The Book Smugglers, page 15
While in Narva, Kalmanovitch reconciled with his former archenemy, Moshe Lerer, a hard-core Communist who had worked in YIVO’s archives. When the Soviets marched into Vilna in June 1940, Lerer seized control of the institute, deposing Kalmanovitch and purging the staff of non-Communists. He removed all “anti-Soviet literature” from the YIVO library and covered the building’s walls with slogans glorifying Stalin. For the next three years, Kalmanovitch didn’t forgive Lerer for the personal humiliation and, even more so, for the political defilement of YIVO. (Kalmanovitch was a lifelong anti-Communist and opposed subordinating scholarship to politics.) Even in the ghetto, the two men did not speak to each other. They worked in nearby rooms in the ghetto library—Kalmanovitch as deputy director, and Lerer as curator of the ghetto archive and museum—but did not exchange words. At work, Lerer reported to Kruk.3
But in Narva, they became close friends, sleeping in the same plank bed and spending long nights in conversation.4 When Lerer fell ill with dysentery, Kalmanovitch cared for him and shared his bread ration with him. When Lerer died, Kalmanovitch, the believer, recited kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, in memory of his friend, the Communist.
Kalmanovitch’s own body gave way to illness just a few weeks later. Inmates bribed a camp official to assign him to easier work that didn’t require him to go outdoors in the bitter cold—cleaning the toilets in the barracks. During the weeks that he performed this work, he is reported to have said to his blockmates: “I am happy that I have the privilege of cleaning the excrement of these holy Jews.”5
Some say that Kalmanovitch died quietly in his plank bed. Others report that a German medical review team ordered him killed. According to the latter account, his final words, as he was dragged away, were the ones he had once said to his paper-brigade colleagues on the street: “I laugh at you. I have a son in the Land of Israel.” This time, it was a taunt. His body, like that of others who died at Narva, was burnt in the camp’s large basement ovens, which served as a crematorium.
A fellow inmate reported that Kalmanovitch had one prized possession in the Narva camp: a tiny Bible that he managed to hide from the Germans, either buried in the barracks or secreted on his body. How tragically fitting that one of the leaders of the paper brigade perished carrying a smuggled book on his body. His death was like that of the second-century martyr Rabbi Chaninah Ben Tardion, who was burnt alive by the Romans holding a Torah scroll.6
Kalmanovitch didn’t live to see the fulfillment of the words in the final entry of his ghetto diary: “We will find the rescued books when we return as free human beings.”
Herman Kruk remained in the ghetto until the very end. He outlived Gens, who was executed by the Germans on September 14, 1943, ostensibly for maintaining contact with the FPO underground. A few days after Gens’s execution, the Germans stopped sending their starvation-diet food rations into the ghetto.
At 5:00 a.m. on September 23, SS Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel entered the ghetto’s territory with a retinue of soldiers and spoke from the balcony of the Judenrat offices reading the order: the Vilna ghetto was hereby liquidated. All its inhabitants were being “evacuated” to labor camps in northern Lithuania and Estonia. The inmates were to assemble at the ghetto gate on Rudnicki Street at 2:00 p.m. for deportation. They should bring along a bucket, pots, and other kitchen utensils, because such items would not be distributed at their destination. Inmates were allowed to take as many belongings as they could carry by hand.
Many of the famished and weakened inmates assumed that it was all a ruse and that they were headed to Ponar. Kittel tried to ease their fears and tensions, because desperate people might take desperate measures—like rebelling.
Kittel also stressed that there was no point in hiding. After the liquidation, the Germans would close down the water and electricity in the area of the ghetto and detonate its houses. Whoever hid would die of thirst or be crushed by the collapsing buildings. Whoever came out of their hiding place would be shot on the spot.7
At 2:00 p.m., several hundred Lithuanian and Ukrainian auxiliary police invaded the ghetto and stationed themselves on all of its streets. Thousands of inmates proceeded quietly to the gate, where Kittel, Martin Weiss, and other SS officials stood, and counted heads as they left. The crowding and hysteria at the gate were unbearable. Parents lost their children; children, their parents. After leaving the ghetto, the exhausted and frightened throng walked down the long winding Subocz Street, which was lined with soldiers in full battle gear—helmets, hand grenades, loaded rifles, and machine guns. Barking military dogs kept watch for anyone who tried to escape. Many weakened inmates dropped their bundles in the middle of the street, making movement more difficult.
