Among the Reeds Page 12

  One day the head priest tapped Nathan on the shoulder. Nestor, follow me, he said, let’s take a walk, I want to talk to you.

  Nathan hoped he wasn’t in trouble.

  They walked through the grounds of the convent for a while in silence.

  Father, what do you wish to talk to me about? Nathan asked.

  The priest kept walking. Finally he said, I have a question for you. Do you come from a religious family?

  Nathan was taken aback. His lack of experience with the Catholic Mass must have shown.

  The priest continued to walk. Nathan kept pace, wondering what to say.

  Look, the priest said, turning to face Nathan, I know exactly who you are and I know why you are here.

  And now, thought Nathan, this is the end. My time is up. If the priest knew he was Jewish, he would turn him in. Harboring Jews was a capital offense. Everyone knew this. This priest would denounce him. He would be arrested, sent to Malines, deported. He would never see his parents again.

  So tell me son, I want to know, do you come from a religious family?

  Nathan thought of his father, of the years spent studying Torah and Talmud at the kitchen table in the cottage in Holland. He thought about his father’s desire for him to become a rabbi. Yes, he replied, I do.

  Good, said the priest. And do you believe in God, Nestor? he continued.

  Yes.

  Good. That is what is important.

  The priest was silent for a few moments. I have prayed on this, he said presently, and I do not think it matters if you worship God in one way or another way, what matters is that you believe. That you believe in God. Yes?

  Nathan nodded. I do, Father.

  Good, continued the priest. God is merciful and He loves his children. You know this, you have been raised right. Your parents taught you. Your God is the same as our God, yes? And God brought you to us for a reason. We will shelter you here. We will not let harm come to you.

  Nathan blinked. Yes, Father, thank you.

  I believe God wants us to help you, Nestor, continued the priest. You are doing fine, son, he went on, I want you to keep doing what you have been doing. I want you to keep attending church, go to the Mass. It’s fine that you don’t take Communion, that is no matter. You are a good boy, you believe in God, and so we will take care of you. Don’t be afraid.

  They walked back toward the shrine. The priest patted Nathan on the shoulder. Go on back inside, son. Your secret is safe with me.

  Nathan never knew how the priest found out he was Jewish. Maybe it was his looks, maybe his accent, maybe his lack of expertise with the Catholic prayers, maybe all of the above. But, true to his word, the priest made no further mention of Nathan’s heritage. He did not denounce him to the authorities. He did not turn him in to the Germans.

  Nathan continued to live quietly and safely in Banneux. Unlike Bobby he was not traumatized by this experience; he did not suffer sensory deprivation or crippling loneliness; he was not kept in virtual darkness; he was not forced to be silent. The food was adequate, if non-kosher. He did not like living like a Catholic, but compared to the alternative it wasn’t so terrible. He went along with what the other boys were doing, and he too waited.

  Back in Lvov

  1939-1943

  Genek stopped hearing from his family. His letters went unanswered. He knew nothing of what had happened to his parents, his brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, his many friends, classmates and team-mates. Last time he had seen Lvov had been in 1936. His home city of three hundred thousand people had been one-third Jewish then. What had happened to these hundred thousand Jews? The Nazis had invaded Poland in 1939 and in fact, unbeknownst to Genek, there were probably double that number of Jews in Lvov after the invasion, as refugees from Germany and Poland fled into Ukraine.

  Galicia, the part of Ukraine containing Lvov, was in constant flux – due to its location, the area was the fulcrum in a never-ending political tug-of-war. Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationals fought ceaselessly over the area. Starting in 1938, right before World War Two, the Russians were in charge. On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, launching the war. Just twelve days later the German army reached Lvov and put the city under siege. By the end of the month, however, the Russians were back in control.

  The Nazis and the Soviets came to an uneasy truce at this time, dividing the control of Poland and Ukraine between them. The Soviets controlled the Ukrainian part of the country, forming a state called the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Jewish community in Lvov was initially delighted to find itself on the Russian side of this divide. But this delight was short-lived. The Soviets began deporting Jews and Poles eastward as forced laborers almost immediately.

