MEMOIRS OF SHERESHEV

By MOISHE KANTOROWITZ

 

 

Chapter 7.C

 

 

There were two roads leading from Shershev to the provincial town of Brest-Litovsk.  One led through forest, sand and fields, but the distance was only eighty kilometers (48 miles).  The other road by thirty kilometers (66 miles) longer was cobble-stoned and led via Pruzany.  On this road half way between Shershev and Brest-Litovsk was a shtetl by the name of Kobrin.  The population of some twelve or thirteen thousand was eighty percent Jewish.  With such a proportion of Jews, it was only natural that almost all the stores and stalls were owned by Jews.  Before entering the town of Kobrin, one had to pass a large meadow on either side of the road.  That late spring of 1937 the government started building booths and stalls on that meadow.  It did not take long to put them up and the government started renting them out to Christians only.  No Jew was permitted under any circumstance.  The farmers from the surrounding villages were used to travel to the center of town, to the market square, continued to do the same, ignoring the newly erected stores on the meadow.  Understandably, the stores there were not doing well.

 

That summer, on a Monday morning, which was a market day, the police closed up all the streets leading into town, ordering the farmers to unhitch their horses on that meadow.  By doing so, it discouraged the farmers from going into town to get their supplies and, as a result, depriving the Jewish store keepers and petty dealers of their livelihood.  They succeeded to a degree.  I say to a degree, for they had neglected to realize that the farmers depended on the Jews as much as the Jews depended on the farmers.  As almost all the tradesmen in the Shtetls of Eastern Europe were Jews, the farmers depended on the Jewish artisans and craftsmen.  The most primitive farmer needed a blacksmith to repair his wagon, shoe his horse, a shoe maker, a tailor, a seamstress, a carpenter, a mason, and a wagon wheel maker.  Not to mention more sophisticated trades.  But most of all were the Jews needed to buy up the farmer’s surplus produce.  Were not for the Jews in the small and large towns, the farmer would not have a buyer for his produce.  Thus they would not have the few zloty to buy the needed commodities.  I believe that there could have been a quiet and even a harmonious co- existence between the Jewish and non Jewish population were it not for the outside or government interference and church contribution. The farmers left their horses outside the town and carried their produce on their backs into the shtetl.  Being as happy with the new decree as the Jews.

 

A proposition was brought before the Polish parliament to prohibit the Kosher ritual slaughter of animals.  The instigator was a certain Madame Pristor.  She moved heaven and earth to get the decree passed.  Jews appealed, protested, written petitions, tried to explain and justify the practice on religious grounds.  Unfortunately, the ingrained anti-Semitism in the parliament was stronger than the economical common sense, the sense of tolerance, justice or respect for other faiths.  The justification of cruelty to animals was a joke, for we could all see how every farmer used to slaughter his pig or pigs.  It could turn sick even the strongest stomach.  They loved to drink the fresh warm  blood of the pig, so they drained it of blood while still alive.  Then try to chop off his head with an ax while he was twisting and wriggling missing several times.  Nor would the head come off with one or two strikes.  That however, was considered humane.

 

Eventually the parliament compromised to a degree, by allowing a certain amount of cattle to be slaughtered according to Jewish religious law, but the total was minimal.  After coming to this agreement the government let it be known that the total meant animal on the hoof.  Knowing well that Jews are not permitted to eat the hind part of the animal.  That cut in half the amount of meat already agreed on at the negotiations.

 

During the centuries of persecution Jews have learned to improvise. There is a law that permits to eat the hind of the animal if every piece of vein is plucked out.  The problem is that after such a cleaning the meat is so shredded that it is suitable for hamburgers only.  The only benefactors of that law were the Polish inspectors that used to visit the Jewish butcher shops very frequently to make sure that the butchers are not selling unlicensed meat.  The inspectors however, were not immune to bribes. Knowing the severity of the fine for selling unlicensed meat they used to extract every grosz (penny) from the already impoverished butchers.

 

The non-Jewish local population was of two opinions. They resented the Polish patriotic anti-Semitic propaganda, still its anti-Semitic contents in it appealed to them.  A small part of the population hated anything Polish, even their anti-Semitic propaganda. Sympathizing with the Soviet Union, which meant Russia to them, their own people.

