Like any place that has been lost, Bialystok was heaven on Earth. Or the center of the universe. That, in fact, it was—or at least it was a sort of universal crossroads. It had been ruled by Prussia, Russia, and Poland, and its streets rang with Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, Belarusian, German, and Russian: this was perhaps why Esperanto was invented there. It was also—no, it was most importantly—a center of Jewish life in Poland between the two world wars, when Poland was the center of Jewish life in Europe. More than half of its one hundred thousand residents were Jewish; and Jews, having lived there for five centuries, dominated the city’s business, political, and cultural life. The current crop of Judeophile Polish historians is fond of claiming that Bialystok in the interwar period was spared the ugly anti-Semitic incidents that grew frequent in the rest of Poland, but this is not so. It is nonetheless true that Bialystok had more synagogues per capita than any city in the world, that in addition to Jewish schools and the world’s first Jewish ambulance service it had Jewish old-age homes and soup kitchens, an orphanage and various other charities, and that all of this earned it the moniker “The City with the Golden Heart” among European Jewry.
Bialystok was neither particularly flat nor especially hilly. It had a broad main promenade and a web of crooked cobblestone streets. It had a Jewish quarter that was largely poor, and it had other, more affluent neighborhoods, where the landlords were mixed and the tenants were mostly Jewish. It had ambition. Forty years after the city was destroyed, Jewish survivors living in New York published a memorial book that overflowed with pride in the city’s prewar accomplishments: “Bialystok’s streets grew more beautiful.… Electric cables were laid under the ground, streets were widened, avenues were lined with trees, and a new sewer system was installed. Large new apartment buildings and four-family homes were constructed.”
In one of these four-family homes on Zlota Street lived the Goldbergs, my grandmother Ester’s family. The name of their street in Polish and their surname in Yiddish meant “golden,” and they might have joked about this without a trace of embarrassment, because they really were one of Bialystok’s golden families. Her father, Jakub, was a big man. Physically, he was hulking: nearly two meters tall, and robust to the point of appearing about to burst out of his suits. Politically, he was imposing. A member of the General Zionist organization, he was an activist of European stature, which certainly commanded respect locally. And locally, too, he was active, as a member of the municipal council—the city’s main governing body—and, later, of the kehilla, the board elected by the Jewish community. Financially, chutzpah was his main capital. A bank he had inherited from his grandmother went bust in the worldwide economic crash of 1929, but Jakub refused to scale back: the fancy apartment, one of the city’s few phone lines, Ester’s governess, and the other help—none of this would be given up. “If I die tomorrow, do I want to be remembered as the Goldberg who paid his debts on time?” He apparently preferred to be remembered as the Goldberg who knew how to live well. He would ultimately be remembered as neither, but he was basically right: life would not go on like this much longer, and, anyway, he did not mind the gaggle of creditors following him around. He briefly tried going into business by buying a train car’s worth of candles he planned to resell, but the merchandise arrived without wicks. He ultimately found a job selling insurance for a large Italian company, but he never did pay off all his debts. Nor did he buy an insurance policy—a fact his wife discovered when their apartment was robbed while they were away on holiday, and his descendants learned about six decades later, when the company in question began paying on the life insurance policies of Holocaust victims.
Jakub’s wife, Bella, on the other hand, was short, even tiny, and held to an entirely different set of political beliefs. She was a member of the Bund, the Jewish workers’ party. The wife of one of Bialystok’s most prominent Zionists worked as, of all things, a Polish teacher at a Yiddish school. That is, while her husband devoted much of his life to promoting the study of Hebrew for the Jews’ eventual return to Palestine, Bella earned her daily bread by helping Jewish children become that much more assimilated by learning the Polish language. But then, her independence did him proud, for she was a university graduate—an anomaly among Polish women at the time, especially Polish Jewish women, especially women from Chasidic families. Yes, they were both from a Chasidic family—they were cousins—and they were both atheists.
Those are the facts, as best they can be established. What could they mean? Perhaps that the Goldbergs formed that rare happy union of two people who continue to grow, independently, in more or less the same direction, conquering the world together. Raised strictly Orthodox, together they gradually mapped their path away from religion until one day Jakub shaved off his beard and exchanged the wide-brimmed fur-trimmed hat and long coat of a Chasid for a generic European suit.