The Germans conducted their first “selection,” separating the men from the women, children, and elderly. They sent the men ahead, to a holding pen in a swampy valley off of 20 Subocz Street, while the others were stopped from moving forward and were forced into a large church courtyard. Cries and wails filled the street as couples and families bid farewell for the last time.
The sun set, and it was nighttime. The Germans shone portable strobe lights onto the men’s valley, which they surrounded with barbwire, and onto the women-and-children courtyard, which they surrounded with soldiers. The inmates were blinded by the lights. Then the Germans began playing jazz music through loudspeakers, for their own nighttime listening enjoyment. The detained women, children, and elderly either sat or lay on the ground of the churchyard. They stayed there overnight, without any rations of food or water—congestion, filth, crying children, groans by the elderly, hunger, and thirst. Some inmates expired right there, while under street arrest.
The Germans lined up the men in the valley in rows for a second selection. This time an SS officer walked through the rows, pointing his finger at those inmates who were too old, too young, or weak looking and ordered them removed from the crowd. The weaker men started to hide behind able-bodied ones, but the officer was thorough. In the end, he chose one hundred inmates, who were sent off in vehicles to Ponar for execution. A similar selection took place among the women.
Several members of the paper brigade perished in those selections. One of them, the artist Uma Olkenicka, went to Treblinka of her own free will because she wasn’t willing to abandon her elderly mother.
The crowd of men was then exposed to a spectacle. The Germans built four gallows in the valley holding pen, with ladders leading up to platforms and nooses. An SS officer stepped forward and announced, “We will now execute people who resisted us and tried to flee to the partisans. This is to show you all what should be expected if you resist.”
They brought forward four captured FPO fighters, who were caught while leaving the ghetto. As a thirty-year-old woman named Asya Big walked up to the gallows, she called out to the crowd, “Death to the German murderers! Long live the FPO avengers of the blood of the Jewish p——!” Before she could finish the sentence, the noose was around her neck, and the ladder was removed. Her body shook on the gallows and fell limp within a minute.8
A few members of the paper brigade chose to go into hiding, rather than march to the ghetto gate. Sixty-two-year-old Chaikl Lunski, the legendary librarian of the Strashun Library, joined a group of people who hid in the cellar of 5 Strashun Street. The Germans discovered their hiding place on October 4, eleven days after the ghetto’s liquidation, and sent everyone to the Gestapo prison on Mickewicz Street. Lunski and the others spent the night in cell number 16, “the death cell.” They all wrote their names on the wall, as their surrogate tombstone. Many, including Lunski, added an inscription: “We are going to Ponar. Avenge our blood!” Chaikl Lunski was executed, quietly, at Ponar on October 6.9
Herman Kruk participated in the march out of the ghetto down Subocz Street and survived both “selections.” He spent most of the next year in a camp called Klooga, near the country’s northern coast. Klooga became one of the German’s main industrial complexes in the East, producing reinforced concrete and lumber for the military. Kruk called it “the metropolis of Jewish camps.”
The contrast between Klooga and the Vilna ghetto was like between night and day. Beatings and whippings were ubiquitous, as were other forms of physical abuse. Inmates were forced to stand at attention for hours in the bitter cold for roll call, at the beginning and end of the workday. They were subjected to punitive gymnastics, during which those who fainted or collapsed were taken away and shot.10
Kruk worked mainly at paving roads and constructing barracks. He was also active in the camp underground, an organization called the PG (Partisan Group). This organization functioned first and foremost as an aid committee, which secretly provided food and medicine to the sickest and neediest. The PG also organized clandestine cultural events, including Kruk’s own political talks on Sundays. And it assembled a hidden collection of pistols, for use in an envisioned uprising if the end—either by massacre or by liberation—seemed imminent.
