Sometime near the end of January of 1941, the shocking news spread among friends that my brother Elek’s 18-year-old friend Dovidl Kuperman had been killed by a bullet from a German post guarding the Ghetto. The rumor was that despite all the difficulties and dangers for Jews to travel, Dovidl managed to return to Lodz from his relatives in Lublin, cut the barbed wire fence and re-enter the ghetto; but suddenly a shot rang out, and he met instant death. His blood quickly scattered in a red patch between the white snow around him.
Dovidl, my younger brother’s close friend, used to be a frequent guest in our home. He was, like Elek, very tall, very slender and gregarious. When I was sick, he had showered me with delicious fruits and gifts, and said that if I promised to marry him, he would wait until I grew up. The shocking news about Dovidl’s fate was devastating to all who knew him, and even to many Ghetto inhabitants who didn’t know him personally. He became both a symbol of courage and a warning to be highly cautious of the German guards surrounding the ghetto on their raised posts. Actually, he was one of many to meet such a tragic end. One’s life was at risk merely by walking or standing near the fence. Quite often, the guards went on wild shooting sprees.
I can vividly recall that as the winter continued, frost flowers covered the windowpanes of our freezing room. Toward the latter part of February 1941 — as our hearts remained filled with pain and fear over the tragic event related to Dovidl’s homecoming — a messenger-boy came to tell us the news that my brother Elek was on the way home from Pruzany. My mother looked at the boy with great astonishment and asked him how he knew that. The boy answered: “Someone, a young man, paid me money to tell you that.”
My mother continued questioning the boy: “Who paid you money to bring me that news? What did the young man look like?” Her voice was filled with amazement, concern and fear.
“He was very, very tall and very, very skinny. He had dark brown or black straight hair, large black eyes, wide black eye lashes and black eyebrows; He was wearing extremely large shoes and…” It was clear that the boy was describing my brother Elek.
“Where is the young man now?” mama yelled out.
“I don’t know. But he said that he would be right over. Yes, he also asked me to tell you not to worry, that everything was all right, that he was well and that he can’t wait to see you!”
I believe that my mother was ready to collapse when the door opened and Elek hurried in. Actually, he was speeding in with a limp. He was extremely pale and seemed to have matured quite a bit in the few months that he was gone. He apologized for frightening us by having the boy come in to tell us about his homecoming, “but,” he explained “I was afraid that it would have been even a greater shock if I had suddenly appeared from the blue sky. So, I wanted you to be a little prepared for the idea that I was returning home.”
After the initial embraces, kisses and tears, mama looked at Elek’s feet and told him that he had a bad case of frostbite. She prepared a basin with some liquid for Elek to soak his feet in as well as a warm meal. Then she filled the little tub in the corner of the room behind a curtain with water for him to bathe in. I noticed that she carefully took away all the clothes that Elek was wearing when he came home and took them outside to bury in the ground because, she said, they were infested with lice. After she returned, she handed him fresh undergarments, pants and a flannel shirt.
“There you are again looking like my handsome, beloved son; not like a vagabond,” my mother exclaimed with warmth in her voice when Elek came out of the bathroom area in the corner.
Elek told us that he had been on the road several weeks. Soon after he began his travel homeward, he was caught by the Soviets crossing the border and wound up in a Soviet jail. He was laughing about the investigation by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Service) and how he succeeded in deceiving them about his aimed destination. Although he was actually trying to return home to the German occupied part of Poland, he told the Soviets that he was fleeing from the Germans and was trying to get to the Soviet Union. He told them this lie about the direction he was actually aiming for, because he had previously been warned that the Soviets were sending people back to wherever they came from. Those who were fleeing from the Germans were returned to the German-occupied territories, and those who were trying to return from the Soviet Union to their homes and families on the German side, were sent to Siberia or other parts deep inside the Russian countryside as alleged spies. “Sure enough,” Elek told us, “after one night in jail, they escorted me to the middle of the frozen river Bug, and with rifles pointed at me, they asked me to run back to the German side.
