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Holocaust and Destruction

… on your high places shall lie the slain, How have the heroes fallen

(2 Samuel 1:19)

And He established testimony in Jacob… In order that the last generation might know, sons who will be born should tell their sons.

(Psalms 78:5-6)

O that my head was a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night over the slain of the daughter of my people.

(Jeremiah 8:23)

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[Page 307]

And I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion. (Jeremiah 3:14)   For these things I weep, my eye sheds tears (Lamentations 1:16)

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		El Male Rachamin – “God full of Mercy”
		Behold and see if there is any pain like my pain, which has been dealt to me. (Lamentations 1:12)

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How can I sing – so that the world will know? How can I play with broken hands? Where are my dead? G-d, I am searching for my dead, In every hill of ash: – Oh, tell me, where are they? Shout out from the sand, from under every stone, From all the dust, shout, from all the flames, from all the smoke –

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It is your blood and sap, it is the marrow from your bones, It is your body and your life! Shout, Scream, loud! Shout out from animal entrails in the forest, from fish in the river – I want a shriek, an outcry, a voice from you, They ate you. Scream from the lime kiln, scream small and big, Scream murdered Jewish people, shout out! Oh, alas, my people appear. Raise your hands Out of the deep, mile long graves and sealed shut, Layer upon layer, doused with lime and burned, Up! Up! Ascend from the obstacle, the deepest layer! Everybody come, from Treblinka, from Sobibor, from Ostrolenka, From Belzec come, come from Ponar and from others, from others, from other! With eyes torn open, raise a cry and without a voice, Come from the swamps, from deep in the mud, from Poland –

Come, you who are drained, ground down, crushed. Come. Stand up, In a circle, a large circle around me, one large ring – Grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers with babies in their wombs – Come, Jewish babies of powder, of a bit of soap. I am the man who watched, who saw How men threw my children, my wives, my young, my old Into wagons, like stones you were flung in there, like discards, And they beat you without pity and spoke to you as wantons. And now? You see wagons, trucks now, you watch, You silent witness of such burdens and of such pain and of such distress! Silent and closed, you watched, Oh, tell me wagons, where You are traveling to. You the people, the Jewish people, have departed to death?

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The first killed were the children, forlorn, little orphans. They are called The best of the world, the most beautiful that the dark earth possesses! Oh, from the loneliest little orphans and children's homes should grow our comfort, from the cheerless, mute, little faces, the gloominess will not be allowed to take us! They were the first to be taken to their deaths, the first ones on the wagon, Men threw all of them in the wagons, like a handful of garbage, like rubbish – And took them away, murdered them, destroyed them, there is no trace Of them, of my best, no more remains! Akh, alas, woe is me!

The sun will rise once more over small villages in Lithuania and Poland never to meet a Jew again A light in the dark, an old man, a man reciting a chapter of Psalms, a man going into the synagogue – After all, the peasants will travel in wagons on all the roads, they will travel to the fair after all, So many gentiles – good gracious! Yet more than before! And the market, the market is dead. The market is full and is not full! There is no longer a Jew to beautify the fair for great distances around, they are no longer lively, there is no longer any spirit And no longer will a Jewish long, black coat flap over the market with a sack of potatoes, flour and grain, and a Jewish hand Will no longer raise a pot, a soft chicken, caress a calf…the peasant a drunk, whips His horse in grief pulls the full wagon back to the village… gone! Gone, there are no longer any Jews in the country!

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And Jewish children – they will not wake up from sleeping, from dreams, every one of them bright in the morning – They will no longer go to school, no longer let their minds wander, no longer play pranks, no longer play in the sand, Oh, you Jewish youngsters, oh, bright eyes! Little angels…where are you from? From here, in this town? And not from here! Oh, beautiful young girl, your brightness, your neatness, everything in order, your little face is not messy. They are gone already! Oh, on the other side of the ocean, do not ask, do not search in Kasrylewka, nor in Jehupiec…leave it alone! Do not search for any one…not the Menachem-Mendels, the Tuwia Milkhikers, the Shlomo Nagids, the Motke ganefs, oh, do not search! Like your prophets, Yeshaya, Jermia, Jehezkiel, Hosza and Amos, from the eternal Bible

They will cry out to you from Bialik, speak to you from Scholem Aleichem, from Scholem Ash, from one of their books. It is that lost voice from the Torah no longer heard from any yeshivas, from any study house and pale yeshiva students, Noble in learning, poring over the Talmud,deep in thought…no, no, not pale, there is such a glow! Already extinguished…rabbis, heads of yeshivas, Jews studying, geniuses thin, dry, weak and full of Talmud, With post Talmudic commentators, small Jews with large heads, with high foreheads, clear eyes, they are already gone, they will no longer be.

