Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust (10 page)

It was hot in south Florida. The temperature broke records, a muggy moist heat enveloping you and not letting go. Only the air condi
tioning dispelled it; but how long can you stay in chilled air after the coldest winter in the North in over a century? The heat felt good, but confusing, too much glare, too bright. I felt out of synch and had no idea how to navigate this place: tight, narrow roads, stop lights at every corner and a sky so blue it hurt the eyes. I was determined to find Sonia Bielski. I had directions to her apartment, south on 95, but Mrs. Bielski had given me the wrong exit, the old exit. I call her; she keeps saying ‘exit l,’ but exit l puts me on a road heading straight for a light industrial area.

My interview with Sonia Bielski, Zush’s wife of 53 years, had been set for the weekend after the worst storm ever in Baltimore, two and a half feet of snow, four days shut in. So, I cancel my plane reserva
tions, call Mrs. Bielski, and reschedule the interview for two weeks hence. Three days before leaving, I call to confirm. ‘But I thought you were coming last week; I waited the whole weekend for you.’ I call her son, frantic; she had misunderstood me. But Zvi assures me: ‘She made a mistake … Just tell her when you will be down.’ I call again, apologize and speak of the difficulty of scheduling times. ‘Don’t worry …,’ she tries to make me feel better: ‘Just have a good appetite when you get here.’ Even on the phone, it’s hard not to be drawn to Sonia Bielski, a strong, determined voice, impatient and quick. She manages to scold and comfort at the same time.

It is with considerable anticipation that I look forward to my interview; the hotel clerk gives me directions to Interstate 95, and I’m off. Earlier, Mrs. Bielski had given me directions to her ‘house,’ so I assume she lives in a townhouse or a small single-family home. But I get lost; exit l takes me to the middle of nowhere, and after several convenience-store stops for directions, I find one of the thor
oughfares near where she lives. I look up and what faces me are thirty-story condominiums, three or four of them reaching into the sky. I’m thinking ‘house’ and all I see is an endless array of huge white buildings. I feel ridiculous; here’s a woman who fought with one of the greatest heroes of the Jewish resistance, and I can’t even find where she lives.

The street curves in a huge horseshoe, and I drive back and forth looking for 1761, the number she gave me. But the numbers on the buildings read 7611, 7633, 8215, and so on. I reach for the cell phone: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Bielski; I think I’m lost.’ ‘Where are you!’ I try to describe the scene; ‘You’re near it,’ she says. ‘Just find 1761. It’s not rocket science!’ She hangs up; but 1761 never appears; the numbers, each etched on stone slabs in front of the buildings, leap higher, not lower. So feeling quite helpless and dumb, I again call: ‘Mrs. Bielski, I’m sorry, but I’m still lost; I just can’t find your house.’ ‘Professor Glass, I thought you were a smart man; it’s right there, on the left.’ ‘But Mrs. Bielski, all I see are larger numbers like 7632, 7611.’ She pauses for a moment; my car stalls in the middle of the road; people sound their horns; I’m flustered. ‘Oh my, I’m sorry, I transposed the numbers; my house is at 7611.’ I pull over to the
side of the road. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Bielski, I’ll find it; but one more thing; you said a house; do you live in a high-rise?’ ‘Yes, yes, now you find it. Bye.’ And she hangs up, exasperated, I imagine, with this clumsy college professor who seems to have great difficulty finding his way.

I felt I had blown the interview; but, there in front of me, finally, stands her building, 7611. I drive up the huge, expansive stone driveway impressed by the Rolls parked in front; a valet takes the car; the doorman lets me in. And before me stretches an elegant hallway, stately rooms with plush furniture, marble floor, gleaming surfaces, quite a distance from Novogrudek and the violence of res
istance. The desk clerk rings Mrs. Bielski, who instructs her to send me up.