  It is ironic that Stalin’s government, virulently anti-Semitic, would inadvertently save over two hundred thousand Polish Jews’ lives. Beginning in 1940, the Soviets deported over a million Poles, including Jews, into remote areas of the Soviet Union as slave laborers. Many of these men worked under grueling physical conditions in Siberia and Eurasia. However, some of these Jews survived the war; they were some of the only Polish Jews who did. The rest, over three million Polish Jews who were not deported by the Soviets, perished in the Holocaust.

  On June 22, 1941, the Nazis re-entered Galicia and ousted the Soviets. Approximately ten thousand Jews managed to escape Lvov right before the Nazis took over, choosing to join the Red Army as the lesser of two evils. Genek’s youngest brother, Mundek, was one of these Jews. The lad signed on as a soldier for the Russian army, realizing his chances were slim either way, but perhaps better as a Russian soldier than as a civilian under Nazi rule.

  In June 1941 he boarded the train shipping the new recruits eastward toward Russia. Mundek’s last memory of Lvov was of watching his father Yehudah, crying and waving, running after the train carrying him and the other soldiers out of the city. Mundek never saw his father, or any of his family other than Genek, again.

  When the Germans took control of Lvov they renamed the city Lemberg. Despite its now-German name, however, the city continued to be a hotbed of opposition, and strife between ethnic groups. The streets erupted in violence between Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Germans. Even the brutal Nazis had a hard time retaining order. The Nazi regime decided to give the people a common enemy.

  The Germans circulated a rumor that the Jews had executed Ukrainian political prisoners. This rumor sparked massive pogroms by Ukrainian nationals living in Lvov, as well as support for the killing of Jews by Einsatzgruppe C.

  The Einsatzgruppen were mobile death squads composed of German Secret Police (S.S. or Gestapo). These battalion-sized squads travelled from city to city right behind the advancing German army. Their express directive was to kill all “undesirables” in the area the army had invaded. The squads were supported by vans carrying food and ammunition, just as any fighting force would be. They were very well organized. There were four main squads, A,B,C, and D, each assigned a specific area of Poland and Ukraine. As they reached a city, the S.S. rounded up the “undesirables” – mostly Jews, some Roma, some political prisoners – and marched them to predesignated killing sites in the nearby forests. The victims were forced to strip, hand over all their valuables, stand at the edge of a mass grave, and wait to be shot. Sometimes the victims were forced to dig their own graves prior to being murdered. At first the Einsatzgruppen targeted mostly Jewish men, but soon included women and children in this ghastly execution scheme. By 1943, the Einsatzgruppe squads would kill over a million people, mostly by shooting, and later in mobile gas vans.

  Within two weeks of the Nazis’ arrival in Lvov, four thousand Jews had been murdered in the streets in massive pogroms. Countless more were shot by the roving death squads. There is no record of exactly how many people were killed, or where, by Einsatzgruppe C, as the squad carried out its demonic deeds in the city.

  The following month another pogrom called the Petilura Days resulted in another two thousand Jewish murders in Lvov i
n just two days. Women were raped, men were beaten, synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted in an orgy of violence.

  By July 8, 1941, Jews still in Lvov were forced to wear the yellow star, and by the end of that month a Jewish committee, a Judenrat, was formed at the behest of the Nazis controlling the city. This committee was headed up by Dr. Josef Parnes. Dr. Parnes and the rest of the Judenrat were a guise under which the Nazis could control the Jewish population, just like the AJB was in Belgium.

  In August 1941 the Nazis demanded that the Jewish population of Lvov pay a ransom of a staggering twenty-million rubles. The understanding was that paying this ransom would protect the Jewish community from harm. The Nazis took many Jews as hostages to ensure that this sum would be raised. Somehow the Jewish community was able to collect enough funds to pay this enormous fine, on time, but once the Nazis had received the ransom they killed the Jewish hostages anyway. In October 1941 Dr. Parnes was also killed because he was not cooperative enough with the “handing over” of Jews for deportation to the Janowska concentration camp. He was quickly replaced by another prominent Jew.

