Trusting Calvin (3 page)

“To live like free men in a free land—this is what I want,” he said to his friends as they left the youth meetings, their souls pulsing with the belief that a different way of living might be possible in this land about which they had heard so much.

“The British control Palestine, which makes it impossible. They will not allow us in,” David reminded him.

“Now they will not,” Moshe agreed. “But some time they must.”

Zalmen, the eldest Edelman son, had made his escape from Poland years earlier at age seventeen. Crossing through Germany, Holland, and France, mostly on foot, sometimes jumping trains, he had reached Belgium late in 1929. Once there, without proper papers, securing employment proved extremely difficult. But he was clever. He schooled himself in the ways of avoiding detection and remained in Belgium for seven years. In 1936, however, he was arrested as an illegal alien and returned to Poland, where he was ordered to report to the military draft board and inducted into the army.

Hennia went at age twenty to a
kvutzah,
a Zionist pioneer camp, to learn agriculture, because most of the few entry permits issued were given to Zionists with farming experience. Two years later, she returned to Krasnik with the certificate and the hope of receiving her permit. Denied that, she married and settled in her hometown.

With each passing year and month, the conditions for Jews steadily worsened everywhere in the region, even in remote Krasnik. A Jewish-owned dry goods store, successful for years, went fallow soon after a non-Jewish Pole opened a similar store nearby and
sokols,
members of an anti-Semitic organization, positioned themselves threateningly in front of the Jewish-run shop.

Abraham was attacked one evening while returning home from synagogue, his coat sliced with long gashes, half his beard slashed off with a pocketknife, his face bloodied. When he reported the incident to the police and identified the two young attackers, whom he recognized, the authorities accused Abraham of fabrication, a charge frightening enough to send him nervously on his way and to vow that he would never again complain.

Even the Edelman mill began to suffer, as farmers—to avoid hostilities directed at anyone who “supported” Jews—traveled many additional miles to mills owned by non-Jews. Abraham's answer to this turn of events was to start a small business selling yarmulkes, prayer books, and other religious items from his living room. The income from either one of the businesses was insufficient to support the couple and their two sons, Moshe and Yankel, still living at home, but the combination of both, along with the money that each of the boys contributed, made it possible to scrape by.

By Moshe's unsettled summer, any hope that the family had nurtured of leaving Poland as a group had disintegrated completely. They needed good connections and a great deal of money to bribe officials, and they had neither. But Moshe would get out, they believed. The documents from South America now held the promise of an entire family.

Then, on Friday, September 1, 1939, the dream dissolved. Germany invaded Poland, and World War II began.

As the German army advanced, the roads became clogged with refugees, a swollen, sluggish target for the German air force, which dropped bombs on them and sprayed them with machine-gun fire. The relentless attacks from the sky had the desired effect: Many people, particularly young Jews and anti-Nazi gentiles who had given thought to joining the fleeing refugees, reconsidered.

Five days later, on the afternoon of Moshe's seventeenth birthday, the Germans bombed Krasnik.

“Run! Get out into the orchard!” Sarah screamed as the first bombs fell. It was never clear why she believed this would be safer than staying in the house, but no one questioned her orders, or her authority.

The family huddled under the apple and plum trees, watching in dazed silence as bombs struck the far end of town again and again, engulfing much of it in flames. The acrid stench of burning buildings blew toward them.

“I knew the war would come to us,” Sarah said softly. “I just did not believe it would happen for many more months.”

As dusk settled onto the burning landscape, Sarah stood. “Come . . . . We will go to the house. We are safe for now. The airplanes will not drop bombs on us in the dark.”

Inside, she put food on the table while the rest of the family sat numbly.

Two days later, German tanks that had ground their way across hundreds of miles of Poland fired three artillery shells into Krasnik, demolishing several houses and killing three people. German soldiers, lean men with mean faces, swarmed in, ordering the townsfolk to stay off the streets.

“Now we are seeing the guts of the beast,” Sarah said to Abraham, who was praying, the only thing he could think of to protect his family.

The
Einsatzgruppen
(special killing unit) immediately sought out the town's rebbe, its Jewish sage, Yaakov Ben Zucher Dov, and several prominent Jewish leaders, ordering them to desecrate the synagogue and Torah scrolls and to burn the prayer books. When the rebbe refused he was shot, dragged through the streets by his ankles, and discarded like carrion in the square for all the Jews to see.

The soldiers demanded a huge amount of gold and silver to permit the rebbe to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, an act of enormous importance to the Jews, they knew, and most came forward with anything of value—wedding rings, engagement rings, watches. Sobbing quietly, Sarah handed over the necklace given to her by her in-laws on her wedding day. It had been in Abraham's family for generations.

The gentiles of the town quickly made it clear to the occupying troops that they would cause them no trouble, which allowed the Nazis to focus all their attention on the Jews. They turned the synagogue into a horse stable; commandeered many homes of Jews; and issued a directive: All young Jewish men and women were to report to the town square at six each morning to receive labor assignments for the day.

Sometimes the young men were ordered to scrub manure from the floors of their former synagogue, always with small brushes that required them to move along on their knees like insects while their overseers ridiculed them, their heritage, and their religion. Often they chopped wood, hour after hour, to keep the occupiers warm, the cold months just a stiff wind away. The females did the Germans' laundry or cleaned the houses that they had appropriated.

All Jews were ordered to wear six-pointed yellow stars whenever they were outside their homes, and if they neglected to do so they were beaten or shot. A curfew was enacted: Jews had to be off the streets from seven p.m. to six a.m.