During Elek’s journey through the German occupied territory of Poland, he had stopped in the Polish capital of Warsaw, where he was unable to find members of our father’s side of the family. Life there was, according to his description, even more atrocious than in Lodz; the Jewish populace was dying there in the streets from hunger and cold. Of course, he did not know that since he left Lodz, conditions had worsened in our city too.
Elek also told mama about people from Lodz that he met in Warsaw, especially about Lererin Lazar, one of our teachers from the Medem Shul, who was working there for the JOINT (under the Nazis an underground organization). Lererin Lazar had entrusted Elek with the mission of bringing a larger sum of money for the underground movement in Lodz.
Elek was in pain and frequently had to soak his feet a solution. The doctor said that he had second and third degree frostbite — as a result of walking for days in the bitter cold during the freezing Russian and Polish winter. On the way home, he was unable to find shelter at night — so he had slept outdoors in the snow. “But if you know how to take care of yourself, it is really not that bad,” he bragged, with a special air of pride in his voice.
My mother repeatedly asked Elek the agonizing question “why, why did you return to Lodz?” His answer was always the same “I was homesick; had it on my conscience and felt guilty all the time because I left you behind.” I understand that Elek had it quite well in Pruzany. My cousin, Note Berlinski, took him in to learn the trade of carpentry and was working alongside him in the NKVD headquarters. Though our cousins’ home and farm had been requisitioned by the Soviet military, the living conditions in the part of our cousins’ home that they had occupied were still relatively good. I personally felt very much relieved and more secure with Elek being home, but I felt sorry for Elek in making the decision to return to this hell.
Soon, Aunt Leytshe heard the news about Elek’s homecoming and came running to inquire about her son, daughter-in-law and her granddaughter, Esterke. When she learned that she had another baby granddaughter of several months, her face brightened up and tears begun to flow from her eyes — which stained her beautiful face. But soon, a grimace appeared on her lips. She probably realized that she would never see or hold this baby granddaughter in her arms.
Elek’s and Shimon’s friends also came to visit. They were anxious to hear about his experiences and adventures in the world outside the fence. He told them many stories about life in the Soviet Union. The people, he reported, were living in misery there too. The populace there was often forced to refer to Stalin as Nash Bog (Our God), and had to carry his portrait during parades as though he was a holy man. “In the land of alleged equality, there are tremendous social and economic differences between the well-todo and the starving, and anti-Semitism is still very much alive there!” he told the crowd that gathered to hear him. He frequently heard the words “Zhid Parkhati” (Scurvy Jew) and “Zhidovskaya Morda” (Jewish snout) directed at him, from the Russian natives.
Many others tried to return from the Soviet Union and from different German occupied territories to their homes and families in Lodz, but few succeeded. Some of these were evacuated to Siberia as alleged German spies, and enslaved as free or non-free prisoners of war; some died on the roads leaving or returning home; others were killed by diseases, or were shot while trying to get through the high walls or the barbed wire ghetto-fences.
As soon as Elek recuperated from the severe frostbite, he went to work in the Tishler Resort. He never complained and said that his was basically a good job, “almost as good as the one I had in the Soviet Union”.
Elek was loved and respected by all — his relatives, friends, co-workers and supervisors.
My mother claimed that Elek — by then 18 years old — was extremely skinny, rapidly growing and developing, and needed more food than the rest of us. “He needs more food than we do and we must provide our main provider with additional energy”, she said.
At times, I brought Elek cooked meals to his Resort. After he ate everything up, he disappeared for a while, washed and dried the pot, and filled it up with broken up pieces of wood that we would later use as firewood. He himself brought it through the control room, because he did not want me to take the risk of being caught with stolen merchandise. Outside the Resort he would hand me the bag with the “empty” pot to bring home.
Oh, how good it was having Elek, our provider and protector, home again!
©2001 Fela Infeld Glaser and Marty Capsuto
©2009 First Look Marketing All Rights Reserved
Leave a comment