for hygiene purposes, before being transferred to various labor camps. Guards instructed the prisoners to undress rapidly. Prisoners made their way through “The Tube” that led directly to the gas chambers. Guards forcefully escorted those who were too old or too infirm to make their way through “The Tube” to a “reception area” instead where they were shot in the back of the neck before their bodies were tossed into a fire pit.

Treblinka existed as a place to conduct mass murder. German efficiency perfected the killings of 2,000 to 3,000 Jews in an hour and a half. The Germans eventually increased the capacity of the gas chambers to accommodate 3,800 people at once. More than 900,000 Jews were killed in assembly-line fashion there in less than one year. Some desperate prisoners staged a revolt on August 2, 1943, without much success. Few of the prisoners involved in the uprising survived, but the Germans knew they needed to eliminate as much of the evidence of Treblinka’s horrors as possible. They exhumed the bodies from mass graves and cremated them; they dismantled and destroyed the camp’s structures, and they ploughed the land and planted trees in an attempt to conceal their inhumane crimes.

Treblinka became the final resting place of both of my grandmothers, my grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, classmates, and my younger brother, the baby of the family, Chaskel. And so, the day of the liquidation of the Wierzbnik Ghetto, October 27th, the 16th day of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar, is the day that the Jews of Wierzbnik commemorate the yahrzeits, the anniversary of the deaths of our family members. This is the date when we say Kaddish , the mourner’s prayer for the dead, for the death of the Jewish community of Wierzbnik.

After learning about Treblinka for the first time, and finally knowing the fate of my beloved family, my beloved Wierzbnik, I began to say Kaddish for those whom I had lost.

At Santa Maria, we studied Hebrew, ate together in a common dining room, and raised the flag that would one day be the official flag of the State of Israel. We established routines and began the arduous process of healing from years of trauma. Physically, I was gaining weight and returning, more or less, to normal. But what does that mean? What is normal ? Nobody survived the Holocaust and remained normal .

Many kids at Santa Maria had nightmares. Nearly all had difficulty sleeping. Once asleep, many cried out in the night for their parents or siblings, or they screamed out in terror as they remembered their ordeals. I, too, suffered from nightmares, especially after learning about Treblinka, and found myself replaying certain images in my mind over and over again.

After nine months at Santa Maria, our visas to Palestine had still not come through. The British were severely limiting the number of refugees or displaced persons who could legally enter Britishcontrolled Palestine. Other countries, the United States included, also limited the numbers of legal immigrants. We were in a state of limbo: no family, no home, no country.

Seven of the eight groups from Santa Maria received legal papers to emigrate to Palestine – only Geulim , my group, did not get official documents, and so we were the only group to go to Palestine clandestinely. Our journey would be grueling. There was the risk that we would be intercepted by the British, returned to Europe, interned at a DP camp, or incarcerated. We wanted to get on with our lives, but encountered difficulties and stumbling blocks at each turn.