I HAD KNOWN HIM in early childhood as ‘the Partisan’. He was a regular visitor. He would come on weekends, especially during the summer, as I recall it, dressed in shorts and sleeveless cotton shirts. He seemed large to me then, far bigger than father. I remember him as a man of muscle and bulk leaning back on a sofa, legs sprawled out in front, body sagging into cushions, while he spoke in a light tenor that highlighted the melodic flow of Bialystoker Yiddish.
His stories wove in and out of forests, hamlets, and glistening swamps, leaving in their wake a fantastic ‘other’ realm: bands of partisans roaming the countryside; thefts of arms and raids on enemy bases; miraculous escapes from barns surrounded by soldiers; and battles that left bullet scars in arms and legs. His anecdotes were told with a slight smile, a sense of irony, and dark humour. The irony was lost on me then, of course, but my glimpses into that other realm remained, always recalled against the clutter of endless cups of tea. It is part of my picture of him: a modest man, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer as he sank into the sofa, the cup rattling as he changed position. I also recall frequent references to a place called Pruzhany, although it would be many years before I came to know why it had been so important to my mother and the fate of the family she had left behind.
September 1941. The Gestapo orders the evacuation of 12 000 ghetto inmates. They are to be transferred, it is claimed, from Bialystok to Pruzhany, a townlet one hundred and fifty kilometres southeast, not far from the Bialowieza forests. The order provokes widespread panic. There have been rumours of death squads, tales of massacres in Vilna, the Ukraine, White Russia. Surely Pruzhany is a ploy, a pretext, a fiction.
The Judenrat, the Jewish councils imposed by the Nazis to carry out their demands, is instructed to make the selection. Debates rage for hours over who is to go. It is the devil’s calculus they have been forced to engage in. Councillors agonise. Arguments erupt. And, as the deadline draws near, criteria are drawn up: retain the able bodied, the skilled, those thousands who trudge to work every morning, to factories controlled by German industrialists, both within and outside the ghetto. Provide slave labour, pay the arbitrary fines, keep the ghetto productive, and we can buy time, argues Judenrat chairman Efraim Barasz. He emerges as the dominant figure. His views are persuasive: what choice have we but to select from the poor, the unemployed, the widows and their children, and from families crowded in the most squalid of quarters?
On the eve of Rosh Hashonah the first notices are delivered: tomorrow you are to assemble at five in the morning by the gate on Ulitza Fabryczna. Among those whose names are on the dreaded lists are Reb Aron Yankev, Chane Esther, my Aunts Liebe, Sheindl, and Tzivie, and Uncle Joshua with his two children Chaimke and Itke.
Five a.m. Darkness. On the streets a heavy frost, a steady drift of snow. Only hand-luggage and shoulder packs are allowed. Furniture, mementos, heirlooms are left behind. Reb Aron parts with his holy books, Chane Esther with mortars and pestles, Aunt Sheindl with some of her many dresses; and like shadows they move through the streets, feet slipping in mud and snow, shoulders bent and hunched under packs and sorrow.
By Fabryczna gate, the lists are checked. There are last-minute attempts to plead for exemption, to flash forged work-passes, to bribe Judenrat police. Occasionally someone makes a dash for a side-street. Fate flits softly, a mere straw on a breeze. The crowd huddles in the cold, against the mute falling of snow, the muffled screams of Nazi guards, the quiet crying of a child.
A fleet of trucks moves through the gates. The evacuees are herded aboard. Packs are lost in the confusion. The convoy lurches off over ice-glazed roads. Many hours later it comes to a halt by a cottage on the outskirts of Pruzhany. The prisoners are ordered in, one at a time, to be stripped naked and searched. Lining is ripped apart for hidden gems and currency. Possessions lie scattered over the floors. Those caught concealing valuables are beaten. For hours the evacuees wait outside, exposed to the frosts.
Pruzhany looms across a field of snow: an oasis, a relief, an unexpected welcome. Jewish doctors wait to treat the bruised and frostbitten. Hot meals are served by the ghetto Judenrat, and the evacuees are escorted to their new homes: cramped timber cottages confined within electrified fences.
