(The following is a story written by my son last year for his 9th grade English class. It is the (barely) fictionalized story of his grandfather in the Holocaust. Some of the characters are archetypes (the man on the train, Vasile) and the narrative from event to event is fictional, but the facts, from the third child to liberation, are real. In many places there are references, e.g. (Interview) that give sources.
I post it with his permission, at a time when we actually seem to be having a debate about the moral equivalence between Nazi and not-Nazi.)
Blankets of Hope
It was anything but a normal day. God did I long for a normal day: one not filled with fear of what lay ahead, or anger towards the unknown. But I needed to stop wallowing- I had to pack for the move to my grandmother’s in Strojinetz. We were to take refuge there since there was word that the roundup of “undesirables” was to begin soon in Czernowitz, my home.
I was only 8 years old in 1942. I was unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, nor what had become of me. All I knew was that I had to run. It loomed over me like a dog threatening me from behind a wall. You did not know if it was going to get you- all you had to know is that you were afraid.
Once we arrived at my grandmother’s farm, a blanket of peace gently tapped the shoulders of my family. My mother and father were busy helping me and my two other siblings unpack what we had left. We had brought what we needed to get along, and what we valued the most.
The peaceful blanket's presence was soon to be stripped from us, torn to shreds and discarded as if it were nothing but a useless piece of paper. The Romanian Police had begun the roundup in Strojinetz. We were to be moved into a ghetto, but plans had changed. We were now to go to straight to the camp, via the next available train. My mother was told that she could bring one bag for the six of us. She never failed to impress me. My mother packed everything we would need into one medium-sized bag. For the six of us. Me, my two brothers, her and my father, and my grandmother. That bag would soon become my new blanket of hope. A smaller, thinner, less protective blanket, but a blanket nonetheless. I told myself I would cling onto it.
My grandmother was not taking the situation as well as the rest of us. She wasn’t quite able to keep up with the pace of everything going on, the quick packing, saying goodbye to nearly everything she had worked all her life for. An officer screamed at her to hurry up. She couldn’t obey. Everybody knew what happened to people who didn’t listen. You didn’t even need to have born witness to it before- you could tell that the officers were waiting for a chance to execute their first of many.
I turned my head the other way, and a shot rang across the farm. It bounced off the empty walls of the house that my grandmother used to call home, off the harsh, cold, wooden walls of the truck transporting us to the train station.
I turned my head back around to see my grandmother lying still, hand over her chest.
My father was consoling my youngest sibling, who didn't really have a grasp on the situation and was mortified. He was carrying me and my two brothers, and was stopped by an officer. I couldn’t hear what the officer said into my father’s ear, but I do know that his eyes watered up very quickly.
He set my youngest sibling into the officer’s hand, and said, “Goodbye son. I loved you.”“Loved.” Not “love.”“Loved.” He was too young to understand what was going on, but as soon as the cold, bloody hands of the officer touched his back, he understood right away. I would later come to learn what the officer said to my father. “You may take two.”
We boarded the train an absolute mess. My father was distraught, unable to tell my mother what had just happened. My remaining brother was clinging to my mother’s jacket as hard as he could. The roofless cattle car smelled of rotting flesh. There was a small window on the side, just enough for somebody to get out. There wasn’t any barbed wire covering it. My father lifted me into his arms, my mother following the steps of my father with my little brother. I drifted off to sleep.
I awoke to commotion in the car and saw a man climbing out of the small window on the side of the car. The train was stopped. I studied the man. He was a slightly built man, around 20 years old. He poked his head out, then the rest of his body soon followed. He fell unto the ground below, however, would not survive. A cannon boomed throughout the air, hanging, seeming like it would never go away. The Romanian Police add some barbed wire to the window on our cattle car.
We arrived at Obodovka (Interview). Word had it that it used to be a village, a subsection of Transnistria (Victor), and had been turned into a labor camp. The camp, if one could even call it that, was an organizational mess. Nobody really knew who was in charge, nobody had a real sense of what was going on- not even the guards. But that didn’t matter. As long as they extracted the labor, money, spirit and hope from us, they didn’t care. It didn’t matter- we weren’t humans anyway, right?