A short, energetic woman of 80 with a strong Yiddish accent greets me at the door. She motions me in and the first thing she says is: ‘I want you to meet the family.’ She takes me to the bedroom and I half-expect a roomful of people. But she points to the dresser full of photographs; her husband Zush as a young man in the forests, and several of him later, in Brooklyn; her sons and their families. She tells me how proud she is of all their accomplishments and the talents of her grandchildren; it is a handsome family with this loving mother and grandmother smack in the middle of many of the pictures. Her eyes shine as she looks at this dresser full of history; and in the effusiveness of her words describing each scene, she brings the snapshots and portraits to life. Her words, in rapid-fire cadence, possess physical properties, heavy, tangible. She com
poses rich images which envelop you like a holograph; if you raise your hand, you might catch a cluster of words. I’m transfixed by this language, drawn into it; her words surround, confuse and trans
port me to places in these snapshots, especially those from the forests. It’s like a spell. Then I hear, ‘But you must be hungry.’

Zvi, her son, had warned me about this: ‘She’ll feed you and then feed you till you drop.’ She takes me to a small kitchen and asks again, ‘Are you hungry?’ but the question translated means, ‘You must be hungry.’ I say, ‘No thank you, Mrs. Bielski, I just ate breakfast.’ My words fly by her, lost somewhere in the wall. ‘Of course you’re hungry; what do you want, a good “Florida” bagel? Coffee maybe?’ She takes out a bagel and I say, ‘Coffee is fine, Mrs. Bielski.’ ‘No, you eat this bagel, and I have some good low-fat cheese, a
peach here, nice fruit, strawberries. Eat!’ like a general giving a command. I’m seven years old again; in my grandmother’s kitchen; anyone, no matter how old, would be reduced to seven years old in Mrs. Bielski’s kitchen. There’s no way to avoid the food. It was a river I had to cross before she would talk. I knew, then and there, that if I refused to eat, she would kick me out.

So here we are: after all this time arranging the interview, I sit at a tiny table, facing a woman who endured hell and survived, who defined her life in terms of decision and action, unable to reach my pen and notebook, blocked by phalanges of cheese, lox, bagels, cream cheese, fruit, and very curious as to what this wonderful person was all about.

Sonia Bielski thrives on action and movement; I cannot, even in those first few moments, imagine her quiet, still. Even when she sits, her persona is like a whirlwind; her eyes, cheeks, brows, fore
head, the surface of her skin, move in exquisite, unexpected direc
tions. After ten minutes of conversation, her energy erases her age; and the more we talk, the younger she becomes. Ever impatient with her own lapses in memory and sequence, she seems at times to be scolding herself: ‘Memory, wake up, don’t make mistakes, get it right!’ It would be difficult if not impossible to persuade Sonia Bielski of a point of view she found wrong. And while she never clamped down on a question or perspective, she had no hesitation in correcting or in instructing in the right point of view, although always with politeness or in Yiddish. And since I told her my grand
mother and mother never taught me Yiddish, the phrases flew around the table with increasing frequency, especially when her two friends joined the interview, women who had been with the Bielski Brigade.

Being Zush’s wife meant that Sonia Bielski had a privileged position in the brigade, for Zush led the fighters. Sonia too carried a gun, but she never accompanied the fighters on missions that involved killing or executions. About the fighters’ ‘wives’: ‘Everybody wanted to be queen,’ but competition and friction never endangered the unit. When under attack the brigade reflected a unity of purpose and suffered equally. ‘There were times when I didn’t live like a queen; when we had to run to escape German sweeps. Once we lived in a ravine for days; I lived on raw horse-meat; but we hoped we would stay alive.’ I ask her what she meant
‘living like a queen’: ‘I don’t really mean that I lived in the lap of luxury; we lived in the forests and tried to survive; but Zush would take care of me. I had a terrible skin infection, and he took me to a peasant’s house to recover. If it weren’t for Zush and the brigade’s reputation, that peasant might have turned me over to the Germans. But he didn’t; I stayed there for several days and when I recovered, Zush came and took me back to the Unit.’

For the most part, Sonia’s account parallels that of Nechama Tec in
Defiance
; she refers to the drinking, the occasional infidelities, but dismisses them as minor distractions in a brigade concerned primar
ily with rescue and survival. What struck me about Sonia Bielski was her being, her persona and the strength of her character, a tenacity surrounding this 80-year-old woman. I tried to imagine what this woman was like 50, 60 years ago; what a powerful presence she must have been amidst these determined fighters. When she first joined the brigade, Zush insisted that she be his ‘woman’ or ‘wife’; Sonia, as she put it, ‘found him attractive; this tall, handsome man’; but she had one condition. ‘I said to him he must rescue my parents from the ghetto before he could have me.’ Zush never hesitated; at great risk to himself, he successfully managed the rescue operation.