And so it was, as accurately as I have been able to recreate it from scant information, that eight Probutskis from mother’s family and, over a period of weeks, an estimated 5 000 Jews of Bialystok made the journey to Pruzhany ghetto in the winter of 1941.
The Partisan made his way to Pruzhany under very different circumstances. It is years since I last spoke to him; but apart from areas of private pain that are clearly off limits, he recounts his experiences quite willingly. He appears considerably smaller than I had imagined, his shoulders now hunching. Yet traces of a once powerful build are still evident; and, as he speaks, that half-smile dimly recalled from childhood encounters hovers upon his face. I am never quite sure which way the smile is going — towards a grimace that conceals an inner torment, or towards genuine laughter. In time I realise that his smile contains both possibilities, constantly at play. The events he describes are at once so bizarre and menacing that his mild demeanor and humour act as a counterpoint, a means of containing the absurd within the bounds of normality. The Partisan brings the voice of the ordinary to events of the extraordinary.
‘You have no idea. How can you? You were not there’, he emphasizes, echoing a refrain I have heard from many survivors. At times he pauses in the middle of a story as if he himself finds it difficult to believe that he had actually been ‘there’. ‘It is impossible to understand. Somehow I survived. I always seemed to make the right move. Or was it that fate always favoured me?’, he muses, and shakes his head in disbelief.
In the early days of August 1941, soon after the Bialystok ghetto was established, he was approached by a Judenrat member, escorted outside the ghetto to a timber yard, and introduced to the German manager. ‘He had been mobilised to build roads. He needed someone to build garages. I said, “Okay. I can do it. But I need workers”. “How many?”, he asked. “Six. Perhaps eight”, I replied. “Choose whoever you want”, said the boss. I returned to the ghetto. People were desperate for work. Many clamoured around me, pleading for a job. I chose some friends, acquaintances. What could I do? I was the only true carpenter among them.’
I have come to enquire about Pruzhany and my relatives, but the Partisan jumps from story to story, following a thread of his own; and he draws me in, increasingly spellbound, into a web of tales, ‘a thousand-and-one nights’, he calls them, and again shakes his head in disbelief.
‘He was a fine man, the boss. He called me “Herr Goldman”. Do you understand what that means? At a time when his fellow countrymen were calling us worms, vermin, the lowest form of life, he would greet me as “Herr Goldman”. He fed us well: bread and liverwurst, a rare piece of meat. One day he called me over and held up a bucket of jam. “Chief”, I asked, “how much should I pay?” “Dummkopf” he replied, “this is a present!” He even agreed to help me smuggle it into the ghetto. As we approached the gates, he saluted the guard: “Heil Hitler!” A few steps beyond the entrance, he spat on the ground and cursed: “Scheisse Hitler’”
And Pruzhany? How did the Partisan meet up with my family? ‘There is a lot to tell’, he says. ‘Until this day I still cannot believe I had the chutzpah to do the things I did. One morning, as I arrived for work, I saw Gestapo officers approaching the shed. I quickly realised that they suspected some of us were involved in underground activity. Actually, we had only just begun to talk and to scheme. There was a Polish mechanic in our group, a Russian, and several Jews. When I saw the Gestapo coming I acted quickly, on impulse. I jumped through a window and hurried back to the ghetto. On the way I met one of the members of our group, “Shloime the Geler”, the fair-haired one, and I warned him not to come to work. He lives today in Germany. We correspond from time to time. A clever man. Resourceful. He even survived Treblinka, where he became one of the barbers who cut the hair of those condemned to the ovens. Aron! You have no idea! A thousand-and-one nights, and many more!’
That evening the Partisan stole over the ghetto fence and made his way to the city square. Two Jewish workers were loading a truck. They had been ordered to transport wool to Pruzhany, where it was to be used in lining boots for the Wehrmacht. ‘At first they refused to take me. So 1 held up something that looked like a pistol. It was nothing. Merely a bluff. A piece from a dead grenade. But it was enough to persuade them’, the Partisan tells me with a grin.
‘I hid in the back, under the wool. Late at night, as we passed through Bielsk, we were stopped by a Nazi patrol. They probed and prodded. I crouched in a corner. Just as I was about to be detected, they gave up the search.’
