MEMOIRS OF SHERESHEV

By MOISHE KANTOROWITZ

Chapter 7.B

In my class of forty students, ten of us were Jews, two boys, I and Laiser EIZENSHTEIN, my private Hebrew teacher’s oldest son.  The eight girls were: Lola BAUMRITER, Cheitche CHADRICKY, Nishkah KALBKAUF, Maykah LONDON, Sara MALECKY, Reshl POMERANIETZ, Rivka WALDMAN and Feigah, her father’s name was Shmuel, I forget the family’s name.  During the winter of 19336-37, our group of the five boys became even closer knit.  At the same time a group of five girls formed an equally tight knit circle of about the same age.  The oldest Chayia CHADRICKY, may age was also my classmate, Lola BAUMRITER somewhat younger, she too was my classmate.  The other two Mayah MAISTER and Sheina-Rivka GRANAT were a year younger then I and my cousin Michla, the youngest of the group two years my junior.  It is unclear to me now, how we boys started coming into Mayah MAISTER’s house and met the girls.  I would not doubt that it was deliberate.  The fact remains that it became a frequent occurrence.  True, we never came singly, but always in a group.  Nor did any one of us meet a girl by ourselves.  Such a thing was unheard of in Shershev in my days.  One could see in the street an eighteen or nineteen year old couple but not younger.  It took another year before we boys and girls dared to go out on a Saturday night walk together. Not G-d forbid as couples but as a bunch.  That took care of Saturday evenings.  The remaining evenings of the week, if not in the local of the Betar, we boys used to sit and talk, talk without end, about Zionism, about the unrest at that time in Palestine, about growing anti-Semitism in Poland, persecution of Jews in Germany.  There was no shortage of topics to talk about.  It is my opinion that we were much better informed about world affairs than boys of fourteen nowadays.  And so went by the winter of 1936-37. With the arrival of spring, a series of decrees were issued applicable to Jewish homeowners.  The main street, Mostowa, was inhabited by Jews only.  Suddenly the Poles decided to modernize it.  They issued orders to all homeowners to replace the wooden sidewalks that served Shershev for a hundred years, with cement ones.   This order applied also to the half of Ostrowiecka Street, which too was inhabited by Jews and the market square, which was the town’s Jewish center.  This (order) decree was accompanied by an even more oppressive demand.  Namely, that all those houses on those very streets are to be painted in either dark green or blue grayish colors.  If any of those houses are more than a meter (3´3´´) from the sidewalk, which ninety five percent were, a fence is to put up in front and  flowers to be planted behind the fence.  The fences are to be all of the same size and shape and of the same color as the house.  The paint used in our part of the country had a linseed oil base with the needed color added.  The thick wooden walls of our houses used to soak up dozens of liters of the paint, putting a heavy financial burden on the poor Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl if compounded with the other decrees. They had no choice but comply.  Otherwise, they face exorbitant fines.  No sooner did the Jewish community comply with one decree, others followed soon.  For example, all the chimneys were to be whitewashed and stay white.  All the street gutters were to be whitewashed and to always stay this way.  I challenge anybody to keep a chimney white while constantly cooking or heating the house with wood.  Better yet, whitewash a street gutter and see what it looks like after a rain.  Sure enough, as soon as the rain stopped the five local policemen were out in the street writing out fines.  The streets of Shershev were paved with cobblestone.  It is only natural that between the stones grass will attempt to grow.  An order came to get rid of the grass.  One could see along the Jewish streets and market place, grown men, women and children standing bent over, squatting on their knees or plain sitting on the ground with knives trying to get the stubborn grass roots out from between the closely set stones.  It was a futile attempt.  After wrestling with the roots in a most uncomfortable position, be it bent over squatting or on your knees on the stones for a couple of hours, one could clear 3-4 square meters and move on the next day a bit further.  However, by the time you finished clearing your piece of road, which was not even yours, the space you cleared when you started a week ago, was sprouting new grass, and your entire effort was futile.  Entire hordes of inspectors and commissioners descended on Shershev and I have heard on all shtetls around.  They consisted of not single individuals but came in twos, threes, and more.   This time, however, they came with a special purpose, to extract from the Jews as much money as possible and be able to do it keeping a straight face.  For example, every scale had to be inspected so their weight was accurate and punched with the inspector’s emblem.  It was done every year.  This year, however, an entire group came, setting up a workshop and disqualifying every scale as well as every weight.  Their own workers supposedly repaired the scales and adjusted the weight and charged exorbitant prices for those repairs, close to the prices of new ones.  The poor Jewish shopkeepers had not choice but pay.  There was nowhere to go to complain for such an outrageous blatant robbery, which they knew, was sanctioned by the government.  Other commissions found other ways of squeezing out every zloty from Jews.  About those I will explain later.  In the spring of 1937 the first co-op store in Shershev was opened, which was the imaginative invention of the government to deprive the Jewish petty storekeeper of his livelihood.  In the town square were two non-Jewish homes, in one of them a co-op was opened.  With the prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere, and a wink from the local officialdom, some local Christians bought shares in this endeavor and encouraged others to buy there.  In the windows of the co-op store were hung big signs calling on the population not to buy from Jews, needless to say that many went along with such propaganda.  It did not take long before another co-op opened down the main street.  This event had no consequential effect on our business, but it very much affected the Jewish petty storekeepers, maybe more morally than materially.

