Jack and Rochelle Read online

  When I was age eight, something very painful happened. My parents separated. It was, for that time, an unusual sort of separation in that, in many ways, the family was still intact. We ate together often and celebrated holidays together. My mother and father were friendly with each other—there was no anger between them, at least not on the surface. Their behavior was meant to make things easier for me. But it also confused me, because I could see that the separation was serious business. After all, my life had changed significantly: I was living with my mother in our original home, but also shuttling back and forth to the little apartment that my father had rented just half a block away.

  Why did they separate? Why did they never file for a formal, legal divorce? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I was too young to understand. And I never asked these questions of either of my parents—not even of my father, who survived the war and lived with me until his death at age ninety. Not in all those years to come did I ask. It wasn’t my place to ask. It would have been painful to go into it.

  My parents both genuinely loved me, but back in those days they often would fall into fighting—quietly—for my love. Each would question me about the other—what did your mother say? what did your father give you? and so on. It became a minor issue, for example, as to which one of them would pick out and pay for my school clothes and shoes. Neither wanted to fall behind the other in gift-giving. So I tried to be careful about what I said, what I didn’t say, in order to please them both. I was a young boy, but I behaved like a diplomat.

  At some point, my mother Sarah began to see how hard it was on me. And as a result she did a wonderful thing. She took me aside one day and told me that, even though the two of them were not living under the same roof, my father was still my father and my mother was still my mother. They both loved me as their one and only child—and they would love me forever. My father was my father and it was natural that he should want to give me the best things in life. And it was equally natural that my mother should feel the same way.

  This talk did succeed in taking some of the pressure off me. But I still kept thinking that, since my mother and my father were good people, and good to each other, maybe I could make things right between them. So I would do things like arrange for them to have dinner together—which they would agree to because they wanted to make me happy. And I would hope that somehow things would suddenly be all right—that we would be a unified family again—a child’s dream.

  It came time for me to enter a gymnasium. Stolpce was closest, but Rochelle has already told you about the Jewish quota there. So I went to the special Jewish gymnasium in Baranowicze, which was a larger town than I had ever lived in before. From the time I was twelve years old, I was living away from home. Financially, I was supported by my parents, but in terms of practical daily life, I was on my own.

  Going to school in Baranowicze was definitely what you would call a “mixed blessing.” On the one hand, I was delighted to be in a setting in which all the teachers and the students were Jewish—the hazings and hatreds of the Mir grade school were behind me at last. But on the other hand, I was leaving my parents behind. My efforts at bringing them together would have to come to an end. I finally had to face the fact that the separation would be permanent.

  I rented a room from a Jewish family in Baranowicze, went to school by myself, and came back at night and prepared dinner and studied on my own. As for studies, don’t forget that we didn’t have five or six subjects to learn, like American students do. There were a total of fifteen mandatory subjects for us, including Latin, Polish, Jewish religion, geography, physics, chemistry, history, psychology, on and on. Three failing grades and you were expelled.

  All of that was not easy for me at first, but soon enough I became comfortable with my independence. I kept up my studies, made friends easily, went out with six or seven girlfriends. I only went out with Jewish girls, and usually they were two or three years older than me. I was bigger than most of my friends, more mature. The older girls liked me and I liked them. Baranowicze was bigger than Mir, but still it was a little town. So on dates there were not many options. Usually we would go to a coffee shop and have lots of pastries with coffee. Sometimes I would skip dinner and just live on the pastry. Or we would go to the movies—usually American films with subtitles. Or we would take a walk. It didn’t matter much what we did. We would behave ourselves, but by the time I was thirteen I had done some serious experimenting. By the time I was fourteen I could write a book. I was not unique in that; I would say with most of my friends it was the same.

  Through all of my independent living, I developed confidence. I became used to fending for myself, thinking on my feet. It may have helped me survive what was to come.

  I did still see my parents fairly regularly, what with winter and spring school breaks and the summer vacations. During my return visits to Mir, I continued to shuttle back and forth between my parents’ separate homes. And even though they questioned me less, each one continued to try to outdo the other in giving me gifts, treats, and special foods.

  Always, at meals with my family—this was true even before the divorce—I was encouraged to eat all the rich foods I could swallow, and to drink not merely milk, but cream! When we went on vacation to a nice resort, if I did not gain five or six pounds during our stay, it was considered a waste of money. This attitude toward food was not unique to my family, or even to Jews. In Poland, at that time, if you were gaining weight or pleasantly plump, you were considered healthy. If you were just average weight, or, even worse, skinny, people would ask what was wrong with you. If you went to a butcher, you asked for a chicken with lots of fat. No one wanted lean meat. A chicken without a good amount of fat was called a padleh [sick chicken]. Food was not as plentiful in Poland as it is in America. When you were plump and rosy-cheeked, that was a sign that you were well-off. The poor man was skinny, while the rich man showed his riches on his body.