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My precious home in Gorzd, Lita My little home – how big you were to me! Through the fog of the years and the smoke of your ruin In abundance of light I will see your image. A swamp in the yard – in spring as in autumn An electric light that turns on and off by itself A firefighters' ladder on a sloped roof And a brick chimney like a holiday hat. Your sturdy walls have seen generations. All of them are planks covering beams.

Elementary school students – early 1920s

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Squeezed between your neighbors, ashamed and afraid Not Jews both as one: On your right the school for gentile children On your left – a tavern for drunks. You had an address, a street, also a number Is there nothing left of that either? Oh, my home that on seventy-six Klaipeda Street! How were you consumed by fire? And “Tamoczne,” the “alley” and all market square – Whereas the gentiles' Pelke Street remained standing! And the klompes[a] culture in thatched-roof huts Built hewn stone houses on your ruins! And indeed, only we who were privileged to arrive here Survived to mourn the destruction… Gorzd, my family home, how precious your memory is to me With my childhood years intertwined in your landscape. Yes, there was a town of Gorzd – and is no more And strangely - because many didn't know about it at all. They didn't know, for example, Yosi Aleya the shamash Who walked a little bent over and his smile never left, Visiting all the sukkot with an etrog and a lulav. To honor adults and children with a mitzvah. And there was Bere Veleve, a learned Jew, Who thoroughly remembered families for their generations. And there was Lerer Lam, whose gait and steps Terrorized us, his students. But the knowledge he taught us with his scary ruler Was a faithful provision for our future path. And there was a pharmacist, a strict man, who behaved like a gentleman.

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Do you remember that when the door opened a bell rang there? And there was Sara Freida – who didn't know her The subject of all jokes – but a pure soul. And there was R' Garsha Feiba, a learned scholar, Affectionately pinching a little boy's cheek: What does that mean? – a serious question To test schoolchildren in the Torah. From Melech's barbershop and the rabbi's house The long Klaipeda Street to the last of its residents. Small gray houses without opulence and splendor Only the Shabbat candles revealed who lived in them. (apart from the policeman – a respected man of power who looked forward to a slice of Shabbat challah from my mother) Simple, innocent and honest people, Carrying the burden, as if they were locked in their own world.

Jews in Market Square

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And on the path of dreams to a great and rich world A small train to the city of Memel. Here they find their livelihood in every profession Working for wages for the needs of every Shabbat. They are also looking forward to Ludwig the postman Expecting a letter with a dollar from overseas. Ludwig! – for years you have made my family happy with my letters! Did you also commit murder? And Jones and Stasia, the woodcutters and water carriers, were our friends. How did they quickly become the murderers of our children?… And years have passed, and turned into decades And what of our memories will we pass on to generations? Will we tell our children that there was a town Of merchants and shopkeepers and also Torah scholars?

Halutzim [pioneers] in hakhshara in Gorzd

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The halutzim of “Mizrachi” and halutzim of Zionist Socialists Carrying lofty ideals to praise! And a vague dream about leaving the Diaspora, That was decided in a daily war on poverty? How on winter nights amidst snow and frost We dreamed of a homeland of sun and light… And to the singing of drunken at the end of market day Who sold geese and sipped from a bottle We suppressed the fear with a different song – About a halutz who somewhere building us a country. And about Jerusalem – a holy word in the Siddur And about Carmel and Kinneret – a kind of vague imagination… And the winding Minija River among the green fields In our hearts the Jordan whispered two banks. Oh! Will the Minija flow by the cemetery they plowed For those who murdered our loved ones? And the sun will rise there for the cruel people And their moon did not turn to blood? Gorzd, my town, you were erased and are no more And so few carry your memory in their hearts, And the pain that floods the heart from time to time And you don't know if it's grief, or anger The echo of “pour out one's wrath” said by all generations And with the oath of the generation: Woe! Forever no more!