Or they may have lived the uneasy union of two people who, while each is driven to act on his convictions, view the world in fundamentally different ways. As a Zionist, Jakub was convinced the Jews belonged in Palestine. Bella, a Bundist, would have subscribed to a different utopian vision, that of Jewish autonomy within Eastern Europe. She was a socialist; he was a banker. He belonged to a party that aimed to establish Jewish national unity as a far more important factor than class; her party opposed any political initiatives that were based solely on the Jewish issue. The argument between their two parties was constantly fought on the floor of the municipal council. On election day Jakub and Bella walked the streets of Bialystok with their respective placards, and he denied her his customary courtesy of walking on the pavement while she walked on the sidewalk (to lessen the nearly two-foot difference in their height).
History, in its way, has since settled their argument. The Zionists—that is, those of them who had the will, money, and luck to move to Palestine before World War II—survived. The assimilationists, or, as the Bundists were known, the “localists,” died where they lived. But then, murder, even systematic and ideologically driven murder, is a function of circumstance more than anything else. Witness the Goldberg case. He was killed; she survived.
In the years leading up to his death and her unwitting escape, the arguments may or may not have subsided, but they did reach agreement on one thing. Aside from matters of politics and matters of religion, they lived a single joint project: their daughter, Ester, who was born in 1923 and grew up, as only a child of total love and devotion can, knowing that she was the smartest, most beautiful, and luckiest girl, who happened to live in the center of the universe.
This is easily the best day of the year. For the holiday of Shavuot, the Bialystok Hebrew Gymnasium suspends classes and marches its entire student population of several hundred from its imposing brick headquarters on Sienkiewicz Street, down Lipowa, the main street—decorated in lavish green for the holiday—through the park and past the staring occupants of the Forty-first Infantry Division barracks, and into Pietrasze Forest for an entire day of campfires, singing, and eating cheese, honey, and triangular kreplachs. The small kids—the three- to five-year-olds—are brought along for their traditional introduction to Jewish schooling, and they run around sticky with the honey meant to sweeten the taste of scholarship. The older kids—Ester is thirteen, which places her in the dignified middle of the gymnasium’s age spectrum—throw themselves into the forest silliness, running around and screaming, only to slow down after a bit for some earnest confessions out of earshot of all but a few close confidantes and for the occasional argument on the political (read: Zionist) issue of the day.
It is still a couple of hours till sundown but the air is starting to cool and some of the children are already casting about for their things when Ester sees a girl from one of the upper classes running awkwardly from the edge of the forest. She is a big girl, with strong legs and thick arms and a mane of light brown hair that is now undone, flying away from her face in a way that somehow, to Ester, signals fear. She stops when she reaches a smoldering campfire and, standing firmly now, starts screaming, her words apparent nonsense: “We are surrounded!” It takes a few minutes for the mood to shift and her words to begin making sense. The soldiers from the Forty-first Infantry Division have encircled this part of the forest and are swearing not to allow any of the “little kikes” out. The two boys with whom Hanna—this is the messenger’s name—tried to leave the party have been so severely beaten they are still trying to make their way back here.
The rest of the day leaves no room to be a thirteen-year-old. The teachers and some of the upperclassmen huddle, while the other older students herd the small kids into a clearing and proceed to count them obsessively, every two or three minutes. A boy from the graduating class is dispatched to try to sneak out to alert the authorities. The authorities are personified this time by Jakub Goldberg, who, being an atheist, is ignoring the holiday and working in his office in the municipal council. For the following five hours he feels very much like his thirteen-year-old daughter: his first, overconfident call to the police elicits a satisfied chuckle on the other end of the line. His calls to leaders of the various Jewish organizations succeed only in raising the level of hysteria. As the news seeps into Bialystok’s tiny telephone network, crying women and shouting men start running through city streets toward the Pietrasze Forest. Perhaps the spectacle of these parents, desperate and immobile at the edge of the forest, in plain view of the Forty-first Infantry Division barracks, moves someone. Or perhaps whoever thought up the joke is satisfied with having reduced the Jews to a state of agitated helplessness. Or perhaps the soldiers get tired and want to go to sleep. It is eleven o’clock when the soldiers finally disband, allowing the children to run through the darkness toward the receiving line of weeping parents.
