The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [35]
By climbing across the rubble of a bridge on the Vistula River, Shmulik escaped to a relatively rural eastern suburb of Warsaw called Praga. German troops were there, but having conquered Warsaw—in fact, all of western Poland—they were relaxed about letting people move around a bit. For three days Shmulik wandered around Praga trying to figure out what to do. He had nothing to eat. At one point he had an encounter with a German soldier, with whom he communicated coarsely on the basis of his Yiddish. The soldier, a young man about nineteen years old, challenged Shmulik’s presence in an old tomato field. Shmulik had been rooting around in the soil looking for scraps to eat. In the end the soldier made a sausage sandwich from food he had in his knapsack, gave it to Shmulik, and then warned him away because there were mines in the field.
The next day the Germans opened the concertina wire they had strung around the city, and as the German soldiers flooded in, people fleeing eastward were able to slip out, Shmulik among them.
He moved eastward on foot and hitching rides in passing horse-drawn wagons, and describes with wonderment his second positive experience with a German soldier:
We were walking along the road, and a horse-drawn wagon passed with two German soldiers, one driving it. I raised my arm, they came up to me, and the driver said, “Sure, hop on.” The two soldiers were talking—I couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the noise of the wheels. Suddenly, the one who was not driving turns and looks at me, and jerks his head toward the side of the road in a signal that I should jump off the wagon; the one who was holding the reins didn’t see that he did this. I understood his signal and jumped. The driver was probably talking about robbing or beating me. A second German soldier had helped me survive.
The Soviets had established a very strong border guard—cavalry, foot soldiers, jeep-mounted troops, guards with dogs—because they were worried about infiltration by German spies. After several failed attempts over several days to steal the border, Shmulik threw caution to the wind one night, sprinted as fast as he could when he saw an opening, and made it, much to his own surprise. A few days later he was back in Trochenbrod where his arrival was greeted with a joyous celebration. He found Communists in charge.
Word soon reached Trochenbrod about the way station to Palestine that had been set up in Vilna, and Shmulik made his way there. There were no serious border issues because the Soviets were now in control all the way north through Lithuania. From Vilna he went to Moscow. Moscow was followed by a long string of twists and turns that landed Shmulik in one strange place, like Tashkent, after another. It was ten years later, in 1949, that Shmulik finally arrived in what by then had become the State of Israel.
During this period of Soviet control, despite the changes—growing poverty, loss of businesses, pressure to join the Communist Party or Communist youth organizations, pressure to abandon Judaism, constantly being watched and worrying about being reported for something, frequent interrogations—the people of Trochenbrod could still move about relatively freely, and to some degree maintain their way of life. Meanwhile, many Jews from western Poland fled the Nazis into Soviet-held territory, and about a thousand of them found their way to Trochenbrod and Lozisht.
The story that Nahum Kohn tells in his book, A Voice from the Forest: Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan, conveys a good sense of what it was like in and