In the villages where single or a couple Jewish families lived side by side with their Christian neighbors for generations, there always existed the desire of those Jews to move into the shtetl.  The reason was the difficulty in keeping a Jewish or Kosher home, giving children a Jewish education and, of course, finding a match for a child.  There was no thought of inter marriage.  Because of all these reasons, those who could manage, would move to the shtetl as long as they could find a way of making a living.  There were those, however, that after a lifetime spent in the village, did not have enough to be able to move, so they stayed there.  In the late 1930s, the life of some of those Jews was put in danger.  I recall a case when in the village of Hallen, two dozen kilometers from Shershev, the village people tied the door of an elderly Jewish couple at night so it could not be opened from the inside and set the house on fire.  They were betting that the old couple will not be able to get out through the windows.  They did, thus saving their lives.  Still there remained a fair amount of Jews scattered in some villages, particularly where there were few families in the village, like the villages of Suchopola, Chwalow, Popielewo and others all within a radius of twenty kilometers (12 miles) of Shershev. 

That spring of 1937 my uncle Eli, my father’s youngest brother, came home on furlough from the army.  He came in full military attire with a sword on the belt.  Naturally the entire conversation revolved around his service, about the sleeping accommodation, food, treatment by fellow soldiers, lower and higher ranking officers.  From among his stories, I will mention this one:  a couple months after he was drafted, they picked out all those soldiers who had gymnasium matriculation, (there weren’t many in Poland) to be taken into officer’s school.  This law was applicable to every draftee.  However, in 1936 the law was unofficially changed.  Jews were rejected, and so was my uncle. Some days later my uncle found himself for a minute alone with his captain who said to him ; “KANTOROWICZ, do not think it was an oversight from above that they did not take you to officer’s school..  They knew what they were doing, for I protested and told them that you would make a good officer.  I don’t have to tell you, you know the reason”.  My uncle served in the light artillery, the 16^th Regiment stationed in the city of Bidgoszcz, northwestern Poland.  One of the most important functions in the artillery is that of the aimers.  It has to do with mathematics.  He being the most suitable was assigned this job, which gave him a certain respect in his battery and among his immediate lower rank commanders.  So they did not pick on him because of his being Jewish.  There were in Shershev quite a few bachelors for whom it was time to get married.  They were sons of business people or storekeepers.  Those young men had no vocation, and to learn a trade was beneath their dignity.  So they waited until a matchmaker will find them a girl or match from another shtetl and with a dowry, which was almost obligatory.  They could then set themselves up in some kind of business, or an established father of the bride could take the son-in-law into his own business.  Some of those available bachelors were already occupied in their either own business, or in their father’s family ones.  None sat and waited for manna to fall from heaven. Three of those most eligible, visible and prominent bachelors in shtetl were: my uncle (father’s brother) Hershl, Israel TZEMACHOWICZ, the Shocket´a son and Berl SHAMES, my father’s and uncle Hershl’s cousin.  Those three bachelors were the closest friends and were always together.  I can recall the time as a child, as they walked as a group with girls, in time the girls got married and the three of them remained single.  They did not get together during the week, each being involved in their own business.  My uncle Hershl was in his father’s, my grandfather’s hardware store that required his full attention.  Israel TZEMACHOWICZ who used to buy up the hides of animals his father used to slaughter and others too and sell it to the tanneries and Berl SHAMES who was one of the partners in the only truck in Shershev that used to haul freight to and from Shershev.  In spring of 1937 Berl SHAMES made the first step to break up the trio.  He married a local girl, Hellkah ROSELEWSKY, Chaikl ROSELEWSKY’s daughter. 