A couple of hours’ drive from Bialystok, Brok is a resort town. Its joys are quiet. A river, a terrace on which to take the air, an occasional visit from a young man. The suitors began to come last year, when Ester was just twelve. Uncommonly well developed for her age, she had attracted the attentions of a college student. Her mother warded him off with unwitting deftness, though, when she shouted from the balcony, as the young couple prepared to board a ferry, that twelve-year-olds rode free. The poor student not only abandoned his wooing immediately but left the resort altogether, so frightened he apparently was by this brush with potential sin or even crime.
This year’s routine—the daily forays to the beach, the Saturday visits from Jakub, who stays in Bialystok during the week—has lately been enlivened by the appearance of another suitor, a Polish officer in training, a slim but dashing character in his military uniform. Bella and Ester have taken a room with a terrace in a large private home, since far too many of the pensions now announce, alongside their name, “No dogs or Jews.” Ester is sipping tea with the young officer on the terrace; she must stay home this Saturday morning because Jakub is due in from a neighboring town where he has been visiting his sister. He takes the three-hour trip from Bialystok weekly, often stopping off at the house of one of his more progressive relatives, someone who would not frown upon his traveling on the Shabbat.
As Jakub approaches the house, he waves to Ester and visibly picks up speed. He bounds up the stairs and traverses the terrace in two leaping steps, then grabs the young man by the collar and holds him suspended in midair like a small animal, for a split second, before stepping back toward the stairway and sending the charming conversationalist tumbling down.
He plops down in the chair that was just a moment ago occupied by the officer. Ester, who must have leaped up when her date was so rudely ended, continues to stand awkwardly, half expecting an explanation, half wondering whether she overstepped an unspoken boundary by entertaining a grown man.
“I saw that little snake just yesterday,” Jakub offers. “In one of those pickets.”
Those pickets have been plaguing the Jews of Poland. Young men have been lining up in front of Jewish-owned shops in all sorts of towns, holding placards calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses. Customers—even Jewish customers, terrified at the thought of crossing picket lines with no one (certainly not the police) there to protect them—have been scared away. Jewish stores have been closing.
“Prec z zidami, zidovecki z nami, eh?” Jakub asks, quoting one of the picketers’ favorite slogans: “Off with the Jews, but we’ll take the Jewish women.” He is trying to make sure his daughter is on his side. He does not need to do that. She has been thinking a lot this summer, ever since the incident in the woods, and she has made some decisions. First, she is happy that her father won the argument with her mother and she was sent to the Hebrew school rather than the Yiddish one. But more than that, she has to leave this country. They all do. She is now a hundred percent behind the plan her father laid out for her years ago: they stay in Poland until she graduates the gymnasium, in 1940, and then she will travel to Jerusalem to attend the university there, and this will help her family get vouchers to enter Palestine. (Though Jakub could use his position within the Zionist establishment to angle for vouchers sooner, this seems to all of them like an altogether more sensible plan.) In Palestine they will all work—surely Bella will see the need for this soon, perhaps even today, when she hears of the officer incident—to build a Jewish state. Meanwhile, Ester has resolved that when school resumes she will become an ever more active member of the Ha-Shomer ha-Zair organization, a leftist youth Zionist group, and will double the time she spends walking door to door with her Keren Ka’emet box, collecting money to buy back her homeland from the Arabs.
By the mid to late 1930s, Polish Jews had come to live with a constant sense of danger, perhaps even doom. Though only a few would have suspected that the ultimate threat would come from outside the country, most Jews had the sense that life as they had known it was ending. Pogroms were coming in waves. Even in Jewish-dominated Bialystok, things were changing fast. As a result of the anti-Semitic economic boycott and a number of state-enforced measures—including one mandating stores to stay shut on Sundays, a measure intended specifically to ban the Jewish-owned stores from reopening right after the Shabbat, as they had always done—the number of Jewish-owned stores in Bialystok dropped from 663 to 563 between 1932 and 1937, while the number of Christian-owned ones rose from 58 to 310. The state quashed the Jews’ attempts to retreat farther into their quasi-autonomous existence. The government controlled the budgets of the kehillot, the Jewish councils, reducing them to largely symbolic functions. As for the Jewish schools, not only did they receive no state support but their diplomas were not recognized by the state, forcing graduates to stand for humiliating, openly discriminatory exams if they wanted to continue their education at universities—which, in their turn, imposed quotas on the number of Jews admitted. Jews who were accepted to universities were required to sit separately, on the so-called ghetto bench (instead, they stood in protest). Nor did those who chose not to seek higher education fare any better. In a time when the state was increasingly taking control of the economy, Jews were banned from jobs in state institutions of all sorts, from government agencies to tobacco factories. Protests elicited more restrictive measures—like when Ester’s Bialystok Hebrew Gymnasium went on strike in response to a pogrom in a nearby town and promptly had its license taken away. From that point on, final exams were administered by a state commission that brought a Catholic priest along as the Hebrew interpreter. Students took pride in their defiance and the small ways they found of getting around the rigged system—like when they contrived to speak ridiculously fast Hebrew to show up the priest, whose Hebrew was evidently rusty. Their parents, meanwhile, were coming to the realization that they could no longer live where twenty generations of Jews had made their home.
