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The Synagogue in Flames
Drawing: Sclare Silber, Netanya
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[Page IV]
By Avraham Ackner, Tel Aviv
Translated by Carey Sassower, Harvard University.
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We owe you a memorial – Neither of marble nor of hewn stone, Nor engraved with golden letters. Not even a torch will burn upon it.
We did not bear you to a Jewish grave,
We did not supervise your burial;
We coffined you in our own wounded bodies.
We set up no memorial for you, |
The great catastrophe that befell the Jews of Eastern Europe, especially those of Poland, invade every corner where Jewish settlement was to be found. In the years 1939 – 1945, all these Jewish towns were wiped out in the cruelest fashion at the hands of the Nazis. Among the many thousands of Jewish communities thus destroyed and erased from the earth was that of Mosty–Wielkie.
We, the survivors of Mosty–Wielkie, have long felt a deep obligation to erect a fitting monument to our Jewish town and its sanctified martyrs. The preservation of their memory took many forms: We erected a memorial stone to the dead of the community in the Nachlat Yitzhak cemetery; we set a tablet on the wall of the Cellar of the Holocaust on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. A scribe was engaged to write on a parchment scroll the names of our dear ones who were exterminated in the great destruction, who were never given a Jewish burial, and whose final resting place is unknown.
Every year, moreover, on the 5th of Adar, we hold a memorial service to their memory. The service took place in the Cellar of the Holocaust for many years, but more recently it has been held in the Nachlat Yitzchak cemetery. During the service, we are united in spirit with our sanctified families. We weep over the tragedy of their fate and relate what we remember of the town and its Jewish inhabitants, and what we know of their life and death.
Yet we constantly ask ourselves a question: Is it enough? Have we really made certain that the memory of our loved ones will be preserved for the coming generations? Have we done
[Page VI]
everything possible to fulfill our obligation to them? For years, we toyed with the idea of putting out a memorial book that would be a true monument to our community. We did not dare set ourselves to the task because a doubt gnawed at our hearts: Perhaps we are not capable of really describing our town. Have we the literary talent to faithfully portray the rich and wonderful way of life our community possessed until the great Holocaust, and to describe adequately the tragic fate that cut it short?
Still, the idea of publishing a memorial book kept nagging at us, for we felt it to be a moral obligation. At last we set ourselves to the task of preparing such a book, though we knew there would be all sorts of obstacles along our way. And after much effort, the long–awaited Memorial Book of Mosty–Wielkie finally came to light in November 1975 in Tel Aviv. The book is a true monument depicting in colorful detail the Jewish life of Mosty in the many generations of its existence, up to the time of the Holocaust.
Within the limits of our possibilities, we did our best to portray all the activities and events of the different cultural and religious organizations as well as delineating the economic life of our town. We tried in the process to tell of the good and devoted Jews of various leanings and types who were active in the assorted circles. We described the new generations of restless Jewish youth, struggling for freedom, searching and longing for a way to be a light to their people and to the world. It was a youth with dreams and hopes that was realized for some but for the most part they were trodden in the dust.
The Memorial Book, 500 pages long, contains articles in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, as well as pictures and reproductions of documents and newspaper clippings. It received warm praise, not only from Mostyites all over the world, but also from writers and critics who commented that the book would constitute an important and lasting memorial to our town. It would serve as a source from which future historians would draw for details
[Page VII]
of the catastrophe that befell the Jewish folk in the time of the Second World War. Our volume would be an eternal light to our sanctified ones till the end of time.
Soon after the publication of the Memorial Book, we began receiving letters from Mostyites in Europe and the United States of America. The writers expressed the thought that it would have been fitting if the Holocaust section of the book, which was printed only in Hebrew, were translated into Yiddish and English so that the many who could not read Hebrew should be able to acquaint themselves with the Mosty of the tragic Nazi period.
Despite our awareness of the difficult task we were taking upon ourselves so soon after completing publication of the Memorial Book, we felt that we must acquiesce to the wishes of the scattered remnants of our town. We can now say proudly that we have carried out our obligation in the form of the second volume of the Memorial Book of Mosty–Wielkie, in which the Holocaust and the destruction of our town are detailed. The pages of this special edition are seeped in tears and sorrow, full of pain and anguish, for they were written by the tiny handful that survived by a miracle to tell of the gas chambers and the valleys of slaughter.
We hope this second volume of the Memorial Book will consummate the task begun in the first volume and will also be a source for scholars in delineating the dreadful period of the Holocaust.