For a full year after his deportation, Kruk continued to write: diary entries, stories of fellow inmates, and vignettes of camp life. Everything went into tiny notebooks that he stole from a storage room and kept hidden in his barracks. When one notebook filled up, he started another one. His handwriting verged on the illegible. “I write on my knees, in constant fear of an unwelcome guest, either in the tailors’ workshop or while mixing cement and pouring concrete, or at night on my hard night chair.”11 Despite Kruk’s physical and psychological deterioration, he never stopped writing. Camp doctors urged him to rest during the evenings after work, but Kruk replied that writing was more valuable to him than life itself. His notes, he said, would outlive Hitler and would be a treasure for future generations.12
The biggest problem in Klooga was hunger. Scores of inmates died daily from starvation. Kruk wrote a powerful essay on the new type of hunger he encountered in the camp. “Thirty-three decagrams of bread is neither enough to live on nor enough to die on. . . . The majority, who cannot help themselves, eventually starve and expire. . . . The more energetic ones try to get potato peels. They sort them out and take the thicker ones. Consumers often get stomach cramps from them. But the stomachache passes and hunger returns. So they chase after a turnip, moldy pieces of bread, and stuff their bellies with poison, with aches, just to drive out the hunger, the worm that gnaws and gnaws and won’t stop.”13
When inmates expired, the Germans piled the bodies on top of wooden logs, poured them with gasoline, and set them on fire. The officer who supervised the burning was dressed in his best uniform. In the words of one surviving inmate, he was like a pagan priest bringing an offering to his deity.
Kruk knew that the Red Army was near. On July 14, 1944, he recorded in his notebook that Vilna had been liberated. “Vilna is liberated and here we groan under the yoke, crying over our lot. The Vilna FPO is surely now marching victoriously through the alleys of the ghetto, searching and looking. I hope they also try to save my materials.”14
Kruk and five hundred other inmates were suddenly transferred on August 22, 1944, to a camp called Lagedi, where conditions were much worse than Klooga: They lived in low-lying wooden shacks built on the bare ground and ate one “meal” a day: a watery flour soup. There were no beds, blankets, or bathrooms. It was a doggish existence. The only ray of hope was the proximity of the war front. One could hear shooting from aircraft and bombs dropping nearby. Tartu, Estonia’s second city, had been liberated by the Red Army.
Because the transfer of the inmates from Klooga to Lagedi was a surprise operation, Kruk didn’t have the time to take along his hidden notebooks. They were lost, or so he assumed.
Lagedi was the final stop for Kruk and the other inmates. They were murdered on September 18, 1944—on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
The Germans carried out the slaughter with shrewd cynicism. A top SS officer came to the camp, reprimanded the director for the inmates’ deplorable living conditions, and ordered him, within earshot of the inmates, to transfer them to a better location. Trucks drove up and delivered a meal of bread, margarine, jam, and sugar. This was all a deception, to lead them to believe they were indeed being transferred to a better location and life would improve.
The trucks were loaded up with fifty inmates and left at half-hour intervals to a prepared execution site. This was done to prevent the inmates from knowing what was going on—until it was too late.
The method of execution was a variation of the one used at Klooga. The Germans tied together groups of ten to twelve people, ordered them to walk onto a log platform, and shot them in the back of the head. Then, a second platform was placed on top of the bodies, and another group of inmates walked onto it and was shot. After the entire fifty-inmate truckload was executed, the Germans doused the platforms and corpses with gasoline, and set them on fire. The Lagedi execution lasted from 11:00 a.m. until the evening.
The Red Army arrived the next day, September 19, and discovered hundreds of charred bodies—and two survivors.
On the day before Kruk’s execution, a secret courier brought him a small package with his notebooks from Klooga. Kruk was overcome with joy. He decided to bury his writings and did so in the presence of six witnesses in the hope that at least one of them would survive and retrieve them. One of them did.15
As a cover note for posterity, he included a prose poem he had written in Klooga, which opened with the following lines:
Neighbors in Camp Klooga often ask me
Why do you write in such hard times?—
Why and for whom? . . .