People rarely choose change when other options are available. By the mid to late thirties, Polish Jews no longer saw an alternative. Their decisions stemmed from despair, and their main hope was to survive. Contrary to the often-cited view of Jews politely and naively accepting their doom in Europe, the truth in Poland, at any rate, was that Jews had lost their illusions. Moderate Jewish political parties were edged out by the radicals: on the one hand the Bund, which wooed supporters with its increasingly forceful rhetoric of resistance, and on the other hand radicalized Zionist parties, which supplanted Jakub’s once-popular party, the General Zionists. Where the old Zionists devised extensive educational, cultural, and propaganda programs aimed at encouraging the Jews of the Diaspora to become interested in someday making their home in the place known to them as Erez Israel (and to the rest of the world as British-ruled Palestine), the new organizations were dedicated to transporting the maximum number of people there in the shortest possible period of time—no easy task, considering the increasingly heavy restrictions placed on immigration by the British authorities. Arab-Jewish tensions in Palestine by the end of the 1930s verged on war. Following the Arab revolt of 1936, the number of Jews allowed to enter the country dwindled every year.
Not that there was any other place to go—even for those who were willing to risk leaving one country only to encounter anti-Semitism elsewhere. The most popular destination for émigrés of the pre–World War I period, the United States, had suspended its hospitality. With anti-Semitism there on the rise, as it always is in times of hardship, America issued a total of just thirty-three thousand visas to European Jews in the five years following Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany in 1933. Neighboring Soviet Russia was, for the new generation, a terra incognita: the mainstream papers reported on the famine and then the purges and show trials there, while the leftist press wrote of equal opportunities for all classes, religious and ethnic groups—but all of them may as well have been writing about a different planet and not about a country that literally could be reached by foot: the border had been sealed for over fifteen years, so Russia was not so much a neighboring country as the end of the world. That left dreams of Erez Israel.
Thanks largely to the efforts of the “pioneering Zionist” parties, as they were known, a sort of Jewish autonomy was increasingly taking shape in Erez Israel, whose Jewish population reached about six hundred thousand by 1940. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the struggle focused on the distribution of immigration certificates: the quota was set by the British, but the coveted papers were handed out by the World Zionist Organization, which made its decisions in accordance with a convoluted set of criteria aimed at maintaining a semblance of political stability in both Erez Israel and the Diaspora. As a ranking member of the General Zionists, Jakub could have claimed a certificate whenever he chose. But Bella’s younger sister Helena, an agronomist, had gone to Erez Israel and returned to Warsaw disappointed: she had not found work. And who would hire a Polish-language teacher in Palestine? Jakub and Bella had decided to wait until Ester finished high school. Staying in Poland past that point was not an option—not unless they wanted their only daughter to claim a spot on the ghetto bench. Ester’s organization, Ha-Shomer ha-Zair (Hebrew for “Young Guard”), was one of the “pioneering Zionist” groups with a distinctly socialist political orientation. Jakub cringed at the leftist rhetoric but supported his daughter’s activities in the interests of the greater good: Zionism. Bella, who had resigned herself to her family’s Zionist path, could at least rejoice in her daughter’s choice of leftist politics. The group was a kind of heavily ideologized training camp for making aliyah—emigrating to Palestine. Shomrim, as its members were known, most of them middle-school and high-school students, were assigned to units of about twenty people each. After graduation these children of Jewish teachers, merchants, and factory workers lived together in their small communes, learning the skills necessary to work the Holy Land, where, once their immigration certificates finally arrived, they would go on to found kibbutzes.
