Jack and Rochelle Read online

  But there were limits to what even Lazar’s riches could buy. As it happened, one of the tenants in our house was a Polish woman who held the post of director of the local Polish gymnasium [a school corresponding to the American grades seven through twelve; admission was dependent on the passage of rigorous examinations]. She had chosen to rent with us because the apartment we offered her—the two rooms that were to have served my mother’s dental practice—was far and away the nicest one available in little Stolpce. She shared our kitchen and even our shower, but there was no communication between her and our family. She was very standoffish.

  When I turned twelve years old, and it was time for me to go to the gymnasium, I took and passed the entrance exam. But that wasn’t enough for a Jew to enter the Polish schools—not with the strict quotas in effect. My father decided to make a large financial contribution to the Stolpce gymnasium that year, and I was admitted—but with extreme reluctance, even with the director living in our home! And two years later, when it came my sister Sofka’s turn, she was refused even though she too had passed the exam. The director told us point-blank: two Jews from the same house in which she lived would make her look very bad. There was no donation, no bribe, that my father could offer that would make it worth her while to appear sympathetic to Jews. So my father made plans, the following year, to send Sofka to a special Jewish gymnasium in nearby Baranowicze.

  I may have been admitted to the Stolpce gymnasium, but my classmates made it clear to me that I didn’t belong there. They would say to me, “Just wait! Hitler is coming and he’ll cut off the heads of all you Jews.” I used to answer them, “What are you so happy about? The Germans might cut off my head, but your independence will be gone. Poland won’t be Poland anymore!” They would tell me that it was worth losing their independence just to get rid of the Jews.

  Within our house, life was very comfortable. But we had heard of dark things going on in Germany. Not as bad as what would ultimately take place, of course. But Cila, my mother, could see the clouds gathering on the horizon. I still have a letter that she sent to an aunt in America, in which she wrote: “Mir kenen leben, ober mi lost nit.” [“We could live, but they won’t let us.”]

  My father was aware both of the political situation in Germany and of the vicious anti-Semitism in Poland. But his very success in business blinded him to the implications. My mother would urge him to take advantage of the fact that, as a wealthy capitalist, he could take his family to virtually any country on earth and be welcomed, since he would pose no financial burden to the host country. She begged him to leave Poland. But my father would tell her, “We lived through the Russian Cossacks and we lived through World War I. With money you can always survive by bribing whatever new regime comes into power. And if there is a war, well, there’s always been war.” No one understood the horror that was coming—not my father, not even my mother. It was beyond imagining at that point in history.

  America was always the first alternative that Cila would put forward to Lazar. America was the goldineh medinah [golden land]. But a visit paid by my uncle Oscar to America in 1938 put a real damper on that possibility. Oscar had gone to visit Herman, the youngest brother, who had left home as a teenager and emigrated to America, because he had been unhappy with his family. Nonetheless, relations had improved enough so that Oscar paid him a visit. And when Oscar came back, he had nothing very glowing to say about America. He told us, “Kinder [children; here used as an intimate colloquialism for all family members], we have here in Poland a Garden of Eden. Over in America they work like horses. It’s not nearly as easy there to earn a living. There’s no place like home.”

  Jews used to come to us asking for money on behalf of the Jewish settlements in Israel. The money my father was happy to give. But when they asked Lazar if he was interested in buying land there, he refused. Israel—or Palestine as it was then, an undeveloped British colony—was too primitive, too rough. He would say, “I’m not going to go there, my children aren’t going to go there, so here’s your contribution and that’s it!” All the same, my father was interested in the founding of a Jewish state. Nearly all the Jews in Poland had a position of some sort with respect to the various Zionist parties and philosophies. My father sided with the more militant right wing, Beitar, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky.

  My mother would have gone to Israel or to anywhere else. But my father didn’t listen and that was that.

  My father was a prosperous man, and we lived well as a result. In the winter we could escape the worst of the cold by vacationing in Zakopane, in the Carpathian Mountains to the south. And in the summer, we stayed in posh resort towns like Druskeniki and Ciechocinek.

  But even with these luxuries, my father was not an easy man to grow up with. As he was in business, so he was with his family. Very strict.

  I remember that dinner was at six o’clock sharp. If I wasn’t there at six, I had better have a good explanation of why not. If I was late, he would make me stand in the corner—it was a big dining room—and watch them eat dinner while keeping my arms against my sides. I was not to say a word, and I would not be given my dinner that night. If I didn’t respect the rules of the family, that was my fitting punishment.

  We had a bellpull over the table to ring the maid. She would carry the food from the kitchen on beautiful platters. We children would be served heaping portions. If I did not finish what was on my plate, he would tell me how, when he was my age, he was living through World War I and was grateful to have even a hard crust of bread to eat.

  Sometimes, if I left too much my plate, my father would—instead of just telling a story from his childhood—slap me pretty good on the hands and make me eat it. On the underside of our large, wooden dining-room table, there were pouches for storing napkins and the like. So I decided that, when I couldn’t finish my portion, I would only chew it up and then secretly spit it in my hand and hide it in one of those pouches. Later I would come back and clean up the mess. But once I forgot to do that. So the mess got moldy and started to smell. No one could figure out what the horrible odor in the house was! And then they found my mess. I got a real good slap on the hands for that.… I never did it again!