I should like to take this opportunity to express our gratefulness to all our fellow townspeople whose financial contribution made it possible to produce the volume. The warmest thanks are due to the Memorial Book Committee for their concerned effort on behalf of the publication of the book. The following individuals were especially helpful and we are deeply obligated to them for their activities: Shmuel Kasner who responded positively to every call, even after a hard day's work; A. L. Binot of the Editorial staff for his great help, especially in translating articles from Hebrew into Yiddish; Hassia Ben–Harari for her inestimable con–
[Page VIII]
tribution in preparing the English manuscript for publication; Clara Silber for her artistic portrayal of “The Beit Midrah in Flames”; the historian, Dr. Abraham Chomet of Tarnow for his very useful advice and guidance in publishing the book and for making available much important historical material on Mosty to the Memorial Book staff; Mrs. Lilli Silber and Mrs. Lillian Sigal of the United States for their vigorous activity in distributing the book among our townsfolk in that country thus promoting the success of the project; Michael Rosenberg, owner of the Or Printing Company, and his staff for their fine and careful work.
Last but not least, I should like to express my special appreciation to Dr. Ya'acov Roth of Paris, member of our Editorial Committee, who was the moving spirit behind the Memorial Book. His vital and interesting articles, so beautifully written, enriched the contents; his photographs and documents helped enliven the material. He took upon himself the burden of editing and correcting the Yiddish section of the work. This second volume would not have reached the light without his great h elp. His warm and encouraging letters enabled us to perform the task and to overcome the difficulties involved. He and his wife, Miriam, were full partners in erecting the monument to Mosty–Wielkie. They also contributed materially and spiritually in carrying out the mission.
May all of these selfless and devoted individuals be blessed and strengthened forever.
by Dr. Ya'acov Roth, Paris
With the publication of the Mosty–Wielkie Memorial Book, we felt impelled to comment on a few flaws that mar this otherwise fine piece of work:
Nearly all the Mostyites now residing in Israel were present; the writer of these lines, who came from Paris especially for the ceremony, was among them.
After the trees were planted and the monument unveiled, several Mostyites made appropriate remarks in Hebrew or in Yiddish. Then our fellow townsman, A.L. Binot read chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel. As a climax, prayers were said and a collective Kaddish intoned.
In closing, special praise should be accorded the timeless
[Page X]
and devoted efforts on the part of Avraham Ackner and A.L. Binot which brought the Memorial Book into being. Avraham Ackner's fine professional labor is worthy of separate mention. He researched through numerous archives, journals, and chronicles in order to create a a historical portrait of our obliterated town. It is no exaggeration to say that without A. Ackner and A.L. Binot, our Memorial Book in its present form and with its manifold content would never have seen the light. These words of thanks to our two comrades express the feelings of the entire book committee.
We hope that this additional volume together with the main body of the Memorial Book will be accepted by all Mostyites as a holy monument to our murdered and tortured martyrs. Land, do not hid their blood!
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Translated by Carey Sassover, Harvard University
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In the month of Adar, in the season of sowing, in that time of joy, The assailant gathered the Jews to prayer, Tortured and murdered them with rabid cruelty – Burned them together with Torah scrolls.
Screams of “Shma Yisrael!” crack the air.
The Rata river swells in its bed.
The blood cries out; from the depths it breaks forth. |
by Toni Gutman, Tel Aviv
In June 1941, Hitler's forces attacked the Soviet Union. On the very same day, they occupied our town, Mosty. A month later, on the 17th of Tammuz, the Germans, together with their Ukrainian supporters, carried out a massacre, called them an “action”, among the Jews of the town. Dr. Stroncicki, the Ukrainian town doctor, killed Jews with such pleasure and zeal that his secretary, a Ukrainian girl, remarked, “You should be ashamed of yourself for wearing a doctor's white coat! It would suit you better to be a butcher!”
In the fall, the Jews were uprooted from their homes and transferred to a ghetto established in the neighborhood of the Jewish”Bet Ha'am” (community meeting house). Every day, the men were taken from the ghetto to the Zawonie railway station – a distance of 15 – 17 kilometers from Mosty – to work at hard physical labor. They were forced to load logs onto railway cars for shipment to the saw mills. The women were taken to work in the sawmill of Zelig and Sons, where they sawed the planks and stacked them. Jews from the neighboring towns of Zoliew, Witkow, Belz and Radziechow, also worked in the sawmill. Jews from all those towns came to Mosty because of a rumor that our town was a paradise for Jews, because of the humane attitude of one Major Krupa.
For two years, the Nazis tormented us in the ghetto. People were murdered in the ghetto itself daily, and from time to time small groups were sent off to the extermination camp. We worked very hard. A communal kitchen was set up; the food was scanty and bad, and the Nazis who guarded us behaved cruelly. The only
[Page XIV]
shining exception, as mentioned above, was Major Krupa. He was a Viennese, and literally one of the saints of world. He did his utmost to ease our situation, but his possibilities were very limited.