Chaikl ROSELEWSKY spent some years in the U.S.A. and came back with apparently a nice bit of money.  Enough to build himself a house that held a  few tenants.  One was the courthouse, which was closed a few years before the 2nd world war, part of the house served for a while as a Betar local.  In that house lived also a family Yaakov-Yeshayou KWELMAN.   Yet there was enough room left for the owners, the ROSELEWSKY family.  I guess that this Chaikl did not spend his last dollar, for as far as I remember he had no visible source of income, yet they lived comfortably, at least the last ten years before the outbreak of the 2nd world war.  It looks as if that trio finally decided that it was time to get married.  Shortly after Israel TZEMACHOWICZ got married, my uncle Hershl got married.  My uncle Hershl  married a girl from Kamieniec-Litevsk, her first name was Shaine, and the family name I do not remember.  All the grown ups attended the wedding, which took place in Kamieniec-Litevsk.  But we children stayed home.  Kamieniec-Litevsk was not much bigger than Shershev, but its Jewish population was twice as large.  There was a large Yeshivah (an institute of higher talmudic learning ) whose majority of students were American young men, who came to study and get “smicho” ordained and go back home.  Many of the Kamieniec-Litevsk Jews made a living from those American students.  From the students of the surrounding shtetls alone they could not have existed.

I still remember when my uncle Hershl brought his bride home.  Her name Sheina (beautiful) fitted her accurately.   She was of tallish stature, rounded in all the right places, rosy cheeks on a milky white skin and a good ten years younger than he.  My uncle Hershl and his wife Sheina moved in with my grandparents, taking up the same three rooms in which we lived ten years earlier.  The reason my uncle came to stay in Shershev was that it was hard for my grandfather to look after the hardware store by himself.  So my uncle stayed on for a year until his brother, my uncle Eli came back from military service.  Only then did my uncle Hershl move with his wife to Kamieniec-Litevsk where he became a partner in his father in law’s business which was called “Packter” (those who used to lease land and cows from estate owners and produced cheese)  The cheese produced in those “Packters” were of a special kind.  It looked, smelled and tasted like real Swiss cheese.  It was sold under such a name and was too expensive for most of the local population.  It went for export. 

I was particularly close to my two youngest uncles Heshl and Eli.  It was Hershl who taught me to ride a bicycle a few years earlier.  He used to leave his father, my grandfather alone in the store in the hot summery afternoons and run after me holding on to the bicycle, so I should not fall.  I am sure he would rather sit in the store where it was much cooler than outside.  The walls of the store were a meter thick and the heat never penetrated them.  In fact it was so comfortable to be in those stores in the hot summer days, that some people used to come in to have a chat about the political situation that was becoming more and more threatening.  At the same time, cool off for a bit in the cool enclosure of the store. 