 

I do not want to go into the details of what the Jewish students and graduates of universities had to go through.  I do want to tell a story of one Jewish university graduate from Shershev that I knew personally.  There lived, for my time, on Ostrowiecka Street, an elderly couple, Shalom-Yosef and his wife Chayie-Rantshe FARBER.  Shalom-Yosef was a sheet metal worker all his life, making sheet metal utensils, containers, chimney tube and alike.  They had a son and a daughter.  The son David was an unusually bright child.  Having finished the seventh grade Polish (public) school , he was smart enough to try and give himself a better future than what  he could expect if he would remain in Shershev. 

 

 With his marks he was accepted in the Polish gymnasium in Pruzany.   His father could not afford to keep him there nor to pay the tuition.  So David began to give private lessons after school and with those meager earnings he put himself through gymnasium graduating with the highest marks in school.   With those marks he was immediately accepted to the faculty of law at The Warsaw University where he graduated just before the persecution of Jews started in mid thirties.  He did his “internship” in Pinsk.  After finishing he traveled to Warsaw to face the panel of examinees, that consisted of well known lawyers in the capital, members of the Polish elite. They did not pass him.

 

It happened that my father was in Pinsk in 1938 and visited that David FARER in his modest office whose walls where full with shelves laden with books about Polish  juristical laws.  He told my father to pick out at random a book, open at any place and read one sentence while he, David, took it over and continued from memory until my father told him to stop.  He tried a few more books and the same thing happened.  My father realized that that man had memorized the entire collection of the Polish juristical laws, a feat my father never stopped talking about.

 

Despite the difficulties life went on.  A couple young men had succeeded to leave for the land of Israel.  They were from the early core of the “Ashome Hatzayir” (young Zionists) and the leadership of this organization felt that they owed them this much.  For Revisionist-Zionists all the official and legal roads were closed.  Only a trickle managed to get through the so called “Alyia-Beth” (the underground route).  It was a difficult and dangerous way.

 

There was in Shershev a Yehudah WEINER, who had three sons in the land of Israel.  I wrote about the three WEINER brothers earlier.  This Yehudah WEINER had three more sons in Shershev.  The oldest Gotl, was nine years older then I and was in the short lived Polish German war together with my uncle Eli.  The second son Rafael was three years older than I, and the youngest Pinchas, a year my junior.  The middle one Rafael made an attempt to get to Palestine in 1938 via the underground.  He got as far as Constantia Rumania and missed the boat.  A second one was being readied to depart some months later.  As there was no definite time, that Rafael returned back home to Shershev.  He never made a second attempt. He went through the expulsion of Shershev and perished in Chomsk on Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) in 1942.

 

As the “Ashomer” (Left Zionist) ceased to exist a couple of years earlier, we began to feel a lack of enthusiasm among Betar members too.  The realization that a member of Betar had no chance to get a permit to go to Palestine, the shortage of inspiring leadership and with the older members assuming responsibility for older parents, others being called up for military duty and still others thinking about their own future and marriage.  The teenagers lacked the experience needed for leadership, led to the eventual closing of the Betar local.  I and my friend Kalman KALBKOIF assumed the official leadership.  A leadership without a following.  It was a loose membership without a local for getting together for meetings.  All we did was to keep contact with the head command in Warsaw, send them in the couple of zloty monthly, just to keep in touch with them.  But for all intent and purposes, the Betar indeed ceased to exist.  In our correspondence with Warsaw. I used to sign as “Mfaked” (commander) and Kalman as secretary.  All the correspondence, records, and stationery I kept in our attic.  A fact that could have landed us in Siberia when the Bolsheviks came.  I will however deal with it at the appropriate time.

 

That summer we made a half hearted attempt to build our boat, but our earlier enthusiasm was missing.  The hours we spent working were more mechanical than creative.  Deep in his heart, each of us felt that we are laboring in vain, but nobody wanted to be the first to say it aloud.  It came to an end when the school year started.  Leizer ROTENBERG, our driving force went back to Brest-Litowsk and we went back to school.  Through the summer, our store more than any other, served as a gathering place for store keepers that could leave their store under somebody else’s attendance, or even close it completely for a while, knowing that they won’t miss out much by locking the store.  For them a customer was a scarcity and a sale even more so.  So instead of spending long hours in the tiny sweltering little four by four store waiting for a customer that won’t show up, they used to close it and come over to us knowing that they will always find someone and exchange news, local and worldly.

 

Besides those I mentioned above, there were a few young men who did not do a thing but sit and wait for a girl with a large dowry.  These few, I would call simply idlers or loafers.  Not having what to do, they used to come in and spend the time with their peers.  One could hear true news, and half-truths, assumptions and wishful-thinking.  Anything one wanted or did not want to hear.  After every lengthy discussion one would turn to my father and ask? “Nu, what do you say YITZIK (Isaak)?” One would think that my father had a direct line to every government leader.  Coming home, my father used to repeat and share with my mother some of the conversations he heard during the day.  Some were sensible, some naďve, some crazy.