Original footnote:

1. Wooden clogs. back

[Pages 318-322]

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Who erased my town from the map? What black devil? What dog's paw? Did they lead everyone to the Akedah?– The whole camp! The whole community! In sealed train cars to the death factories, tricked into the baths, disposed of with gas? Did they, each one in his home, in the cellar, in the yard, in the attic, on the street, in the barn– torture them all: with the blade of a knife, with the butt of a rifle – to magnify their pain? Where is their grave? Where is their rest? – Enclosed in the earth or somewhere in the heavens?

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Does the dust soar up like ashes in the wind? Woe for my life, woe and alas… I would bring the dust here for burial– and lie together with them in a row. My sinful life would persevere: – lying near those martyrs, buried with them…

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In 1939, when Hitler Germany occupied Memel, the Gorzd population was left almost without any opportunities for existence. Many young people from Gorzd and even entire families moved from Gorzd to other cities and shtetlekh [towns, shtetl is the singular form of the word] of Lithuania in order to look for a source of livelihood. However, the greater part of the Gorzd population remained in place.

Gorzd, which lay right near the border with Germany, was occupied by the German army even earlier than the official announcement of the outbreak of the war. The Gorzd population remained in place.

As soon as the bloodthirsty Fascists invaded the shtetl they immediately drove the population out of their houses and set fire to the small amount of remaining goods left over after the great fire of the summer of 1939.

Two young Jewish men, Mendl Man and Josef Osherovitz, who helped the small border garrison to resist the incoming German army were later found dead near a machine gun. The Hitlerists used the fact that young Jewish men fought against them; they staged a public trial against the men in the shtetl. They drove all of the Jewish men together on a side of the shtetl and told them to dig a grave for themselves. When the grave was finished, they carried out the sentence: for staging resistance to the German army, all of the men were sentenced to death by shooting…

The death sentence was carried out immediately.

The first heroic death during the execution was my sister Toybe's husband, Motl Meirovitz. He had well mastered the German language and hearing the death sentence, he

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He tore open his shirt and his last words were; “Shoot, you will pay dearly for our innocent blood!” The first bullet immediately found him and he fell dead.

The Jewish women and children were driven to a stall in Anieliske (a village near Gorzd). There they were held hungry in cold and dirty conditions under the heavy supervision of

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the Lithuanian nationalists. The women were forced to clear the streets and dig potatoes.

When the work ended, everyone, young and old, was shot in a swampy forest. The outrage took place in October 1941. The aktsia [action, often deportation] was carried out by drunken Lithuanian nationalists. They rampaged and shot to the right and to the left during the course of an entire day. In the morning they placed their bloody work in the ground and not finding the grave used the previous day, they dug out a second one.

Thus the Jews of the shtetl ended their lives and all that remained of our Gorzd martyrs was one large grave at the side of the shtetl and two graves among the swamps and forests on the road between Vezaiciai and Anderame.

Three mass graves remained of our dearest Jews of the shtetl, who were murdered in a savage manner, brothers and sisters, friends, comrades and innocent

Mass grave near the house of Dovid Volfovitz

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children. Three mass graves – this is the fresh cemetery of the Gorzd Jews.

Ruchl Yami-Gritziana, who until the end was with all of the women at the grave and survived by chance, later spoke about the tragedy of our Gorzd Jews.

When the women were shot she jumped into a pit and lay there until it became dark. She crawled out of the pit late at night and left for the village of Vezaiciai. The teacher in the local Lithuanian school hid her for a time and later he took her to a secure place where she survived until the liberation.

Ruchl Yami-Gritziana is the only living witness to the bloody tragedy of the Gorzd Jewish community.

At the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, a small number of the young from Gorzd, who lived in various cities and shtetlekh [towns] in Lithuania, succeeded in escaping to Russia. I was among those escaping.

Our will was strong and we proudly fought against the Hitlerist army and took revenge for the spilled innocent blood of our dear annihilated families.

Heroically perished in the savage fight against the enemy:

Boris Majsachovitz
Leyzer-Ayzyk Karbman,
Gutl Cuker
Jukhl Zilberg and so on.