I hit myself. How dare I start to believe the rhetoric spewed out by the people I grew up with? The howling police in my home town. The children who spit on me at school and called me “penny-picher” (Interview). How dare I give in to their verbal abuse?
I was pulled out of my world of thought, hearing somebody screaming at me.
“Everybody off the train, now!” Officers were yelling so many things at so many people. There was a putrid smell and smoke everywhere. Nobody could identify the smell, and nobody wanted to. At the front of the line, my mother was directed to the right- the direction of the smoke, while the rest of us went to the left. She began to negotiate with the officers in German. She was the only one who spoke German amongst the four of us. Never before had we heard her spit it out so violently. Another officer begrudgingly put his hand on the chest of my father, and said something to in German. My father understood that he was being stopped.
After around 30 seconds of talking, she ran towards the rest of us. She had just negotiated to keep us together. I never did learn what she negotiated for. We moved forward, not knowing what lay on the road ahead. Some were singing upbeat, joyous songs. Others were saying Kadish Yatom- the prayer for “healing of spirit, healing of flesh, and mourning the dead.”
Soon, we found ourselves running. Running from one place to another. At our first stop, we stripped naked. At the next stop, we received new clothing. Flimsy, thin, clothing, in a harsh winter. I was already freezing cold. The older amongst us gave up hope. They collapsed, and allowed themselves to be trampled, for they would rather die at the hands of their brethren than die at the hands of the persecutors.
After a few more stops, we arrived in a cabin. It was completely wooden and had no insulation. The walls were covered with shelves. There were wooden blocks sitting on the shelves. These were our pillows. The officer yelled something at us in German and left the building. The few who spoke German translated for us. They told us that our bags would be here in a few days, two people per bunk, and we would start work tomorrow.
Everybody in the building was bewildered, but found hope in each other. We were all shy, except for one man. This man introduced himself to us. Within seconds, he was shaking hands. His name was Vasile. He would soon become my new blanket of hope- as thin as the clothing we were given, but it was all I had. Vasile was 15 years old and from my home town. He had been separated from his family at the beginning, yet did not seem phased by it. I pondered how one could be so blind as to what was going on around him, and how inhumane he was. I had but one wish: that I did not become like Vasile, blind to the pain and suffering surrounding us.
Then again, I appreciated his joyous attitude. We all needed something to cling on to. Many others soon followed in Vasile’s path, until a considerable amount of us were as joyous as he. Tomorrow was to be different. We awoke to a siren placed in the middle of the cabin. It must have been four in the morning.
An officer explained to us, again in German, that we were to work in a factory that made mechanical parts, for what we were not told. Every morning, we had to run five miles to the factory, work until 11PM, and then run back. After he explained this, we stepped outside the cabin, and began running. Our legs began to move on their own, separate from our bodies. The officers ran alongside us, looking for anybody slowing down.
Off in the distance lay a yellowed factory, sitting idle. A few lights were on inside, but it was otherwise dormant. We stepped inside to see rows upon rows of workstations. There was one person at each of them, impatiently awaiting our arrival.
“Choose a workstation and remember it. Come back to the same workstation every day.”
We complied. I followed Vasile. The person at our workstation was cold. He showed us how to assemble what came our way. Suddenly, the man explaining became weary, his eyes watered. He explained how to survive at this camp- emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. Nobody would have ever expected such a thing from as harsh of a person as he.
We learned why he became so soft. He stepped outside, along with the rest of the people that used to be at the workstations. An officer replaced them at every third workstation. The sounds of shots pierced our ears, shattering one of the glass windows at the top of the factory. Vasile and I heard the scream of the man that spoke to us before, followed by an eerie silence. We looked at each other, knowing what had happened.