  My mother did not like the harsh streak in my father—not with his employees, and especially not with his children. But for the most part, my father was well content to leave our upbringing in our mother’s hands. If we needed help with homework, or just needed to talk, we turned to my mother. My father was making money.

  I wanted to please my parents, but especially I wanted to please my mother. Before we children would go to sleep, my mother would kiss us all good night. But if she was mad at me, she wouldn’t kiss me good night. When that happened, I would sit up in my bed and sometimes fall asleep in a sitting position. But I would try not to let myself fall asleep until she came and kissed me—forgave me. Sometimes she would wait an hour before she came back. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back at all. It drove me crazy! I hated for her to be angry at me.

  When Miriam, the youngest, was born in 1933, it devastated my father. Three daughters! He had always wanted a son, a kaddishl, a male child who could say kaddish for him when he died, because that was something that the Jewish tradition forbade girls to do.

  Within a half a year of Miriam’s birth, my father fell ill. The one doctor in town, Srkin, was good friends with my family. He and my father played poker together with some regular cronies a couple of nights a week. But Srkin was no medical genius. He diagnosed my father’s condition as leukemia. My father wanted a second opinion, so he travelled to Warsaw, which was very difficult for him. It was winter. I remember seeing my father, as he set off, in a dark fur coat with a very high collar to protect his neck from the cold, because his lymph nodes were inflamed. He was pale. Large boils had been breaking out under his arms. The eminent Warsaw specialist told him that he had Hodgkin’s disease and that, with good care, he could live for another ten years.

  He used to have flare-ups. He would feel b
etter, then worse. All the medications … a nurse would come and give him a shot when his white-blood-cell count went especially high. They would tell him to drink lots of egg yolks to boost his redcell count. He was in and out of the hospital.

  In the midst of all this, my father began to mellow a bit, because he saw that money couldn’t buy you health or happiness. He was gentler after he fell ill. Not a saint, but gentler. He still continued to focus as much as he could on the business, even though it was hard for him. Money was still money. Even with his illness, he still believed that it could buffer the worst that life had to offer.

  On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland began—the Germans on one front, the Russians on the other. The Hitler-Stalin pact called for Germany and Russia to split Poland in two. The Germans took the western sector. We lived in the eastern sector. That delayed—for us—the coming of the Nazi murderers for nearly two years.

  JACK

  My grandfather Isaac was a rabbi. He and his wife Miriam lived in a little Russian town called Puchowicze. I never met either of my grandparents. My father Julius did not like to talk about his relationship with them.

  Basically, Julius could not see eye-to-eye with his father about a suitable profession. His father hoped Julius would follow in his footsteps as a rabbi, but Julius was not the religious type. He was far more modern, you might say, in outlook than his father. And Julius loved the full flavor of life. So things were difficult between them. Julius also had three brothers, but he was not particularly close to them.

  As a young man, Julius moved from Puchowicze to Warsaw, the Polish capital, to avoid being drafted by the Russian army. But he was also happy to get away from his father’s orthodox ways. In Warsaw, he first opened a leather-goods store. His father helped him out financially in that enterprise, but it was not a success. Julius then enrolled in some art-school painting classes with dreams of becoming an artist. There is a strange kind of pattern here, because a cousin of his, a member of his same generation (though they never met), also moved away from Russia to become a painter. But he moved to Paris, not Warsaw, and he persisted, as Julius never did. That was Chaim Soutine, who is now regarded as one of the great painters of the century. Soutine is the French spelling of our family name.

  In Warsaw, Julius was introduced to Sarah, my mother, through a mutual friend. Sarah was then studying to become a dentist—yes, just like Cila. Julius and Sarah were quite different personalities. Julius was a good man, but easygoing. He was short, but well-knit and lively, and he had a beautiful smile that you saw often. Sarah was serious. She had a round face framed by short, light brown hair. Her eyes were hazel, and she could seem very sad and dreamy. Maybe that was what drew my father to her at first. And maybe it was his happier outlook that drew Sarah to Julius.

  Early on, Julius was very impressed by Sarah’s professional ambitions, and he decided to give up art school and instead study to become a dental technician. After they married, they opened a dental practice together. From Warsaw they moved to a small Polish town, Rubizewicze. From there, a short time later, they went to Stolpce, Rochelle’s hometown. So our mothers were the two female dentists in town! But they never knew each other. And shortly after I was born we moved some miles away to Mir.

  Both of my grandparents on my mother’s side died before I was born. I never got a chance to meet them. She had three sisters and two brothers, but they were not nearby. Two of the sisters and one of the brothers were killed by the Nazis.

  In Mir, my parents were very successful. My mother was the only dentist in a town of some 4,000 people. The Jewish population in Mir comprised roughly 25 percent of that total, but it included the students and teachers of a very famous yeshiva [Jewish religious school that trained both laymen and rabbis]. The Mir yeshiva was known all over the world. Students came there not only from Eastern Europe, but also from America and Africa. The Jewish families in Mir could rent out rooms in their homes and make quite a nice income, as most of the Mir students were well-to-do.