 

It was no secret to all that Germany was arming itself and that Hitler was building a huge and powerful army.  Any conversation inevitably turned to talk of war.  A topic familiar to my parents, as they have experienced it first hand twenty years earlier, in the first world war.  My father was a soldier in the Czar’s army and my mother knew about hunger and deprivation under German rule in  1915-18.  I will admit that their stories used to trigger my imagination and awaken in me all kinds of fantasies in which I used to be the hero.

 

My father being born in 1892 was drafted into the Czar’s army in 1913, spending a year in Kazan, the capital of the Tatars Russia.  There he had a hard time convincing the locals that he is a Jew, as they believed that Jews grew horns.  When in August 1914 the war broke out my father’s regiment consisting of three thousand men, was sent west and took up positions near the now Polish city of Lublin.  As it is well recorded in history, in the beginning of the war, the Russian army had tremendous successes against the Austrians.  The so called Russian steamroller moved ahead.  Still, even in retreat, the Austrians inflicted heavy losses on the Russians.  Here is an episode as told to me by my father.  I have no reason to disbelieve a single word, for my father was no braggart nor a boaster.  Arriving at the front they were ordered to dig in and reinforce the trenches with logs from nearby woods.  A couple days later they moved up and had to build new ones. When they used to have their trenches finished, they used to receive up to a thousand cartridges a day and ordered to expend them by firing towards the enemy.  It did not matter if there was even the slightest chance of hitting a target or not, they were supposed to use up the ammunition  To fire off this many bullets from the long barreled first world war rifles, was no easy task.  After a couple dozen shots the shoulder starts to ache, after a couple hundred it starts to swell.   My father noticed that when a superior is not around the soldiers would bury the cartridges in the ground under their feet and he started doing it too.  An example of a wasteful, squanderers and corrupt leadership.

 

A few weeks after being in the front lines, my father and three more soldiers were sent on a reconnaissance mission behind the Austrian lines.  They succeeded to cross behind the enemy lines.  However, on the next night they were unable to get back to their line.  They were forced to remain behind the enemy lines 4-5 days with no food, hiding out in forests and swamps, until they made their way back.  Their company was hidden in a forest.  As soon as they arrived the company commander ordered the company to fall-in and began to inspect their riffles.  Understandable, after hiding out for a few days in holes and swamps, their rifles were dirty.  They were ordered to step forward, their rifles were inspected again and the inspecting officers gave my father a slap in front of the entire company.  This act was considered an insult to the soldier.  But the officer dared to do it knowing that for slapping a Jew even in uniform, he won’t be prosecuted.  My father added that he could hear some soldiers behind him were grinding their teeth and under their breath whispering “ubyiey yevo.”(kill him)  He did not dare even to raise a hand knowing that for such an act he would pay with his life in war.

 

It is much known in western Europe and the western hemisphere about the senseless slaughter that took place on the western front during the first world war, but little or not enough of the millions senselessly destroyed on the eastern front, especially on the Russian side.  Here is an episode which my father was a participant and told it to me personally.  Not long after the event with the reconnaissance incident, his regiment found itself near some village where they dug in.  Even though the Austrians were moving back they left behind a strong rear-guard which his regiment was trying  to take. They used to run towards the Austrian position with bayonets at ready and shouts of “hurrah.” The Austrians used to mow them down with machine guns.  After every attack his regiment was driven back to their trenches.  As the Russian trenches were within the perimeter of the village, the Austrians set the village ablaze exposing in darkness of the night the entire Russian position.  It did not take long for the Austrian range finders to find the Russian trenches.  They unleashed an artillery barrage whose every shell hit the trench.  There was no more thoughts of an attack.  Everybody, officers, soldiers tried to save his own life.  The shells were exploding right in the trenches where the pile of bodies kept on rising.  Some soldiers used to try and run back, but were cut down by the Austrian machine guns.  Others yelled loud and clear “Poddaymossa” (lets surrender) Despite the presence of the officers, some tried to do it despite the incoming fire which made the attempt hopeless.

 

 The pile of twisted, torn bodies kept on growing.  Suddenly my father felt a tug at his coat.  He turned to see a soldier that was crouching near him pointing to an officer.  It was the same one that slapped my father a couple of weeks earlier.  The soldier yelled above the sound of exploding shells; now it is your chance to get even with him.  Under the constant cannonade of exploding shells and staccato of machine guns, when every still living soldier tried to find a hole among the twisted torn bodies of his comrades, nobody would have heard if my father would have pulled the trigger and fired.