‘Pruzhany was a Yiddishe shtetl, a small crowded ghetto, far more intimate than Bialystok. It was possible to endure.’ The Partisan speaks matter-of-factly about the struggle to survive. There was a certain point at which one lost the will to live. Over one-third of Pruzhany inmates did die: of hunger, disease, despair, especially in the early months. But those who weathered the initial onslaught toughened, adjusted. They were able to smuggle in food. White Russian peasants were willing to trade. In the spring of 1942, it was even possible to bake matzos for Passover.
Nevertheless, Reb Aron Yankev refused to eat it. He preferred to go without, rather than eat suspect food. What could be kosher under the rule of the devil, he argued. He would rather stick to a meagre diet of tea and potatoes. In Pruzhany Reb Aron appears to have turned away from the absurdity called life, to retreat inwards, to the refuge that had sustained him through previous crises. A ‘black plague’ on a world that had fallen victim to the ‘evil impulse’. The past was repeating itself. As he had during the first war, Reb Aron withdrew to his dream of God and Tzaddik, while Chane Esther, the matriarch, remained firmly rooted in matters of daily survival. ‘She was old, worn out, embittered’, observes the Partisan. ‘But she was also tenacious, persistent, a fighter.’
The Partisan came to know her well. He was a frequent visitor in the Probutski household, for it had become a meeting-place for a cell of the Resistance. During their secret gatherings, on her own initiative, Chane Esther would tie a kerchief over her head, stroll nonchalantly outside, and stand lookout by the fence which ran close to the house.
Potapoffke 33. The Partisan recalls the exact address. Every detail is welcome, every little aside that throws light on an aunt, a cousin, anything that elevates them above a welter of facts, statistics, and collective destiny. Potapoffke 33. A peasant’s cottage. Of timber. A small garden. A kitchen and one large room in which lived Reb Aron Yankev, Chane Esther, Liebe, Sheindl, Tzivie, Joshua, Chaimke, and Itke; and, in addition, two young men. One was a goldsmith who made rings on order, for German clients. He would hand over the meagre profits to comrades in the underground. ‘His hair was grey’, recalls the Partisan. He still marvels that one so young could look so old.
The second boarder was Yanek Lerner. He was a key member of the Resistance. The Partisan had known him for years. A tall man, with blond hair, he spoke the earthy dialect of a peasant. In Bialystok he had dealt in dairy products and livestock. The Partisan laughs as he pictures him walking through the streets of Bialystok driving gaggles of geese. He was a regular guy, a reliable comrade; and in Pruzhany he had become Sheindl’s lover.
‘Your Aunt Sheindl was beautiful’, claims the Partisan. ‘A true krasavetse.’ Whereas the youngest sister, Tzivie, appeared fearful, a haunted soul afraid to venture out into the streets, and Liebe had become bent with labour and resignation, Sheindl remained proud and defiant. She ran the household, provided spine to the family, infused everyone around her with energy; and at night she lay with Yanek Lerner. ‘This is how it was’, says the Partisan. ‘One could be fearful, another defiant. No better, no worse. Merely different. After all, who are we to judge them?’
Sheindl was such a beauty. They all say it: mother, father, Aunt Feigl, Uncle Zalman. 1 had not visited Uncle Zalman for many years. A distant uncle, related through in-laws of Feigl’s, he had left Poland in the late 1930s to settle in Melbourne. He greets me enthusiastically, and remarks: ‘You are a true Probutski. I can see it in your eyes: a grandson of Reb Aron Yankev, a nephew of my best friend Joshua.’
He is in his eighties, a frail man with Parkinson’s disease. It is eating into him at the edges. Yet there is a gentleness, the poignant dignity of an elderly man struggling to keep his faculties intact. Zalman’s vision of things around him is blurred, constantly disintegrating. But when he focusses on the past he moves into clear waters, and within this transparency he regains sight of a city and of friends he has not seen for fifty years.