  In November 1941 the Germans established a ghetto in Lvov, relocating tens of thousands of Jews into a small area surrounded by barbed-wire fences, where overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition were the rule. Some five thousand sick and elderly Jews were killed during this relocation, by Nazi soldiers and by Ukrainian hooligans who hated the Jews as much as the Nazis did. Many more Jews subsequently died in the ghetto due to the abysmal living conditions. The ghetto was periodically raided by the Nazis, who seized Jews for deportation, or killed them right there in the ghetto. Following the raids, the Jews still living outside the ghetto were then forced to move in. There were periodic attempts by the Lvov Jews over the next years to resist and fight, but, with few exceptions, these efforts were quickly and ruthlessly quashed.

  Next came the mass deportation of Jews to labor camps and to concentration camps. The Belzec camp received over fifty thousand Jews, and Janowska camp was a close second-place recipient.

  The Lvov ghetto lasted about two years. In 1943 the Nazis “liquidated” it, sending any remaining survivors to Auschwitz or other killing camps, or marching them into the forest to be shot.

  Of the original hundred thousand Jewish inhabitants, as well as an additional hundred thousand Jewish refugees who had moved to Lvov prior to the Nazi occupation, only a handful were still alive when the Lvov ghetto was destroyed in late 1943. Even fewer were alive when the Soviet Army liberated the city in 1944.

  Among those who perished were Yehudah and Beila Bottner, and two of their four sons, Joseph and Ephraim, as well as grandparents, scores of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and hundreds of friends. Old people, young ones, children, babies, all were gone. Religious, secular, Hassidic, Zionist, agnostic, atheist – it made no difference. If they were Jewish they were doomed. There are no known records of precisely where and when the Bottner family died. Probably they were either killed in a pogrom, shot in the killing fields around Lvov by the Nazis, or deported to Belzec concentration camp and killed there.

  Yehudah and his two sons did survive long enough to relocate to the Lvov ghetto. Work cards with their names on can be found in the archives in the Holocaust Museum. But Beila (Berta) disappeared – perhaps she died of natural causes, perhaps she was killed in a pogrom or in the relocation process. The very last communication from her was in April 1940 in a telegram. Genek had sent his parents notification of little Bobby’s birth and Berta replied via telegram, sending congratulations. Genek’s one solace was that his parents did know they had a grandson. They would never meet him, but Genek would later say that he hoped it had brought them a little joy.

  The only survivors of the family from Lvov were those who had left: Gimpel (Genek), who had fled to Belgium years earlier, and Moshe (Mundek), who had joined the Red Army.

  Mundek fought as a soldier for the Soviets for a couple of years until he was wounded by a gunshot to the arm. He received treatment in the Soviet city of Rostov, east of the Black Sea, some 850 miles from his hometown. The shot caused a serious wound, and he barely managed to avoid amputation.

  Unable to rejoin the fighting after being wounded, Mundek was no longer useful to the Soviet army. He was told that as a Jew he had two choices: go to prison, or go to Siberia to work in the coal mines. Mundek chose “Siberia,” a euphemism for the vast hinterland of the Soviet back of beyond, and was sent to work in Kazakhstan.

  Although he was a virtual slave laborer, he did meet the woman he would marry, Yetta Herscovitz, a Romanian Jewish refugee who had also fled to Kazakhstan. They managed to get married and somehow survived the war. After liberation they would find their way back into Central Europe. Mundek wanted to return home to Galicia, but Yetta was afraid of returning to Lvov, having heard stories of the Ukrainians’ brutality toward Jews. They would eventually make their way to a refugee camp in Tyrol where their only child, Golda Bottner, would be born in February 1947.

