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in front of Block 27[7]
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[Page 195]
By Asher Ben-Moshe (Tel Aviv)
Translated by Allen Flusberg
Footnote
by Dov (Bertchik) Shmida
Translated by Allen Flusberg
Survivors
I remember that just after the war ended two brothers, cousins of mine from Pruzhany[3] who had survived Auschwitz, paid me a visit. They were fearful, their nerves on edge. Their stories were fragmentary and not of this world. What they said sounded more like descriptions of Gehenna, the hell of the afterlife: something that no living human had ever experienced.
Although every one of their stories was about Pruzhany Jews, families I had known and real people I was acquainted with, I did not really react to their words; for deep down inside I did not believe that what they had said could be accurate. I listened and remained quiet, stunned: I couldn't absorb their words, because none of it seemed plausible.
Later we received Dora Galperin's first letters,[4] which shook me to the core, for they came from there, straight from the Valley of Tears. They mentioned names of relatives and townspeople who were lost and exterminated. Dora's letters were first–hand accounts: they told of the backstreets and oppressiveness, of the dead bodies in the streets and starvation within the houses. Her letters shocked me to the very depths of my soul. However, the sense of loss of everyone, of all the people who were dear to me, was not yet there. My heart did not want to believe and my tears did not yet come, for deep in my heart there was still some hope: perhaps in spite of everything someone had been rescued: someone from my family, from the town, from among my friends or even from among acquaintances.
The Journey
In the summer of 1965 I received word that I had been given permission to participate in a seminar on fishing that would take place in the Soviet Union. The first thought I had upon hearing this news was to visit Dora and to hear the horrible story directly from her; and also to make a trip to the graves of my forefathers in my hometown of Kamenetz. I knew that there were no graves left and that nothing had remained, yet my heart demanded that I should see it with my own eyes. After arranging a special visa in the Soviet embassy, I was given permission to visit Brisk[5], where I would be able to get authorization to travel to Kamenetz. Then I decided that on my way to the Soviet Union I would take a three–day side trip to visit Dora in Poland and to hear from her the story of the fate of the Kamenetz townspeople.
[Page 201]
Dora
When I met Dora in the Warsaw airport I felt as if I had actually returned to Kamenetz: to my childhood, and to all my relatives and acquaintances.
Throughout that night, as we traveled by train from Warsaw to Gliwice[6], we did not even close our eyes. I listened and sighed as she told her story, her eyes welling with tears. Her Polish husband, a sensitive and compassionate man, also did not close his eyes. He listened to the conversation in Yiddish, understanding the momentousness as she relived the collapse of decency and humaneness.
The story of my little town of Kamenetz is no different from stories about other towns and cities in Poland and throughout Europe: the murders, the shutting up into ghettos, the hunger and suffering that pierced the heavens; peasants' wagons loaded with women and children as the men plodded along behind, surrounded by murderous Ukrainian and German militias; the train that led to extermination without leaving a single person alive, someone who could tell the world where the train had gone to and what the last moments had been like.
The next day we went to pay a visit to Auschwitz, and along the way Dora poured out her own story: how she was saved by the Gregorowski family; how she hid out in cellars and attics; her hiding place over the stove, in barns and in horse stables.
Auschwitz
We reached Auschwitz and all the conversations ended; there were no more questions. Our senses were paralyzed by the sight of the blocks, outer walls, death walls and soot–covered chimneys. Death strolled about between the barracks. There was nothing but a choking feeling, endless sighs, and tears running down our faces, for our hearts were broken. It was as if we were present at a large, solemn funeral.
When we left Auschwitz, it was almost superfluous to discuss the fate of Kamenetz after seeing the giant cemetery of our entire people. There was nothing to talk about anymore.
Dora also told me about her bitter fate after the liberation, about her year of imprisonment in Brisk, about how she moved to Poland, exhausted; and how her kindhearted and compassionate husband rescued her from the very jaws of death that lay in wait even there, in liberated Poland.
Dora is not the same Dora whom we knew before, the pretty, cheerful girl with the mischievous spirit and fiery vivaciousness. The Dora I met up with in Poland is the embodiment of all the grief, pain and torment that our town underwent. She did indeed remain alive, but without the ability to free herself from all that she had experienced, all that Kamenetz had undergone. And yet she did not actually see the bitter end with her own eyes.
[Page 202]
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| Dora Galperin and Dov (Bertchik) Shmida in front of Block 27[7] |
When we said goodbye to each other in the train station, she told me that she hadn't believed that she would ever meet a living soul from Kamenetz again, even though she was quite aware that there were hundreds of Kamenetz Jews scattered throughout the world. For to her it felt as if they were all dead, that nothing was left, nothing but nightmarish memories.
[Page 203]
Brisk
On September 17 1965, I got on the international train Moscow–Berlin–Amsterdam. I was on my way to Brisk, which is the last stop on the Russian side of the Russian–Polish border. All night I did not close my eyes, and the conductor in the train car couldn't understand why I was not sleeping even though I was in a luxurious sleeping car. The conductor brought me tea all night, asking me where I was headed. I answered that I was going to Brisk, that I was a Jew who was born near there. “Yes,” she replied in a compassionate voice, “You are excited to return to your hometown (na rodino), but you will not meet up with a single one of your Jews there, because Hitler murdered them all.”
