A Holocaust Story On Yom Hashoah

My parents weren't shy about telling about telling their Holocaust stories and neither am I

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. My parents were Holocaust survivors. I’m down to one living survivor in my family, my only uncle and my mother’s kid brother. He’s 87, was all of one year old when World War II began, and doesn’t remember much. This is what he told me when I visited last month. “I remember an empty breadbox and being so hungry. I remember looking from an attic window and seeing endless snow. I remember how cold it was, always cold.”

But my parents were much older. They have been gone for decades and were never shy about telling their Holocaust stories. My father was a gifted storyteller, so gifted that people would come to our house on summer evenings to listen to him. My mother told stories as well, but they were more scattered in structure, more puzzle-like. I’d have to listen to her tell several stories in order to piece the narrative together.

I could fill a book with the stories my parents told and did so privately for my daughter, who requested a family storybook for her 20th birthday. On this Yom Hashoah, I’ll tell one.

My father survived the war because he fled to the Soviet Union within days after the invasion of Poland by the Germans and Soviets. He begged for his father to let him take his brothers and sisters with him. My grandfather refused. “God will help us,” he said.

My father, like many trying to avoid the war, fled to Uzbekistan, where he earned money by cutting trees. But when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin needed all the soldiers he could find and my father was drafted into the LWP, Stalin’s Polish Army. They were used as cannon fodder. Somewhere around eighty percent of my father’s troop died in the war.

My father survived because he was a translator for Russian officers. His best friend in his troop was an Armenian Pole, who also survived. My father told so many impossible sounding stories about his experiences as a soldier that I thought he must have made some of them up. How could he have been in so many critical battles during the war?

But the Russian government has a web site detailing the journeys of most Soviet soldiers in the “Great Patriotic War.” My father has his own web page that details the medals he won and the battles he fought. I was surprised to find out that the stories he told were backed up with some real data.

The Polish LWP began their offensive with the rest of the Soviet Army sometime in 1942. By 1944 their rate of advance was rapid. My father marched with his troop through Belarusian town after Belarusian town. He was surprised that there were never any Jews in any of these places. He knew, like in his hometown a couple of hundred kilometers to the south, that Jewish people must have lived there before the war. But they were all gone.

He had a tragic sense that what was true in Belarus was true in Volhynia, the part of Poland where he was born. His hometown had 18,000 Jews before the war. He couldn’t fathom how so many could be killed.

My father, who had a strong mathematical mind, did the numbers in his head as they marched. How many Jewish people had been killed? He was thinking of all the towns he was passing, now all Jew free. The number in his head was half a million. He talked to the few other Jewish soldiers about his estimates. They did not want to hear this “crazy man” talking about so many deaths. But his friend, the Armenian Pole, listened to him.

He couldn’t imagine how the Germans could do this mass killing in such a short amount of time. They had a war to fight. Why would they waste their bullets and soldiers on such an effort?

But then his troop advanced with other Soviet soldiers to Majdanek, the first camp to be liberated. He said the stench of rotting bodies was so heavy from a distance of 100 meters that some of his troop mates threw up.

My father walked into the camp and saw the rotting bodies. That’s when he understood how such mass murder was accomplished. Everyone was put in camps. There were centralized facilities for this atrocity and he was in one of them. He thought of his family. They could be here with the other rotting bodies. His hometown was 200 kilometers away. They could be in another centralized facility closer to home. But he knew for certain then and there that they were all dead.

My father sobbed openly and inconsolably. He felt a hand on his shoulder from behind and turned around. It was his best friend, the Armenian Pole. His friend hugged him. Then his friend said, “First he came for us. Now he’s come for you.”

“Who is he?” my father asked.

“God,” his friend said.

My father was right in this final assessment of his family, but he was wrong about how they died. Soldiers and locals killed them with bullets in a field outside of his hometown, Volodymyr, along with 18,000 other Jews. His town had fewer than 100 survivors.

How does anyone get past this kind of horror and trauma and create a new life? I don’t know exactly how but I watched both my mother and father do it. Sometimes I’d see my father shadow boxing in the hallway of our home. I asked him once why he was doing this. “I’m beating up my darkness,” he said. I’m guessing that telling stories was another way he beat up his darkness, too.