  It was in the refugee camp that the two surviving brothers would eventually be reunited. After liberation, Genek would make frantic, endless inquiries about his missing family, coming up with nothing about his parents or other relatives. Two years of searching would yield nothing. The family was gone, and no-one knew how or where. Eventually he would find his brother Moshe’s name on a Red Cross list. Genek would set out to find the only member of his family who had survived the Holocaust. He would convince Mundek to return with him to Belgium along with Yetta and Golda, and help him get apprenticed in his own field as a furrier.

  Genek’s Luck runs out

  Brussels, 1943-1944

  After the children were in hiding, Melly and Genek made a pact. If someone denounced them, their dwelling would be under surveillance; it would be unsafe to re-enter their apartment. If one of them were to disappear, how would they ever make contact again? There was no way to telephone each other, nowhere they could leave a message. They needed to have a place to reconnoiter if separated. They came up with a busy street corner in the center of Brussels, and a time of day, late afternoon. If one of them disappeared, the other would go to this street corner every day at four o’clock. They would try to reunite this way.

  Considering the overwhelming chance that if one of them was picked up he/she would be promptly deported, this was a very optimistic plan. Those who disappeared in occupied Belgium did not return. But they made this pact, and vowed to keep it. They had two young children out there who needed them. They had to survive.

  For now they avoided repeating patterns, tried not to have habits that would make them predictable. They took different routes every time they left the apartment. They went out at varying times of day. Eventually they rented another apartment so that they would have multiple addresses, multiple potential hiding places. They randomly chose where to sleep every night – some nights in Rue des Menapiens, some in Rue Rogier, some elsewhere. If anyone was watching them, following them, they wanted to be as unpredictable as possible.

  Melly later found out that the couple who rented the apartment underneath theirs was terrified of them. Because they heard Melly speaking German, and noticed her erratic patterns, they assumed she was a German informer. They thought most likely she was Gestapo, sent to live among the Belgians to gather intelligence. Ironically this was a great help in keeping them safe. If the neighbors thought they were Gestapo, it was unlikely anyone would denounce them as Jews!

  For a time they managed to get by, Melly doing most of the errands, Genek staying indoors, especially during daylight hours. Of course, there was a curfew, but if he had to go out he tried to go when the light was dim, and he wrapped a scarf around his lower face and pulled his fedora down as low as he could. He looked like a Jewish man, and he risked his life every time he left the apartment. Jacques le Gros and other informers were always on the lookout for someone to denounce; the Nazis were always on the prowl for someone to fill their quotas for deportation.

&
nbsp; But one day Genek’s luck ran out. He was stopped on the street by the Belgian police and asked for his documents. He was carrying a false ID, of course, stating that he was a Christian. But the police were suspicious of his looks and his accent; they suspected he was an illegal immigrant. They turned him over to the Wehrmacht. Somehow, miraculously, he was not sent to Malines for processing and deportation to Auschwitz. At this point in the war the Germans were desperate for laborers to keep their war machine going. Instead of being killed or deported, Genek was assigned to work as a forced laborer in a factory.

  The Germans used forced labor (slave labor) in every country they occupied. Most of these laborers were transported from their own countries into Germany to work in factories, agriculture, or construction projects. Two hundred thousand people were conscripted from the tiny country of Belgium alone. From larger countries, many more people were seized and sent to work as slaves. Slave labor was a mainstay in the Nazi economy; millions of people were used as slaves by the Nazi regime during the war. Jews and other subhuman undesirables were worked literally to death, but other prisoners served as free labor as well.

  The Nazis, as was their way, categorized their slaves by strict racial criteria. Jews and Roma were at the bottom of the ladder, subhuman, deserving of no mercy, as little food as possible, and to be worked until they were dead. They were treated worse than animals. Slavs (Poles and Russians) were one small rung up and were treated very slightly better; Czechs were a little higher still. The Dutch were considered to be of a higher class and their work conditions reflected that status. “Nordic” people like the Scandinavians were considered to be closer to Aryan, and were treated much more favorably.