He was hated by the Ukainians and the Poles because of his humane treatment of the Jews in the ghetto.
In February 1943, the most frightful murders were carried out in the ghetto. In one day, some 2,000 men, women and children were killed. First they were cruelly tortured, and then murdered in cold blood. Small children, hidden in crates by their parents, choked to death there for lack of air. The snow was reddened by the blood which ran like water; the walls and the stones, too, were covered with dried blood. The Nazis and their Ukrainian helpmates broke into the ghetto like wild animals, chased after those of their victims who tried to escape and killed them mercilessly. A mass murder was also carried out at the Zawonie railroad station where the men worked.
Alongside Dr. Tuerk's house, there was a strong fence. I broke that fence and to this day it is hard for me to understand where I got the strength to destroy such a strong construction. My mother fell and I picked her up. The bullets flew over our heads and between us. I held on to my mother and covered her with boards that happened to be there. We stayed in this hiding place for a whole day. Then we ran off to the area of the sawmill. There we hid ourselves away for four days without food or water. Our only nourishment during that time was a little snow. I was sure that not one Jew was left alive in Mosty.
On the fifth day, I came out of our hiding place, crossed the frozen river and returned to the ghetto. In the mass grave on the way to the village of Borowa, the blood had foamed up and the layer of earth covering it heaved up – it was the spilt Jewish blood crying out to the very heavens. For nearly two weeks, lime was poured over the mass grave.
[Page XV]
In 1943, the Gestapo sent Major Krupa away from Mosty because of his merciful attitude to the Jews. In his place we got a former S.S. officer, Shultz. He came from the Yanowski camp and had a glass eye. He remained in the ghetto until its liquidation. I later ran into him in Nowy–Soncz when he was examining the railway cars in which the Jews were transported to the extermination camps to make sure they were tightly sealed so that no one could possibly escape. The commander of the ghetto was a man named Hildebrand who always used to visit us before and after each “action”.
Those remaining in the ghetto after the mass murder continued their miserable lives tormented and humiliated, hungry and suffering from their hard labors. When we, the women who worked in Zelig's sawmill, found out that horse–drawn wagons had arrived to take us to the valley of slaughter for extermination, we began running off to hide in the nearby Wieczorki woods. As we ran, they fired at us. I was lightly wounded in my leg by one bullet. Afraid that the path of blood dripping from my wound would give away our hiding place, I stuffed bits of bread that I happened to have with me into the wound and bandaged it up. About forty of us were left, men and women. One of our group, Engineer Zager, instructed us to dig trenches and we settled ourselves in these makeshift bunkers. We had no food. During the night we scoured the fields until we found some frozen potatoes. This was all we had to eat. Thus we survived in the woods until January 1944. We were ragged and barefooted, starved and frozen. A cat used to come to our bunker and warm our feet in turn, a few minutes for each person. My strength was running out and when I saw that I couldn't hold out this way any longer, I gave myself up to the Germans. They sent me to Lemberg (Lwów) to the Yanowski camp, noted as an extermination center. We were forced to do hard work there. I toiled in the laundry washing and ironing. We remained until the end of June 1944 and went through all sorts of upheavals. People were taken out daily
[Page XVI]
for extermination and their bodies burnt immediately to erase the traces.
One night in June 1944, the Russians started to shell Lemberg, including the area of the camp. At the time of the barrage, many
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[Page XVII]
of the camp's inmates escaped, and in retaliation we were punished. They stood us along prepared open trenches and got ready to shoot us. At the last moment, I said goodbye to life with a cry of “Shma Yisrael!” At that very moment, my ears caught the sound of a motorcycle. A miracle! A messenger came from the high command bringing an order not to shoot us, probably for fear of the approaching Russians. Among our prospective executioners I identified Hildebrand, the murderer from the Mosty ghetto.
After a few days, we were sent on foot to a certain spot and loaded into freight cars. We made a number of twists and turns, and stopped at a number of stations before arriving in Przemysl. There we stayed only a short time for the Russians were quickly approaching. From Przemysl we were transferred to the mountains. Everywhere we stopped, we worked at military excavations. Not far from Tarnow, we toiled for about three months. The work was terribly difficult, for the earth was hard and rocky. We worked with hoes and it took much effort to accomplish what we had to do. We worked all day long and at night we were so miserably tormented that we weren't able to sleep. This went on till we arrived at the notorious and hellish Plashow concentration camp. From there we were taken to Auschwitz and here our torture, our hunger and our suffering reached such a peak that it is impossible to describe. Every moment, we waited for death to release us.