  During my second year at Baranowicze, I came home for an extended visit to celebrate my bar mitzvah. Lots of friends and family came—it was a big celebration. But one of the gifts was a violin, and I had to start taking lessons. I hated the violin. I was lousy at it—even my teacher said that there was no future for me there, but my mother insisted. A pain in the tush!

  I was still intent on moving to Palestine someday. In fact, if it weren’t for the war, I would have gone and probably would still be there today. Six months before the invasion of Poland, a shaliach [Zionist leader] came to Mir and recruited young boys and girls to attend an agricultural school in Israel. The Zionist movement treated boys and girls very much alike—a very different approach than the orthodox tradition. I signed on for the school because I wanted to emigrate to Palestine. So I filled out the applications and my mother sent in a deposit; she and my father planned eventually to come and join me. I was supposed to go with two of my friends. But they received their papers two months before the war. And they left Poland.

  Then the world was turned upside down. And my papers never arrived.

  II

  Life Under Soviet Rule

  JACK

  The invasion of Poland, which began on 1 September 1939, was over with quickly. The Polish army was overwhelmed from the start. There was no serious resistance. Within a month, the two conquerors were already setting up their respective regimes in the western and eastern sectors.

  There is no question that things were far better for the Jews in the east. Amongst the Russian people there were, of course, a considerable number of anti-Semites, and Stalin himself—as history shows—held a deep and violent hatred of Jews. But the official Soviet policy was that discrimination on the basis of ethnic or religious groupings was illegal and intolerable as it cut against the formation of a unified socialist society. So there was no such thing as Pole or Jew or Belorussian—only members of the state.

  Mir, where my parents lived, was so close to the Russian border that the Soviet troops arrived and took control literally a
day or two after the invasion began. I remember that they came around noon, and that the first vehicles to arrive were not tanks but open trucks full of Russian soldiers. The people of Mir were very confused as to what they should do … go in the house and hide, or go outside and wave. The trucks were parked and the soldiers were basically waiting there. Finally, they came down from the trucks and began giving away candy, cigarettes. They seemed to be friendly so the people began opening their windows, coming out of their homes, even inviting the Russian soldiers inside for dinner.

  As Jews, we learned that we were lucky that it was the Russians, not the Germans, who had arrived. We didn’t hear about the atrocities in the western section of Poland for three or more months, when a very few of the Jews from that section managed to sneak over to our side. Those Jews were called byegentses [refugees]. In some cases they managed it by bribing the border guards. Anyway, they started to let us in on what was going on. We had no idea of the extent of what was to come—we didn’t know, for example, about the concentration camps. But we understood what to expect—that many Jews would suffer and die. We heard that the Germans were seizing Jewish houses and possessions and putting all the Jews into ghettos, which were always in the most run-down sections of a town. The refugees told us that, when entering the ghettos, each Jew was allowed to carry one suitcase with only basic clothing items. If you were caught trying to smuggle in furs, gold, even a nice warm coat that a German or a Pole might want, you were immediately shot. Jews had to wear the yellow star patches, which symbolized that they were less than human, with no legal rights, no right to attend school or receive medical aid or even adequate food—there were strict rations for items such as stale bread and watery soup with fish bones. We heard that the younger Jews were being put to work while the older ones and the very young children and the babies were somehow disappearing.

  None of that information was ever officially acknowledged by the Russian occupiers. Either they were uninformed, or, more likely, they had decided not to discuss it. Perhaps they did not wish to cast a bad light on their German allies, or perhaps they did not want to deal with the unrest that the news might have caused if it reached the Jewish population as a whole. But the net effect was that the Russians ignored the “Jewish problem.”

  Please understand that we were not so foolish as to think that the Russians had brought Paradise with them. As time went on, we discovered that there were many Jews amongst the soldiers and officers of the occupying Soviet army. They would stay for a few weeks in Mir and become friendly with the local Jews so that we could talk straight with one another. They told us of the horrors that were going on in Russia—horrors affecting the entire population. Remember that, beginning in the thirties, Stalin had begun his internal program of liquidating literally millions of Russians whom he suspected of opposing him and the Soviet ideology. Overnight disappearances of family, friends, and neighbors was commonplace. If you were lucky, your life was spared and you were exiled to Siberia for years, maybe decades. And even if they left you alone, you knew that you were under surveillance. You couldn’t buy what you wanted—it wasn’t available. (That was why so many of the Russian soldiers, as soon as they arrived in Poland, tried to buy watches from the conquered civilians. They were crazy for watches.) In Russia, you had to be afraid of what you said, how you looked, whether you seemed to be eating better than others around you. So the Russian soldiers warned us not to feel too happy about our new rulers.

  The same kind of brutality that went on in Russia extended to conquered Poland soon enough. In Mir, there were maybe a dozen or so Polish patriots who were opposed to the Russian occupation. Within the first month they disappeared—they were picked up in the middle of the night, and the next day we realized that they were gone. But you didn’t have to be a Polish patriot to be in trouble. If you were viewed as bourgeois—that is, as having money—or intellectual, the future was grim for you. There was no room for expressing—or even so much as thinking—ideas that varied in any respect from the official Soviet line. One of the first things the Russians did in Mir was to close down the famous yeshiva—which had functioned for centuries—and to convert the building into a people’s social hall. Every weekend there was Russian music, Russian dances, and lots of propaganda speeches.