Zalman had grown up in the Chanaykes, next door to the Probutskis. His friendship with Joshua had persisted beyond childhood; as young men they had often sung together in the renowned Chor Shul. ‘Joshua was a tenor. He had a voice that could fly’, claims Zalman. ‘And your Aunt Sheindl was very beautiful. I had my eye on her for many years but, alas, she never wanted me. She was a true krasavetse. She looked like a famous film star of those times, but I can’t quite remember who. And Joshua, he was my best friend’, he repeats with tears in his eyes.
‘When he cries, it’s a sign he feels well’, Zalman’s wife assures me. She is a no-nonsense woman who fusses around him, wipes the saliva from his mouth, attends to his every need.
‘Bialystok was a city with a heart’, mutters Zalman.
And you went barefoot and hungry’, interjects the practical one. She brings us cups of tea and continues to fill them to the brim.
The table is overflowing with drinks, strudel, honey cakes, apple compote, and albums featuring family parties and picnics, bar mitzvahs and weddings, children, grandchildren, a recently born great-grandchild; and pasted between them, in stark contrast, are obituaries to relatives who have died in recent years. All of them Bialystoker’, points out Zalman. ‘Those who managed to get out in time.’
‘The doctor says he shouldn’t talk so much about the past’, interrupts the prudent one, forever observant of every fluctuation in Zalman’s moods. But increasingly time loses meaning as we sit around the kitchen table, flipping through family albums in which past and present, celebration and obituary, seem to dissolve into one shared moment of silence. Suddenly Zalman glances up and remarks, ‘You look exactly like Pushkin, the Russian writer’; and he begins to recite one of his poems. But he stops abruptly, mid sentence and, like a cheeky child, he grins and announces: ‘I know a verse far more profound than any written by the great poets. We used to stand on the streets of Bialystok, your uncle Joshua and I, and recite it as we gazed up at the stars:
A Jew looks up at the sky.
Is he looking for God?
No — he’s just scratching his beard.’
Fate is not a grand design. It is made up of slight twists and feints, impulsive decisions, hesitations, unexpected detours. Sheindl had many admirers and boyfriends. In one photo she is pictured with her first fiance, Chilek, in 1930. She is wearing a black dress with white frills on the sleeves. Chilek is dark complexioned, curly haired, his face lean and tense. He migrated to Palestine, and in mother’s album there is a postcard in which his portrait is circled and linked with Sheindl’s, above a montage of Tel Aviv scenes. He was organising a visa for her, he wrote. Soon after, letters ceased. He had found someone else.
Several years later, Sheindl was engaged to a Bialystoker called Laizer. On the eve of his departure for Chile they married. Sheindl sent a photo of the occasion to her sisters in Melbourne and Wellington. Laizer is appropriately handsome, exuding confidence, a man of the world. He wears a pin-striped suit, a black shirt, an embroidered silk tie. He is looking away from the camera at some distant point, while Sheindl, as usual, gazes directly at the lens. Yes, she reminds me of a film star of the times, but I am not quite sure who. Perhaps it is that she embodies the look of the era: she is of the future, rather than the past, far removed from the shtetl outlook of her parents, and unafraid of her beauty.
She had always been strong willed, mother has told me. She was the sister who fought the fiercest of the battles against Aron Yankev and his strict orthodox ways. He had tried to forbid her from associating with the bohemians, freethinkers, and visionaries who had captured the longings of Bialystok youth. Sheindl drifted in cafes and dance halls about town. On one occasion she had brought home a statuette of a naked woman, sculpted by a friend. ‘I will smash it’, raged Reb Aron. ‘Smash it and I will set fire to your holy books and never return’, retorted Sheindl.
She had her way. The statuette remained standing on top of the living room cupboard, and Reb Aron withdrew one step further from his daughters. Yet, in the final days, he was to be reunited with Sheindl in a fashion far more potent than formal religious bonds, and Sheindl was to prove a source of loyal support in the darkest of times.
The photo of Laizer and Sheindl is dated February 6, 1939. By the time Laizer had organized a visa, in Chile, it was too late.