 

The Austrians did the job for him. Less than half an hour later a shell fell close by.  When the smoke cleared the first thing my father noticed was an officer’s cap.  Nearby over fresh bodies lie the body of that officer with half his head torn away.  Unable to surrender or go to the back, for to stick out his head one would have his head shot off, every one tried to dig his way deeper among the corpses.  So did my father.  At dawn, my father dug his way out from among the corpses and began to run towards the rear. In his favor was the fact that he ran eastwards toward the rising sun, which made it difficult for the Austrians to take aim.  Running, he could see bullets kicking up the ground to his right and left.  The ground was full with Russian dead and wounded.  Some that were still able to utter a word used to beg him “dobeyey menya” (finish me off.)  They knew that there was no chance of getting any help.  All they wanted was for someone to take them out of their misery.

 

When he finally got out of the range of the machine guns, he began to ask for the command of his regiment, which was a couple kilometers farther.  He found it.  In a few minutes, a colonel the commanding officer of his regiment, a middle aged man with a noticeable stomach gave an order to fall in.  It was applicable to those that managed to come back from the front.  They took count, including my father, there were sixteen men. The sixteen men watched in astonishment as their old commander broke down and cried.  Those few soldiers were attached to another company and a month or so later, under a similar artillery barrage, s shell tore off two fingers of my father’s right hand.  The index and the middle finger.  It was still late 1914, and my father was taken all the way to a hospital in Moscow.  It was a time when the Russian people were patriotic and very much behind the Czar.  His daughters used to visit the wounded soldiers in the hospitals and distribute medals.   One of the Czar’s daughters gave a medal to my father.   He told me even her name but at that time I did not try to remember.  After being discharged from hospital my father came home, before the German army came in to us in 1915.  As a former Russian soldier, my father had to report to the German authorities every so often.

 

My mother was a gifted storyteller.  That is a family AUERBACH trait, and her stories were spellbinding.  I won’t even attempt to imitate it.  I will only try to tell a couple dry facts that remained in my memory of her youth.   My grandfather Laizer-BEAR and grandmother Freida-LEAH brought six children into this world.  Five boys and one girl.  Two of the boys died in infancy,  the other three grew up to be well and healthy men.  The oldest Shloime (Solomon), the second Pesach (Philip) and the third Lipah.  Her brother, my uncle Lipah, was  a volunteer fireman.  Once during a fire my Uncle Lipah found himself in a burning house while the ceiling, on which some other volunteer have just pulled up a barrel full of water, collapsed on him.  After coming to, he seemed to be in good health.  A  couple years later, he left for the states, where he shortly afterwards, married Becky and brought into this world, their only child Irving.  Unfortunately, my uncle Lipah died in the states a very young man.  The circumstances of his death are unknown to me.  But I remember my mother always blaming the incident during that fire for his untimely death.

 

My uncle Pesach (Philip) left Shershev sometime around the turn of the century to avoid the conscription into the Czarist army.  My grandparents remained in Shershev with the two children, the oldest my uncle Shloime (Salomon), and the youngest, my mother - Esther-BEILAH.  In the beginning of this 20th century my uncle Shloime married a local girl, Esther-Libah WINOGRAD and started to raise a family of  his own.  

 

There was nothing more precious to my grandmother Freida-LEAH than her only daughter, my mother, nor was anything too good for her.  As my mother used to tell: The only tin bath tub in shtetl was in their house and nobody was allowed to use it except my mother.  The same bath tub became ours after my grandparents passed away.  In such conditions was my mother raised, up until the first world war broke out. Even then life in Shershev went on almost as before.  People knew that a war was going on but what the situation is or where the front is, nobody knew.  Here is a good example;  My uncle Shloime (Solomon) had hired  two young men to split wood in his wood shed for the winter.  As they were working the first artillery shell fell on Shershev.  The explosion scared the two young men so much that they threw away the axes and the pieces of wood and ran away.  It just happened that in that shed stood a samovar.  One piece of the wood they threw hit the samovar and made a dent in it.  This story was told to me by my mother in the mid thirties.  Among many stories about the first world war.  I did not pay much attention to it for there were more stories and much more interesting.  The years went by and I survived the second world war, refugee camps and came to Canada in 1948.  Less than a year later, I visited my uncle Shloime and family when they lived yet on Daily Avenue.  Sitting there in the kitchen, one of the daughters opened a kitchen cabinet to get something.  I looked up and noticed two samovars stuck away on the highest shelf in the very corner.  They looked like they had not been moved or touched in a long time.  One had a quite noticeable dent in its side.

