The Heavens Are Empty - Avrom Bendavid-Val [48]
Once we were near a sort of orchard, and the trees were beginning to produce fruit, just the beginnings of the apples, very far from ripe. My brother went out to get those. We were outside the bunker because as I said, there were leaves on the trees already and they were sheltering us. We were looking and waiting for him to come back, and all of a sudden we see horses. There’s a soldier on one horse, and on another someone in civilian clothes but with a rifle, and on a third horse another soldier with a rifle. One of them is holding my brother. They caught him stealing the apples. They told him to lead them to where he came from. He was a little boy, and he led them to our bunker. When we saw the Germans, Ukrainians, whatever they were coming toward us with my brother on one of the horses with the soldier, we knew it was the end. We decided as soon as they come with my brother, we’re all going to start running. Again we all said good-bye to each other, kissed each other good-bye. We were glad it was over. We didn’t even really care anymore.
But it turned out to be the partisans! Russian partisans! Liberation had come! A third miracle! I have never seen such tears and laughter and screaming, and hysterics. There was such mixed emotions, happiness that the worst of our hardships was over, that we had survived, and deep deep sadness about all those who were lost, who didn’t get this far. I looked up at my father and asked “How did this happen? How did we survive?” Even as a child, at that time, I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense. We had been living like animals on the run, like starving animals on the run. Why were we alive?
Chaim Votchin, who now lives in Haifa, Israel, was born in a village in the vicinity of Rovno. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried and moved to Lozisht in 1920, when Chaim was six years old. He was an athletic and strong-willed youngster, one who tended not to follow traditional paths. He was also very good with mathematics and languages, and from a relatively young age used these talents as a professional teacher. He had the right set of inclinations and abilities to be a partisan leader.
One day in 1942, a German soldier ordered Chaim to catch one of his chickens for the soldier’s dinner, and then “… stood there with his chest pushed out and his thumbs in his belt exploding in laughter” as Chaim chased after the chicken in his yard. This humiliation cemented Chaim’s determination to prepare for partisan activity. He knew nothing about fighting or guns or living in the forest, but he began making plans.
Then others came to me, like Gad Rosenblatt, who was a Beitar commander, and we began to discuss how we could be partisans, where we could get weapons, how we could live in the forest, how we could learn to be fighters, with what could we carry out our fight, how could we get started without the Germans or Ukrainians finding out, and so on. This was much before August 1942. But we didn’t go into the forest yet.
We formed a committee and handed out jobs: acquire weapons; convince Trochenbrod young men to join us; make a plan to move Trochenbrod people to the forest; make contact with Russian soldiers who were separated from their units during the big retreat of the Russian army; figure out the best way to get food in the forest; try to contact the Ukrainian Communists. It’s very important to find the Ukrainian Communists because they were probably in contact with the Red Army and maybe they get supplies from them; and also we heard their leader is operating in the Radziwill forest and maybe he could tell us how to get weapons.
The name of the Ukrainian Communist partisan leader was Alexander Felyuk.