  Life was pleasant in Mir. The Jewish community was a close-knit and friendly one. There was a good relationship between the orthodox and the less religious Jews. Actually, there were virtually no Jews in Mir, or elsewhere in eastern Poland, whom you could call nonreligious. We all used to go to shul [synagogue] for the holidays. On Succot we would all build succahs [ritual outdoor huts to celebrate the harvest and the successful observance of the New Year]. We all contributed to the support of the rabbi and the shammes [all-purpose assistant to the rabbi] and the shochet [kosher butcher]. We always ate kosher meat because there wasn’t any other meat to buy, unless you went well out of your way.

  I did not attend the yeshiva, but I did go to grade school in Mir. The teachers—and most of the students—in that school made things difficult for the minority of Jews who attended. There were maybe twelve other Jewish students in my particular class. The school day began with a Catholic prayer, and the Jewish students were instructed to stand up and then to remain absolutely silent while the rest of the students recited this prayer. It made us feel awkward, singled out. As for school work, if we failed to complete an assignment or to pass a test, we were singled out for special criticism, well beyond what a Polish student would receive. “What’s the matter, Jew?” the teacher would ask us. “Can’t keep up?”

  During recess, a small percentage of the Polish students would be willing to include Jews in their games. Most would not. All the same, I managed to make a number of friends, mainly Jews, but also some non-Jews. I was relatively outgoing, but I was also very careful. Only after I saw that a boy or a girl was an honest and decent person would I begin a friendship with them. With the students I didn’t like, especially the anti-Semites amongst them, I tried to avoid confrontations, even when remarks were directed at me. I knew that, in that environment, once I started something—anything—the confrontations would go on forever.

  In addition to the grade-school education, my parents hired a tutor from the yeshiva to prepare me for my bar mitzvah. He taught me Hebrew, Chumash [the five books of the Torah], and Tanach [prophetic and other biblical writings]. I was fairly good at these studies. Our family was not very religious, but we did observe the Jewish holidays and we always prepared a special meal and recited the blessings on the Sabbath. I believed in God, but it wasn’t in a way that conformed closely to Jewish orthodoxy. It was a very personal belief—a sense that there was an guiding meaning to things, no more formal or detailed than that. My most important Jewish involvement was with a Zionist youth organization called Hashomer Hatzair [Young Guard]. It was labor-oriented, left-wing. Its basic credo was that Palestine was to be settled by Jewish youth collectively working the land, as was already taking place. There was no tension then, in Poland, between Zionists and orthodox Jews, many of whom today deny the validity—according to the Torah—of the state of Israel. Back then, there was too much pressure on the Jewish community from the outside to allow us to split up into separate and opposing groups. You had to remain united to survive.

  You should understand that in those days you couldn’t just pick up and move from Poland to Israel. There were immigration quotas set by the British mandate government, and there was strong resistance to Jewish settlement from the Palestinian Arabs. If you were wealthy, you could go and establish yourself, but my family was not wealthy. But there was another alternative—you could emigrate by way of attending a school in Palestine. That was my long-range plan. Jewish girls as well as boys yearned to leave Poland for Palestine. Through Hashomer Hatzair and other organizations, it was sometimes arranged for these girls to enter into purely “paper” marriages with Jewish boys who would come from Palestine to Poland for that purpose. Legally, the woman could follow the man. In many cases, Jewish youths would simply smuggle themselves into Palestine. They would stay in a kibbutz as a guest for a time, then make their way into the life of the land, disappearing from the authorities.

  Yes, we knew that Palestine was a difficult place in which to liv
e. But we also knew that there was no freedom, no future for us in Poland.

  Did I have a sense that Jews were hated in Poland? You didn’t need to have a sense of it. I knew it from the time I was two, three years old. By that age, you knew that you were not the same as all the other kids, that you were discriminated against in the subtlest ways, as well as in the most overt and painful ways. I remember once, while I was a young student, I boarded a crowded train. I went through several cars and finally found a passenger compartment with a single empty seat. But the man sitting next to it stared at me and then spat out the words, “No Jews allowed!” I remember that moment because it made me realize, more than anything that had come before, that in Poland I would never be allowed to live a normal and peaceful life.

  The hatred was built into the society throughout. You couldn’t count on attending a university because of the small quotas. And even if you were admitted, you weren’t allowed to sit during classes. Jews stood in the back. It was very difficult to establish a business unless your parents were wealthy and could give you financial backing. So that left becoming a merchant, or a shoemaker, or a tailor, something small-scale and nonthreatening to the Poles.

  So we dreamed of Israel. We followed the news there through Jewish newspapers published in Poland and, occasionally, magazines sent directly from Israel. Radio we could listen to only at night, because in Mir there was electricity only at night. If there was a special crisis in Israel—a violent attack on a Jewish kibbutz, or something equally grim—the Polish radio would include mention of it in their news of the world. We collected money for the settlements there through the Keren Kayemet [Zionist fund-raising agency]. We bought special stamps to pay for the planting of trees, for the purchase of land from the Arabs, for the building of new kibbutzim.