The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [44]
The false wall was vertical boards. I looked through a crack between the boards at one point, and I saw they had a truck full of babies. An open truck. Two soldiers that I saw through the crack, they were still leading people to the ghetto, but they were grabbing babies and throwing them by the arm, by the leg, into the truck. And the mothers were reaching for their babies, and screaming. I saw that, and I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand what it was all about, I couldn’t believe it. I saw my little cousin thrown on the truck like a sack of meat … how does a child control herself, and not scream and cry when she sees a thing like that? I knew those faces, I knew those babies, I saw them every day of my life. When you’re told to be quiet and keep your mouth shut, and you watch that … there’s nothing we could have done; if I had gone out they would have thrown me in the truck too. I thought, “Maybe they’ll just take them to the ghetto, they don’t want them to walk, they don’t have the patience to wait until babies and toddlers and little kids will get there, so they took them in the truck, and that’s how they’re transporting them just to the ghetto, and then they’ll give them to the parents.” No, nothing like that.
A day passed. The next day we heard a lot of shooting. We were still hiding behind the false wall. I did not see what happened, but we heard the shooting clearly, maybe a mile or two away, so we heard it real loud. We found out from a survivor afterward, someone who ran away from the shooting, that they took the rabbi, the parents, the children to a big pit to shoot them. Some ran away, some were shot trying to run away. Some made it to the forest, and when we met them in the forest, sometimes months later, they told us about it.
We couldn’t get out from our hiding place the next day because they picked our house to store valuables and clothes they took from the houses and from people they killed. There were so many soldiers there, unloading and packing and moving things, that we couldn’t escape. We had to wait through another night and day. The next night, in the middle of the night, we crawled out into a garden that was next to that building. It was raining, we were so grateful it was raining, we hoped nobody would hear us. We crawled to the canals that drained the water: they were long, maybe half a mile. In the canals we crawled to the Radziwill forest, and that’s where we ended up.
After a short while things seemed to calm down, and we went back to the ghetto. Almost everybody had come back for Yom Kippur. The Germans and Ukrainians surrounded the ghetto, took everyone from their houses and killed them all. How did we get out of it? My father threw us out the window, and yelled, “Run, and we’ll meet there and there in the forest.” They were the last to get out of the window, after the children were thrown out. My cousin and her husband had two children there—she had choked her third back in the wall; my parents had three children. Her two boys were gunned down: we survived. She was left with none. My parents survived with all three.
Running to the woods through the drainage canal I stepped over my uncle’s body, bleeding to death, I stepped over my cousin’s bodies, I stepped over my girlfriend’s body, I stepped over a rabbi’s body. Not just me, but everyone running was jumping over these dead and bleeding bodies of their friends and relatives, some of them screaming for help. My father was yelling, “Run, run, run, don’t stop,” and we were jumping over dead, half-dead, wounded people we knew, our own flesh and blood, while we were running to save our lives. Can you imagine how we felt, how your heart aches with guilt and pain?
We could still stay in the forest because there were still trees with plenty of leaves. While we stayed there my father and his cousin and a couple of other men who were with us decided they would