Jews began worshipping secretly in houses and apartments, posting lookouts to alert them to any surprise visits by the Nazis. It was risky, gathering this way, but for a time they could huddle together in a prearranged location, taking furtive comfort in their faith and rituals, the cord that bound them together, when nothing else in their lives was as it had been.

Every move a Jew made was monitored by the Nazis, sharp-eyed and self-important, who arrived in larger numbers every day. All had Lugers, rifles, and whips , and they were quick to use them on anyone who resisted or moved too slowly after an order was issued.

Sometimes the soldiers relied on other implements if the timing or the circumstance seemed right.

Moshe had a favorite cousin, Chayale, a smart, sensitive girl with a gentle nature. The two had shared a special connection since toddlerhood, when they had learned to walk together, giggling and bobbling and pulling each other up after one or the other rocked off balance and sent both to the ground.

Chayale had grown into a heart-stopping beauty with long, thick hair the color of a raven's wing, ivory skin that seemed to glow, and a trim body that had started to bud into full womanhood. At just sixteen, she had very little awareness of the attention she drew, too young, really, to pay much mind to such things, too humble to believe it if it was ever mentioned. But the Jewish boys had long noticed her.

Moshe's friend David had recently declared his heart stolen. “It's as if a sculptor created her,” he said in hushed, reverential tones. He vowed that when they were both old enough he would take her as his wife.

One afternoon, two SS, barely out of their teens themselves, watched Chayale pass by. They fell in behind her, matching her step for step. She walked faster, and then she ran. When she bolted through her doorway, yanking it closed and throwing her body against it, they kicked their way in.

She cried and screamed and begged them to go, to leave her. They shoved her into the bedroom and ordered her to strip and lie on the bed, leering, touching her in places she had never been touched. Nazi law forbade Germans to have intercourse with Jews, and these were obedient men. They raped her with a broomstick again and again, shouting, grunting, calling her vile names, stirred into a frenzy, shoving their fists into her mouth to still her screaming.

Chayale's twelve-year-old brother, hiding in the closet, as all children had been instructed to do if Nazis appeared, heard it all, his sister's cries growing weaker.

Finally, the girl struggled no more. The two men strode off.

Beautiful Chayale, in a bloody nest of bedding, was as pale as cold ashes, still as a stone in the field. The broom, sticky with her blood, lay at her side.

Word of her murder spread in minutes. Moshe insisted upon going to her, even though he knew the scene would be horrible. He owed her a final good-bye.

Everything in Krasnik had changed. Jewish shopkeepers had closed their doors; the Germans had requisitioned everything of value. Work at the Edelman mill halted completely when the few farmers they had managed to keep turned elsewhere in fear. Jews began running out of basic necessities and set up, at great peril, underground bartering networks.

A moment of joy rose from all the darkness when the eldest Edelman son, Zalmen, returned home safely from the army. He had been taken prisoner and held in a stalag after German forces had overrun his unit. Although thin and worn, he was alive, and he had all his limbs.

As autumn lurched into the winter of 1939–40, cold stiffened the air, and the snow was much heavier than usual. Every morning, one hundred or more young Jews, Moshe and Yankel among them, were herded from the town square to shovel shin-high snow from the two-lane road leading to the railroad station two miles away. During especially vicious snowfalls, when a storm dumped so much so fast the shovelers couldn't keep up, they were whipped. Their feet ached from the cold and then went numb. Many men lost toes that winter. Some days when they shoveled, savage winds roared across the fields, forcing the snow into crusty drifts along their route, and their hands and wrists throbbed from the effort of breaking through them. Their trouser bottoms froze into stiff sheets. Cold and exhausted, they were released at six each night so they could walk home and be off the streets by curfew.

One evening in early January, when Moshe and Yankel stamped their way into the house after shoveling detail, Sarah was frantically rolling clothing into bundles and making small piles of valuables.

“By the day after tomorrow, we must be gone from this house,” she said, her voice sharp. “The Germans arrived at the door this morning and said the commandant of the city has ordered us to leave the house in forty-eight hours. We must find a place in the ghetto to live. They are taking over our home.”

They managed to secure housing: a drafty, three-room apartment without plumbing in a rickety building they would share with nine other people from two families. Sarah arranged for friends in the country to keep the few items of value they still had, mostly jewelry, some silver, and her cherished cut-crystal seder glass, which had been in her family for generations.

On a wretchedly cold morning, gray as steel, they loaded a few pieces of clothing, bedding, and some utensils into a cart to make the long walk to the ghetto. Sarah refused to look back at the house in which she had spent her entire life. She did not cry. She dipped her head against the biting wind and plunged forward.

Conditions in the ghetto rapidly grew dire. Scarce food, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions invited sickness and disease. Medicine proved almost impossible to obtain, no one had soap, and the town's one doctor had donned a swastika as soon as the Germans arrived and refused to treat Jews. The number of funerals conducted each day grew so large that people lost track of who, among the families they had known since childhood, was still living and who had died.

Sarah took ill, and the family knew, as all families in the ghetto did when anyone became extremely sick, that she would die from lack of treatment.

When Zalmen, who had married and settled fifteen miles away in Zaklikow, received word of his mother's condition, he pulled off his yellow star and made his way through back roads during the night. In Krasnik he located a man willing to transport them by horse and sleigh overnight to Lublin, where a hospital was still accepting Jews. It was a last-gasp attempt, this journey, as Jews were no longer allowed to travel anywhere outside their own towns.