In innumerable struggles the roads of war were crossed until victory:

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Eliyahu Akerman, Shayna Ornshtein, of blessed memory (born Joslovitz), Avraham Ornshtein near the graves of the murdered women

Eliyahu Akerman,
Chaim Rubinshtein,
Yitzhak Zilberg,
Leyzer Winik.

I voluntarily mobilized in the Lithuanian division and took part in all battles with the division. During the last year of the war, my fight continued in a partisan headquarters.

Returning after the war, I immediately visited our Gorzd, which had become a ruin, and the graves of our Gorzd martyrs.

With our extremely limited resources, we erected three headstones on all three mass graves. A great thank you

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Pointing in the direction of the grave of the children murdered by the Nazis

Several years later, the local regime also placed a memorial wall near the grave in the forest and a road to the grave was also paved.

We Gordzer, who still remained in Lithuania, were invited by the local regime to the opening of the meeting at which gathered a large number of the Lithuanian population. We appeared as the representatives of the victims to thank the local regime for the initiative to erect a monument for our murdered Gorzd Jews.

In my short speech, which was translated

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on television, I turned to the local population to ask them to take care of the sacred earth of our murdered brothers and sisters in a respectful manner and to honor their memory. At the same time I branded the traitorous deeds of the murderers and of those who lent a hand to the murder of our closest and dearest families.

Each summer we would travel to visit the graves of our parents in order to be “together” with our closest and dearest even for a short time.

Let their memory be sanctified for eternity.

Shipping logs of wood on the Minija River

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Quiet, quite, my son, let's be silent! Graves are growing here, The haters planted them Here are the paths. To Ponary the roads will lead, There is no way back, Father went, never to return, And with him the light. Quiet, my son, my treasure, Let's not weep in pain! Either way our crying The enemy wouldn't understand. Also the sea has borders and a shore, Also the prison has a fence and an end, – But our torment Is without borders, Is without borders. Spring has come to your land, We have a mournful autumn. A great light is sown all over, And around us is night. Autumn is already turning treetops golden, The pain increases

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The mother is left bereaved, Her son is in Ponary. The bound waters of the Viliya Are already bearing their waves. The stormy ice floes Are carried out to sea. May the darkness of our days be dispelled, Great light will shine upon us. Come, cavalier, rise up! Your son is calling, Your son is calling! Quiet, quite, be not stormy, Rouse the springs of the heart, Until the walls fall, We shall be silent in our pain. Please, my son, please don't laugh! Now is not time for laughter, The enemy has turned our spring Into a leaf in autumn. Let the wellspring gently flow Quiet, merciful son! With freedom, father too will return… Sleep, sleep, sleep. And like the freed Viliya, Like a tree wearing a crown, You will see the light, When freedom comes, When freedom comes.

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At the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, when there was enthusiastic preparation, in which I participated, for assaulting the strongly fortified German positions in Konigsberg, I came to be in Gorzd.

This is how it happened:

My military unit was about 50 kilometers from Gorzd, my birthplace, my town, which I left in 1941. At that time it was well known that the Germans had killed the Jews in Lithuania and other countries. We read this in newspapers, but we still held on to some hope: Perhaps? Perhaps someone still remained alive from my family and from Gorzd's Jews? My impulse to visit and to convince myself of the sad reality was so strong that when I told my division leader, he immediately gave me permission to leave our dispatch point and take myself off to Gorzd.

I got to Gorzd that night.

It is hard to describe what I felt on seeing the road to Gorzd. I went through Tavrik, Neustadt, Veksna [Svveksna?], Varzan – all of them empty of Jews. I was disturbed by the question: Was Gorzd also devoid of Jews? What if my nearest and dearest were not there?…

As I drew nearer to Gorzd, my heart began to pound. And then I was in Gorzd. The town was deserted, all burnt. Only a few houses remained here and there. But Gorzd was full of soldiers from various units of the Red Army tanks, artillery, sappers, infantry.

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The plowed-over cemetery – photograph from 1944

I approached a peasant I knew, Kofitskus – he used to make ovens. He lived in town, and he suddenly said in an amazed voice so that everyone would know:

“This is Motke Akerman's son!” Everyone looked at me with amazement – was that really me? From the looks on their faces, I understood that there was no good news for me.