Among my friends, I will mention another friend of mine, Moishe GELMAN, and indeed he and his father’s hair were yellow.  He was a year older than I.  He had a sister a couple of years younger by the name of Bunia and still a younger brother Chaim.  His father Meir was a tailor.  However, as a tailor in Shershev, he was considered to be a well to do man.  Besides the fact that he had a few young men as apprentices, he was considered the best men’s tailor in Shtetl.  He was always loaded with work, despite his higher labor charges.  It was he who used to make my yearly suits for Pessach (Passover).  His wife Yente was a dressmaker and she too had a couple girls working for her.  Being busy as her husband, there is no wonder that they made a nice living.  That Meir GELMAN loved gardening, especially flowers and in spring he used to leave his work to his assistance and give himself up with life and soul to his flowers.  It is quite possible that his was the nicest flower garden in town.  It was a pity that the garden was behind the house and could hardly be seen by passersby.  Maybe he did not do it for show but for the love of it.

The narrow part of the house in which end was the parlor, was completely surrounded by flowers.  Two of its windows were looking out to the back, right onto the beautiful flowerbeds.  Along this narrow side of the house Meir GELMAN planted grapes.  Its vines climbed along the lightweight scaffolds, erected half a meter (1´7´´) from the house,  up to the top of the roof.  There was just enough room to open the windows and inhale the fragrant smell of the flowers.  The two of us, that is, I and my friend Moishe GELMAN, used to spend a lot of time in that parlor on rainy days, in front of the open windows protected from the rain by heavy grape leaves, watching the warm rain drops falling and being soaked up by the sea of flowers.  I used to get a feeling of comfort, protection, even security.  It must have been there that I developed a liking even an affection for a summer rain.

Still, my closet friend and confident at that time was Kalman KALBKOIF.  He was the son of Hershl and Yente.  His sister Nishka was in my grade in school.  There were three smaller children in that family whose names I do not remember.  What we shared together was our dream of traveling to far away places and our hope of a Jewish homeland.  To realize our dream we even started to build a small boat as soon as Laizer ROTENBERG came home on his vacation.  We worked at it the entire two-month vacation.  It is now a waste of time to describe how difficult and futile our effort was.  Cutting the timber and making the molding to fit the frame, which took us the two months holiday.  Yet nobody was happier and more enthusiastic than us boys, doing what we thought was materializing our dream.  AH! those youthful years. 

That summer every man and some women became a politician.  If they ran out of world politics, there was always something to complain about the local “Kehilah” (leadership of the local Jewish community),  In fact, the leadership or the Kehilah was in the neighboring Pruzany, which took in all the neighboring shtetls, like Shershev, Linovo, Malech, Seltz and a couple others.  Each of those shtetls, had two representatives in the Kehilah but the majority members were local, that is Pruzany residents.  The members were being elected every couple of years democratically in shtetl, never the less it used to cause dissatisfaction.  How else can it be in a democracy?  Interestingly that in Shershev the same two men were elected time after time.  They were: my grandfather Yaakov-Kopel KANTOROWICZ and my friend’s father Meir GELMAN (the flower lover).  From time to time GELMAN used to be replaced by Chazkl KRUGMAN. 

There lived in Shershev a shoe maker (among dozens of others) Meir Chayim.  A very tall man with unusual strength, besides his strength he had a loud voice.  All week long he worked long hours to provide for his wife and many children.  Out of habit he used to be up at six in the morning, sitting in his favorite place, on the doctor’s porch in the market square, his voice thundering half way across the shtetl.  The doctor, who did not have to and did not want to be awakened at this time of morning, told him to move on but next Saturday morning, Meir Chayim was back in his favorite place preaching world politics.  I doubt if he could read, so he spoke about the shtetl politics, Kehilah politics and just talked.  Nobody wanted to start a discussion with him for fear of getting a punch in the nose.  If not, they preferred to be on his good side.