  ROCHELLE

  I’ll tell you how I felt when the Russians came to Stolpce.

  I remember that it was early one morning when I heard a rumbling. I ran out of the house and looked down the street. There was a Russian tank with a red flag coming toward me. I thought it was so exciting! The tank was moving slowly, and the soldiers riding on it were very friendly, saying hello to everybody, giving candy to the kids. They were shouting to us, “We came to liberate you from the Polish kulak [the wealthy class].”

  I ran back into the house thinking that this was going to be terrific! My mother could see how excited I was, and she looked at me sadly and said, “My dear child, you have no idea what is happening. Your life, the way you know it, is coming to an end. You just wait and see what is going to happen to us!” I thought to myself, what the hell is she talking about? The Russian soldiers seemed so friendly and kind.

  As one of the wealthiest men in town, my father was singled out as a special target by the Russians. Very shortly after they arrived, they not only stripped him of control of his business, but also requisitioned most of our home to house KGB officials. The KGB was the first wave of Russian occupiers to arrive. They were in charge of setting up the political and social regime just they way they wanted it—without opposition of any kind from the Poles. We learned to be afraid of the KGB. Just like that, they could have you killed or sent into exile. Later, when the “regular” Russian people came—the teachers and other functionaries—you could relax a little bit in their presence. They would tell you nicely what you could and could not do if you wanted to get along.

  But it was the KGB officials—with their wives—who lived in our very own home. They took over nearly all of it—the house that my father had built for his family. Our former Polish tenants—including the director of the Stolpce gymnasium who had turned down my sister Sofka—were arrested immediately, because they were members of the Polish ruling elite. That director was told to pack a single suitcase. She left all of her furniture and possessions behind. And she disappeared. The KGB left us with two bedrooms. The kitchen was for common use. That was a dangerous situation because we were afraid to cook anything that might seem in any way better than what the KGB had to eat. So it was either don’t cook it, or offer it to them first. The tension spread through our entire home life. We were afraid of offending in what we said, how we dressed. We lived in constant terror.

  All of this severely depressed and upset my father. He had a heart attack. When he went to the Soviet-run medical center, they barely bothered with him, just gave him some drops and told him to stay in bed. This all came on top of the Hodgkin’s disease. He recovered somewhat from the heart attack, but he was just not the same man. Everything that he had worked for in his life had been taken from him. He even went so far as to go to the Russians and offer to work as an employee in his former business, just so he could have a hand in things and show himself to be of value to them. But they didn’t want him.

  We knew how much danger we were in by how miserable they made my father’s life. He was called into the KGB offices for interrogation at least a couple of times each week. The pattern was always the same. They would come for him unannounced around two in the morning, waking us all up in the process. They would roust him out of bed and he would go with them and not come back until maybe five or six A.M. When he came home, he would be as white as a sheet. When we asked him what the questioning was all about, he would say, “Don’t ask!” He was forbidden by the KGB to say anything about it. His friends and neighbors weren’t even to know that he was being taken for these nightly questionings. Just once he let us in a little about what happened during those sessions. The KGB would ask him about his friends, his fel
low kulaks. The KGB wanted to know how much money they had, what their capitalistic views were, if they were disloyal to the Communist state. And on other nights, they would call in my father’s friends and ask them about him. So everyone was being played off everyone else. You could not trust your friends. You could hardly dare to speak to them.

  From the pattern and tone of these interrogations, it seemed likely that the KGB would come one night and send our entire family to Siberia. So my father tried to do something to prepare for that crisis. All the money he had kept in the bank before the Soviets arrived was gone, of course. But he had privately hidden a number of foreign gold coins—Russian rubles, English pounds, American dollars. We put the coins in glass jars, then melted pork fat over them to hide them from view. The plan was that when the Russians came at night and gave us fifteen minutes to pack—as was their method—we could grab at least some of these jars and have in them not only the coins but also the pork fat to help keep us alive. Because we had been told that in Siberia you needed a lot of fat to give you the energy to survive the cold. My father hid these jars all around the house and drilled us children on how to find them. “Don’t forget,” he would say, “this one is hidden in the corner, this one is in the bush alongside the tree.”

  So, in that way, we lived with the Russians. We wondered from day to day what was going to happen to us.

  JACK

  The Soviet policy was to even out all social and economic distinctions from the start—and, at the same time, to take what they wanted and needed for Stalin and for the war effort. Within the first week of the occupation, the Russians posted a notice: you must turn in all of your Polish zlotys. And in return, no matter how many zlotys you had turned in, you received exactly 100 Russian rubles, in paper bills. So your former savings were automatically nil. We all became poor in a week. No one had any money to buy anything. Most of the stores closed.