Noike: A Memoir of Leon Ginsburg. Suzanne Ginsburg
Piecing the old and new together, I started emailing him rough drafts. Initially they resembled a book of MadLibs: the pages were dotted with empty spaces for details on people, places, and events. Writing the stories, I thought, might be easier than face-to-face interviews, easier for both of us. Maybe looking at me—the daughter named after one of his loved ones—forced him to acknowledge what had happened in a way he had never allowed himself.
Eager to fully immerse myself in the project, I started renting Holocaust documentaries. The films would sit on my dining table for one week, then another. After writing about the Holocaust all day, I dreaded watching the videos at night; it was too painful to be confronted with real, live voices detailing events similar to the ones playing over and over in my head. Eventually I would send the videos back and rent comedies and love stories instead.
I bought pink tulips for my apartment; I started taking yoga.
Lying on my back in the savasana yoga pose (the “corpse” pose) our instructor gently urged the class to free our minds of all thoughts from the day, to focus on our breathing. As I tried to clear my mind, I found myself drawn to the very images I was trying to forget for those five minutes: the rebbe reaching his long, bony hand out to the German soldier; the old man forced to burn the holy books; my great grandmother being taken away by the SS. My instructor’s voice roused me from the morbid pose: “Open your eyes and turn to your right side.”
A few weeks after my return from Florida I started finding large envelopes crammed into my mailbox, sent by my father via U.S. Priority Mail. The first package contained photos of his town, a sketch depicting one of his escape routes, and stories about life before the war. “Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was one of the most festive days for the Jews of Maciejow,” my father wrote. “Weeks before the holiday, my mother would take us to the tailor to get fitted for our new clothes: tweed suits for my brother and I, a printed dress for my sister.” When the holiday finally arrived, his family would attend synagogue together and wish for gezunt and parnusse, health and good fortune. My father would race home after the services, eager to read the holiday cards delivered by the postman and taste his favorite holiday foods—gelfite fish and chicken soup. All of these traditions came to an end under the German occupation.
6
THE BASEMENT
Maciejow Poland. September 1942
The town synagogues were still shuttered when Rosh Hashanah arrived the following September, but most Jews continued to pray in secret, inside their homes. Noike and his brother were invited to one of these clandestine gatherings, this one held at a neighbor’s house down the road. They quietly entered through the back door, closely guarded by two teenaged boys from their school. “Shana Tova,” the young guards whispered as they ushered the boys into the house.
At least thirty worshippers were crammed into the tiny living room. They leaned against archways, squatted on the floor, and sat on the occasional chair. In the center of the room a group of older men wearing prayer shawls were huddled around the Torah, swaying from side to side as they sang. The prayers were the same ones they read every year but the atmosphere had never been so tense. Posters all over town had warned Jews about large gatherings: “More than three Jews found in assembly are to be shot instantly.” But forgoing prayer was not an option for these religious Jews: Rosh Hashanah was judgment day, the time when God would decide who should live and who should die.
One of the men leading the prayers, Itzchak Shochat, was dressed in a kittel, a white robe worn on religious occasions such as this one. Itzchak had a beautiful, long white beard, soft as cotton. He belonged to the same synagogue as Noike’s family, the Trysker Synagogue, and sat in the same section as Noike’s grandfather. “Noikele, come here,” Itzchak would say after the Shabbat services, “such a sheina punem.” Squatting down, he would reach out and pinch Noike’s cheeks until they turned pink. It hurt but Noike liked his attention.
As they were softly chanting the holiday prayers, one of the boys on watch ran into the living room and announced that two SS officers were heading towards the house. Itzchak grabbed the Torah, stuffed it underneath his kittel, and ran out the back door. The worshippers frantically hid their prayer clothes and books, placing them behind curtains, inside furniture, under couch cushions. Noike stuffed his prayer book inside his coat.
Within seconds two SS officers stormed into the living room with their guns drawn. They wore riding pants, black leather boots, and tall hats with the Totenkopf symbol, the skull and crossbones, the same uniform worn by officers who had raided Noike’s grandfather’s house the previous summer.
“Jewish assemblies are forbidden!” one officer shouted in German; the other panned his gun across the room.
The worshippers remained silent.
“Raus, raus!” he ordered the group. “Everyone must leave immediately!”
Noike kept his head bowed as he followed his neighbors out of the house.
No one was arrested that day; no one was instantly shot. Hours later the reason for the reprieve became clear: a large-scale massacre, an aktion, was planned for Monday. One leak came from a Jewish woman, Sheva Berelson, who worked as a maid at German headquarters and had befriended a soldier in recent months. Upon learning that Jewish workers would not be needed that Monday, she asked her soldier friend about the sudden change in schedule. He confided that the situation would get much worse for the Jews in Maciejow—pregnant women would soon be removed from the Jewish clinics and shot.
Another leak came from a Ukrainian hospital administrator who was close friends with Avram Avruch, a Jewish doctor who studied medicine in Switzerland and was fluent in German. Avram was no longer allowed to treat non-Jewish patients—a racial law introduced by the Germans—but he wrote medical reports and completed other hospital administrative tasks that had to be done in German. The hospital administrator told Avram that the next aktion would be the final one.
Noike’s mother, Pesel, tried to maintain a sense of calm around her children, even as she prepared for the inevitable. She went from house to house, meeting with close friends and relatives; they exchanged what little information they had on the raids and their strategies for survival. After everything had been arranged, Pesel shared her plans with her children: “We are going to stay with Gitel Silverberg for a few days. She has built a hiding place in her basement and will let us stay there until the next aktion is over. The rebbe also has a secret room, but it’s too small for all of us.”
Hiding places had saved many people during the last aktion; this plan seemed to be their only hope. Gitel Silverberg, a second cousin, started building her hiding place a few months earlier, a short time after a Polish woman returned from the neighboring town of Kovel and told her Jewish friends about corpses lying in the streets. The Germans had massacred 15,000 Jews, decimating Kovel’s entire Jewish population.
“But what about all of our things?” Noike’s sister Blima asked.
Many homes had been ransacked during the raids of the previous summer. The police had been the biggest culprits but many peasants from the neighboring villages had also plundered. Anything left out in the open was for the taking: dishes, armoires, mattresses, bed frames, clothing—even children’s toys.
“We can bring some blankets and food,” Pesel said. “But the police will be suspicious if they see us leaving the house with anything else. We’ll hide the silver and photographs later tonight.” One room was left unfinished when Pesel expanded their home before the war; she planned to bury the silver, photographs, and other family heirlooms under its bare, clay floor.
The next afternoon the four of them left their home, keeping everything but their most sentimental valuables in place. They locked the door and crossed town as if they were on an ordinary social call, visiting