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The peasants began to whisper among themselves… A young man from Gorzd, wearing a military uniform, with a machine gun and grenades on his belt…

While they were looking, I had the thought that I should take vengeance on the spot. Everything was clear to me…I did not need to know anything else…Their faces told me everything…

At that moment, Mrs. Ermolyena came to me and said, “Come. I can see from your face that you are tired. You haven't slept and you may be hungry. Come, we will tell you everything…”

We went through the marketplace, and Ermolyevna told me that all the men of Gorzd had been forced into that area in the first days of the war. In the evening, all the Lithuanian had been released to go home, and the Jews from 16 to 50 years-old were taken to Loygal. On the morning of June 23, 1941, there was a trial for the Jewish men of Gorzd. They were accused of conducting an uprising against the German army.

Among the fallen Russian soldiers who had led an uprising in the first hours of the war, two young Jewish men from Gorzd were found. These were Mendel Mann and Yosef Asherovitch. This was the pretext for the trial of Gorzd's Jewish men.

In the morning, they were forced back to Gorzd, to the border near Shmuel Vilfolvitch's home. There they had to dig a large pit, and there they were shot…

Outside the marketplace, on Minji Street, the way to the garden and to the football field, all the homes were in a single spot. It gave the impression that there was no war in half the town. The women were forced to work there on Anelishka Courtyard, to seep the streets, and to clean the garbage.

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Over the course of three months, they were tortured by hunger. They were deprived, ill; women and children and old people were tortured – they were like the living dead. Then the rains began and many women became ill and could not work. The murderers decided to liquidate this living cemetery from Anelishka.

On a rainy day, they were forced out to Vizeytzer Road and then to Kulev Road, six kilometers from Vizeitz, where there is a large forest by the side of the road. They were forced into it, and that was the last road of their lives.

On that first day, they did not allow anyone to see the shooting. It was dark in the woods. Those who were not shot on the first day were forced back to Anelishka and the next morning were forced to retrace the bloody route. The killers pressured and hurried them on to to the killing place before it became dark. Those criminals were drunk and could not find yesterday's shooting spot, so they shot everyone at a second spot, close to Vizeytz, about a kilometer from the first spot.

People told me that the cries and screams of the unfortunates and the sound of the shooting could be heard many kilometers away…

I left Gorzd that morning and returned to my division at the front. For the whole way, I could hear the sounds of the shootings in the woods.

After the war, there was in Vilna a coming together from different places of the few surviving remnants from Gorzd. Our duty and sacred responsibility was to erect three monuments on the graves of Gorzd's martyrs who were killed at the hands of the German and Lithuanian bloodthirsty murderers. The active organizers for erecting the three monuments

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were: Avraham Ornshteyn, Yitzchak Zilberg, and others who did not spare effort and energy and did everything to have the monuments erected. They stand there even now. For us – for all Gorzd Jews who are scattered around the world – they will stand forever, because these are the only reminders that remain of Gorzd Jewry, and we dare not forget what Amalek did to us.

May all the Gorzd Jews in the country who took upon themselves the burden of issuing the Gorzd Yizkor Book be blessed. It will be a symbolic monument after the Shoah of the former Gorzd Jewish kehillah.

Stone monument on the road leading to the women's grave

[Page 340 - Yiddish] [Page 339 - Hebrew]

It's burning! My brothers, it's burning. Oy, our poor town, poor thing, is burning. Angry winds rip angrily, they tear and blow more strongly at the wild flames, and everything around is burning! And you stand and watch with folded arms and you stand and watch– our town burning… It's burning! My brothers, it's burning. Oy, our poor town, poor thing, is burning! Already tongues of fire have devoured our whole town– and the angry winds rage, and the whole town is burning. And you stand and watch with folded arms and you stand and watch– our town burning… It's burning! My brothers, it's burning. Oy, the moment may come, God forbid; our city may, along with us, remain as ash in the flames,

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as after a battle just empty, blackened wells. And you stand and watch with folded arms and you stand and watch– our town burning… It's burning. My brothers, it's burning! Help can only come from you. If the town is dear to you, take up buckets, quench the fire, quench it with your blood. Show that you can do it. Don't stand there, brothers, with folded arms. Don't stand there, brothers. Fight the fire– our town is burning!

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