That summer I spent a lot of time in the store reading books sitting behind the shelves.  There I could sit undisturbed as long as I wanted, as long as I was reading.  My father never interrupted me while I was doing my homework or reading.  I read lots, at times a book a day.  The only bit of work I used to do sometimes was to help my father unpack the cases with vodka and put the bottles on the shelves.  It used to come in solid wooden cases packed in straw.  After the bottles were out of the cases, the straw was put back into the cases, the covers hammered on and put behind the shelves to wait for the next trip.  We had a steady wagon-driver or coach-man, a husky fellow in his late twenties.  He lived with his elderly parents and a single sister in a small house at the end of the main street Mostowa.  He was the sole provider for his family. Twice a week he used to drive with his horse and wagon to the station of Linovo or Oranczyce as it was called in Polish, a distance of thirty kilometers, where he used to pack up the vodka and drive back home.  He used to leave Shershev at midnight to be there in the morning.  Pack up all the bottles in the wooden cases and leave for home in late afternoon, arriving back in Shershev at midnight.  The next morning he used to leave for Pruzany for a load of groceries.  This is how the young man worked to provide for his parents and sister. 

One summer evening this wagon-driver, his name was Shepsl RUDNICKY, comes in to us and in his always polite manner and voice, turns to my father and says: “I came to ask you a favor.”  It was an unusual thing to hear.  He went on to explain that he and a few others got together and are buying a truck, with which they intend to haul freight from Shershev to Brest-Litowsk and Warsaw.  However he is short a couple of hundred dollars to put up for his share and he was wondering if my father could extend to him a loan for this amount.  Of course, he promised to pay back as soon as he can.  A couple of hundred dollars was a big some of money in those days, especially in Shershev.  I can still see as my father exchanged glances with my mother, walks away into my parents’ bedroom and comes back with a handful of dollars. (People in our parts of the world used to put their trust in U.S. dollars, not in the bank). Handing it to Shepsl, he took it, counting over slowly and carefully, put it in his pocket.  Thanking my parents nicely but not profusely and turns to go out.  Just before the door he stopped, turned around, we could hear a reluctant sigh come from his throat and with sincere words and difficulty said:  Mr. KANTOROWICZ  (it was the first time I heard him address my father as MR. KANTOROWICZ.  He usually used the Jewish word “Reb” Itzik (that is Mr. ISAACK.) I worked myself up from a horse and wagon to a truck. Should I fail, will I be able to end up at least with a horse and wagon?  It turned out that this ordinary fellow was more foresighted than most of the considered smart members of our community.  He did pay in his share of the partnership, but hung on to the horse and wagon with which he continued to earn his meager existence.  With his share of the income from the truck he was paying up his loan.  Two years later, when in 1939 the Bolsheviks came, they took away the truck.  They called it “Nationalized” without any compensation.  That Shepsl held on to his horse and wagon.  He did however pay up during that time his loan to the very last cent before the war.  He was a hard working Jewish young man, one of hundreds of thousands whose fate was so mercilessly wronged.

One of the things the non-Jewish locals feared more then the Jews was a thunderstorm, which was accompanied with thunder and lightening, as the farmer’s buildings had thatched roofs, lightening would set it on fire and engulf the building within seconds in flames.  It used to happen so fast that at times the farmers had no chance to let the animals out of the stable.  Any little breeze would carry the sparks to adjoining buildings and neighboring ones setting ablaze other farms too.  The Jewish homes were covered with wooden shingles that were more resistant to lightening.  There was the voluntary fire brigade, for some reason consisting of only Jewish men.  Their equipment was outdated with half a dozen hand operated pumps and some twenty horse drawn barrels mounted on a single axle with two wheels.  As there were a few wells in shtetl, there was  a chronic shortage of fire hoses. The hauling of water in the barrels from other wells were more of a hindrance than a help.  Finally 1937 Shershev got its own motor pump with enough hose to reach from the river to any point in shtetl.  A year later Shershev got its own fire engine, a brand new shining vehicle, even more modern than in the larger neighboring town Pruzany.  It was not predestined for Shershev to enjoy it too long.  A year later, when the war broke out the Polish government also mobilized among all private vehicles consisting of the only two buses, the two trucks, also the municipal fire engine. 