The express train flew past all the stations: Smolensk[8], which aroused a memory of battles, and Minsk[9], which brought back the memory of a large Jewish city. It was dawn and we were already passing Baranovichi[10], where as a child I studied in the little yeshiva. Racing along at 120 km per hour, not stopping at any station, the train rapidly passed Kartuz–Bereza[11], a famous Jewish town well–known for its Polish prison camp; and then Linova, the train station of Pruzhany[12], where I used to spend my summer vacations. And now we were passing Žabinka[13], the train station of my Kamenetz. The train slowed down as it entered the suburbs of Brisk.
The sun rose. It was a beautiful summer day; from far away the Przechodni crossing bridge was visible; and there I was, already in the Brisk train station: the same building, the same clock in front, the controller at the doors. However in the entrance there were only large red flags and red stars fluttering from the towers of the station.
My heart was beating hard with emotion, for it was in Brisk that I had studied and spent the best years of my adolescence: in Tachkemoni[14], in Gordonia[15] and in the Tarbut[16] high school.
I make all the formal arrangements in the Intourist office and start out on foot along Unya–Lubelska (now Lenin) Street to the address that I had on Yagelony (now Moscow) Street, where the sisters Clara and Genya Ehrlich, who hail from Kamenetz, now live.
Until the moment when I reached the line of shops that I remembered well, on the corner of Dombrowska Street, I thought that I had gotten lost and come to a strange city. The Soviets constructed and erected many buildings that changed the appearance of the city fundamentally. Some of the streets that had been side–streets were transformed into central streets, and among them were Yaglonska and Sharoka.
However the former city center, which had been completely populated by Jews, has remained standing, without any change and without a single house or sidewalk being missing; but what is missing from it are the Jews of the city of Brisk, where more than thirty thousand Jews used to live, a community that gave the city its character and its mold.
For three days straight I stroll around Brisk in a state of shock…
[Page 204]
At first I am drawn to the Large Synagogue on Dombrowska, standing neglected and serving as a shabby movie theatre. Right near it is the rabbi's house, and a bit further away the Tachkemoni School. Strangers are strolling around, walking along the streets and into the houses, houses I know so well that it feels as if it was just yesterday that I was living in an apartment here. I don't see a single familiar face among them. Strangers who don't seem to belong here gaze out from the windows, walk through the courtyards, and stare at me as if I am the stranger.
I walk around for all three of those days in the streets that I know so well: Topolowa, Kashiwa, Bialostocka, Dombrowska, and Zigmontowska, the streets I had walked around in for 6 years, on my way to the Tachkemoni School, to Tarbut, to Gordonia, to relatives and friends. Everything has remained the same: the sidewalks, the houses, the shutters, the courtyards; only the people are strangers from elsewhere, as if they have been brought to this place unnaturally. Where are the people I know? Where are my friends? Where are the Jews of Brisk?!!
I felt as if none of this was real, that something basic was missing, that life itself had been uprooted from these streets. Is it not unnatural and inhuman not to meet a single acquaintance throughout this entire city? Not one friend?!
The Monument
Two sights have been deeply engraved in my heart, and I will never forget them:
On Daluga Street I searched for the large common grave, where the last ten thousand Jews of Brisk had been murdered. The place is abandoned, built up with yards and temporary structures. It was hard to find the paths that led to the grave, which is marked by a shabby concrete monument. The memorial plaque on the monument bears the following inscription, written in Russian: “Here lie buried Soviet citizens who were murdered by the Fascist beasts”. This is all that is stated about Brisk Jewry.
As I stood next to the monument, a young boy, 13–15 years old, came over to me and said: “Citizen! Did you know that the people who lie here were buried alive, and to this very day the earth trembles here every single night…” My eyes did not well up with tears, for my heart had turned to stone; and only my feet trembled as they stood upon the blood that had not been covered over.
The next day I asked the Brisk survivors: “What has remained of all the glorious Jewry of Brisk? Has the Brisk cemetery survived?” “Yes,” answered one of my friends (one of the seven Jewish natives of Brisk who still live there), “Come with me and I will show it to you!” He brought me to Staczekwicza Street, to a yard whose sidewalk and the rest of the yard was paved with Jewish gravestones. The house located in this yard had been occupied by the Gestapo during the German occupation. As an everlasting memorial, these beasts had paved the yard and the sidewalk with gravestones from the Jewish cemetery.
The Nazi beasts murdered and destroyed, and those who came to Brisk afterwards and liberated it obliterated every trace and every sign of the flourishing life that had still existed here in every lane and every house 25 years ago; this is the story that I heard from the tiny remnant of the Jews of Brisk, and this is the reality that I saw with my very own eyes. Not a single Jewish inscription, not one Hebrew memorial.[17]
[Page 205]
Yet the sidewalk [paved with gravestones] cries out: “Remember, do not forget!”
The strangers strolling along the streets appear passive; but when they are made aware that I am a Jew they become hostile, for this reminds them of an unpleasantness, something that preys on their conscience. However one can neither deceive history nor silence a conscience.
My Hometown Kamenetz on September 20, 1965
[Pages 206-208]
Note by translator: The sections entitled “My Hometown Kamenetz on September 20, 1965”, “My Kamenetz”, “The Only One who Greeted Me with Tears”, and “Effacing the Memory and the Past”, appear in the English version of the article, beginning on p 176 of the English part of this Yizkor Book. There are only a few differences between the three versions (Yiddish, Hebrew and English).[18] [19] [20] [21]
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