He called him simply Probutski. He could not recall his first name. He was aware that he had been a master weaver in Bialystok, and that he was Chaimke’s and Itke’s father. But it was not until after many conversations between us that the Partisan mentioned that uncle Joshua had been one of the tenants in Potapoffke 33. It was as if in Pruzhany he had become a nonentity, unrecognizable as the spirited Joshua of Zalman’s reminiscences. I have to press hard for information. ‘What can I say’, the Partisan replies. ‘He had become a shadow, always standing to the side. His sunken eyes gazed only at his children, as if afraid for their every move. That is all I remember.’
Yet usually the Partisan can recall the most minute of details. ‘There are incidents that took place yesterday I forget’, he tells me. ‘After all, I am almost eighty years old. But of the ghetto and the forests, my memories are so clear. For instance, I am standing in the kitchen of my White Russian boss, a man I worked for in Pruzhany. He ran a factory in which wooden kegs were assembled. Sometimes I would be directed to work on his house. There was a pan of peas, frying in pig fat. It smelt so inviting. I was very hungry. In the ghetto there was a severe shortage of food, and the boss didn’t feed us well. For a moment I was left in the room alone. Mmm! I couldn’t resist it. I approached the stove and grabbed some peas from the pan. Of course, instead of getting a tasty morsel of food, I burnt my fingers.’ As he tells the story, the Partisan winces and blows on his hand, as if he had grasped the food a mere moment ago.
The winter of 1942 was approaching. The earth lay buried under snow and ice. ‘Jude! Jude!’, the Wehrmacht officer ordered. ‘Take this wood to the third floor!’ The Partisan hauled the heavy load up three flights of stairs to the officer’s quarters.
The order had been barked in typically abusive tones. Yet when the Partisan entered the apartment and stacked the wood, the officer thanked him. He had to maintain appearances in front of the others, he claimed, and apologised for having nothing to offer except some biscuits sent to him from Germany.
The Partisan gave the biscuits to seven-year-old Itke on his next visit to Potapoffke 33. Her radiant joy on receiving them he can picture vividly to this day. Again the Partisan laughs, this time fully and spontaneously; and it is obvious that when one lives in Gehenna a spark of joy is a revelation, a flash far brighter than the snows that covered the earth in the winter of 1942.
In the cottage at Potapoffke 33 the Partisan and his comrades discussed reports from the Russian front, and worked out ways of obtaining arms. The Partisan chuckles as he recalls one of their smuggling ventures. ‘I built a concealed deck into a sled. One of us had obtained a pass to bring firewood into the ghetto. We stole arms from a nearby barracks where some of us worked, and hid them in the false deck under a pile of wood. When we reached the ghetto gates we asked a Nazi guard to accompany us. We convinced him it was his duty to ensure safe delivery of our load. He was flattered. Instead of searching the sled, he rode with us, seated upon the wood, drawn by horses across the snow, the proud protector of Wehrmacht property.’
The underground in Pruzhany was divided over whether to move to the forests or remain within the ghetto to foster an uprising. The debates were fierce. Those with family tended to favour a final stand within. Others insisted that effective resistance could only be waged beyond the fences that kept them trapped and encircled. ‘At times we came to blows, and even worse’, mutters the Partisan, and lets it go at that. After all’, he adds, ‘either way we were confronted by a ruthless enemy determined to destroy us.’
Yanek Lerner and six comrades left for the forests in December. The Partisan was to steal out later with a second group. Yanek had asked Sheindl to accompany him. There was no future in the ghetto, he argued. There were rumours the end was imminent; sooner or later the camp would be liquidated. But she could not be persuaded. She would not desert her aged parents and family. Perhaps she would join him later; but not just yet. She was needed at Potapoffke 33.
After they crept out of the ghetto, Yanek’s group raided the barracks, obtained arms and a typewriter, and disappeared into the forests. ‘You will never understand such things’, says the Partisan, allowing himself a smile at the thought of a typewriter being lugged into a forest.
On January 27, 1943, two partisans stole into the ghetto and approached the Judenrat offices to discuss Resistance matters. As they entered they unexpectedly encountered the Gestapo commandant. Upon seeing he was confronted by armed fighters, the commandant turned and ran. Fearing reprisals if they shot him, the fighters held fire. ‘In such situations’, asserts the Partisan, ‘we acted from instinct, seeking above all to survive. As I see it, most of us become brave only when it can no longer be avoided; and our heroism conceals an immense terror.’