 

This takes us back to 1915.  It seems that the Germans did not need much to drive the Czarist army out of Shershev, for the next day the Germans arrived.  The retreating Czarist army broke into Jewish stores and homes helping themselves to anything portable.  The Jewish population could not decide what to do.  Should they go east with the retreating Russian army or stay and be after all under the westernized and civilized Germans.  They stayed.  The Germans did introduce new laws and practices. Like opening a window for fresh air in winter. For Jews the most embarrassing thing was the stopping bearded men and looking for lice. If found, they used to cut the beard off right in the middle of the street.  Most men wore beards. To be seen in the street without a freshly cut beard was very embarrassing.  There were other laws.  Like being sent away from home to work for little pay.  Constant food shortages and outright hunger.  My grandfather, Laizer-BEAR, being over fifty, was exempt from being sent away.  Never the less, he had a wife and a daughter (my mother) to support, so he volunteeringly went to work in Bialowierza Forest, making shingles.  Even with his pay, the two woman were hungry many a day.  Not all were as hard off.  I recall as my mother used to tell us children how difficult it was for them during the German occupation in the first world war.

 

In 1920 my parents got married.  Our part of the world was still in a tumult.  The two main antagonists in central and eastern Europe, Russia, by then the Soviet Union, and Germany were in the middle of a revolution.  Germany tired and exhausted after a humiliating defeat.  The Soviet Union likewise, exhausted after a prolonged war and a bloody revolution, that left the country in ruins, was leading an army of mislead, deceived, fanatic idealist to what they thought was a bright future for humanity.  Their objective was to cross Poland and unite with their likes in Germany.  Already marching westwards through Shershev, Shershev Jews branded them with the name “Borvese: (bare footed).  They wore a hodge-podge of uniforms footwear and light weapon of an assorted vintage and caliber.  No visible rolling stock or provisions. Their transportation consisted of starving horses barely pulling the wagons.  How such a genius as Trotzky hoped to cross Europe with such an army is difficult to understand. No wonder that an army like the newly created Poland could muster, could beat back the undisciplined, unorganized mass of humanity.  An army that instead of marching well provided and on a full stomach, marched in tatters and was hungry on unknown roads in strange lands. 

 

It was on such a day in late afternoon that my parents, just recently wed were going from my mother’s parents to my fathers.  They were going via back alleys, as the main street was full with retreating Soviet soldiers, who were running back after their defeat near Warsaw.  If they appeared pitiful on their way to victory, one can imagine what they looked like on the way running in defeat.  What was worse was that in that defeat, they not only lost the battle, they lost the spirit and idealism that could bring them on foot and empty stomachs from Moscow to Warsaw.  An army that lived not on reserve and proper supply, but on bounty from peasants and towns people.  An army that for a change did not supplement its shortages by plunder as it was usual practice.  All those things, all their manners and behaviors were lost with it.  Suddenly, in that narrow alley my parents found themselves surrounded by riders who demanded everything they had in their pockets.  After taking it all and ready to leave, one of them noticed the wedding ring on my mother’s finger, promptly demanding it.  As if in spite the ring would not come off.  Without hesitation the rider or riders ordered my mother to put the finger on the nearby fence.  Unsheathing his sword, he raised it to chop the finger off.  My mother asked him to let her try it again.  He did, and this time the ring came off.  They rode off.  Those were the same people that a short time ago marched on western Europe, with lofty ideals of  bringing to them a bright future.  How fast their ideals evaporated.

 

In that year 1920, the western provinces of Belarus (white Russia) and Ukraine remained under Polish rule, until 1939.  We will speak about it later.  Meantime let us return to 1937.  As I have mentioned previously, there was in Shershev a Jewish library.  The main initiator of this idea came from my cousin Abe (Abraham) AUERBACH, my uncle Shloimes (Salomon) son.  It was started by school children, of whom my cousin Abe was one.  Those teenagers desire and longing for Jewish and Hebrew literature was the spur, the stimulus that moved them to fulfill this dream and nobody’s desire for knowledge was stronger than that of my cousin Abe.  But the generation of those founders grew up.  A couple left Europe, like my cousin Abe, some moved to neighboring shtetls and the rest had to assume responsibility for family, or got married.