That spring 1937 the government decided to open a health center in town.  They started looking for a suitable place.  It had to consist of four roomy bright rooms in centre of town easily accessible consisting of a waiting room, an examination room and the two remaining room for a nurses living quarters.  They liked our house. Besides being centrally located, it had four rooms all facing the front, two front entrances to serve as one for the clinic and the other as a private entrance for a nurse.  A representation from the district came, looked over our house and the four rooms they needed.  After a short discussion among themselves, they made my father an offer.  It must have been a tempting one, for my father, after talking it over with my mother immediately accepted it.  A carpenter closed up the three doors that connected the front four rooms to the others and we moved all the furniture over to the remaining rooms. Now we had only four rooms and the kitchen and there was no room left for a maid.

It was the first time that I could remember that my mother had to do without one.  Surprisingly, my mother managed without one.  She was not more busy without one she was with one.  That is, she was just as busy from the moment she got out of bed early in the morning until she went to bed.  I can not remember my mother sitting idly for one moment while there was a maid, nor did she sit down doing nothing after the maid left.  I will say in all honestly, that I have come to the conclusion a long time ago, that the lot of the housewives, even in the better to do households, was harder than that of their husbands, the providers.   True, I did not realize it then, but much later I began to draw a parallel between those two segments of society.  For an example, I will take my own parents.  While I mentioned already that my mother never stopped for a moment, in contrast my father opened the store at eight in the morning sitting and waiting for a customer to come in.  Serving the customer required little effort.  All he had to do was to hand him the bottle and collect the money.  True in the busy season when in fall a lot of weddings use to take place and the sales used to come up to a hundred bottles per customer, the bottles had to be packed in sacks between straw to withstand the rigor of the road to a far away village. To do it, one needed a special skill that my fathers possessed in those days.  He truly worked hard most of the year.  However, he had time to read the newspaper and discuss the news with friends and acquaintances who were all trying to solve the world problems.  Not to mention that some used to come in during the hot summer day, as the store was cool as if air conditioned.  In contrast my mother and other housewives spend that time in a hot sweltering kitchen where the cast-iron  plate on the cooking stove was making the heat unbearable to stand. 

Coming back to the renting out part of  our house.  We no longer had a front entrance to our part of the house.  We had to use the lane between our house and that of our neighbor Nachman FELDMAN, who too, used the same lane as an entrance to his house. 

There were in Shershev four brothers by the name of GLUSZKO, of Russian orthodox faith, they for some reason dabbled in other Christian faiths.  Some changed to Catholicism and later to Protestantism.  Eventually, they came back to their original faith.  Being fairly well educated and well to do, as they inherited a flour mill and a saw mill, they were considered aristocrats of sorts.  They fitted this description.  All tall, impressive and good looking, they had that kind of air about them.  The youngest and most handsome was still a bachelor.  He could not find a good looking enough and befitting enough girl in and around Shershev, so he set out for further pastures.  Sure thing, a while later he came back already married, with a girl whose beauty I would not even attempt to describe.  The local population could not get their fill of looking at her.  When the two of them used to walk by in the streets, every head used to turn their way.  This young woman was a nurse and she got the job in the clinic.  The two of them moved into our house, in the two rooms designated for the nurse.

Two country wide boycotts were taking place at the same time in Poland.  One led by Jews against buying German merchandise.  One could see signs in the Jewish store windows, written in Polish and Yiddish.  It proclaimed: ‘We don’t buy German merchandise.”  The stores, some of them so small that they had no windows, had the same signs nailed onto the doors.  The second boycott, much more intensive, more serious, and much more effective was led by the Polish “Endeks”.  An anti-Jewish Nazi sympathizing movement sponsored by the Polish government which was trying hard to deprive the Jews of their livelihood.