It is very touching, sweet, this love story between Zush and Sonia; the love, passion, runs through her every word; intensity, commit
ment, admiration, frustration, jump from her eyes, and the sadness, too, of his no longer being there. But it was a passionate and desper
ate time; men and women loved each other. No one knew if they would be alive the next morning. Sonia’s remembrances were more about love and working to patch over differences than about killing and revenge. ‘Yes, at our “wedding” we had 1,200 guests; God gave us the
huppah
.’ If a fighter wanted a wife, it had to be now. Leah J.: ‘A few days after I met him, my husband told me “you have to be my wife or I will kill you and myself”.’ But ‘luckily, I liked him, so I went with him.’ Or, as Elsie S. describes it, ‘A girl living with a man had a better chance of living.’ Pregnancies generally were dealt with by abortion; but one or two births occurred in the brigade.

About two hours into the interview, Mrs. Bielski invites her two friends over for lunch and the four of us sit round her small kitchen table. It is an extraordinary conversation, moving alternately from English to Yiddish, with the women disagreeing over interpretation and facts, but intent on describing what they endured. I find myself
traveling back in time and memory with these women, whose voice and eyes reflect pride and sorrow, anger and wonder at their survival. And in the images they use to describe survival, I sense something like a prayer of deliverance, an affirmation understood through the continuity of generations, the accomplishments of children and grandchildren. Survival in their accounts could not be disconnected from birth, natality. Behind their eyes, and in the sonorousness of their heavily accented voices, and their own wonderment and even confusion at the reasons for their survival, each spoke of the experience in terms of natality, what they subsequently created as mothers and grandmothers. It was a powerful theme that tied past and present together, that allowed them to locate and define the reasons behind their survival.

I had not heard the importance of natality expressed in this way in the narrative of the men, who while speaking of their great pride in their children and grandchildren, never placed them at the moral epicenter of survival. Natality in the narratives of the women stood at the center not only of who they are now, but what they had been ‘then.’ It was as if they were saying back ‘then’ they held inside themselves, physically and spiritually, the key to the future; that their bodies could, if they survived, assure, if not sanctify, the con
tinuity of the community through the literalness of birth.

Natality and being Jewish: these themes encircled each other, as if survival had been God’s way of saying to time and history, ‘It will all begin again, and it begins with birth, with your bodies.’ Sonia O.: ‘And that’s why I survived.’ The children represent continuity and connection with a community stretching back into the past and forward into the future, a community greater than themselves, but one that would not exist without natality, the very physicality of their bodies as guarantors of identity. This belief, commitment or faith in natality, creates a biological link to their own murdered families; it is their testament, or
Kaddish
, to the death of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Natality establishes a spiritual conversation of the living with the dead; because through their children, the remembrance of those they loved moves across the boundaries of time. With birth comes a re-creation of the past; the child brings back into the world the spirit of those who perished. The mother sees in her child an image of her dead mother and father.

The forests bring birth; and it is the omnipresence of birth, spir
itual rebirth, not death, that hangs over the forest. For Jews trau
matized by German barbarity, the ghetto held death and terror. But the forests allowed for the creation of action, the establishment of a community; it was the space of natality and regeneration. Being a partisan transformed all moral perspective; as one survivor put it: ‘No one in the forest was bad; we were all good.’ Concepts of good and goodness change in the forests; anti-Semitism, the vicissitudes of survival, alter the traditional formulations. ‘Good’ consists in sur
viving, and that means fighting, subverting the aims of the anti-Semites, intimidating peasants and stealing food. ‘Bad’ defines itself as what anti-Semites can and may do to you. The unrelenting hatred of Jewish partisans by Germans, peasants, Poles, some Russian partisans, forced the Jewish brigades to stretch and redefine the meaning of good and bad. For example, forcibly confiscating food from peasants had nothing do with ‘Thou shalt not steal’; it was rather, ‘We are collecting taxes.’ As Charles Bledzow, a member of the Bielski Unit, described it to me: ‘We would come to a farmer by surprise; they know what to do; that was the power of our repu
tation in the forests.’ And then he adds, with a smile: ‘We justified it by arguing it was taxes; they paid taxes to us.’