Months had passed since we first arrived at the camp. Just as we became used to the ordeal, it changed. After arriving back at the cabin one night, we saw a fence surrounding it, topped with barbed wire and surrounded by guards (Interview). Somebody approached one of the guards, one of the ones who spoke German, to ask them what was going on. The guard that she approached had a close eye on her- as we did on the guard. He was holding his gun, aimed at her. She continued. She was shot. Nobody was to approach guards. We did not know what to do, but were scared for our lives. We were without food, without heat, without light, and in a harsh winter, what were we to do?
We all went back to the cabin and drifted to sleep, assuming this was some weird new procedure. We did not awake to a siren, but an officer standing at the front of the cabin, shouting at all of us to get up. He said that since there was an outbreak of typhus at the camp, it was going to be fenced off (Interview). He then told us that we were not to approach the fence, but we already knew that.
Everybody in the cabin was eager to ask the officer questions, but did not want to go down the path of the poor German-speaking woman. We wanted to know about food. We wanted to know about water. We wanted to know about supplies. Soon, we got our answer.
A few days had passed without any more information or supplies. We did not have food, but were living off what we had (Interview). The camp would only have a few more days of food, even if we all ate as little as humanly possible. Vasile was still alive- somehow. My blanket of hope had been torn, burnt, frayed, beat, but was still holding together, by the threads. The blanket wasn’t doing so well. He was sick and starving. Never before had I seen this person so defeated, so void of joy. He made the best out of everything, was he not able to make the best out of this?
He said the Sh’Ma, closed his eyes, and became one with God. For the first time, I was without a blanket. The entire cabin mourned after learning the fate of Vasile.
My father found a hole under the electric fence. He began sneaking out every night and taking food from local farms. We did not dare tell anybody else that we had food, otherwise they would kill to get it. The people that were small bits of the quilt that was our collective hope to survive quickly became simply another threat.
A new blanket of hope formed, surrounding me and my family. It was tiny, even thinner than the clothes we were issued during the harsh winter, but it was something. Comparing it to the blanket of hope that was my grandmother’s house, this was minuscule, but I had to have something. Vasile had taught me how to make my own blankets of hope in times where nobody was providing them for me. They may have been small and thin, but they served their purpose. They gave me the courage to not charge at the electrical fence with all my might.
Death became a daily occurrence. Seldom did a day pass where a family was not ripped to shreds due to the death of one of it’s members. Some had resorted to eating dead bodies. How joyous it was not to be as them!
Months went by. There were only 400 of us left. We started with 15,000. We all tried to spread the joy unto the rest of the cabins but it did not work- you needed Vasile to emulate Vasile. A few people had tried to make an escape, but the only person who had managed to make it out of the fence area alive was my father. He did so around once a week now, because security had been heightened after the first two or three tried to run.
Two years had passed since Vasile passed away. There were 200 hundred of us left (Interview). Most were dying. It was a usual day, as usual as the days got around here. The sun was setting, and, out of nowhere, all the guards ran to each other and met in one spot. This had never been seen before, since it was easy to escape from here. Nobody dared. We all thought it was a trap to catch us.
The most unexpected came next. The officers threw on prisoner’s clothes and joined us (Interview). They begged us “not to tell anybody.” We hadn’t a clue what was happening, but would soon find out. Tanks flying red flags approached the camp. As soon as they reached the fence, they did not bother stopping, rather ramming right through. A few soldiers jumped out of the tanks, they were Russians! (Life) Oh, thank the Lord they were Russians! For if it had been the Germans, this would have meant certain death. A few of the soldiers spoke Romanian. They told us that they were here to liberate us, and asked where the guards had gone. We were quick to shoot back that they had hidden in prisoner’s clothes. It was easy to tell, for they were the only ones not malnourished.
What the Russian soldiers did was horrid, yet just. They were relentless with what they did to the guards. Usually, one would try to put an end to this type of behavior. However, it did not apply in this situation. The guards had imposed a living hell upon us, why would we not let them experience what we went through?