On day, 10 or 12 women were chosen, I among them. We were led to a clean, orderly laboratory that was used to show foreign visitors how well the prisoners were treated. They immediately began doing various tests on us. After weighing us and examining and measuring us from head to toe, we were asked from where we came and questioned closely about our family histories. Then we were sent back to our former camp, not far from the crematorium. As we returned to our block in the dusk, an old woman about 65–70 years old approached us and asked
[Page XVIII]
us where we were coming from. We told her everything. She folded her arms and said, “They have chosen you for experiments. They are going to make white mice out of you!” Upon hearing these words, I suggested to the other women that we get out of Auschwitz on the first transport leaving the place. The next day, a transport carrying prisoners to work in Germany stopped in our camp. We jumped into a car and to our great good fortune they didn't count the people in the car nor check them off a list.
We all got in, and off we went to work in Saxony, in Germany. We were 500 women, working 12 hours a day in an ammunition factory. We worked in two shifts and were constantly hungry. A potato peel was an attainable dream. More than once, I prayed with all my heart that I would be able to hold out just long enough to see Germany defeated, Hitler dead, and the remnant of Israel saved.
God heard my prayer and I lived to see the collapse of Nazi Germany in May 1945. One night, very close to the time of our release, I dreamt that my mother brought me bread and I asked her for potatoes. Suddenly, I saw an unforgettable sight for those times: a lovely garden, trees in blossom, a green lawn, in brief, the sweetness of spring with everything growing and blooming.
A few days after this dream, we were again transported in freight cars, 150 women to each car. I received a slice of bread, which was promptly stolen from me. We were told that we were being taken to Schlossenberg for extermination. The railroad tracks were torn up from the Russian shelling, making it hard for the murderers to stick to their timetables. We were being taken to Czechoslovakia. When I looked out of the small opening in the freight car, I saw my dream come true: broad fields, blooming trees, just like in my dream. We came near Theresienstadt, and here we were allowed to get out of t he cars. When the Czechs saw what we looked like – living skeletons,
[Page XIX]
ragged and barefooted ( I weighed 36 kilos at the time) – they fell upon the Germans with axes, took their guns away from them and were ready to kill them. The Czech women received us warmly. At the Theresienstadt camp we received medical treatment, food and clothing. It was the end of our tribulations.
On 25 May 1945, the day the Czechs regained their independence, we were freed.
by Hella Rettman (Katz), U.S.A.
My family consisted of six people: my parents, Shimon and Rachel Katz, my two sisters, Golda, the eldest (married to Reuven Bark), Sarah (Sala), the youngest girl, my young brother, Alexander (we called him Junek) and myself. The family home was next door to the Ukrainian community hall. I was married to Nathan Klam and lived in Lemberg with him. At the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of that city, I took my 3½ year old son and went back to Mosty to join my parents. My husband, of blessed memory, remained in Lemberg. In 1943, after the two great “actions”, I ran away from Mosty. My father had been killed in one of the “actions” and my two sisters were working hard but didn't want to leave.
My late mother didn't agree to my running off all by myself. Auster, a friend of ours from Kamionka, suggested that we go off together to his sister who was in the city of Bisk. Kamionka was already “Judenrein” (free of Jews). I only stayed a short while in Bisk. I witnessed with my own eyes the hair–raising tortures and murders carried out by the Nazis against the Jews there, and I decided that I would infiltrate a transport of Ukrainians being taken to work camps in Germany. I changed
[Page XX]
my name and had myself written down as Christian. Until the end of the war, I labored in the work camp in Germany and in 1945 I was released by the Allied Forces together with other survivors.
After the war, I went back to Poland to search for survivors from my family, but to my sorrow no one was left alive. Everyone had been exterminated. Alone and depressed, I was tired of life and I became apathetic about everything around me. I was undergoing a great emotional crisis and badly needed sympathy and warm support in order to relight some spark of hope for the future in my heart. To my good fortune, I met my present husband and after we were married we left for the United States. A son was soon born to us there; he is a teacher today, married and the father of two children.
Some time later, I saw the pictures of my sisters and brother that were sent to me from Israel. My heart was so pain–stricken that for a long time I could not stop the flood of tears. Their faces had dimmed in my memory over the years, but when the pictures brought their images back to me, the barely healed wounds opened again. Once more I found myself reliving the past, that is such a great part of me to this day. All that happened to my family, to the Jews of Mosty, and to the Jewish people as a whole, returns to me that I live in a nightmare in which I too was exterminated with them and only my ghost is left in the world of the living.
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