I know I am condemned and awaiting my turn.
Although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle.
Drunk on the pen trembling on my hand,
I record everything for future generations.
A day will come when someone will find
The leaves of horror I write and record.16
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Miracle from Moscow
ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER’S personal miracle—the one he had summoned in his inscription inside YIVO’s guest book— came in March 1944. Fyodor Markov received a cable from Moscow that a Soviet military airplane would be sent to collect the poet Sutzkever and his wife. The partisan commander arranged for armed guards and a horse-drawn sled to take them to a partisan airstrip. It took two attempts to perform the private airlift—the first plane was downed by German artillery, but the second plane retrieved its human cargo, and the next day Abrasha and Freydke Sutzkever were in Moscow, sitting in the general headquarters of the Lithuanian Partisan Division.1
The extraordinary private airlift was arranged by Justas Paleckis, the titular head of the Lithuanian Soviet government in exile. Paleckis was a well-known poet before he became president and befriended Sutzkever at a meeting of Lithuanian and Yiddish writers in early 1940. An opponent of the authoritarian Lithuanian regime of Antanas Smetona, he reportedly picked up Yiddish in prison, where he served time for antistate activity alongside Jewish inmates.
Paleckis joined the Communist Party in June 1940, when Stalin incorporated Lithuania into the Soviet Union. A few months later he was appointed president, as a gesture by the new rulers to reach out to the Lithuanian intelligentsia. The position of president was largely symbolic.2
Paleckis evacuated to Moscow at the time of the German invasion, in June 1941. When he received a letter from a partisan field commander informing him that the poet Sutzkever was alive and writing in the Narocz forest, the head of state intervened with the Soviet military command. The next thing, Sutzkever was on that plane.3
The abrupt change in Sutzkever’s life was almost surreal. For two years, he and his wife Freydke had been animals of prey in the ghetto, and for most of the last six months they had slept outdoors or in earthen huts. Now, after one quick plane ride, they lived in the luxurious “Moscow” hotel, wore fresh changes of clothing, and walked freely down the streets of a modern city. They had rejoined human civilization after a nearly three-year absence.
Sutzkever’s arrival in Moscow was a sensation in literary circles. At age thirty-one, he was already recognized as one of the greatest Yiddish poets of his time. While still incarcerated in the Vilna ghetto, he had sent a few of his poems by partisan courier to Moscow, where they were read at a meeting of writers with bated breath and amazement. A few days after his miraculous airlift, the Yiddish section of the Union of Soviet Writers held a reception in his honor in the Moscow Writers’ House. The poet Peretz Markish, a laureate of the Stalin Prize for Literature, chaired the program, and introduced Sutzkever: “People used to point at Dante: ‘This man was in hell!’ But Dante’s hell is like a paradise compared to the inferno from which this poet just rescued himself.”4
Sutzkever’s arrival was an event not just for writers. He was the very first ghetto inmate to reach the Soviet capital and to report firsthand on the German extermination of the Jews. He was invited to speak at a large anti-Nazi rally, held on April 2 in the Pillar Hall of the House of Trade Unions, just across from the Kremlin. The event, sponsored by an organization called the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, attracted more than three thousand people who listened to speeches by the most prominent Jews in the Soviet Union—military heroes, writers, the chief rabbi of Moscow, and Sutzkever. He was the only speaker who had actually survived a ghetto.
In brief staccato paragraphs, Sutzkever portrayed the mass executions, the ghetto’s spiritual and armed resistance, and the escape of the FPO to the forests. He concluded, “Let the entire world know that in the forests of Lithuania and Belorussia, hundreds of Jewish partisans are fighting. They are proud and courageous avengers of the spilt blood of their brethren. On behalf of those Jewish partisans, and on behalf of the surviving remnant of Vilna’s Jews, who are in forests and caves, I call upon you, fellow Jews everywhere, to fight and take revenge.”