Ester herself, coming as she did from a relatively well-to-do family, assumed she would go to university rather than join a commune—a proposition that required money both in Poland, where she attended the private Hebrew gymnasium, and in Erez Israel. Still, the life of the Ha-Shomer ha-Zair, with its uniforms, its songs, its heroics, and its dreams, was supremely, overwhelmingly, consummately appealing. The uniforms? They were vaguely military in style, with neckerchiefs—the more or less generic uniform of scouts and “young guards” everywhere, with the ideological advantage of erasing class distinctions in dress and the practical advantage of making shopping trips and tailor visits with Bella superfluous. The songs? There was the one in Hebrew that said that “the Jordan River has two banks, this one is ours, and that one is ours too.” It was the anthem of a different, more militant Zionist organization, but it sounded good, so they sang it anyway. The heroics? One had to be willing to live for the organization and carry out its orders, no matter how difficult. The organization could, for example, choose to separate couples: that happened to an older girl Ester knew, Chaika Grossman, whose fiancé was dispatched to build the future in Erez Israel while she stayed behind to organize—for a total of twelve years, as it turned out. And the dream? It was a perfect dream, of a land unseen and a life barely imagined.
Life, in other words, was elsewhere. The universal theme of teenage existence—the present as prologue—was magnified manifold by both the wretchedness of life as it was and the hurdles and uncertainties on the way to the imagined future.
The dreams were all the more powerful for Ester because she had someone with whom to dream them. The star of Bialystok’s Shomrim was a boy named Isaj Drogoczinski. He came from an unconscionably poor family—he had had to stop schooling after seventh grade to go work at a leather factory—and he was fiercely articulate. By the age of sixteen he had become the group’s main ideologue; as Ester would later find out, he was also the author of most of the unsigned editorials in Unzer Lebn (“Our Life”), the leading Yiddish-language daily in Bialystok. He and Ester had become a couple when she was fourteen and he fifteen, sometime during the year following the summer of her unlucky Brok affair, and from that point on their future was never in doubt: “There was never a question in our minds that we would marry. He was, naturally, also planning to go to Palestine.”
Jakub and Bella were less than thrilled with Ester’s early and firm choice of a match from such a poor, uneducated family, but they resigned themselves to the fact about a year into the relationship. That spring the leather factory where Isaj worked burned down, and the boy, luckier than some of the workers, ended up in the hospital with horrible burns all over his body. He was hospitalized for about two months, and Ester spent her days by his bedside the entire time, eventually moving Bella to start visiting him in the hospital as well. By the time he was released, half emaciated boy and half scar tissue, his place in the Goldberg household was no longer questioned.
There is perhaps nothing so expansive as teenage romance with an ideological foundation. Isaj and Ester’s romantic moments were shot through with their politics. On the way to a Zionist summer camp in the Carpathians in 1939—the year Ester turned sixteen—they read the stories of Yosef Hayyim Brenner to each other; Ester had given Isaj the book. Brenner’s biography, which they knew by heart, was a study in the history of Eastern European Jewry. He had been born and studied at a yeshiva in Ukraine, become a Bund activist in Belarus, lived briefly in Bialystok, served in the Russian army, fled to London during the Russo-Japanese war, become a socialist Zionist, and emigrated to Palestine in 1909. There he wrote in Hebrew, describing the Jews’ blood-drenched existence in Russia, their sweat-soaked life in London, and still more bitterly, their humiliated position in Palestine. He was killed in the Arab riots of 1921. Like thousands of Eastern European Jews of their generation, Ester and Isaj adopted as their manifesto Brenner’s story “Hu amar la” (“He Told Her”), the monologue of a Jewish youth addressing his mother on the eve of a pogrom. He tells her the time has come to stop relying on the anti-Semitic authorities for protection from the hoodlums and to wage “a war of the poor sons of Yankel against the powerful descendants of Chmielnicki.” Chmielnicki was, in the seventeenth century, the Ukrainian Cossack leader who presided over the massacre of more than one hundred thousand Jews. Yankel, a name Brenner picked to represent a generic Jew, happened to be Ester’s father’s Yiddish name. Isaj had been just as poor and as desperately angry as the narrator. Clearly, this was their story, and their future.