The Judenrat was accused of aiding the Resistance. Next day the deportations began. ‘Some claim they were in direct response to the events of the previous day’, the Partisan says. ‘I am more inclined to believe that the trains were already waiting. Besides, what difference does it make? One way or another, this was the fate they had planned for us all.’
All the next day the Partisan hid in a bunker with a group of about forty. The warmth generated as they crowded against each other caused a vapour to rise into the rooms above. This could have given them away, since outside the Nazis were beginning their roundup of the ghetto inmates.
That night the Partisan and his companions crept towards the ghetto cemetery, where they had hidden their arsenal of weapons. Within metres of the fence there stood a carpentry workshop. The Partisan entered to make last-minute repairs to some of the guns. The noise almost alerted German guards. ‘I still don’t know how I had the nerve’, he tells me, yet again.
The electric wires were cut with insulated pliers. After scaling the fence they moved away beneath white sheets, a camouflage against the snow. For hours they walked without any sense of direction. At dawn they realised they had wandered to the edge of a Nazi airstrip. Falling snow had wiped out their footprints, and they were not discovered.
They lay under the sheets until evening in groups of three, beneath trees merely metres from a road. Military vehicles flew by. Peasants whipped horses to draw their sleds faster. On the second night they waded into swamps and through water that rose up to their shoulders until, at last, they reached the forests. They now faced a life of scavenging and hunger in bitter conditions, in snow and in blizzards. Yet it offered, at least, a means of survival.
Four days it took, from January 28 until January 31, at 2 500 inmates per day, to clear the entire ghetto. The Probutskis were ordered out of Potapoffke 33 to assemble in the central square. Lists of names were barked out interminably as the ghetto inmates were loaded into horse-drawn wagons driven by local peasants.
‘Between Pruzhany and Linowe station was a distance of perhaps fourteen kilometres’, the Partisan tells me. Snow and sleet drifted in a veil of mists. The convoy stretched for miles, a procession of phantoms enveloped in ghostly white. Occasionally someone jumped off and made a run for the forests through a gauntlet of bullets.
At Linowe station the trains were drawn up by the platform, waiting. The time-tabling was precise, the organisation efficient. The doors of the cattle wagons slid to a close on entire families, crammed together, robbed of light, air, and hope. Soon after they were on the move: a journey of several hundred kilometres southwest, across the breadth of Poland, to a town called Auschwitz.
Yanek Lerner and the Partisan established separate bases. They constructed zemlankes, earth huts, one sizeable room dug underground. The floors were cushioned with pine needles; the roofs covered by branches and twigs, topped by a camouflage of dirt and grass. In some of the hideouts, primitive stoves provided a semblance of warmth.
Various groups roamed the forests. ‘There were Ukrainians, White Russians, Poles, and Jews; even the occasional German deserter’, the Partisan explains. Alliances were formed; others remained determinedly separate to emphasize their national allegiance. And there were gangs of bandits, intent on survival at any cost.
Within days of taking to the forests, the Partisan heard shots echoing nearby. On investigating, he came across Yanek and his comrades lying in a well near their zemlanke. They had been shot by bandits who had masqueraded as friends. The bandits had made off with guns and boots, grenades and food. ‘Boots were our most prized possessions, especially during winter’, says the Partisan. ‘One of Yanek’s comrades survived and gave an account of the attack. He lives today in the United States. Just a few years ago I visited him.’
Our fate is so fragile. A mere straw on a breeze. What shall we do? Stay in Poland or leave? And when the doors are sealed, the New World cut off: which way shall we go? To the trains or the forests? And at the end of the journey, at the gates of Auschwitz, Doctor Mengele waits, white gloves on his hands, as he points left or right, the ovens or slave labour. As it turned out, Yanek Lerner and Sheindl Probutski perished at about the same time — Yanek with his comrades in the forests, Sheindl with her family in the ovens of Auschwitz. Children of the Annihilation, we know it well: life is so fragile. A mere straw on a breeze.